WEBVTT
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Hi, Warriors.
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Welcome to One and Three.
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I'm your host, Ingrid.
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A victim of domestic violence encounters many people throughout the course of their abuse, and any one of those individuals could be the catalyst that changes the trajectory of that victim's life.
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My guest today, Suzanne Shepherd Post, understands that from both a personal experience and her professional background.
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She founded Sheerhaven, which was initially a small organization based out of Nashville, but has now reached over 100,000 professionals worldwide.
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Let's dive in to hear more about her mission and advocacy.
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Hi, Suzanne.
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Welcome to One and Three.
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Thank you so much for joining me.
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Oh, thank you so much, Ingrid.
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I'm so happy to be here.
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I'm very happy to have you here, and I'm very excited to talk about your topic because I think this is so creative, so necessary.
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But before we get into that, could you give just a background so we can get to know you a little bit?
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Absolutely.
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I am um so grateful for this opportunity to share about my passion project.
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Um, my background is actually in the beauty world.
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I am a stylist and a salon owner.
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I've been in the industry for over 30 years, and I'm also a survivor of domestic violence.
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And these two worlds collided back in 2017.
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And I had heard about a law that was passed in Illinois.
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It um it required my industry, the beauty industry, to be educated about the science of domestic violence.
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And it absolutely stopped me in my tracks and caught my attention, and it um basically birthed this initiative that I started here in Tennessee.
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And the timing of it was interesting.
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I'm also a mom.
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I have two beautiful kiddos.
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And at my internal nudging after having my second child, I had let go of my bigger salon space and had actually downsized into what I thought was a much simpler world for um kind of holding motherhood and my working, you know, time behind the chair.
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And at that point, it, I believe it created that opening, that creative space that allowed me to then step into this next chapter.
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And I know we'll go much deeper into that, but that's that's the gist.
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I am a beauty professional slash mom slash wife and uh advocate for domestic violence awareness and education, which is the perfect storm to come up with your projects.
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So, quick before we get into that, did you do you just get to hear all of the beauty news throughout the states, or is this something that you just stumbled upon, or how did you find out about Illinois?
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Well, that's interesting.
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I was I was actually in the middle of cleaning up my closet.
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It was a snowed in uh January day, and I must have just been listening to the news.
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I came across a story that um just was just a blip on the news about this law that had been passed in Illinois.
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So it was um interesting timing for it to uh just pop in front of me that way.
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But of course, after hearing about it, I I did some research and read up a little bit more on it, and it was everywhere.
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It it was kind of groundbreaking at that point.
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Um, it was a new requirement for the industry, and I had been looking for a way as a survivor to get plugged into my community and support survivors and and victims in the community in that interesting way.
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I had been thinking about volunteering at the local YW shelter to do hair for for people that might be uh in shelter or moving back into the workforce.
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I had been to some of the fundraising events and um yes, was just looking for that right place to plug in and had actually reached out to them about that.
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And I was very familiar with the statistics in Tennessee because of those events.
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I knew that Tennessee was pretty consistently in the top 10 in the nation at the rate that women are killed by men.
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And of course, I knew that statistically, at least one in four women, um, I think more than one in four women and one in seven men would experience domestic violence in their lifetime.
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So I knew that in Tennessee, half of all calls to law enforcement are domestic violence related, and that it was a really big issue in our community that uh needed perhaps some unique ways to address it.
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I thought this is so outside the box, and yet it made perfect sense to me.
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Um and so that that was when I reached out to them initially and said, okay, is this something that that you would like to join me in?
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Is this an effort that makes sense?
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And they said, Yes, we have actually been looking for a you.
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We have been uh trying to start breaking into this world and didn't have uh a hair professional to actually be the face of it.
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And so it was just perfect timing.
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That really is.
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It's kind of eerie, actually, how it just all fell into place exactly perfectly.
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So let's talk about it.
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Yes.
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Yes.
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Okay.
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So what is the name of your project and what it what have you what have you done?
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We'll start with past and then move to present and future.
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Yes.
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So the past.
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My my reaching out to them back in 2017 led to us creating a curriculum together that was based in the YWs.
