Season Two, Episode Eight: Micah Blumenthal on the Deep-Rooted Cultural Issues Surrounding Work, Money, and Time

We recently had the great fortune of welcoming Micah Blumenthal into conversation. Micah is a worker trustee at the Good Work Institute, a workshop leader of the Kingston based TMI project, serves on the board of Radio Kingston, and is co-host of The Breathing Room and host of Hip Hop 101 on Radio Kingston. In this episode, Micah and our host Martin Ping reflect on the phenomenon of time, the importance of being rooted in place, the nature of work, our complicated relationship with money, and how all of these things are interconnected.

To learn more about Good Work Institute's mission, to build and amplify the collective power of people to reject systems of oppression and extraction, and create regenerative, just, and life-affirming communities, visit GoodWorkInstitute.org. Learn more about TMI project's mission to change the world one story at a time by crafting and amplifying true stories that set us free- visit TMIproject.org. Visit radiokingston.org to hear past episodes of Hip Hop 101 and The Breathing Room, or tune in Fridays at 9:00 PM and Saturdays at 11:00 AM to listen live. 

Micah's Bio:
Micah (he/him) is of mixed race (black and white) and mixed religion, and grew up in two different socio-economic homes. He is a cisgendered, working/middle class parent of two living on Munsee/Lenape land in the Mahicantuck Valley, commonly referred today as Kingston, NY, working to prove possibility and to liberate the imagination in order to see a Just Transition. Micah is a worker-trustee (a term used to illustrate the practice of shared leadership) at Good Work Institute. The Good Work Institute exists to build and amplify the collective power of people to reject systems of oppression and extraction and create regenerative, just, and life-affirming communities. He serves on the board of Radio Kingston, is co-host of The Breathing Room – a radio segment discussing and leading mindfulness, as well as host of Hip Hop 101 on Radio Kingston. Micah is also a workshop leader of TMI Project.

Thanks for listening to Hawthorne Valley’s Roots to Renewal podcast. We are an association comprised of a variety of interconnected initiatives that work collectively to meet our mission. You can learn more about our work by visiting our website at hawthornevalley.org.

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Transcript

Heather Gibbons (00:10):

Hello friends. Thank you for joining us for this brand new episode of Hawthorne Valley's Roots to Renewal podcast. We recently had the great fortune of welcoming Micah Blumenthal into conversation. Micah is a worker trustee at the Good Work Institute, a workshop leader of the Kingston based TMI project, serves on the board of Radio Kingston, and is co-host of The Breathing Room and host of Hip Hop 101 on Radio Kingston. In this episode, Micah and our host Martin Ping reflect on the phenomenon of time, the importance of being rooted in place, the nature of work, our complicated relationship with money, and how all of these things are interconnected. Let's listen in.

Martin Ping (00:55):

Good morning, Micah.

Micah Blumenthal (00:57):

Good morning.

Martin Ping (00:58):

Nice to have you on this podcast, Roots to Renewal, and nice to follow up on the wonderful conversation we were able to have just a couple weeks ago, I think, here at Hawthorne Valley.

Micah Blumenthal (01:09):

Yeah, about that. Yeah, it's nice to be here.

Martin Ping (01:12):

Glad to be able to share with the listeners of this podcast your work at the Good Work Institute, and I'm sure we'll get into some discussion of the phenomenon of time. But as we both know about each other, I have a kind of chronological impairment that I don't really remember when things actually happened, and I think you're even more advanced than I am in this curious relationship to time. But when was the Good Work Institute founded? You and I were in this initial cohort and I don't even remember what year it was.

Micah Blumenthal (01:45):

It is funny. I think I just recently, for a long time I had been saying that I was in the cohort in 2017, but I think it's actually 2016. The funny thing that made me finally realize the year is because I happened to be looking through my photos on my phone, specifically wanting to find the one that I took- sunrise, Hawthorne Valley Farm. I had just come back with you from bringing the cows in, and that was the previous night was my first night of the fellowship. You and I were both in the Good Work Institute Fellowship back then and I found that photo, it's a really beautiful photo of the sun coming up behind the barn, and that was 2016. So GWI itself must have started maybe the year before. Back then it was really almost entirely the fellowship program, and I ran that first one out of the city working with entrepreneurs with the intention of being an online business school, but done in a different way.

