328 Equity Centered Employee Engagement Leads to Collective Liberation & Joy with Viva Asmelash

The Well Woman Show

Hello Well Women!

Today on the show I interview Viva Asmelash. She is a passionate workplace consultant and certified inclusion strategist specializing in forward-thinking employee engagement, equity-centered strategic planning, values-driven branding, and critical team conversations. Viva’s professional purpose is to create environments where people feel truly seen and are inspired to be their best and most authentic selves. She often facilitates inclusive executive group coaching, delivers engaging keynotes and panel discussions, and crafts org-wide education experiences for clients like IDEO U, MiQ, and Reading Partners. As the co-founder of Liberation Labs, she proudly co-designed the first-of-its-kind Culturally-Aware Feedback Training™. She also co-authored the viral 2023 Harvard Business Review article, Creating Psychological Safety for Black Women at Your Company.

As a first-generation Eritrean-American, Viva leverages a unique, lifelong perspective on race, gender, culture, belonging, privilege, and education access. With this lens and her breadth of experience, she takes deep care in helping teams evolve their people + inclusion ethos and efforts—all in hopes of planting seeds for collective liberation and joy.

We discuss:

How to Gain awareness of how identity factors into our pathways to emotional and psychological safety at work

How we can Swap "saviorism" for solidarity

And why making workplaces safer and better for Black women actually benefits everyone.

In celebration of Black History Month, I also want to highlight past episodes featuring the work and lives of Black women.

265 The Urgency For Equal Rights - Carol Jenkins was President and CEO of the ERA Coalition/Fund for Women’s Equality, which aims to amend the U.S. Constitution to include the Equal Rights Amendment, something many Americans believe already happened.

298 How to Make and Keep Friends with Dr. Marisa G. Franco author of NYT bestselling book Platonic

303 When Black Women Thrive at Work with Ericka Hines, author of Black Women Thriving, a report and call to action which seeks to define what it means for Black women to thrive in the workplace and determine how they find joy, success, and stability at work.

245 Leading Inside the Beltway with Dr. C Nicole Mason, the past president and chief executive officer of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a leading voice on pay equity, economic policies, and research impacting women.

The Well Woman Show is thankful for support from Collective Action Strategies - a consulting firm that supports systemic change so that women and families thrive, and by the Well Woman Life Movement Challenge Quiz at wellwomanlife.com/quiz