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They're the largest provider of domestic violence resources and education in our community.
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And so they did domestic violence 101 trainings.
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And I stepped in as the beauty professional to dig in a little bit deeper to the signs that our industry might be uniquely positioned to hear.
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And the why around our industry is because of the relationship and the consistency that we see our clients.
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We have people in our chair that we'll see month after month, often for decades.
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I have clients that I've seen since truly day one in the salon, that I've now seen once every four weeks, some of them once every three weeks for now over 30 years.
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And have been able to build such a close, trusting relationship with them that they open up to us about everything.
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I have found myself, you know, the first person to hear that someone's pregnant, that they're expecting a baby even before their husband is.
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I have heard about, you know, the exciting job change, career change, shakeups and relationships, for better or for worse, you know, the person that says, I can't believe I'm falling in love with my best friend and I haven't told anyone it's top secret.
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Or I've also been um on journeys with people through really difficult seasons.
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And of course, our relationship, it's times that people will kind of expose little bits of their story as they're ready.
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Um, it could unfold over years.
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And so there's times that looking back, I've had little glimpses that maybe something wasn't quite right in a relationship, but it wasn't until maybe two years later that they really started sharing in depth more details that were more discernible that I was able to put into um context with okay, this this was actually an abusive relationship that I was privy to, that maybe nobody else was.
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And so the why is important because, you know, a lot of people have asked why not every industry.
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Domestic violence education should reach everyone in the community.
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And I agree with that.
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I think it's really important to spread awareness and um reduce stigma, open up conversations about what the signs are so that any of us are able to support our friends in a different way.
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But our my industry is of course where I am grounded, and so that is what I'm building from.
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And the relationship that we have is very unique and um makes us really kind of that perfect year.
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So we started doing in-person trainings with the YWCA, and um we had our first training back in 2017 during October, which was Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and we opened it up to the community at the health department.
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Uh, we thought this is how we'll do it.
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We'll just make it a community event.
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It can um attract anyone from any salon that wants to be a part of it.
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And interestingly, when we put it into a press release and reach the community with the news, we had people from other industries that showed up.
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We had a couple of nurses that showed up.
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We had um an attorney who showed up, which we were thrilled with because um it's very important to us that anyone who wants this information is able to receive it, uh, even if they're outside of our industry.
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But very quickly we realized that it might be more successful with in-person salon trainings to make it as easy for the salon owner or the stylist as possible.
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So we shifted from the big community event to more intimate in-person salon events.
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And we had, you know, groups of 10, groups of 20 that we would go and uh provide this information to.
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And often the trainings were several hours.
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Um, we would usually book it for an hour, but the conversations that would unfold were so incredible that um often they ended up being two hours, three hours at times.
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And the response was incredible.
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The questions that were asked, the light bulbs that would go off.
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You could see people um have moments of awakening where they they would say, okay, I currently have a client that I could see these signs in.
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Or looking back years ago, there was a client that I think I missed.
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Um, a few really heartbreaking stories unfolded.
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Like uh one of my friends reached out and she said, I lost a client to a domestic violence incident.
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It was a murder suicide.
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And she said, looking back, I now know after going through the training that there were some very obvious signs in front of me, but I didn't, I just didn't quite know what it was.
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I knew something wasn't quite right, but I didn't know that it was abuse.
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And so as we started doing these in-person trainings, it very quickly became evident that it needed to be bigger than what we were doing there.
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And that's when a couple of years in, I decided to reach out to my local lawmaker and see if they would be willing to introduce legislation like we had seen Illinois pass.
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And he's wonderful.
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His name is Sam Whitson.
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He's actually retired from being a representative now, but um, Tennessee is a supermajority red state.
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And as I've done more work at the state level, I know that it's very important to find the right lawmaker to carry your legislation.
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And in Tennessee, it needed to be someone like Sam who was highly respected and had a real heart for an issue like this.
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And so we started working in 2020 to um introduce this legislation.
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And it's a windy road that we can go into, but that that was kind of the condensed version of the beginning.
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In-person trainings, which led into our legislative efforts here in Tennessee, which ultimately have really good news, and we can go into that.
