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- [00:01]
Steve Burns
Hey, it's me, Steve Burns. And I'm so glad you're here because you and I go way back, right?
- [00:07]
Emily Janock
Yeah.
- [00:07]
Steve Burns
And look at us now, like we're all grown up. We've got this new podcast where we talk about all this grown up stuff and there's special guests like Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Nye, but for the most part, it's about you. I mean, it's always been about you. From Lemonada Media Alive with Steve burns is coming September 17th. Wherever you get your podcasts or you can watch every episode on YouTube.
- [00:33]
Emily Janock
Lemonada.
- [00:42]
Podcast Host (Underthedesknews)
Hey, friends. As you know, we are all about helping people. And today we're going to talk with someone who is working to help a lot of people around the world. Emily Janock is the Senior director of thought leadership, knowledge management and Learning at care. CARE is an organization with a mission to work around the globe to save lives, to defeat poverty and achieve social justice. I mean, how can you not love that? Thank you to Care&P and G for making this conversation possible. As you'll hear, Emily says, the work they're doing relies heavily on listening to the communities they're trying to help and empowering them to make things even better. CARE specifically places their focus on women and girls. That's because they believe it's impossible to overcome poverty until everyone has equal rights and opportunities. And what better time to talk about this than Women's History Month?
- [01:35]
Interviewer
Emily, I'm so glad you're here today.
- [01:37]
Emily Janock
Thanks so much for hosting.
- [01:39]
Interviewer
So start off by just telling me about the work that CARE does.
- [01:43]
Emily Janock
CARE works in over 100 countries around the world with local communities trying to help them solve what are the problems in front of them. One of the things that is both amazing and challenging at care, it's hard to have one sentence that explains what we do because what we do in Niger is going to look very different than what we do in Cambodia or Guatemala. Because those communities are starting in different places and they have different priorities and they need different things. And the core of our work is to work with those places to say, what do you need to change? How can we help you do it?
- [02:12]
Interviewer
How does CARE stand out from other organizations? Because there's a lot of folks who do, like, niche work, but you guys are trying to do, like more broad strokes, big projects.
- [02:19]
Emily Janock
So we do a lot of big projects. And then we have this real focus on changing systems. So we talk about it both what do individuals want for themselves? So maybe they want education, maybe they're interested in literacy classes. In many cases, they're interested in savings. But you can't assume that a woman will do it all by herself. Other things in her life need to change. What about the relationships in her life? What does she need different from her husband or her father or her mother in law? And then how do we look at the bigger system? What needs to change about the legal environment? Can she access a loan without her husband's permission? Can she leave the house without her husband's permission? Some of those are bigger systems changes. And CARE is relatively unique that we look at all of those pieces together. So we don't say, well, we're going to focus on one issue and do that in one place. We're gonna say, how do you combine those to have the best change possible for the people who need it?
- [03:09]
Interviewer
Absolutely. So what kind of groups is CARE helping right now? Like couple projects off the top of your head?
- [03:14]
Emily Janock
So one of my favorite examples is something we call Village Savings and Loan Associations. They're savings group small groups of women saving together all over the world. Those started 30 years ago out of a tree planting project where women in Niger said to us, please stop planting trees, the trees are all going to die. We don't have any time to water the trees. We need you to help us think about savings instead. Our best and coolest work comes out of a time when the community says to us, your assumptions are wrong and we listen to them and then we change. So the savings group operate all over the world. We have nearly 14 million women who are part of those and are working in them. And that's just through care. So we estimate that for everything CARE does, women set up an additional group themselves because they're so inspired and so excited about it. So that's one place we see it. We also do a lot of work with couples groups.
- [04:01]
Interviewer
So.
- [04:01]
Emily Janock
So women and men sitting together and having dialogues about what does need to change in my life. Exactly how many hours of housework am I doing a day? Could you maybe help out with that? So those kinds of groups are ones that we spend a lot of time working with. We also spend a lot of time working with farmers groups. You know, there's a huge food crisis happening in the world right now. Billions of people don't know where their next meal is coming from. Working with the people who produce that food is critical and thinking about what needs to shift so they can produce that food more effectively, they can produce more nutritious food and that every single bit of that food is getting used effectively instead of going to waste. So those are some of the groups.
- [04:34]
Interviewer
That we work with and where are these projects mainly located?
- [04:39]
Emily Janock
So we operate in a hundred countries around the world, primarily in Africa, Asia and Latin America. So those are the biggest chunks of the work. But we have a pretty broad geographic spread and we work with partners to really understand what is happening and what are local based organizations doing and where and how can they lead. And then we do have a little bit of programming in the US So.
- [04:59]
Interviewer
Often somebody decides that they want to be a helper and they just don't know like how to decide where to go when you're in your position. Right. Such a high level, so so much need. The need is so great across the world.
- [05:12]
Podcast Host (Underthedesknews)
How do you decide who gets help first?