(02:48):

That was what I knew of it anyway, and I think it was really in that first cohort that it had that it realized that, yeah, it can't be online, being in person is necessary and rooted in place is necessary and it made its way up here. Again, my understanding made its way up here to the valley at the time and I think it discovered something else in that move that I think up here we define entrepreneur a little differently. There were a lot of folks who were in that cohort with you and I, myself included. We weren't coming from, necessarily, "here's a business that I started." There are a lot of folks, a lot of nonprofits and things like that, other just a different kind of energy around some of that work. In fact, I remember someone from, and it was also called etsy.org.

(03:39):

Do you remember that? All of our original materials, they gave us a book to write in everything, said etsy.org on it. And I remember somebody had reached out to me as Erica Dorn and asked if I wanted to be involved. And I remember she had a very difficult time explaining what it was, and she apologized for being vague and I was like, nah, I'm pretty sure the best things are vague and hard to describe. And then I was like, alright, I think I get it. Yeah, I'm in. And she was like, let me know if you have any difficulty filling out the application, if you have any questions. And the application was immediately all from this, very much this perspective of an entrepreneur, what's your business? And I immediately had to call her back and I was like, I don't really have business, not, I don't know that I'm an entrepreneur doing a thing. I do these things. And she was like, great, just fill it out with that. Say all these things that you do. And I was like, okay. But that began my journey with Good Work Institute.

Martin Ping (04:44):

There was a lot of co-creative element in that, and I was actually involved with Matt Stinchcomb from the time that he transitioned from etsy.com to etsy.org and this origin of what became Good Work Institute. And we were actually at his farm down in Sullivan County with Otto Sharmer and Judy Wicks and Michelle Long. There was about seven of us did a weekend retreat. And we were looking at this, what Matt and I were calling the business as unusual school, and it was this impulse to start a business school that had a different idea of what the role of business could be in a healthy society. And Judy Wicks as from White Dog Cafe as one of the early adopters of the idea that business is a beautiful thing or could be a beautiful thing. But what Matt really came to as I understand it in our conversations was not everybody identifies with business or even thinks it's a great thing necessarily. Not everybody identifies as an entrepreneur, but everybody has work in the world, whatever that might be. And he likes this essay by Wendell Berry where Wendell talks about good work.

Micah Blumenthal (05:57):

Yeah. Well, I remember before we were out of the fellowship, you and I, it had officially changed its name to Good Work Institute and years later I would be a part of Good Work Institute and we would begin practicing shared leadership and become a worker self-directed nonprofit and root ourselves in just transition as a framework, which I can talk more about and we kind of put together a manifesto, if it's okay, I'll read the cover of that manifesto, which is from Wendell Berry. It feels, yeah, it feels important.

Martin Ping (06:30):

Please do.

Micah Blumenthal (06:31):

"The name of our proper connection to the Earth is good work for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials. It honors the place where it is done. It honors the art by which it is done. It honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing good work is always modestly scaled for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places. And it always involves this sort of religious humility for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth"- Wendell Berry.

Martin Ping (07:12):

I love that.

Micah Blumenthal (07:14):

Yeah. I've come to think of it as I find it hard to believe that there's any other creature on the planet. I find it hard to believe that a bird wakes up and it's like, I can't believe I have to build a nest today. I can't believe I have to find worms. I just can't believe that any other creature does that. But we do, right? We have built into our culture a lot of language actually about how much we hate work. There's the idea of even the term thank God at Friday is like, I've just had to endure work. Now I get, now I have time off. It's always something that we want to vacate from. We have desires to win the lottery and not have to do it anymore or to have our investments pay off and to retire early. There's all these things in our culture, we've created a world where work is about exploitation and we largely hate it. And that's odd to me because this is of our making. It is this way because we made it this way. I have a theory that the vast majority of the jobs on the planet fall into one of four categories, making things we don't need, selling things we don't need, indoctrinating us into a system of things that we don't need or helping us heal from the fact that we have trauma from living in a world of things we don't need. That's most of them.

Martin Ping (08:35):

The fifth might be disposing of and trying to get rid of the things that we don't need.

Micah Blumenthal (08:39):

There you go. You get rid of those five because we don't have to have those, right? Those five categories do not have to exist. Work has to exist because I like to think that work is our meaningful contribution to the whole to existence. Work has to exist and work could be beautiful, work could be good. And if we eliminated those five, we might all actually have the time and the capacity to find what our good work actually is. I feel like I found the place that I need to be at being here at the Good Work Institute and trying to uplift these things and trying to work differently. It's why our being a worker, self-directed nonprofit, which just means not having an ED, but collectively holding that role. It was why that was really important to us and it took a lot of work, good work to even do that.

