LaVerne:

Welcome to Brilliant in 20, a new podcast from the Scoop News Group and Emerald One, where we celebrate the unique brilliance of today’s leaders and share their greatest lessons with you, in just about 20 minutes. Hi, I’m LaVerne Council, CEO of Emerald One. On this episode, we’re featuring part two of my conversation with Bridgette Heller, a global leader, board member, and now, CEO of an educational nonprofit she founded in her mother’s honor. If this is your first time joining us, make sure to go back and listen to part one of our conversation.

We begin this episode discussing some of the success factors Bridgette noticed as an executive with companies like Merck, Kraft, Johnson & Johnson, and Danone. Were there any qualities that you can attribute to being a female that helped you be more successful globally than not, or being African American that helped you be more successful more than not?

Bridgette:

Yeah. So I think this notion of vulnerability definitely came a lot from being both, but especially, honestly, from being African American because when I walked in… So, I always say two things about this. One is, people always ask me the question about being a working woman. How is it being a working mom or a working woman? Oh my God! How are you able to balance the working woman thing. Initially, I found it a very funny question, a very strange question, because I don’t know about you, but as I grew up, every woman I knew worked.

LaVerne:

It’s all I knew. Yeah.

Bridgette:

Exactly, it was what I knew. So, I grew up in an African American community in the segregated South, where every woman worked. And so the idea that I was working in a job that didn’t require the level of sacrifice that most of the women that I saw growing up were required to give to their jobs, I felt incredibly blessed as a working woman. So the idea of not being a “working woman” never really crossed my mind. I never really thought about that as something-

LaVerne:

As an option. Yes.

Bridgette:

Maybe, but I didn’t know it was an option and I certainly didn’t fire to it because the other piece of that was if you aspire to do something like that, then you might actually lose your skillset and down the road… My grandmother used to say, “Girl, you don’t know how long you’re going to be able to keep a man. You need to always have your skills ready [crosstalk 00:02:50].” Right?

LaVerne:

[crosstalk 00:02:50] you don’t know.

Bridgette:

Because how are you about to walk out on that man and be able to feed those children? Right? Again, that’s what I grew up with. That was always the lay of the land. So I think that the fact that I never really worried as much as many of my peers about this whole sort of working woman image, it just never was a thing for me. So I didn’t have that burden of, “This is my image.” I didn’t have that. So I didn’t know.

And then I think the other thing about being honestly, African-American and perhaps even being female, but definitely more African-American in my view, and this may sound a bit racist, it may sound maybe even a bit sad, but the truth is that because I grew up in a segregated South for most of my childhood, when I went to work, the fact that people did things that seem to convey that they felt I might be stupid, that actually wasn’t new to me. So I actually felt that was a huge advantage. So I loved the fact that often when I walked into a room, I was way underestimated. People would be like, “Oh my God, she can add.” You know?

LaVerne:

Of course, I do.

Bridgette:

So I can add. I’ve been adding since I was six. Of course, I can add. I did bookkeeping for my grandfather from the time I was 10. So of course I could add. It was like, this was just an amazing thing. So the fact that people would underestimate, it always just blew my mind. But I have to acknowledge the fact that it sometimes served as an advantage. And I think that it’s an advantage-

LaVerne:

It was a catalyst, right? It was a catalyst. I know you don’t think I got this, which is great, but I got this. And not only do I have this, but it’s going to inspire you to do better.

Bridgette:

Exactly. So when I would do what was my best, it was viewed as miraculous. Now, granted, I do believe my best was very good and often better than peers. Sometimes as good, but often better. But miraculous? Maybe not. So it was that kind of thing.

LaVerne:

Yeah. Well, it’s fascinating. People will ask that question and often say, I always know I was a woman.

Bridgette:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

LaVerne:

Especially traveling abroad, I was an American woman.

Bridgette:

Yes.

LaVerne:

Which was fascinating too, because the ratio aspect changed, the gender never did. And then going to other places where race was important as a black woman first. So it’s always not having that consciousness take you away from who you are.

Bridgette:

Yes.

LaVerne:

But being conscious enough to use it as an advantage, but also being conscious enough to understand what people need to understand about you, in order to develop the kind of respect they’ll need to trust you and to enable your business growth abroad. So [crosstalk 00:06:31]. Yeah. It’s always a handful and I always tell people, one of the things I always did because I thought it was needed was when I would go into a foreign country, I would set up a breakfast with the women that worked on the team-

Bridgette:

Yes. I do that too, yeah.