- [05:15]
Interviewer
How do you decide what projects to prioritize?
- [05:18]
Emily Janock
CARE's rule is pretty simple about this. Who are the people who need it the most? Who are the people who are most marginalized and need the most, most additional support? So one story I tell all the time is we had somebody we'd hired to evaluate one of our programs to see if it was working. And they came back and their report said, look, your program isn't working as well as it could be because you're working with poor people. And if you stopped working with poor people and you worked with middle class people, they would be able to earn a lot more money for us. That's fundamentally not the mission. The mission is to say who needs the support the most and how can you help them overcome the obstacles they face. And that's where we prioritize, which is part of why I don't have a great sound bite that says here is the one thing we do because that looks different in different places.
- [05:57]
Interviewer
So true. And do you ever run up on a project where you're like, you know what? We're not the right person for this. That must be difficult.
- [06:04]
Emily Janock
Absolutely. And there are a couple of things. One is just absolute honesty, right? Sometimes we're not the right people. One is the importance of leaving space for others. That if we're not the right people, that means we have crowded out somebody who was, which ultimately is not the best impact for the world. And that's what we're here for. We're not here to be the biggest, the most famous, the best. We're here to see the world change. And sometimes that means stepping back. And as we have more and more conversations about localization, understanding who in this context is better placed than we are and how do we support them. And if their answer is, you can't, please Just leave us a space. Then that has to be the right answer.
- [06:40]
Interviewer
Sometimes that's it. Sometimes it's get off my lawn, I'm doing my best, I'm okay, I'm okay. Maybe check back in with us. So there are so many people whose heart is in the right place when they go to help overseas. But we're also aware of the fact that some organizations can helicopter into these areas and don't take the time to really listen to what the communities need. Can you just share a little bit more detail on your thought process when you're going into a community for other folks who are listening right now who want to be missionary helpers?
- [07:10]
Emily Janock
One of the things is that we've been in a lot of places for a long time. Care's more than 75 years old in some countries. We've been there since before they were a country. Right. And so that role in the birth of a nation is really powerful in the places where it's happened. And there are a few countries like that. Building those relationships are so important and really building that ear for listening to say, you tell us what's happening here, you want to do that in a way that's not completely overloading people. Nobody is interested in answering 70 surveys a week or spending six hours doing the detailed, here's exactly what I need from you. They especially don't want to do that if you don't have the mechanism to change. So if you're going to listen to them, you better be willing to do what they're asking for. And so those are some of the pieces that are really important about those long standing relationships. Building that trust. And to me the best signal of that trust is when a community tells us no when they come back and they say that's not the right thing, let's try something else. That's the signal you need to hear that if they're willing to say that to you, you've started to build that relationship because otherwise they won't say anything and they will just try to make the best of what they can.
- [08:13]
Interviewer
It's what they used to say to me at the restaurant. Be thankful for your bad reviews because those people at least cared enough to hope that you get better. It's nice people who just say, I had a lovely time and then they never come back.
- [08:25]
Emily Janock
Exactly.
- [08:26]
Interviewer
And I know do no harm is a big part of your work. I was just reading about, can you tell me a little bit more about what that means to you?
- [08:32]
Emily Janock
So our first priority is to see the best results for the people we say we serve. Right. We're an organization that claims we're based on service, and we're also enormous. We're in 100 countries. We have 14,000 staff. That doesn't even include our partners and our donors and the governments or schools or other people we are acting with. On the ground, institutions can cause problems. They can either cause them unintentionally, which I think is what happens most of the time, or an institution can act to protect itself instead of to protect the people. And so we have to be incredibly thoughtful and to build those recommendations in and to build the systems to hold ourselves accountable. So a couple of examples. One is having some kind of feedback mechanism in all of the work that we do and making sure that that's relevant. So if I say, well, I put up a survey on my own website, is that going to make a huge difference for a refugee in Syria? Probably not. That is not the way she is going to interact with the work. So how do you make it available to her? One is to hold rigorous accountability processes. So we do an annual report on sexual harassment and assault. What happened? What did we do about it? What actions are we taking? Because to assume that in an organization of this size and scope, nothing ever goes wrong is naive to the point of disruption. And then also thinking about how do we hold ourselves accountable, making sure our staff are trained, making sure everyone is on the same page, is that this is what is acceptable and this is what is not. And then how do we think about those unintended spaces? So here's an example I'll use. We do surveys all the time with various kinds of communities. And it's really easy to say it's important to understand the experience of violence. It's important to understand what violence women are experiencing or other marginalized groups are experiencing. And researchers always want more data. If you do that, you go out and you ask those questions with no plan to support a woman who is suddenly reliving the trauma you have just asked her about, but you don't have services available for her. You've now put her name and experience in a database that may or may not be safe for her to be labeled that way. You have suddenly done more harm than good. So how are we thoughtful about those kinds of things to make sure that we're not putting an additional burden on communities and we're not putting them at risk, even with the best of intentions?