(09:39):

We spent a lot of time really slowly building that, creating the policies and doing the practices and establishing the culture that would allow us to function in this way. And we've spent a lot of time now in the really last couple of years, especially of trying to share this work out, trying to make this hopefully a little bit more accessible for other businesses and organizations or working groups that would like to lean into more of the space. Because back to the work thing in our culture, since we do work, a lot a of our waking hours are spent working, why wouldn't that time also be in a personally transformative space? It'd be a waste not to, you know what I'm saying? So let's work on the workplace is really ripe for dealing with power dynamics, dealing with finding and ways to be conflict resilient. It is a right place for that. So we should utilize it as such.

Martin Ping (10:39):

Yeah. I wonder if one of the kind of underlying picture of the human being, and I'm thinking of going all the way back to Adam Smith and the division of labor and the idea that people would end up doing something all day long that was really repetitive and kind of deadening and soul draining. And Adam Smith even called it out that it's going to be, it's gonna produce kind of automatons who are going to end up being essentially unhappy and depressed. I'm paraphrasing and there, but for the grace of God go I, because I have to say I feel very blessed and privileged to be able to show up and work hard at a place where it has meaning to me and that absence of meaning and absence of purpose other than to be able to have a paycheck to pay bills and buy the things that we buy much of which maybe we don't need as much as we think we do. But I don't want to get into judgment on any of that except to say that the commodification of labor and thinking of people as just commoditizing their is certainly not a healthy starting point for how we think of human beings. I think.

Micah Blumenthal (12:01):

Yeah. Well, I'll use this as a opportunity to bring the time discussion in because I think it's not only extractive and therefore an affront to how we treat each other, but I think it's an affront to time itself. Money is hoarded time. That's what it is. When we really boil it down to it, money derives from labor, it is extracted, but what we're really gathering is then time, right? We are taking other people's time and energy and we've taken this broad concept that is time, that is, I believe non-linear and vast and undefined, all these characteristics, and I think we've broken it down to this calculable rudimentary system of ticks and talks, seconds and minutes and hours. But we've also forced into a box that is the dollar. That is money. Money is other people's time. And when we hoard a lot of it, we have the ability to do with what we please with our time because taken someone else's. If you have a lot of it, you can not only afford to alter your time, but like, oh, my kids and my grandkids will be afforded this luxury of being able to really determine what they want to do with their time.

(13:28):

But where did that time come from, right? This pot of time. That's really what it is. And I think it's an affront to time itself, and I think time is patient and I'm not sure that time likes very much what we have done with it. We could

Martin Ping (13:47):

Spend a lot of time on time and it probably will weave its way back in and out. But you mentioned you'd be willing to share more about the just transition framework.

Micah Blumenthal (13:58):

We didn't put those words together. We really ourselves discovered it through an organization called Movement Generation who does really amazing work. And the just transition movement itself really came out of climate activism and the labor movement and it evolved from there to then kind of become a larger framework for really looking at how will we make this transition from this current dominant, extractive, oppressive paradigm into one that's life-affirming, regenerative built on care and is just, and so five principles of just transition that we ourselves adopted and also adapted for movement generation slightly are, and these are in no particular order. We believe they're all intrinsically intertwined, but advancing ecological repair, democratizing community's wealth and work driving racial justice and social equity, retaining and restoring cultural diversity and relocalizing economic power. And in our work around those, when we start to work on those, we realize that if the principles felt important to us to also identify the practices and that are the principles helped to guide us in what we are doing.

(15:12):

But we also needed practices to help guide us into how we are being. So an incomplete list of practices that we often talk about are collaboration, navigating conflict, connection to place, creativity and storytelling, mindfulness, and also just rest. Right, a different way, a different way of engaging, I think even with this urgency, how do we engage with that a little bit differently? So those are just, like I said, an incomplete list of practices. I probably even left a couple off that we talk about. So Just Transition has become really important to us. At Good Work Institute, we do a few workshops around and we do a shorter one, Just Transition primer. We also do a full day workshop called Just Transition in Action, which is really embodied and that one particularly is in person. This has become kind of the foundation of our work and the values that we hold.

