Bonus Solo Episode: Co-Founding ACTIV-ISM With Taylor Rae Almonte-Roman

In this episode, I discuss founding ACTIV-ISM with my friend Kira West in 2020, an anti-racism wellness company.

Summary

Taylor Rae and Kira West co-founded Activism in 2020, a company promoting anti-racism wellness in line with the Black Lives Matter movement. Activism, drawing from the founders' backgrounds in both fitness and anti-racism education, started as an online platform that offers 30-day fitness and anti-racism education programs. Apart from providing educational resources, the company also created a space for open discussions on racism. Despite pending post-pandemic challenges, the co-founders have produced an ebook to further race conversations and are considering the introduction of self-paced online platforms and retreats in the future.

Transcription

Taylor Rae Almonte-Roman

What's up and welcome back. My name is Taylor Ray and this is another episode on the outside. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode. Today I am talking about starting activism, which is the company that I co founded with my friend Kira West in 2020. And it's spelled active dash is, but it's just pronounced activism and we call ourselves an anti racism Wellness company.

And it really just started out of both K and I starting to speak more about racial justice and anti racism education in the wake of the movement for Black lives in 2020 having such a captive audience during the pandemic and having a really, you know, just a really clear moment where people were wanting to learn and we were really wanting to educate.

This is this is something that really motivated me initially to go back and get my masters in human rights and get more of a formal background in this, especially if you're a woman of color, especially if you're a black woman. I think, you know, the feeling that you need to be the most educated, the smartest, the most articulate person in the room about any given topic in order to be taken seriously.

And so this was part of that journey of me striving to be taken seriously in this area. But before all of that, before, you know, going back to school and all the things, it really all started with activism, I really just wanted to kind of talk through in this episode mostly just what it is and why we started it. Kira was doing so many fitness challenges during the pandemic.

Love that for her. And so I think at this time, she was doing like a core like ab challenge or something. And she reached out to me and was like, hey, what if we did some kind of challenge? But it was like kind around fitness but also around anti racism education. And at that time, I was teaching guys like 13, I think 13 or 15 Instagram live classes a week from my living room, like workout classes all the time.

That was how I was making my money. This is kind of just at the beginning of when I started doing content creation and I was like living that fitness life. And I was like, yeah, that sounds awesome. And we thought of the name of this company calling it activism because, you know, we're getting active, we moving our body. we're in the fitness and wellness space.

But also we're obviously talking about these important topics and I built the so on my journey of the Ka jillion jobs that I've had and done. At one point, I used to build websites for actors, especially when I was finishing up. my undergrad at NYUT and all my friends were actors. I was building all their websites and I mean, I build, you know, I still work on websites now.

I do my website for this show and all the, all the other things, my weekly newsletter, I was building that website myself. So that being said, I built a platform for us to host this online program and it was 30 days. We had a weekly in Zoom conversation.

I don't think we had Instagram lives, maybe we did. And this was about 100 people enrolled in that very first online program. And every week we had a different topic and we focused on having a bunch of different resources knowing that people have so many different learning styles. So every week you had something to read, watch, listen to support and share.

And those were our five action steps. And I use this in the past tense because right now, we're still kind of figuring out what activism looks like in a post pandemic world if you want to call it that even though COVID is still honestly running rampant, but we're not even going to get into that right now. So what, what is the, you know, how does activism evolve into this world.

But that being said, we started out as this online platform and just creating community and having conversations and people being so just vulnerable and honestly brave because we created this space knowing that there are questions that are embarrassing or shameful or potentially offensive in, you know, the wrong setting, not potentially like our offensive in the wrong setting.

And we wanted to create a space to be educators and to allow people to ask all those questions. And I'm so proud that we did that. I think it was really important in my evolution to really seeing myself as an educator and taking this work seriously. And it's so interesting because even now like teaching classes in, you know, the detention centers and the prisons that I teach in, I think it really stemmed from that moment of, of kind of seeing myself as an educator. You guys are going to get to meet Kira in, I think she's episode 11 of the show, maybe. So you're going to meet her in a couple weeks. and learn more. We talk a little bit about activism there, but just also about her work that she does. And I feel like it was such a platform for me to really find my voice in the work of anti racism education. We wrote an ebook that was honestly so hard guys, like you can check it out on our website which I'll link it in the show notes and it's called Activating

Your vocabulary. And it's around having tough conversations around race and racism and we kind of made our own little dictionary. And we had a lot of support. We had an illustrator do some really cool illustrations. We had a copywriter or copy editor. I don't even know she was an icon. She like cited everything for us and made sure all the citations were there if you wanna, you know, learn more.

And it was just a really, really awesome project. And I'm so proud that we did that. I'm like, go for us. We wrote an E book. I love that for us. So yeah, that's kind of been my journey in activism and I thought it really deserved its own episode because it was such a important moment in my life. And who knows, friends, maybe we'll be doing more with activism in 2024.

We've talked about doing a retreat. We've talked about creating an online platform that's kind of like you can do at your own pace because the ones that we did before were kind of real time and we had live conversations, but just how we can evolve the platform. So stay tuned as always grateful that you're here. See you out there.