- [10:43]
Interviewer
So what have you done to make sure that that doesn't happen?
- [10:45]
Emily Janock
There's lots of different ways. So One is about minimizing data is saying, if you don't need it. There's a Mark Twain quote, data's like garbage. If you don't know what you're going to do with it, you shouldn't collect it.
- [10:56]
Interviewer
Yes, right.
- [10:58]
Emily Janock
So one is about saying, if you don't know exactly how that is going to inform your decisions, don't ask. One is about saying, what are those mechanisms we can put in place? Sometimes even questions that seem simple from the outside can be traumatizing. How do you think about that and have your reference systems in place and have a process so you can say, we're going to stop the interview now. Here's where you can get some help. Right. So how do you do some of those things? And some is also about when we do need the information, being incredibly rigorous with where we store it, how we store it. Anonymizing the risk to the person involved always has to be our first consideration.
- [11:32]
Interviewer
I know another way that folks often think about sending help is to send care packages like we did 75 years ago, you know, and sending things like, I think I was reading the first care packages had things like rice and beans and powdered eggs and milk. But the difference is like Americans were picking wet in the box and there wasn't like a ton of thought to like, okay, does this person have a can opener? Do they have an oven? Do they even eat this type of food? Care has since shifted and now allows those directly impacted to choose what they receive, which is very powerful. How did communities respond to that new approach?
- [12:03]
Emily Janock
It's a fascinating story. And just I had a professor in graduate school who was a recipient of an original care package in World War II. And he said, we ate everything but the powdered eggs. We did not know what those were. We literally didn't. Yellow powder. It looked very strange. We didn't need any of that. So even at the time there were issues about that. Communities get really excited and invested when they feel like they have control the same as any of us. It is easier to buy in when you feel like somebody's listening to you, when you feel like you have some influence over what happens next. And it doesn't happen in every case. There are some cases, large scale refugee responses in the middle of cholera, where you say, look, clean water has to be the first priority in the middle of this camp and this outbreak. That's what we're going to focus on. So there's both. It doesn't always happen completely community driven, particularly in that kind of an immediate Mass scale challenge. But communities really feel better when they get involved. And we see that the response works better, it lasts longer, it helps build long term ability to respond to change. When people feel like they have some control over their own lives. And my favorite part about this job is I get to watch when communities say things are a little bit better for me than they used to. How do I pay it forward? We watch this all the time. Women in Somalia who were saving just a few dollars a week put together care packages where they were giving money to people they thought of as poorer than them. In Yemen, 89% of women who are in a savings group with care are using some of their money to support other people in their communities. That that's one of the first things they do is say, okay, how do I pass it on? And that's one of the most exciting pieces to me about the work.
- [13:40]
Interviewer
Absolutely. What are some of the things that people ask for most often?
- [13:43]
Emily Janock
One that always surprises me is that people start with soap. It's a big one. I hear all the time when you say to people, tell me about the biggest difference in your life. They say, now I have soap. And to just think for a minute of what that means about their previous experience and about what's happening now. Women will talk a lot about now. I feel cleaner, I feel like my appearance is better. Those are things that kind of always get pushed to the back as not being incredibly urgent, but change so much how you feel about yourself and how you feel about what is happening and if you are supported in the world. So that's one that comes up a lot. Food is an obvious one. Right. The act of eating together, of sharing food is so powerful, no matter where in the world you are, that we see that come up a lot. And we see. I was just watching a video out of Cote d' Ivoire where women were saying, well, we were donating food to the school so that kids in the school got free lunches. So that's what they decided to do with their own work. So we see that come up a lot. And then other things that are often interesting to me are things like candles, the ability to have light to study after school or after dark. Right. Some of those things come up. Lots of other things are very specific based on the context and what it is that people are looking for.
- [14:54]
Interviewer
I was surprised to hear you say soap because when I worked in food security, that was similarly the thing we would get asked also, I was straight up only there to serve, to bring food in particular mostly to children. So that they would be able to eat over the weekend and they would be like, do you think that we could use some of our money if we like trade a banana for more shampoo or for soap or for different cleanliness items? And I was like, no, but we'll find a partner and we'll try to make sure that gets in the backpack too. But it's this thing that we take so for granted because when you walk down the grocery store aisles or soap aisles of any store here in America, it's just everywhere and it seems so inexpensive and like it should just be something that everybody has. But the difference between having soap and not having soap is oftentimes life changing. What have you seen when that soap delivery comes in from people?
- [15:42]
Emily Janock
It's interesting. People talk a lot about feeling better about themselves, right? The confidence that you get in, feeling like you are well presented, feeling like you have met the social standard of what cleanliness looks like. People talk about that a lot. There was a group in Malawi that was HIV positive patients and they all talked about the importance of having soap because it was so connected to dignity for women. A lot of what comes in is around menstrual hygiene, right? The idea of even being able to leave your house depends on being able to be clean, being able to manage your period when it's happening, being able to do that safely. Those are pieces that come in. So it's partly the dignity and the self confidence and feeling like you are part of the community. And it is partly because very real, practical can I leave my house or not? Is it safe for me to be out and around? And then of course, it also relates to is the food I'm eating safe? Am I healthy? Those things are all tied up in soap and various kinds of hygiene items.