(16:08):

So it was important that we moved into practicing shared leadership because we hold that value for how we democratize our workplace. So it feels, yeah, I think storytelling is an important practice for how we make this transition that this shift in consciousness that you were talking about, Martin. Right, I think storytelling actually is an important piece of that, and so I'm really proud to be a part of TMI to help make space for that and to invite other people into sharing their stories. In this last year, that has also shown up in our work, specifically on this idea of democratizing wealth and also communities and the work that we've began doing around Kingston Community Fund. The idea is to have a fund, which will launch sometime this year, and we knew from the beginning that it would help to put $150,000 out into the community. Let's start there.

(17:01):

Let's test with, see how that goes. And when we did our own research on looking at some interesting community funds that have worked in a creative way around the country, not all, but a lot of them essentially designed something and then brought community in to be the decision makers, which is great. But we had this premise of there's a lot of power in design, and if we were going to help hold this work, then we wanted to bring community members from that point that some of those big questions that funds might have to answer, are they loans or are they grants? What's the mission of this particular fund? What are the types of things that fund who and what and where in the community, so many questions, what will the process be? How will it get decided on? What will the application process be like? All those things are, actually, there's a lot of power in that. So we brought together 18 Kingston residents from really diverse set of backgrounds to work together, most of whom are largely strangers to each other. And we had planned it to be a six month journey.

(18:21):

We knew that we wanted the journey to be, the learning journey to be, we knew that it would be all too easy to just make it this really kind of head space, this intellectual space. We're talking about a fund and let's do that and talk about money and how funds work. And we knew that in order for it to be successful, it had to be as much coming from the head as the heart. So we spent time, those six months in that kind of learning journey of bringing in different pieces of shared decision making. We brought in pieces around conflict resilience. Obviously, we talked about funds and we brought in fund examples. We also brought in TMI project, we do true storytelling workshops, just to have a storytelling day where each person just wrote about their own story of money. I believe that we all have trauma in us around money.

(19:11):

It's my own personal theory that when we trade money, we're also actually trading trauma. So it was important to, let's be in those spaces too around this project. And there was a lot in between. We also had a whole session on participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies and how those things work. We had a small panel of three different people who do community engagement work from different spaces. So there was a lot of other guest speakers and things in the six month journey to then have them begin to design community fund. There are so many points in the process that have felt like to me like, oh, this is actually what democracy looks like. 18 people working through some things and hitting those moments where somebody's like, I think this, and somebody's like, I think this. I'm like, how does the space get held so all those conversations can happen?

(20:05):

How the space gets held, so over time people can shift and it's been beautiful to really be a part of and beautiful to watch. And it was also beautiful that we designed it to be intentionally emergent. We asked people to be in that space with us and to honor that. We had always imagined that there was this kind of ending retreat that was going to happen in November, is how we imagined it from the beginning. And that folks would come together, they would've designed along the way, and that retreat in November, they'd make all the final decisions. They'd come out of it like fun designed. And it was, I think in the morning of the second day there, it was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday morning, the second day we're like, that's not going to happen and we need to respond to actually what's emerging in this moment.

(20:57):

And that the urgency that everyone was working to try to force this to happen was actually not helpful. And so we had to shift and had to ask them to shift, and we all did. And then found a way to extend the work for another three months, which we're in now. So we still got a little longer to go, but it was really, it was a beautiful moment actually. It was, to see people, I watched people leave that weekend expressing, I'd ask people, what are you leaving behind? And I watched people say, "I'm leaving behind my sense of urgency", "leaving behind my need for control," which was beautiful to see.

(21:37):

And I should also say that it was in that retreat that someone else there mentioned. She was like, "ah, it's just so beautiful to see that all 18 of us are still here." I was like, oh, that actually is significant. It's a six month journey. All these 18 people still here, still clocking in, doing the work together, showing up. And then we took that break for December, came back in January, and in January then it was like anybody who wanted to continue and 13 continued. Even the ones that couldn't, were like, it's not because I don't want to, it's just obviously just life and things like that. And those people still, some of them may be involved at later points, but it's been a really beautiful journey. And to see these people come together, almost as a family, doing the hard work together, so still in the middle of it.