LaVerne:

… just because they need it. I wanted to give them access, and I also wanted to give them a voice, and I also wanted to understand what it was like for them, and what could I do to make sure that they were given an equal opportunity to succeed. Because otherwise they… And many of them would say, “I’ve never meet a woman leader. I’ve never met one ever.” And so this is great motivation and I’m happy to say many of them have gone on to do really great things. So I’m always proud.

Bridgette:

I would say, I found that to be true because honestly, being black and being a woman already makes you an inclusive leader or at least it sets the expectation. [crosstalk 00:07:26] the expectation. But it does set the expectation of you as a more inclusive leader. And so for me, it’s been really interesting to sort of watch that because I will say I’ve had that experience definitely with women. I always want to…

Again, one of my first conversations, my first town hall in Amsterdam, and she’ll laugh if she actually hears this podcast, but was a Dutch woman, the Dutch are known for being very direct. So she said to me in a very direct way, and I was still learning the culture, “Well, you are a black American woman. What are you going to do to make things better for women at Danone?” And I was like, “Well, first of all, you’re absolutely right. I am a black American woman. How observant of you?” And then I said, “I don’t really know. I don’t really know how things are yet for women at Danone, but one of the things I can promise you is that I’m here to listen and find out, and then we’ll make a plan. But you know what? You have just designated yourself as my point person and [inaudible 00:08:43] do that, right? Because you raised the question.”

LaVerne:

Yeah. You have an interest.

Bridgette:

And she’s a great point person in doing that.

LaVerne:

Yeah. When you see the interest, that means that’s your project.

Bridgette:

Exactly. But the other piece I found was that it wasn’t just for women, right? So people of color really gravitate towards you, whether it’s honestly, whether for me, whether it was American, whether it was African, whether it was Indian or even some Asians, they gravitate toward you when you’re working in a culture that’s primarily either Anglo or in our case at Danone, sort of a very French type of a culture, they really do gravitate to you. If you again, create that transparency and that vulnerability, that openness, they gravitate toward you because they feel different. They feel extremely different in that culture. And so they gravitate to you to express that and to almost anchor and validate, right? And so that I feel was where my role was sort of most important operating in cultures, where again, there were people who were different.

LaVerne:

Yeah.

Bridgette:

Having the ability to validate their experience was really, really important.

LaVerne:

Yeah. I can totally understand that and I can remember how important it was for people to understand that I was a mom and how thrilled they were when they found that my mother lived with me when she was living.

Bridgette:

Yes.

LaVerne:

In certain cultures that was really so respected.

Bridgette:

Absolutely.

LaVerne:

And they didn’t think Americans did that. And so they really valued who I was as a person and that really helped me in leading people by being open enough to talk about who I was, not just what I do.

Bridgette:

Yeah, right. That’s that vulnerability. And in some cultures it’s almost nonexistent. And I often wondered whether it was because they wanted it that way or because it just was, and so you would respect the culture, but you would also create the opportunity.

LaVerne:

Yeah. I totally get it. Well, thank you Bridgette. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the Shirley Proctor Puller Foundation. You’re on a mission, you’re on multiple boards, you’re a busy person, but this foundation, I know this is your guiding light and you have a goal. So talk to me about the critical drivers and what are you really trying to do with the foundation? And then talk to me about boards because everybody wants to know how to get on the board. Talk to me about Shirley Procter Puller Foundation, and then talk to me about your leadership and what that means to you and your board and engagement.

Bridgette:

Let me actually… I’m going to try and intertwine it or weave it in. I actually, from a board perspective, I had my first board actually, when I was at Kraft, it was a private company board. And I was approached by a gentleman who asked me if I’d ever thought about it, he thought I would bring sort of great perspective. And it was consumer perspective that they were looking for. So, I think the first lesson, and it’s always been consumer perspective on every board sense, it’s been some other things as well, but definitely that consumer perspective has been a driver.

LaVerne:

Yeah.

Bridgette:

So I’d say that the first thing you do is again, treat the board or the board room that you’re trying to get into as your consumer and say, “What do I bring to that table? What do I bring to that party?” Right? And so figure out what it is you have to offer. And then interestingly, figure out if there are a few target companies that are within your space or your realm that could really benefit from it and then begin to navigate your way into those things. So that’s actually one of the ways in which it has worked best for me, to figure out sort of, those people are really in need of consumer perspective.

But then I did that early on and I also did not-for-profit boards early on. So I did the Local Family Services board. I did the Girls Inc board. I did not-for-profit boards that got me great exposure to people who were working in for-profit boards. And so those are the two tips I would give to people as you think about board work and how do you get it?