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But it uh it's been an incredible journey that is so outside of my realm of uh understanding of how how big this little seed of inspiration would grow.
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And during 2020, which is you know what a horrible year for so many people.
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But 2020 actually ended up just, I don't know, I don't know if it was because of COVID or despite COVID, but just so many incredible things happened to that year.
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Well, and something that COVID did is it really exposed the the issue of domestic violence.
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There were so many people that were not safer at home, to your point.
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You know, there was so much magic that happened.
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I think all of us were um at least temporarily kind of brought together in a really beautiful way and showed incredible depth of caring for each other in an incredible way.
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Of course, we were brought online.
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We didn't know how to do this before 2020, really.
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Um and it actually, as far as our legislative efforts, ended up being a huge gift in our in our mission.
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Um, sadly, with the increase in domestic violence, it became even more crucial to um find a unique way to respond.
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And during the shutdown, our industry was one of the close contact industries that didn't have the ability to pivot online.
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You know, we're up close and personal with our clients.
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And so when I was asked to be on Governor Lee's economic recovery group as the representative for my industry, I was thrilled to have um honestly something to put my anxious energy into at that point.
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And it connected me with a key player in our future, our current um Shearhaven journey.
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And that was a company called Barbicide.
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Um, they were the leaders in disinfection, they're the leaders in safety in our industry.
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They're in the blue jar that's on every station of every salon around the world.
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They're um the liquid that we put our combs and our brushes in to keep them clean.
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And they were really putting out incredible information about how to stay safe during a pandemic, how to clean our instruments properly, which of course we know how to do anyway, but they were um reinvigorating our knowledge about how to do this um pandemic, this global pandemic thing.
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And I was able to gather information from them to then pass on to the state to give them information about how we how our industry could reopen as quickly as possible.
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And through that partnership, they had actually just launched their trainings online.
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They had just scaled their website to be able to reach people in that way, rather than having to do in-person trainings.
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And um, it wasn't an immediate light bulb for me, but over time it occurred to me maybe this could be a key partner as our legislative efforts had come to a close during 2020.
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Um, it allowed us to take a breath and figure out how to meet some of the requirements that lawmakers had asked for.
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So our um our legislation had been moving through committees.
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I had been testifying and sharing my personal story as a survivor and of course as a beauty professional, and explaining why this was so important and why this um additional requirement, which by the way was the only requirement, the only continuing education requirement in our state, um, was important and how it could save lives.
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And when we came to a halt, we realized that a couple of the things lawmakers had asked for were a quick training, which, of course, we had been doing multi-hour in-person trainings.
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So I was like, I don't even know how we shrink this into one hour.
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And they wanted it online, which we had no idea how to do.
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And they wanted it to be free, which that was the part that we knew, okay, even if we can figure out a way to make this less than an hour, even if we could figure out a way, of course, we knew we could film a video and um do maybe quarterly webinars or do a video that lives on a website somehow.
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We knew that we couldn't figure out how to do that at no charge.
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And that was something they said, we don't want it to cost a single dollar for the beauty professional.
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We don't want it to be any sort of additional weight that they have to do in order to keep their license.
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And so that was the part that we had like retracted and we said, okay, we're just going to pass this for people in school.
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That's something that we could do.
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We could go into schools, provide the education, wrap it into their hours.
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We could figure out a way to do that.
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But through a partnership with Barbicide, they agreed to actually host our training and provide it on their education platform at no charge, which oh my gosh, was the biggest gift.
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And we ended up we found$500 and created a simple, concise 20 minute video and wrote a little quiz that went at the end and provided it to Barbicide.
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They were gracious enough to put it on their website and Ingrid overnight within three days, we went from having reached a couple of hundred people in Tennessee, perhaps, which we were thrilled with, to reaching over five thousand people globally in three days.
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And my mind and my heart were absolutely blown wide open.
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I could not believe the impact that that had.
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I mean, that people around the world were embracing this education the way that they were.
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And Barbicide has a very large following globally.
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They're, of course, very established here in the United States, but they also have distributors.
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Um, they have a huge amount in the UK and of course across Europe, but they have followers all over the world.