(22:26):

So I cannot report yet on exactly how that fund works, but I can say every time we meet now, decisions are getting finalized. And there's something really beautiful about seeing people come together in this way and wrestle with money. I mean, money is hard. It is hard to talk about. It is hard to make it in any way, shape or form. I think just maybe that ties into more to what I was saying earlier, that I do feel that it is laden with trauma, and I don't even, I don't think we know how to heal that. I don't think we have cultural practices for healing. So to see people coming together around something like that and showing up in this way is really encouraging to me. I'm really honored to be a part of this process.

Martin Ping (23:21):

It's quite a deed actually, that your group is doing this. And while in one way you could say it's 18, now 13 people, in Kingston doing something, I think there's a significance to this that's much larger than that, especially now as we're, you know, the whole question of can democracy even survive with people willing to be so polarized over every darn issue and money being such a large one, and yet it's money. It's so ubiquitous, and I think it remains almost unconscious in many ways. People aren't really even thinking about it to the level that you're bringing it to conscious awareness. And I remember, I mean, it's a small reflection of this idea of money and trauma, but there was a pretty benign workshop I was involved in. I actually did this twice with the same person for some, because I got invited twice and showed up twice.

(24:29):

But they asked the question, everybody turn the person next to you and let them know what your favorite color is, or let them know a couple of benign questions that just warmed people up who didn't know each other. And then after a couple of questions and everybody having a nice conversations with their partner, the next question was, how much money do you have in your bank account? And the whole audience just froze. And people just sat there in this awkward, what are you asking that for? And I'm not going to, I don't want to talk about that. And the workshop leader said, people are willing to share way more intimate details about their personal life and going into very, very intimate personal details. But when it comes to this question of money, it's just like, nope, not going there. And I think that somehow your statement about trauma is exposed in that kind of a workshop, that there's something there that's just too uncomfortable.

Micah Blumenthal (25:38):

It's not hard to imagine that scenario, that room. It's not hard to you reflecting on what the facilitator said, right? That yeah. Yeah, that checks out. We are willing to share. I've been in spaces even with strangers where it's been facilitated some sharing, and it's amazing how deep you can go and how quick. It's amazing how vulnerable people can be willing to be. And also amazing. Like yeah, "Wait a second, but we can't talk about money?" That's what a strange phenomenon.

Martin Ping (26:13):

Yeah, it is. It's the sort of mythical cultural sway that it has in our lives is I teach grade 12 economics, and it's one of the questions that I just raise with the students is, well, why is that? Why do we have that? And I'm going to deepen my question and live with the question. I think on a deeper level, based on your statement around trauma and money, I think that's really a fascinating insight to just really live with for a while as a question.

Micah Blumenthal (26:49):

I can give you a little more on that. As I think money itself, I think it's worth thinking of the physical paper or coin. I've begun thinking really as a talisman, it is an object of desire. It embodies that. And as I began thinking about it in that way, I began thinking about what is this magic? What is the spell that seems to be cast over all of us? It's this really kind of powerful form of magic that I think money is that has us many people who even are trying to extricate from themselves, from that, myself included, who want to have a different relationship with it. I'm still bound by it. I'm still caught up in its spell at times, still spending in ways. I'm like, why am I even doing this? What is this? What is this drive? What is this literal, what is the spell that we seem to be under?

(27:47):

And I could say a lot more about that, but I think, I don't know, it's helped me even when I began to think of money as a holder of trauma in a way that it began to at least help me to have a different relationship with it, understand it in a different way, similar time that I am working to have a different relationship with this entity. That is time. And the more I open myself up to that, the more I feel like a little bit more gets revealed, or at least new insights emerge. And same with money, seeing it, even seeing the relationship between those two, I think it would evolve from this place. And part of that's just from a desire of, yeah, I want to relate to existence differently than I think than the ways that I've been indoctrinated into. And so that requires me kind of seeing life through a different lens.

(28:44):

Yeah. Again, I'll argue that it holds trauma, and I've thought a little bit about what that trauma might be, that in money being an object of desire, that there's a lot of expectation. I think in a lot of unmet expectations, I think about what are the dead futures, the expectations that didn't come to pass, the ways in which we acquired this money thinking that it might alleviate some amount of suffering or open up some new possibility or opportunity for us. And what about all the ones that didn't pan out all the unmet expectations? And I think it's important to note that we are, I think, a grief illiterate culture. So how did we grieve all the expectations that went unmet, all the things we thought we might do with this money when we acquired it that we didn't? What ritual do we have for healing our own selves?

