Ep 13: Economic Justice and Building an Economically Just Business Model with Kelly Diels

When Kelly Diels, a feminist entrepreneur, faced an internal crisis of having to use business tactics in direct conflict with her principles, she had to find a creative way to do business in a way that honored her values, her team, and the collective. 

Kelly is a feminist educator, writer, and coach specializing in feminist marketing for culture makers. She works to raise awareness about how business-as-usual formulas reproduce oppression and develops alternate feminist marketing tools to help us do better.

A feminist since she was eleven, Kelly went on to study political philosophy, so when she became an entrepreneur, she immediately realized the conflict between her personal beliefs and the business tactics she was being taught. After a personal breakdown and going through a start-stop cycle of trying to build something that was in conflict with her values, she realized that economic justice meant everyone in the equation needed to be flourishing. She now works with people who have non dominant identities to help them understand and navigate the conditioning and trauma that comes up when challenging the status quo. Kelly believes that tending to one's emotions and nervous system is essential for success.

In this episode, you will learn the following:

1. How to Balance Principles and Business Tactics to Achieve Success
2. What is Economic Justice, and How to Create It in Businesses
3. How Economic Justice Helps Everyone Thrive 
4. Kelly’s Three-Part Framework for Economic Justice 
5. What Strategies are Needed to Create Demand and Generate Leads as Culture-Makers

• [2:10] How Kelly came to this work
• [4:23] Why many teaching methods don’t work for every identity 
• [5:15] What is economic justice 
• [7:34] How not taking care of ourselves undermines the collective
• [8:18] Why asking “how can I make this more affordable” is asking the wrong question 
• [9:56] Making the numbers work
• [11:28] Cultural conditioning and how doing the math supports our nervous system 
• [14:14] The power of somatic practices and therapy
• [17:17] Money and feelings of survival
• [19:24] Creating demand as culture-makers
• [21:15] Business systems and The Flywheel
• [23:16] Entrepreneurship and chronic illness
• [26:24] The onus of change doesn’t rest solely on our shoulders
• [29:05] The power and challenge of being the “first, the few, or the only”
• [31:21] The power of community care
• [35:24] How employees can be participants in economic justice
• [38:54] How culture makers and historically excluded folks can leverage their ambition to pave the way

Quotes

"If you have a non-dominant identity and you're supposed to be signaling authority, you're going to get punished for that online. So what I think economic justice is, is that every human has the resources they need to flourish."

“Vulnerability is the opportunity for relationship. We have to show each other our needs to actually be in loving relationships.”

Connect with Amina AlTai

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Connect with Kelly Diels

Website: KellyDiels.com

Instagram: @kelly.diels