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And they ended up putting out an email blast to their million email addresses and reached people everywhere.
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And the feedback that started rolling in, the people that were sharing their certificate on social media just became this grassroots movement.
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Um, Barbaside's caveat in releasing the training was that they wanted to make sure it was not Tennessee specific.
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They said, we understand this is a tool that you need, but we want you to provide the resources to every state.
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And beyond that, we want you to provide international resources.
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So include hotlines, include resources for people around the globe.
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And so we were we were like, oh, okay, of course.
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We were a little nervous that lawmakers here in Tennessee would be put off by that, but they were not.
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Um, in spring of 2021.
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And so we were able to reach every licensed cosmetologist, barber, aesthetician, nail tech, and natural hairbraider, as well as everyone in school for all of those um industries with domestic violence education.
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And that is incredible.
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I mean, just because I know the numbers are no longer 5,000, but when you take that initial 5,000 and you think those are 5,000 professionals, and how many lives those individuals touch beyond I'm it's just it's like an astronomical amount of people.
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And that was just the beginning.
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It it really is thinking about how many clients I have on my book, you know, just that I see in rotation over the course of a month, and then multiply that by certainly even 5,000.
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It's incredible because it's not just the clients that we see behind the chair, it's our coworkers, it's our family members, our friends, our friends' friends.
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You know, we're just so much more aware and able to listen with a different uh sensitivity, a different amount of compassion and um awareness that allows us to support everyone in our lives in a different way.
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Absolutely.
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And, you know, you can you think if you have a favorite restaurant you go to and you develop any kind of a relationship with the bar staff or the wait staff, you may even pick up on cues from those individuals.
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Absolutely.
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Absolutely.
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I've I've had so many of those stories come back to me.
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You know, just you know, I had one stylist who said that she, you know, knew that when she was shopping in her favorite boutique here in Nashville, that uh one of her friends that she had met that works there was talking about her relationship one day and kind of opening up about things.
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And she was like, I I knew what she was in the middle of.
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I knew that she was in the early stages of being love-bombed and that there was some serious red flags.
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He was moving way too fast, and she recognized it because of that training, that awareness.
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And that awareness is so key because there are so many people.
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I've gotten messages from a lot of different people of my loved one went through this domestic violent relationship.
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And I wish that I would have understood the situation more.
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I could have intervened, I could have reacted possibly different when they started talking to me about this abuse.
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And there are so many pieces that just stretch along that timeline of abuse, of like you mentioned, the beginning stages of the love bombing and the red flags that are there, to the more subtle abuse, to the blatant abuse.
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And those victims need to be heard and they need to be seen, they need to be believed.
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And even post-escape of that relationship, the survivors still need to be seen, heard, and believed.
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And that healing process is difficult.
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So to bring an entire industry who touches, like literally touches so many lives, that awareness and then that information that they can just pass on in conversation to others, that may be the only exposure people get to understand abuse and violence.
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Yes, I every single bit of that.
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I I know that because of the long relationships that we build, that I've heard behind the chair with people around me, stylists even get really frustrated.
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Like it's frustrating to know that someone who might be kind of in that cycle who is maybe even leaves but goes back, you know, being able to educate people that it could take up to seven times on average, you know, so we know it could take many more than seven times for someone to finally be able to uh pull themselves out of that relationship successfully.
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And teaching people about how you need to hold space, you need to be patient, encouraging, but not pushy.
00:27:46.440 --> 00:27:55.480
Um, our hope is that we are educating people as much about how not to respond is how to respond in those kinds of situations.
00:27:56.279 --> 00:28:07.640
And um just really open up their hearts and their eyes in a different way, uh knowing what that may look like.
00:28:08.519 --> 00:28:18.119
Yeah, because the the response or the inappropriate response holds such weight in what a victim may or may not do.
00:28:18.279 --> 00:28:29.000
If they're not believed or if they're blamed for what's happening to them, that can lead to them not leaving because they're going to think, what am I, what am I going up against here?
00:28:29.240 --> 00:28:34.599
This person, this individual that I've been going to for 30 years is questioning what I'm doing.