- [16:53]
Dr. Susan Swick
There's so much advice out there and all we want to do as parents is get it right. The great news is you're the expert on your child and sometimes figuring out what they need is as simple as getting them to talk. I'm Dr. Susan Swick, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, and I'm also a mother of four. On my new podcast, Talk About Able, I'll hear from parents about what's keeping them up at night, and we'll figure out how to tackle it by talking about it. From Lemonada Media, Talk about able is out September 9th. Follow wherever you can get your podcasts.
- [17:34]
Interviewer
Why does care look at fighting global climate and world hunger as a gender issue?
- [17:39]
Emily Janock
Because women eat less than men. First and most starkly, women are also more impacted by climate change than men are. Which is not to say the impacts don't affect everyone. Of course they do. But if you look, there are 150 million more women than men in the world who don't know where their next meal is coming from. That's as much as all of the women in the United States. And that gap in 2018, that number was the equivalent of all of the women in California. And by 2021, it was all of the women in the United States. Women get pushed to the back bumper immediately when crises happen. And they're the ones who are often involved in putting the food on the plates. Right. 90% of food shopping and preparation is something women do. So if you don't look at the gendered experiences, women and men will both say, oh, I'm not eating as much. Men are eating smaller meals. Women aren't eating it all. There's a quote from a woman in Ethiopia that says a woman who eats before her husband is considered a bad woman who only cares about filling her stomach. So it's not just tied up in whether you ate or not. It's how does your community see you? Are you a good woman or a bad woman? And that's a huge amount of pressure. Those are all things that impact a woman's experience and her ability to contribute. The flip side is, the more gender inequality there is in the world, the more hunger there is. And we see that across about 150 countries. There's a direct correlation there. And one of the reasons is because women are heavily involved in producing food, but without the same tools and resources and support that men have, which means that everyone is hungrier when you don't address gender equality.
- [19:17]
Interviewer
It's just shocking, honestly. Like, we hear these stories so often, and every time you, like, can't believe that it's so tied together and that it's happening in this way. So what efforts is CARE putting forth to build equality in the hunger space?
- [19:32]
Emily Janock
A couple of things, and one seems so obvious that it's almost embarrassing to say it, but it turns out that it's true. Take women seriously as farmers, believe that they count, and treat them like they matter. That is in the sort of acronym we have come up with it that's called the farmer's field in business school, which is ffbs. And that is literally saying, we're going to treat women like they are farmers who deserve the same access and attention as men, and we're going to figure out ways to do that. And it doesn't seem like that should be revolutionary, but it turns out that it is because other people don't do it that way. The sort of stereotypical image of a farmer is a man and of the person who should be selling grain is a man. And so how do you think about that? And then correspondingly, what needs to change in the world? So, for example, just saying, well, we're going to go out and we're going to give these women a bunch of training, we're going to teach them how far apart to plant their soybeans. That's useful. But if they're not allowed to leave their house, it doesn't really matter if they know how far apart to plant the soybeans, if they have to spend five times more hours a day dealing with childcare and cooking and cleaning than male farmers do. Just teaching them how far apart to fantasy means not enough. So how do you think about that broader system I talked about earlier, of how do you get a husband engaged and have couples dialogues where men and women talk to each other about what is our plan together to move forward? How do you get the mother in laws involved so that they understand, oh, it's not that she's being a bad wife to my son, because it turns out that's a universal issue that happens in every country in the world. There is something happening that is good for all of us. Right. How do you shift some of those arrangements about access to credit or access to resources? The first step is you take women seriously as farmers, and the second is you help them shift the system so it meets their needs more effectively here in the States.
- [21:28]
Interviewer
I know a lot of the times when I was doing food security work, we would find that it was the farmer's daughter who was going to be taking over that farm, because I don't know where their sons were, if they just. More women were born into farms of the last hundred years, or what the case may be, or they moved on to something else. And what we were finding is that women also had greater passion for consumable crops as opposed to crops that would be made into products. Is that something you find internationally as well?
- [21:49]
Emily Janock
Absolutely. Women are much more likely to be involved in food crops, and particularly crops that feed close to home, so crops they can use in their own meals or their communities can use. They're less likely to be involved in crops for export, cash crops, that kind of work. And you know, I said before, women do 90% of the cooking in the world. There's a reason they have a vested interest in making sure they have the Ingredients they need to feed their families. So that is one of the things we see. Another piece we see, and we're seeing this all over the world and at an increasing rate now, is that women are more likely to be doing that, not always more likely than men, but more likely than they were five years ago, 10 years ago. Because with climate change and with conflict, men are more likely to migrate in most circumstances. They're more likely to have an education. They're more likely to be mobile. So they are moving away from the rural areas. And that leaves the woman holding the farm, holding the need to feed her whole family, holding the need to be the head of the household, while the sort of official head of the household is in another place. So we see that getting bigger and bigger in many communities is care.