(29:39):

And then on top of that, the fact that money then became a source of the extraction of time and labor. So there's a lot of suffering, I think built into the dollar that I think we are unconsciously putting into it. We are not properly grieving it, and that we then just pass it on. And I can imagine that as money circulates, that's just a lot of healing that we didn't stop to do. So I think I understand conceptually the idea that money is benign, and I think if we were a more advanced culture that knew how to engage in actual healing practices that knew how to hold expectation in a different way, and if we weren't so set on extraction, if we were that culture, yeah, money might be benign, but we're not. And so instead we have a few centuries, maybe millennia relating to money in this way. And I think it is fed off of that. I think we have to also be honest about the fact that money is a religion. Money is a God. If you look into the definition of religion, what makes money not a religion, a belief in a higher power, we treat money like a higher power. And so, yeah, there's just a lot there that I don't think we are not taking the time to address. And I think that's doing us harm.

Martin Ping (31:17):

This is really touching on areas that are right at the core of where a cultural shift and a consciousness shift needs to occur. If we're going to break the spell, if you will, you mentioned creativity and storytelling is one of your processes, and I know you've been heavily involved in the TMI project, which is a storytelling which Hawthorne Valley has participated in with you. Thank you.

Micah Blumenthal (31:47):

Yeah, I remember. That was sweet.

Martin Ping (31:51):

I did want to touch a little bit on that.

Micah Blumenthal (31:55):

Yeah, I really, especially because of my work with TMI, I really came to understand storytelling as an important practice in this work. I think for me anyway, it's because truth is actually really malleable, I think. And I think we can all get a little bit lost in it and wanting it and rigidly holding on to what we want to be true. And we can get into bait about what truth is and all those things. And so I think it really taps into something deep in us when we just hear somebody get up and speak their truth. That's it.

(32:35):

Nothing to argue. We just hear somebody speak their truth. I feel like I can only imagine that it's useful now. And it was useful when we just gathered and ran a fire. And so I think it touches into something deep in us, and it's always amazes me in the work. And as a facilitator, sometimes going through a multi-week journey, helping to guide people in a writing process and find their story to tell and helping to make that happen. And then that person may then get up and it's a full workshop. They then make, get up and perform their story. Or even in a one-off workshop, hearing storytellers that what always strikes me is that the details can be more different than my life, but the feelings, those are universal, that we hear somebody else's story and somehow there's this piece that we understand, that we know that we connect to in this very deep way, even though their journey to getting there was not my life. And I think that kind of sharing that kind of truth is so fundamental to, I think, who we are as a species, I guess. So it feels, yeah, I think storytelling is an important practice for how we make this transition that this shift in consciousness that you were talking about, Martin. Right? I think storytelling actually is an important piece of that.

Martin Ping (34:15):

Well, Micah, thank you so very much for your generous offer of your time today to share with us your wisdom, which is profound and very much appreciated, and am personally grateful that you and I were in that first cohort of the Good Work Institute and that we've been able to have this relationship now for however many years that is. Yeah. Must be...

Micah Blumenthal (34:50):

Nine years, eight years, eight years. Yeah. Well, yeah. Thanks again to you. I'm also, yeah, we've mentioned earlier how beneficial the cohort was and these connections that we have throughout this region are important, and I love any chance getting to talk with you. So, really honored to be here.

Heather Gibbons (35:16):

To learn more about Good Work Institute's mission, to build and amplify the collective power of people to reject systems of oppression and extraction, and create regenerative, just, and life-affirming communities, visit GoodWorkInstitute.org. Learn more about TMI project's mission to change the world one story at a time by crafting and amplifying true stories that set us free- visit TMIproject.org. Visit radiokingston.org to hear past episodes of Hip Hop 101 and The Breathing Room, or tune in Fridays at 9:00 PM and Saturdays at 11:00 AM to listen live. Thank you for tuning in today. Hawthorne Valley, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit encompasses a diverse array of initiatives united in achieving our mission. Discover more about our work by visiting our website at hawthornevalley.org. Our work is sustained by the kind contributions of people like you. We invite you to donate and support our efforts today at hawthornevalley.org/donate. Please help us spread the word about our podcast by sharing it with your circle, and by leaving us a rating and review. We extend our sincere gratitude to Grammy Award-winning musician, Aaron Dessner for creating our soundtrack, and to Aaron Ping for his exceptional editing skills.