And then the final tip I’d give is that you have to let people know you’re looking, if you’re at that senior level or at a level where boards are truly viable, for-profit boards, you have to let people know you’re looking, you have to let people know it’s something that you’re interested in, particularly, and people don’t think of this, but particularly let your boss know. So, if you can get your boss to say, “Yes, I support her for a board.” Wow! A recruiter is all of a sudden very interested, not just because your boss is supporting you, but because if he can place you, then maybe he can get in with the boss.

LaVerne:

Yes. So there’s a lot of [inaudible 00:14:19].

Bridgette:

So there’s a little bit of that. So, that’s one tip I’ll give you. Now, when I moved to the Shirley Proctor Puller Foundation, this is most definitely a labor of love, I will say that. You know that I was extremely close to my mom. My mom passed away in 2013, she had been an educator for almost 40 years. So it’s 35, 36 years. She’d raised us in what was at one point this very close knit, little African-American community that then went through integration and this whole thing.

As a result in the years since I’d left and I left here in 1983, integration… No, actually I left here in 1979. Integration did not happen here until the early 70s. Late 60s, early 70s. Just keep that in mind. And from the point of integration in the, let’s call it early 70s until probably 2015, I think looked at, the schools had gone through a whole bunch of sort of change, but the net of it was that the schools and the community had really lost their way and had become the most horrible places to be educated in the state actually, if you were African-American.

Actually, the worst performing school in the state is a school that I went to when it was first integrated. So my first integration school is now the worst school in the State of Florida and actually of the schools that I’m working with, probably there are five schools here that are on the bottom 300 list in the state of Florida. And that’s not a good list. I mean, it’s a horrible thing.

And my mom sort of saw this long before any of us did. So she started to really wrangle my family about the need to invest in the children in the community because she felt like we’d lost a couple of generations in terms of the emphasis and the focus on education, in terms of the quality of education that they were receiving and that if we weren’t careful, we would now lose more generations that we would never be able to turn around the sort of fate, if you will, or the trajectory of African-Americans in this community and to have them become in mass contributors from an economic perspective to the economic health of the city, right? And if you’re not a contributor to the economic health, then you are not a player in the city or the county or the state. As a result, things get done to you, you don’t do things.

LaVerne:

[inaudible 00:17:28] with you.

Bridgette:

Right. You don’t do things in concert with the leaders. And that was her biggest thing. So when she passed, my brother and I and my father and many people in our family decided, okay, we’re going to try and do something. I then did the research and actually shortly after I did the research and concluded that she had a very good point, she had great reasons to believe what she did, there was a great article that came out in 2015 called Failure Factories. They literally labeled these schools and this community as Failure Factories. And they said it was the single worst place to go to school or get an education if you were an African American child.

So that really hit home. It really disheartened everyone. We had been working on a file from a foundation perspective to decide what we were going to do. So our mission truly became to advance literacy, which is at the core of the education and help close the achievement gaps for children in this community. And it’s a community that is 62% African American in a county that by the way is only 18 or not even 18, probably 13% African American. It is a county where… Or it is an area where literally 42% of the children under 18 live in poverty. And so those kinds of statistics really speak to the underlying sort of issues that the children can’t control. It’s everything you’ve heard about if you grow up in a certain zip code, you have the least chance of getting a great education.

So we decided to first focus on summer learning loss because most educators realize that if you’re out of school for two to three months, which becomes a big issue now with the pandemic, but if you are out of school for the summer, as kids are out of school for the summer, what happens is children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds tend to go to some sort of extracurricular programming that advances their education and keeps them engaged, whereas children from lower socioeconomic traditions tend to not have that same exposure or same sort of opportunity.

LaVerne:

Yeah.

Bridgette:

So we decided we would give those children that opportunity and therefore stop that summer slide or summer learning loss. It’s typically 12 weeks of learning loss for children in that type of situation. And so if we could stop that 12 weeks of learning loss, we felt we’d make a huge contribution to closing the gap. So we actually surprised ourselves in that we’ve had this camp now for the last four years and in each of those four years, more than 80% of our students have suffered no learning loss, which has been-

LaVerne:

Wonderful.

Bridgette:

… phenomenal.

LaVerne:

Wonderful.

Bridgette:

And not only that, last summer we had 63% of our students made gains in reading and 57% of our students made gains in maths. So we-

LaVerne:

Wow!