- [22:55]
Interviewer
Also working on things like better access to basic education, good health care. Because I know we talk about farmers and food and growing, and oftentimes that could take away from the time that you get to go to class or you get to go to school, we see that you have to work at home. So how could I possibly afford for you to go to school?
- [23:11]
Emily Janock
Yeah, absolutely. We do work on basic education, and there are a couple of ways we do that. So one is clearly the quality of the education itself. Is it there? Is it accessible? One is around these gender norms, Right. Several years ago, was in India visiting a girls school. And it's a school where it's girls who haven't been able to go to school or they've dropped out. They catch up all the way up to fifth grade in one year. And so it's all these girls who are in an accelerated program, and we were asking them to draw pictures about their hopes for the future. And my favorite one, I'll never forget is this little girl who drew a picture, and she was narrating it to me, and she said, okay, so this is my brother, and he is helping me go get water because I don't like it that I have to do all the chores and he gets to go play with his friends. And this is a ceiling fan, because if we had electricity, we would be able to study at night and it wouldn't be so hot in our house. And here is a road so my dad can go into the city and get a job. And here's an elephant, because I like elephants. Kids see the injustices in their own lives, and sometimes they're a lot more willing to tell you about them than grownups are, because they haven't learned to filter that up yet. But that idea of how do you make it possible for a girl to stay in school? Things like, how do you reduce the risk of child marriage so she doesn't get pulled out of school to get married at the age of 13 or 14. How do you make sure somebody else is helping with the housework? We saw that a lot in Covid. Boys were able to prioritize online education in ways that girls weren't because girls, girls were doing childcare while their moms were working. So you start to see these really complex dynamics that are partly about the classroom and partly around the universe that surrounds it.
- [24:43]
Interviewer
And I wanted to ask you about that next. During the pandemic, CARE released a report called she Told Us so. And it was a look at women's lives during COVID The report said COVID 19 is widening systemic inequalities, especially for women and girls and others who face discrimination because of race and migration status. And that was adding to just these decades of threatening progress when it comes to equality. Could you just give us like a little example from the report?
- [25:10]
Emily Janock
So here's an example that I think most of your listeners will have some experience with. Whether or not they had a full time job, women were suddenly in charge of childcare. And no matter what the theory was, women were holding almost all of that burden. So an example we were just looking at in Turkey during the earthquake. Now women are doing five times more household work than men are, regardless of their employment status. So that's not a question of, well, women don't have jobs, so they can take time for that. They did have jobs. They just also have to hold this burden. And what that did even in the US was drive women out of the workforce at a much higher rate because you can't do both all the time. So that is one of the things that we saw. We also saw employment gaps open up. So women got pushed out of the workplace. It was harder for them to come back. And that was true in many countries. One is a quote from Iraq on the never forget, as a woman said, just the psychological burden of knowing that in this environment a man will always be picked before I will. He will always have first priority for a job is so high. There's something really important about that, that inequality is causing mental health burdens in ways that impact people's ability to engage.
- [26:18]
Interviewer
And this was not a small sampling of a report. It was like 6,000 women in 40 countries over the years.
- [26:24]
Emily Janock
We've done it. We now have over 28,000 women who have shared their experiences with us I.
- [26:30]
Interviewer
Was reading about one of the studies that you had done about women in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, and they weren't leaving their homes. And the assumption was that this was due to the virus, but you guys uncovered a different reason. Will you tell folks what that was about, what you found out when you were on the ground?
- [26:44]
Emily Janock
Yeah. So we thought, oh, women, they're worried about the virus. If we teach them how to wash their hands, that will be fine. And then you start asking questions and women say, I'm not allowed to leave the house because the men in my life think COVID 19 is caused by women's rights.
- [26:58]
Interviewer
What?
- [26:59]
Emily Janock
And the way to stop COVID 19 is to roll back women's rights.
- [27:03]
Interviewer
Emily Jannock, the women told you that their men think that women's rights are causing a global pandemic.
- [27:12]
Emily Janock
Yes. And so the women told us that because we said, tell us about what's happening.
- [27:17]
Interviewer
Sure.
- [27:18]
Emily Janock
And instead of saying, please tick one of these boxes, because never in a million years would I have thought to put that as one of the boxes would never have. Would never have occurred to me. We said, tell us about your experience leaving that space and in this case, having it be female volunteers who already had relationships in communities who really were there to listen and they weren't there to find an answer that I had determined from where I sit and then shared that back. And that's one of the most important things, is about how do you leave that space to hear the thing you never expected to hear and take it seriously. Yeah.
