Episode 100: Gloria Feldt

Written By lori kranczer

JJoin Lori as she speaks with Gloria Feldt, Co-Founder and President of Take the Lead, an organization dedicated to advancing women's leadership. Gloria empowers women to embrace their power confidently, joyfully, and with bold intentions, inspiring them to lead with purpose and make a meaningful impact!

 

Here are the things to expect in this episode:

  • Gloria's journey in founding the organization Take the Lead.

  • The concept of reframing power and how it can empower women to embrace leadership roles.

  • Gloria's vision for women's pay, power, and leadership equality.

  • The success stories of women who have gone through Take the Lead's programs.

  • And much more!

 
 
 

Episode Transcript

You're listening to the Positive Impact Philanthropy Podcast, where we share the journeys of everyday philanthropists as they incorporate philanthropy into their lives. Philanthropy is a personal journey, and through the stories we will share here, we hope that it sparks something in you and how you make your own philanthropic impact in the world. I'm your host. Lori Kranczer, attorney, philanthropic advisor and legacy giving strategist. Together, we're going to explore what it looks like to be an everyday philanthropist and make a positive impact in the world. Before we get started, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a new episode posted on Wednesdays. Now today, I have a very special guest. Not only is it our anniversary of 100 episodes for the podcast, but today we have Gloria Feldt with us. She is the co-founder and president of Take the Lead, and before I let her share more information about herself. I just have to explain, and most people know this about me. Said I got involved in planned giving, and specifically in the nonprofit sector after I went to law school, and I told everyone that I wanted to work for Planned Parenthood, but I don't really talk about the fact that I used to always say, I want to be the president of Planned Parenthood, and that's because I won't say the decade, but it was a while ago when I graduated law school and I saw Gloria leading Planned Parenthood, and it was very inspirational to me, and that is really what has directed my career. So welcome Gloria, and why don't you share a bit about yourself and what you're doing now. 


Speaker 2

Lori, thank you so much. And it just makes me so happy. It just warms my heart to know that you know what some of your motivation has been and thank you so much for sharing that, it really means, it really means a lot because you know what you are doing, and particularly talking about legacy for people, this is what we all want. We all want to make the world a better place, I think, and so I really appreciate the work that you're doing. So a little bit about me. I actually grew up in rural Texas, small towns in Texas. And you know, it was the era where women weren't really given motivations to have careers, even to go to college, necessarily. Well, okay, so I drank the Kool Aid. I married my high school sweetheart. I had three kids very quickly, by the time I was 20, and then I woke up, started college, and in a very serendipitous way, was offered my first position with Planned Parenthood. And believe me, it had never entered my mind to become president of Planned Parenthood. I was planning to be a high school social studies teacher. That was what I thought was the highest form of, you know, of a career that I could have as a woman in those days. And it truly was serendipitous that this all happened, and I can explain it to you if you want me to, but I thought I would, when I was offered that first position, I thought I would do it for a few years, and then I'd go back to teaching. And instead, 30 years later, I retired as the national president. I had started in Odessa, Texas, in West Texas, with 17 huge rural counties, some of them, including this, the least populated county in the entire country, I believe so it wasn't a matter of too many people, it was a matter of just trying to reach the people who were there. And then I went to Arizona, where I had the wonderful opportunity to build that affiliate into one of the largest in the country. And then I was planning on retiring, not retiring retiring, but I was planning on making a shift. I had run the Arizona affiliate for 18 years. I was starting to get bored. I thought, Well, I had always wanted to write since I was, like, four or five years old, and I carried my little notebook around with me. My vision of myself was that I would be a writer someday. And so I thought, Okay, well, this is the time I have a nice life in Arizona. I can make this happen. I can, I can start writing for real, not just for myself


04:13

and then instead, I was recruited to apply for the National Presidency of Planned Parenthood. And the first time, I wouldn't even apply, because, again, life was good. Life is good. It was, you know, I could still be running the Arizona affiliate now with two hands tied behind my back, and would be just easy and fun and all good.


04:37

Well, the second time, I have to tell you, I was married to the most wonderful man who actually understood the organization and the movement. As a matter of fact, it was a Planned Parenthood love story, which I will tell you about. When I walked in for my interview in Arizona, I saw this curly headed guy standing there with his hand on his hip, obviously waiting to see what I look like.


05:05

And apparently he then this has been verified, told one of the other board members that he had just met his last wife.


05:14

We both had been married before and had children and so forth. And anyway, as it turns out, as it turns out, he became the love of my life. And because he knew the situation, he was actually the one who said, you know, you really need to do this. You know, the organization. It was that period of time when people were literally getting murdered for providing reproductive health care services, the doctors, even volunteers. I mean, nobody was safe. Nobody was safe. It was really a difficult time, and the organization was in not only emotionally bad shape, that needed a rejuvenation, and financially as a result of that, it was bleeding red ink. It was, it was just, it was just a very difficult time, or the movement as a whole.


