Ladies and gentlemen, on this week's episode of the Rise Together podcast, we are going to push into a hard conversation about race.

It is an impossibly difficult thing at times to fully get our arms around what's happening, how we got here, what systems and power structures exist to afford it,

and we're going to push into it because of one, it being important, and two, it being the thing that's necessary for us to create the kind of progress and activism inside of anti-racism to actually afford a path forward.

We are so fortunate, I'm so grateful that we have a guest today who is an expert inside of this field.

Dr. Ed Barron is a diversity and leadership consultant, he's an executive coach, he's an accomplished speaker, he's got 30 plus years of having developed his expertise in small nonprofits, in large multinational corporations, he has been working inside of the diversity and leadership space for a very, very long time, and is well known for conducting content specific workshops dealing with all aspects of this conversation.

He's a workshop that in fact he's given not once but twice to the people on our team. He's the chair of the Department of Leadership and Organizational Psychology at Azusa Pacific University, and his teaching specialties include systems and strategic planning for leaders, organizational implications of diversity, and leaders as agent of change.

He is a good man, he is a smart man, and he happens to be a friend of mine and our family. He also notably is the father to Brittany Beans-Baron for anyone who is familiar with her awesomeness and the way that she has been such an amazing contributor inside of our space in this community on the rise stage and beyond. Without further ado, please welcome Dr. Ed Barron.

What would the world look like if we all pushed ourselves to have candid conversations with people who didn't look like us, think like us, or live like us?

I'm Dave Hollis, and I'm on a mission to learn more about this world by meeting more of the people who live here.

You may not always agree with everything you hear, but I guarantee you'll come away more informed on topics you might never have thought to seek out before.

This isn't just a podcast, it's a community, and when we raise each other up, we all rise together.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Ed Barron to the Rise Together Podcast. This is going to be a fantastic and timely conversation.

I could not think of another human being on this planet to wait into a conversation around race and where we find ourselves and how we got here.

So thank you, Ed, for being here. I appreciate it so, so much.

Man, the pleasure is mine. I'm excited to connect and talk about the things that are most important, man, especially timely.

Well, you have been doing this work for quite a long time.

As much as man, there is more relevance and importance to the kind of conversations that we will have today and that you are having in real time with other humans.

You've been doing it for a long time. Can you tell me a little bit of how you got started inside of this space of provoking these very important and hard conversations and why it's so important to you?

Yeah, well, the evolution actually started probably about 30 years ago. And I say evolution because the conversations evolve obviously with context, but I was way back to my early years as an engineer and the aerospace industry, working to make sure that contracts were the ability to complete compete on contracts by minority owned businesses and women owned businesses was part of my charter.

And realize early on, man, that you can give a small minority owned company a contract and they don't have the wherewithal to perform it.

And before you know it, the reputation fails and they don't get into the contracts. We had to work on developing those companies.

And then in the religious nonprofit space, working on reconciliation for probably a decade or more.

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