- [27:56]
Interviewer
So how did you work around that?
- [27:59]
Emily Janock
Well, so then your programming is very different. Right. It's not hand washing classes and it's not masks and it's not soap, even though we talked about the importance of soap earlier on. It's how do you start to do those couples of dialogues? How do you start to get men who are champions in the community to be a little more vocal? How do you start them talking to their peers to shift some of those narratives? One example from Niger I will use is that several women who were in a savings group had been trying and trying and trying to get their husbands to let them do particular kinds of business opportunities and just had no luck at all. And they very strategically went and said, if we convince the chief of the village and have him talk about how great this is, then that will solve the negotiation problem for us. So instead of me going head on with my husband, we're going to see if we can convince the chief to do a talk about how great this is. And that Unlocks things. So how can you tap into local leaders and local structures? Because me as a white lady from dc, I'm not going to change that. That's not helpful for me to show up and say, no, women's rights are the most important thing. They're not going to listen to me. How do you find ways to unlock that community organizing that don't just become me? On a soapbox, right?
- [29:09]
Interviewer
On a literal soapbox, a literal box of soap. Now you guys are going to these places a lot more than you did even before the pandemic, which I found very interesting, because a lot of folks are just still trying to ramp up their program or there's still, you know, so many complications to the ongoing pandemic. But places you were going only like four times a year before, now you get to go like 60 times. How has that changed for you, this volume of work abroad?
- [29:32]
Emily Janock
One of the things is about it's not always work abroad. It's how you unlock the folks who are already there. So it doesn't have to be me on the plane. There's somebody in that community who already knows how to do it. And it's really pushing us to think more creatively and frankly, more ethically about local leadership and who needs to be involved. And again, how do I support and help unlock as opposed to drive the show? That's one of the things that it was really allowed us to do. Somebody that we work with in Zimbabwe, who's a care staff member, who's fabulous, said, the difference about COVID 19 is there were no experts. You couldn't just put somebody on the plane to come here and tell me what to do because nobody knew what to do. We had to figure it out. Unlocking that kind of entrepreneurship and trust because you had no other choices is something I really hope we keep and lean into, as opposed to sort of going back to a business as usual, which is before we were doing that. It really forced us to confront a lot of our own assumptions, which were never appropriate. Let me be clear. The idea that I should go tell the guy in Zimbabwe what his job was was never a good idea. But it forced us to confront that in new ways. And it forced us to see that a lot of things really worked, whether or not we were sending somebody like me there. He also showed us where that kind of global connectivity is really important and what can be help helpful in a space like that. But it really requires taking a step back and saying, how do I support that agenda as opposed to how do I push an agenda of my own.
- [31:05]
Hasan Minhaj
I'm Hasan Minhaj, and I have been lying to you. I only pretended to be a comedian so I could trick important people into coming on my podcast. Hasan Minhaj doesn't know to ask them the tough questions that real journalists are way too afraid to ask. People like Senator Elizabeth Warren. Is America too dumb for democracy?
- [31:23]
Emily Janock
Outrageous.
- [31:24]
Hasan Minhaj
Parenting expert Dr. Becky, how do you skip consequences without raising a psychopath?
- [31:30]
Emily Janock
It's a good question.
- [31:31]
Hasan Minhaj
Listen to Hasan Minhaj doesn't know from Lemonada Media. Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [31:42]
Interviewer
Were there any other things that the COVID pandemic helped expose for you?
- [31:47]
Emily Janock
One of the things that we. I talk a lot about in my job is the idea of having to learn fast and imperfectly. Some of our teams who were already operating in humanitarian response were doing this already because, you know, an earthquake happens and you have a couple hours to get started working, right? You're never going to know the perfect information, but you can't wait for six months to know the true answer before you try to help people who are trapped in buildings. Right?
- [32:09]
Interviewer
Right.
- [32:09]
Emily Janock
Can't do that. It really pushed us to think a lot more about the idea of is waiting 10 years for an RCT the right answer? And is that the right version of truth for what needs to happen next? RCTs randomized control trials are incredibly valuable, but they are one piece of a whole picture of the world, and they're a very specific piece that is created in a specific way. So that idea of being able to react faster with less perfect information, really having to center the local perspective. The woman in Bangladesh says, I'm not staying in the house because I'm afraid of COVID That's not what's happening here. Knowing that we didn't know it all, but that we had to act anyway, has really forced us to think about that. How do you do lighter touch learning? How can you be more adaptive? Turns out some of those processes we had built were holding us back. How, again, how do we keep that in our thinking and not kind of just sort of by default, spring back to a business as usual?
- [33:07]
Interviewer
Right? And I know there was the second episode of she Told Us so again, where you guys found out that things for women were actually getting quite a bit worse as the pandemic was even starting to, like, heal, like, come 20, 22 times. What were some of the biggest takeaways from that report?