06:11

So I took it on again, thinking, Okay, well, this is interesting. I'll do it for three years, and then I'll be back in Arizona, and I fell in love with New York. So as you know, what's not to love. So I ended up being the national president for nine years. And then I thought to myself, okay, this is 30 years. That's a good round number. I'm going, if I'm ever going to write these books that I have in my mind, I have to do it now, because I'm not getting any younger, and I need to do that. Plus, I was really exhausted. I think that's something that women need to think about, because if you can, you can let what you do exhaust you. And I did, I did, you know, I really loved it too much. I worked too hard and I just needed to, you know, I needed some rest, right? Okay, so I also said I don't want to ever have a staff or a board again, since, you know, nonprofits, you understand.


06:34



07:16

So I wrote some books, and one of them was a look at why women hadn't reached parity in leadership, even though we had been opening doors and changing laws and we'd seen a woman first in almost everything. And it was, it was just, I was shocked, because here I had been in the women's movement for three or four decades. And how could this be? Women were earning 57% of the college degrees for decades. The data was really clear that companies with more women in their leadership were more profitable.


07:26



07:57

Women were half of the workforce. How was it for women, at that time? That was like 15 years ago, when I started doing this research, women were at 18% of the upper leadership, the senior leadership across the board in every single sector, didn't matter which sector,


08:18

so I was just obsessed with figuring out why, because I had actually started studying it about women in politics, and pretty soon I realized that the dynamics were the same, because it didn't matter. The sector, politics, business, entrepreneurship, law, medicine, it didn't matter.


08:38

So I wrote a book called No excuses, nine ways women can change how we think about power. Because what I found was that, unlike most of the research of that day, which concluded women had less ambition than men,


08:54

I just can't believe that that's it. I think there's something else going on. And my conclusion from the research that I did and interviewing women all over the country and actually looking into my own heart in my own life, and how I had given away my power, so often in the service of other things and other people, and I realized that women and men were socialized differently around power, and that affects your levels of intention.


09:00



09:33

And for good reason, women would say, even women in executive positions would say to me, “power is a bad word, and you can use another word, but I would not say.” They would say, “I don't, I would not say I have power.”


09:40



09:48

Speaker 1

What would they use? What would they say? 


Speaker 2

Well, maybe I have influence. Okay, you know, maybe, you know, I just work hard and


09:58

But power has really negative connotations. And I realized that it has obviously negative connotations for women, because we've borne the brunt of so many negative aspects of power. Who starts the wars and then who suffers from them?


10:17

Women have been through, you know, through millennia, raped and pillaged and bartered. And why would we want that kind of power?


10:30

And so once I would explain, Well, the thing is, power is just energy.


10:39

You can't get anything done without it.


10:43

But if you shift your thinking from a negative, oppressive idea of power being the power over you, and understand that power is what you do with it, I use the metaphor of a hammer. You can build with a hammer, or you can break things apart. So if you use that hammer to build power to becomes a generative, positive, innovative, creative thing, and it's and also it gets you away from that idea that that power is a scarce resource,


11:15

because ultimately, the power, especially now in an economy that is based on brains, not brawn.


11:23

There's no end to human intelligence. There's no end to our ability to innovate and create and solve problems and find new ways to do things. There's no end to the ability to love and have empathy and to make life better. Well, it was just like, Okay, I want that. I want that kind of power so I wrote this book, and being basically a practical movement builder person I had each chapter have this is a part of the problem, this is why this happens, and these are three things you could do about it, and I called those things power tools.


11:58

Well, pretty soon, people started asking me to teach using what I had written about. See I was ready to go on to the next book. I went like, this is one. There's another one. Put this on the shelf, go on to the next one. And I started doing workshops, and I was actually also teaching it as an academic course at Arizona State University, which I did for about 10 years. And I realized that it's, it's very teachable. It's eminently teachable, and it's not really, you know, it doesn't take a lot of time to help women shift their mindset, and it's all about that mindset, and then suddenly they're free to embrace their power to be confident in it, to be joyous about it, and to elevate their intentions about what they want to do with their lives. Because what I found was that, in fact, it wasn't that there were barriers to women anymore. It was that women weren't walking through the doors that had been opened.


