Alyssa Calder Hulme: [00:00:00] Welcome to the women of ambition podcast. I'm your host, Alyssa Culler Hume. And today we have a fantastic guest on our show. Nina Simons is co founder and chief relationship officer at Bioneers and leads it's every woman leadership program throughout her career, spanning the nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, corporate, and. Philanthropic sectors. Nina has worked with nearly a thousand diverse women leaders across disciplines, race, class, age, and orientation to create conditions for mutual learning, trust, and leadership development. She co edited Moonrise, The Power of Women Leading from the Heart and authored Nature, Culture, and the Sacred. A Woman Listens for Leadership, which is the book we're going to talk about here today, was released as a second edition in 2022 with an accompanying discussion guide and embodied. Practice. Nina received the Goy Peace Award with her husband and partner, Kenny Ausubel for pioneering work to promote nature inspired innovations for restoring the earth and our [00:01:00] human community, which is pretty incredible. So thank you so much for being here, Nina. Nina Simons: Thank you, Alyssa. It's great to be with you. Um, Alyssa Calder Hulme: this is your beautiful book. You can see it behind her if you're watching the video. Um, it's beautiful. This artwork is fantastic. Um, and I, I'll just start by saying that, you know, I, I get reached out to by a lot of PR teams and different people wanting me to promote the material. And, I'm really picky, but yours is the first one that I, I read and I really loved and am deciding to share it because, um, I think what your, your message here is, is really incredible. It's really holistic. And I think it's something that we really need to talk about. So thank you so much for, for me, for writing this book and publishing it. And. Talking about being like a feminist as a white woman who's trying to, um, decolonize perspectives, understand privilege, um, and also, [00:02:00] um, someone who's been in that space for so long. You have a lot of wisdom to share and a lot of experience. And I, I'm just really grateful that you're putting that out in the world and being vulnerable. So thank Nina Simons: you. Oh, it's my honor and privilege. I feel really grateful to get to do it. Thank you, Elisa. Okay, Alyssa Calder Hulme: so, I, so this book is about women's leadership, um, and you talk about it from your own personal experiences and then in working with other, with other leaders in, In lots of different communities, um, can we start maybe talking about, uh, what Bioneers is and where that word comes from, because I was really intrigued by that. Nina Simons: Sure. Sure. Well, the word was coined by my husband and partner because it's a contraction of biological pioneers. Okay. And the idea behind it was he started looking to find really innovative and effective [00:03:00] approaches. To healing our relationships with ourselves, each other and the earth and what he found was that some of the great innovators out there, many of them were looking to nature to heal nature and so there were nature sourced solutions and that's where the word Bioneers came from. But. Bioneers started as an annual gathering. Um, we started it in 1990 and over the years it has grown and grown and evolved tremendously so that now there is an annual face to face in person conference of about a year. 2500 or 3000 people, but there is also an incredible wealth of media that we put out. So we produce a radio series that wins awards many years and, um, a great newsletter and a lot of what motivated Bioneers in the first place was the recognition. [00:04:00] That the mainstream media tends to carry the bad news, but not the good news of the world. That's being born. And especially in this time when there's so much destruction and violence and coming apart, we all need to remember to give some of our time and energy to the world. That's being born because it's incredibly uplifting and inspiring and full of role models. And, and, um, that's what Pioneers is. And, um, what else did you ask me? I think that was the main question. No, Alyssa Calder Hulme: it, it was. Um, one of the things that you talk about in your book is the difference between a Bioneer and a Pioneer. And how as in the Bioneer space, you are looking to To create with the world instead of imagining it as a blank space that doesn't have, um, life already living and I don't know, I'm not articulating it very well. Your book says it so much more [00:05:00] beautifully, but, um, co creating in that world with indigenous people with local knowledge with local plants and flora and fauna and all of those things. You speak maybe a little bit. to that? And, and why is that a revolutionary concept to an American white person? Nina Simons: Oh, that's a great question. Well, and it's interesting as you frame it, it very much parallels my exploration with leadership ...