- [33:23]
Emily Janock
So, a couple of things there. One was that obviously these women were facing more than one crisis at a time. Covid was One part of everything that was going on in their lives. So as particularly in the US we were just desperate to be like, never mind, it's over. It's all done, right? For women, for one thing, Covid hadn't been the same experience for them as it had been for us in the United States. And for another, that was one part of desert locust invasions, of droughts, actual locusts of civil wars, right? They had all kinds of plagues happening all at the same time, not just Covid. And so as the rest of the world was sort of starting to pull back and say, okay, back to normal, even though that wasn't necessarily accurate, that wasn't what these women's lived experience was. And the rush to address Covid actually broke a lot of systems women were depending on. So things like their ability to access healthcare. We're seeing cholera outbreaks all over the world, partly because huge investments went into Covid that correspondingly did not go into preventing cholera. And there's only so much money and so much time in the world. You can't do it all. But some of that is that we put so much focus on one thing that instead of trying to solve the system, we were treating an individual symptom. Right? And so thinking about, how do you treat that system instead of the symptom is a big part of what we're having to focus on now.
- [34:48]
Interviewer
And the most recent report that came out this month is called Her Voice Listening to Women in Action. How was this different than the previous two reports?
- [34:56]
Emily Janock
So it's always been a theme in the report to say, look, these women are not just victims. They're not just sitting around waiting for us to come in and help. They are taking action in their own life. And this report I particularly loved because it put that front and center. It's been in all of the reports as a theme. But this really started from that premise. And for us, it was a lot about that work. Women are leading, they are stepping up to the plate. We are not keeping up with them. As a global community, we see all of these incredible stories of what women are doing, and we still see gender equality has rolled back by a generation because the systems are not investing at the same level the women are. And that focus on them as actors, on them as people who can help drive the change is one of my favorite pieces of this work.
- [35:41]
Interviewer
What kind of recommendations does Care have to help women and girls in these communities? What could the average person be doing to help?
- [35:48]
Emily Janock
The average person can do several things, and one is really to listen for it, really to say, where are the women showing up here and are they showing up? So if the way I'm making decisions is driven entirely by white men in the global north, and what they tell me is the truth, that's probably not so relevant for the female refugee in Syria. So really questioning our own data sources, our own assumptions about what works and what doesn't, our own prioritization of particular narratives and sources of truth is something that's really powerful for all of us. And certainly our work is not the only work in the world to do that. And it's, again, many of the things I say feel so obvious that it's hard to imagine that it's a recommendation. But also question your data. Look to see, is this something that a person living through the crisis is telling me, or is it something else? So that's something that we all have a lot of power to do, and I think we often underestimate the power of that. The power of writing to a decision maker and saying, wow, you didn't talk about women at all here, or you only talked about them as victims. What's up with that? Those are things that we can do, really, also trying to center those people as leaders. And so one of the things I see all the time coming from a really great place is especially in America, where Americans, we want to help. We know the answers. Here is the answer. Go do it. The assumption that I, as a girl who grew up in Michigan and has lived in D.C. for a while, knows what the answer is for the woman in Bangladesh is pretty flawed. And I know it comes from a good place of wanting to help and wanting to share, but willing to step back. One of the things that somebody told me many years ago in my job was stop thinking of yourself as an expert and think of yourself as customer service. And that completely changes the dynamic. Just because I live in a country where I have immense privilege doesn't mean I know anything about her life. Step back and think of it in that service mindset of how are they telling me what they need next and am I doing that, or am I using my own lens to force a viewpoint? So those are some of the important things, and then some of the obvious ones that I'm going to say anyway. Pay attention to this kind of work, particularly pay attention to global inequality and global poverty, because it impacts your life more than you think it does. It impacts what you're eating, what you can buy at the grocery store, what diseases you are at risk of, and your general experience as A human. If we treat each other like equals, where everybody matters, or if we only care about the narrow circle we're in. So those are some of the obvious ones. And then to the extent that you can donate to causes, it doesn't have to be care, but donate to causes that work on this. There are a lot of people doing incredible work in the world. Support them to do the work they do.
- [38:32]
Interviewer
What can we do about misinformation and disinformation online? How do you fight that? You know, sort of constant wall of rhetoric from naysayers.