13:01

We have to want, you know, we have to want it. We have to know how to get there. So, long story short, pretty soon I had a staff and a board again, started a nonprofit, take the lead and here we are. 10 years later, we just celebrated our 10th anniversary, and now we have taken that curriculum, I've taken it and I've turned it into just actually launched online versions of the course, one for women in in organizations seeking to elevate their their leadership in organizations, and one for entrepreneurs, because women are starting businesses at an astonishing rate right now. And it's the same basic theory about mindset, but the courses are a little bit different based on what the aspirations are of the women taking them. So we can do those online courses. They're self-studying. You do them on your own time, very reasonably priced. They can be licensed to companies to have a plug and play Women's Leadership Program. We also do it in person, with workshops and immersive programs called 50 women can change the world, where we create cohorts in different sectors. So it's now, it's just, you know, we can provide it in any way. The fundamentals are always the same, 


Speaker 1

all right, so I love this, so let's talk a little bit about because we love sharing stories here and like big 

reveals. So can you share any stories with the work from take your lead of the impact, or what you've seen, or even particular stories from individuals you worked with? 


Speaker 2

Oh, my goodness, how long do we have?


14:41

So for our 10th Anniversary, one of the things that we did at our annual conference, which is called the Power Up conference, we do a concert and conference. And one of the things that we did this year was that we honored nine women who have been through our programs, one for each of the nine leadership power tools. And so I will give you a couple of those examples. Yeah, sounds good. One woman, one woman who went through the program for nonprofits. Now this is like about eight years ago. I guess 50 women can change the world in nonprofits. And at that time, she was, she had a vision. She was in Arizona, and this was before there were some draconian laws about abortion and family planning providers, and she had a vision of creating a teaching clinic. And she wanted to, she was a newly minted physician, and she wanted to have a clinic where she could teach other physicians how to do abortion procedures. Well, legally, things changed, and what has happened with her is she has become a national advocate for Reproductive Justice, and she's just amazing, and she has actually built her clinic, and she has, she has done what she said she's going to do. She's written a book about it. I mean, she has become a really national leader in helping people understand the broad context of women's reproductive health and what it encompasses, and it includes the whole range of things related to childbearing decisions and having children and maternal health. And I mean, she's amazing. That's one. 


Speaker 1

What was the tool that she used? 


Speaker 2

So the tool that she used was to define your own terms. Actually, she was she was like she was in a situation where other people were setting the agenda,

16:51

and she chose to set her own agenda. So that's the power tool, to define your own terms first, before someone else defines you. Whoever sets the agenda is more likely, lawyers always know this, whoever sets the agenda is more likely to win the debate, and I think that's why she's been able to be successful, even in a climate that wasn't favorable to her in many ways. Okay, on a completely different profession. One of the programs that we did, 50 women can change the world in journalism, and journalism, especially for women, is a very difficult profession right now because newsrooms are imploding all over the place. Media outlets are closing down. Local media outlets are disappearing, and the consequence of that is very detrimental to democracy.

17:53

You lose your sense of community when you don't have a local paper or, you know, local media vehicle that helps you know what's going on and connects people. So this woman, actually is now the publisher of a nonprofit local media. Nothing is just print anymore so I hesitate to say newspaper, but a media outlet and her mission is to grow, you know, to show, make a create, a model of how you can grow local media. It's, you know, it's like, it's that, because these women both could get a vision of what they could do that they had never had before. And then also they make a plan how they're going to use these power tools to achieve that goal, so that that woman, Angeli, is her name, she used to carpe the chaos. That's power tool five, which is that when things feel chaotic, our normal human behavior is to back away, but instead understand that that chaos is where the juice is. It's where the energy really is. So ride into it, take the energy of it and let it help you create a new way of doing things. So that was, that was her power tool. 

Speaker 1

I love this, all right. So I know we could spend probably so much time talking about all this, mindful of the time for the parking interview. But was this through a live workshop, or did they go through? Yeah, they went through a live workshop. 


Speaker 2

Okay, so we're going to tell you, well, here's here. Let me just say that the secret sauce of this immersive program, they both went through the 50 women can change the world version, which is our most immersive program, it blends in person and virtual. So we start with in person so people get to know each other. We end with in person so they can celebrate together. In between, there's a lot of virtual webinars and things, and also coaching.


20:15

And secret sauce is the community that's formed, and we see women who were in the program 10 years ago still helping each other out and supporting each other, maybe just drinking with each other. You know, whatever, it's that community that makes all the difference. 


Speaker 1

Absolutely great. All right, so we're gonna, I'm fascinated about this. I gotta check this out for myself. We're going to post all this information in the show notes that everyone else that's sort of, you know, listening to Gloria talk about this, you'll get the information. You can check it out for yourself as well. So we have, and I mentioned to Gloria these go really fast, so we're almost at time. So I want to get back into your social sector, philanthropic work that you did for much of your career, and also how it is expanded into the work you're doing now, because it's all that value based work that you're doing now as well.