Bridgette:

… were so super excited. We’ve now moved to expand the program to include an afterschool initiative, which I’m truly excited about. And we’re seeing our kids continue to have those gains and to really have those strengths. We focused on both literacy and we actually focused on STEM, which your audience will be very interested in, or STEAM as we call it because we added the art, there’s lots of studies that have been done that shows if you can do the STEM plus the art, you really work both sides of the brain-

LaVerne:

Stimulate that brain, yes.

Bridgette:

… which is critical to us. So we really have been leveraging that piece. And the coolest thing about it is actually that when you’re drilling kids for an hour each day in the summertime on reading and on math, and then you put them in a STEM class, oh my God, they love it. They actually will go to the reading and the math just to get to the STEM class because what they’re doing in STEM is they’re putting it all together. They’re practicing the literacy, they’re practicing the math, but they don’t get that, right? They talk about it as, “I’m building robots. I’m really doing these really cool experiments. I blew something up. I got to grow something.” Those things are really the things that excite them and motivate them. And so it is my absolute joy to bring those types of experiences to the children in our community.

LaVerne:

Thank you for doing this and thank you for doing it with your mother’s name. I had the opportunity to spend time with your mom. She was a lovely, lovely woman. Exuded everything that motherhood is, but also exuded a great personality and clearly she was a teacher, she was always teaching-

Bridgette:

Always.

LaVerne:

… always learning, but always full of joy. So thank you for that. Thank you for doing that. I think it’s so important and I look forward to seeing that school turnaround and Emerald One will be wherever you need us to be to help you-

Bridgette:

Thank you.

LaVerne:

… to do this.

Bridgette:

Thank you very much.

LaVerne:

We have a gift to give, we will give it. So Bridgette, you have my most respect. I want to thank you for giving me your time. You always are on me because we’re friends, but I never take my friends for granted. I don’t feel like anyone has to do anything for you. They don’t have to give you any of their time, they don’t even have to love you, but you’ve been willing to give me all those things and I thank you for that. And thank you for being our guest today. It’s been nothing but a privileged to learn from you over the years, to laugh with you and to cry with you. And so I so appreciate you. But before you go, I just have one final question I’m asking my guests. What’s on your desk that you want to share with us. What do you have in front of you? What’s driving you today?

Bridgette:

Right now, what’s driving me is the fact that it is GivingTuesdayNow which is not something that we had ever heard of, but GivingTuesdayNow is actually a global day of giving that was created as an emergency response to the unprecedented need for funds during COVID. So in my situation or my case, we’ve had to make a lot of adaptations as we’ve moved our children online, which in again, lower socioeconomic situations where kids don’t have typically computers or families don’t have Wi-Fi access and absolutely people also forget that our children are mobile. So a lot of times that the parent is actually not the one that’s at home with them, it’s a grandparent or someone of that sort.

So the idea that learning is happening in those environments is actually quite challenging. So just trying to help them navigate that has required a lot of extra resource for us. So we are actually right now doing a GivingTuesday campaign to ask people to really help us both replenish, but also to help us to pay for the funds for a camp for kids this year, even as we go back to onsite camp, because families can’t afford it. Many of our families have been furloughed or laid off, many of them are obviously working in some of the hardest hit industries like retail or the resort industry, the hotel industry, those kinds of things. And so lets all pitch in, we’re in this together and make sure-

LaVerne:

So what do you have in your desk. A can? What do you got? A [crosstalk 00:25:33].

Bridgette:

Okay. I’ll show you. Let me see what I can show you around that. I’ve got here. I’ll show you this. I’ve got my fact sheet-

LaVerne:

The promo.

Bridgette:

… that actually speaks to all of the learning gains that we’ve made over time. These are our cohorts right here. And so you can see how they’ve really made significant learning gains. And that’s something that we’re including in our GivingTuesday pitch.

LaVerne:

Well, that’s another sign of a great leader and a pro, you’re looking at the metrics that matter. So, appreciate that in you, regardless of this for the kids, you’re still going to make sure that you’re doing what you said you’d do, [crosstalk 00:26:12] for that Bridgette. I am so proud of you. Thank you again for being on Brilliant in 20. Come back anytime.

Bridgette:

Thank you so much for having me. And you know that the feeling is incredibly mutual. I’m honored. I hold such great respect for you and I’m really, really pleased to have been among your early guests. Thank you.

LaVerne:

Thank you. You’ll be back. Big ups.

Bridgette:

Big ups. Bye-bye.

LaVerne:

And thank you for joining Brilliant in 20, a joint production of Scoop News Group and Emerald One. We look forward to sharing our next episode with you. So stay brilliant.