00:28:34.839 --> 00:28:37.559
How is anyone else going to believe what I'm doing?
00:28:37.720 --> 00:28:40.759
How am I going to get any support when I leave?
00:28:41.720 --> 00:29:10.680
Well, and that feeling of if they open up being so exposed, you know, really being gentle with the way that you respond in a way that doesn't um where they don't feel uncomfortable coming back, even if they haven't quite left yet, knowing that you are gently holding that space, that you're a friend, that you're not, you know, that you're there as a support, but you're not being pushy.
00:29:11.240 --> 00:29:16.759
Um, our law that we passed does not make us mandatory reporters.
00:29:17.000 --> 00:29:19.400
And we really emphasize that in the training.
00:29:19.559 --> 00:29:22.519
That is not your, that is not your role.
00:29:22.759 --> 00:29:40.200
Your role is to be aware of the signs so that you can listen effectively, be aware of the resources so that you're able to be that warm referral that can send someone to the therapist or to the expert if given the opportunity.
00:29:40.519 --> 00:29:42.519
But you don't have to be the therapist.
00:29:42.680 --> 00:29:44.440
I know that we are kind of therapist.
00:29:45.240 --> 00:29:47.079
I was just about to say that.
00:29:47.799 --> 00:29:51.079
But we're not trained therapists, we are not the expert.
00:29:51.240 --> 00:30:08.359
And even the years in this work myself, if I have someone in the chair, I'm very careful to say, I can speak from my own experience, I can speak from what I've gathered by doing these trainings, but I am not the trained professional.
00:30:08.599 --> 00:30:15.160
And there are incredible professionals out there that are there and are a support.
00:30:15.960 --> 00:30:19.160
So yeah, just leading people to them.
00:30:19.559 --> 00:30:23.720
So before we get into the future, because that part's really exciting too.
00:30:24.039 --> 00:30:30.119
You went from owning a salon and being a survivor to jumping into politics.
00:30:30.279 --> 00:30:34.519
Did you have any past experience with that or how did you do that?
00:30:34.920 --> 00:30:38.519
Oh no, absolutely zero experience.
00:30:38.839 --> 00:30:41.559
Um it's been wild.
00:30:41.799 --> 00:30:49.319
I I'm still kind of in shock that that's even part of part of my story now.
00:30:49.640 --> 00:31:06.599
But no, I I absolutely would break into a full sweat walking into the Tennessee legislature, you know, just walking into the General Assembly and being like, okay, I'm gonna go in and have this meeting and share my story.
00:31:06.759 --> 00:31:21.079
And um, and yet I think most of us as survivors that are in a position to share any bit of our story are experienced some form of healing in doing so.
00:31:21.319 --> 00:31:25.160
It it feels incredible to be able to give back.
00:31:25.400 --> 00:31:40.359
And even if we can help one person through that really incredibly hard process that we went through, that really difficult season, it it kind of um yeah, it's healing.
00:31:40.599 --> 00:31:44.279
It it feels incredible to be able to get back in that way.
00:31:44.599 --> 00:31:56.279
So I pushed through discomfort and just kind of put one foot in front of the other, and uh it felt like the direction that I was being nudged in.
00:31:56.440 --> 00:31:58.119
So I just kind of leaned into it.
00:31:58.279 --> 00:32:00.920
But no, learning, I still know nothing.
00:32:01.079 --> 00:32:05.960
I just am showing up wherever I can be useful.
00:32:06.519 --> 00:32:07.799
I still know nothing.
00:32:08.359 --> 00:32:20.599
So what I was going to comment is I have found that every time a survivor shares part of their story, it's almost like a little bit of a weight that they're able to take off of themselves.
00:32:20.759 --> 00:32:32.920
And then in the same respect, this shame that all of us at some point did carry or still carry, you know, the amounts of shame it's not our shame to have.
00:32:33.079 --> 00:32:35.799
It's should not be anything to do with us.
00:32:35.960 --> 00:32:42.920
But I think also by hearing others' stories, it releases some of your own shame too.
00:32:43.079 --> 00:32:44.359
So it is so important.