- [38:42]
Emily Janock
There's a wall of rhetoric about everything, right? And you know, one of those quotes that you can't fight a soundbite with a paragraph. It's that idea of how do you meet people where they are and sometimes how do you surprise them? So one of the things we did, we did a lot of work around COVID 19 vaccines and promoting acceptance of COVID 19 vaccines. And one of the biggest surprises for the team that was working here in the United States was that celebrity ambassadors were actually a great deal less effective than everyday people. So honestly, having either a CARE staff member talk about their experience of why they chose to get vaccinated, or having a community doctor who was not a famous person say, here are the recommendations I make was so much more powerful than having a celebrity campaign. The celebrity campaigns make a difference in particular ways, and they can be really useful for drawing attention to something. But when it came down to people choosing, do I get the shot or don't I get the shot? It was about identifying with the messenger. Does that person seem like me? Does that seem like somebody I would trust? So how do you think about building on those communities? How do you think about cutting through the noise? And nobody ever, ever wants the conversation to start with, you're wrong and. Or you're evil. They want to be met where they are. They want to have a conversation. And so there are a lot of things. And she told us the work, the her voice is part of what's so powerful is like, you don't have to believe me. This is her. I mean, this woman will tell you her own story. And I'm not going to filter it and I'm not going to clean it up, and I'm not going to try to make it the story I think you want. I'm just going to let her tell her story. And so there's a lot of those ways that it's usually surprising, because pure debate, unless you're a total dork like me, is mostly not the most convincing thing in the world, right. Is that it's more about a conversation than a community. How do you do that over time?
- [40:34]
Interviewer
What else is coming for Cara this year? What can we look forward to?
- [40:37]
Emily Janock
All kinds of things. A couple that I'm really excited about is continuing to drive this agenda of what happens when women tell their own stories, what happens when they are in more control of the narrative. So we have a lot of different work that's coming out about that that I'm really excited to see. We're also continuing to focus on food and hunger crisis in the same way that last year at the beginning of 2022, we were all desperate to say Covid is over and it wasn't. We're seeing similar things in the hunger crisis. It's not at the top of the headline anymore, but it hasn't gone away and in many places it's going to get worse. So focusing on what that means and how can we try to make decisions that are going to set us up not just for a better this year, but a better future. We often have this drive to say we want to do it now. We want to have the biggest number today that might actually hurt us two years out. So how do we think about that longer term vision and that longer term future instead of just the immediate now, now, now, which also has to happen, immediate response is important. So those are two of the pieces that I'm really excited about. And then there's a lot more work coming out about how do you. We talked about earlier when you have to step back and say, we are not the people here. There is a local organization that should be leading this and we will support them, but we're not in charge. So there's a lot more coming out about that in the next couple of months.
- [41:48]
Interviewer
Where can people keep up with this work?
- [41:50]
Emily Janock
There are a few places. So care.org is our website and that's the easiest place to go. You want to look at our reports, we have a whole section on that. We also do something called Failing Forward, which is a podcast about here's what's going wrong. And we've produced almost 100 of those over the last four years to talk about what are we learning and how do we make sure we don't repeat the same mistake over and over again. So that's on Podbean and you can get it on Apple podcasts in those spaces. Those are two of the places where you're going to see the work that's designed to be conversational, like this if you're really interested in all the research reports. We also have an evaluation website where people who are excited about the data can dive all the way in.
- [42:27]
Interviewer
I love the data so I will be there. Thank you so much for being here with us Emily. We will follow you. We will keep up with the work of CARE and we just greatly appreciate knowing folks like you are out there.
- [42:36]
Emily Janock
Thanks so much.
- [42:40]
Interviewer
Wow.
- [42:41]
Podcast Host (Underthedesknews)
I did not see COVID 19 is caused by women's rights coming, but I am very glad that we had Emily.
- [42:47]
Interviewer
Here from CARE to help give us.
- [42:49]
Podcast Host (Underthedesknews)
A rundown on the state of women, women around the world and the importance of equality when it comes to improving the global economy, hunger and health care. Thank you to Care&P and G for making this conversation possible.
- [43:01]
Interviewer
Be sure to tune in to next week's episode where we dig into the headlines you might have missed.
- [43:05]
Podcast Host (Underthedesknews)
Leave us a five star rating on whatever platform you're listening on. Follow me at underthedesknews on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. And guess what friends? There is even more Be interesting with Lemonada Premium subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content like Gina Platanino from the Food Research Action center telling us what is a food shortage and why eggs are so expensive. Subscribe now in Apple Podcasts. The interesting is a Lemonada Media original. Our producers are Chrissy Pease, Aria Brachi and Donnie Matias. Our VP of Weekly programming is Steve Nelson. Executive producers are Stephanie Whittles Wax and Jessica Cordova Kramer mix and scoring by Brian Castillo and music by Seth Applebaum. Please help others find the show by rating and reviewing wherever you are listening and follow us across all social platforms itaspear and nderthedesknews. And if you want more vlog interesting, subscribe to Lemonada Premium only on Apple Podcasts and follow the show wherever you get your podcasts. Or listen ad free on Amazon Music with your prime membership.
- [44:27]
Podcast Narrator
Our healthcare system is broken in so many ways.
- [44:32]
Interviewer
We have a health care system that's supposed to be taking care of people that is making it literally more difficult.
- [44:39]
Steve Burns
For people to put food on the table.
- [44:41]
Podcast Narrator
So this season we'll dive into the challenges headfirst while also thinking about how we can find a better way because we all deserve better. Uncared for Season 3 from Lemonada Media available August 6th wherever you get your podcasts.