21:15

I can see that pattern, that trend, but I wonder if you can sort of identify your inspiration that you had in your life to pursue what you were doing, because I know you started off thinking you were going to be a social studies teacher.


Speaker 2

Well, there were several epiphanies along the way, and one of the epiphanies was that I got involved in some civil rights organizations, and I noticed that the women were doing all the work in the front line, really all the work, basically, and the men were in all the leadership roles and getting all the credit.


21:51

And that epiphany was, wait, if there are civil rights, women must have them too.


21:58

And honestly, it was that epiphany that made me decide, okay, well, I'm going to then really focus on things that I can get involved with that will help women have more of an equal share of whatever they want in life.


22:15

So that was, that was a really big one. That was a really big one. I will say that growing up as either one of very few or sometimes the only Jewish family in town, in little Texas towns, was something I hated as a child, hated as a teenager, because, you know, a teenager wants to be like everybody else, right?


22:39

But once I matured, as I got older, I became very grateful that I had had the opportunity to know what it feels like to be the other


22:51

and that has propelled it really took a long time for me to understand how much that had propelled my life, but it really ultimately did propel a lot of what I chose to do with my life because, you know, just having the experience of being othered, essentially, and it wasn't always in a negative way. It


23:15

was, No, I go watch your grandmother talk like that, you know, things like that.


23:21

But I became just extremely grateful for it, and I think that that has driven a lot of my passion for social justice in general.


23:32

Speaker 1

So I love that. And I get to the last question. I just kind of agree with that point, because I feel very similar in that respect, that it has allowed me also to see so many different sides and different perspectives of so many people. And one of the best compliments I ever got from a former client who I'm still friendly with, was that they didn't think that I'd be able to connect with their constituents because I'm not part of that group, that certain religious group, but they were so impressed by the way I was able to do that. And I think it's a to me, it seems like a given, right, of course, someone should be able to but I guess it's not. And I think when you have that, and you maybe it's within you know, grow how you've been raised or or in your professional settings, I'm not sure, or just how you take in information and are able to have that output into the world. I think it's a great thing to have, and it's underrated. People don't think about that, and so thank you for bringing that up. I really like that.


24:31

All right. Gloria, our last question that we have to get to is, what do you consider your legacy today?


24:42

Speaker 2

I want my legacy to be to see women truly have equality in pay, power and leadership.


24:55

Now I doubt that it's a job I will be able to finish,


25:00

but I so therefore I want my legacy to be having established a process by which it can continue to move in that direction.


25:10

And one of the things that I'm noodling around about is how to actually collect up all these, historical things that I have had the absolute honor and opportunity to be part of, and turn that into something that's living and breathing and connects with the women's leadership development that I do, and put it in some some place where it can be continuously a living, breathing opportunity for people to learn from it. So I haven't quite gelled on that yet, 


25:50

I mean, the legacy at this point in my life is a very important thing, and the hard thing, I think for many of us it is, for me anyway, is to know I won't be able to finish the job.


26:03

But so how can I? How can I lay enough of a groundwork that other people can pick it up and take it forward? And I think that's what keeps me going at this point, and what keeps me believing in making Take the Lead a sustainable organization, which is the next step in our development.


26:22



26:26

Speaker 1

Oh, well, it's incredibly exciting. So thank you so much. Where can people find out more about you and take the lead? 


Speaker 2

Thank you. So take the leads. URL is take the lead women.com, or.org either one gets you there.


26:42

And my personal website is Gloriafeldt.com and so I am a social media fiend. So I am on social media almost everywhere @gloriafeldt. And then Take the Lead is there as @takeleadwomen or @taketheleadwomen, depending upon how many letters you can have in your handle and so social media is a great place to connect, learn more about us. And also our website is there. We have a lot of free material on our website. And then also, that's where you can find out about our classes and courses, and we have a great newsletter that wins prizes for the wonderful editorial director, who writes excellent pieces, so that it's really very helpful. Leadership information, the latest in leadership information, and encourage people to sign up for the newsletter, and then you'll always know what's going on with Take the lead. 


Speaker 1

Exciting. Thank you so much for sharing that. And so I really, I want to thank everyone for joining us today and for listening, but I really want to thank Gloria for joining because, of course, this is obviously a very personal thing for me, that I'm absolutely thrilled that she has joined us today, and thank you so much for everything you've done for women, your service and your support of women's issues and leadership is just absolutely outstanding. So thank you again, Gloria, 


Speaker 2

Thank you. Lori, it's been such a pleasure to be with you. 


Speaker 1

Thank you, and for everyone listening, we hope we provided some insights and inspiration that you can use for your own philanthropic journey.


28:21

Thank you Very much. Applause.


lori kranczer
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Episode 99: Dana Dornsife