Into Liberation: A podcast about transformative change, equity, and working against oppression

Championing Equity and Maternal and Child Health with Dr. Cassandra Joubert

• VISIONS, Inc. • Season 1 • Episode 6

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This episode of Into Liberation features a conversation with the extraordinary Dr. Cassandra Joubert, who shares her story of growing up in racially segregated Houston and becoming a passionate advocate for maternal and child health.  Dr. Joubert talks about how her early life experiences and her time at Howard University in the early 1970s (amid the vibrant activism and Pan-Africanist movement) shaped her understanding of complex social issues, her work in her field, and her consulting with VISIONS.  

Dr. Joubert also talks about how her mother’s advice on financial independence led her to a career in policy advocacy and early childhood development. From research in neonatal intensive care units to leading philanthropic initiatives to ensuring hundreds of people working in early childhood development received VISIONS training, her work has consistently focused on improving the lives of mothers and children. Join us for an episode filled with warmth, wisdom, and inspiration from a life dedicated to making a difference.

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About us
Into Liberation: A podcast about transformative change, equity, and liberation is a production of VISIONS, Inc, a non-profit that offers effective tools that help individuals and organizations communicate and forge connections across differences that drive collective success.

Since 1984, we’ve offered research-based, time-tested approaches to cross-cultural learning that invite participants to engage in equity and inclusion work, starting at the personal and interpersonal levels and expanding to include changes toward institutional and cultural levels.

VISIONS offers actionable approaches that empower people to identify actions, explore their motivations, and effectively move through complex situations with respect and humanity for others and their differences.

Any opinions and views expressed by the speakers are their own and do not reflect the positions of VISIONS, Inc.

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Music credit: Tim Hall @tv_hall

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Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Hello, you're listening to Into Liberation, a podcast about transformative change, equity and working against oppression. I'm Lina Akhtar, director of Programs with Visions Inc. Welcome, hi, everyone. It is my pleasure to welcome you to another Visions Elder Story podcast, this time featuring the brilliant Dr Cassandra Jobert. Cassandra is a Visions consultant and retired professor of public health, specializing in maternal and child health, whose career has spanned NICU-based research, philanthropy, working on behalf of women and children and also heading up the Central California Children's Institute.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

In this episode, we talk about her upbringing and childhood in racially segregated Houston, texas, including content note a racially motivated attack that she was the target of when a young girl.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

We talk about her moving to DC for college and fortuitously ending up in a doctoral program at Johns Hopkins, and then how she helped bring the life-changing perspective that she developed in her Encounter with Visions work to hundreds of people working in early childhood development in the Central Valley.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

The first time I met Cassandra, I immediately noticed her warm, open and wise energy, and that came through and forced in this conversation. One of the things that I was most delighted to hear about was how her love of children was the thread that she has followed all through her life, from when she gathered up and read to the neighborhood children when she herself was a child, to what she decided to study, how she spent her career trying to improve outcomes for children, and now how, in retirement, she is surrounded by her grandbabies. It was a delightful conversation and I'm excited to share it with you. Hi everybody, I am really excited to be here with Senior Visions Consultant, dr Cassandra Jobert, who is, among other things, a former professor of public health, has worked in various sectors, including in maternal and child health, and also in philanthropy. Cassandra, thank you so much for being with us here today.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Well, it's my pleasure. Anything for Visions and for you.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

You know, as I mentioned, these conversations have been a wonderful opportunity to get to know people in Visions community better. We've spent some time in spaces together and when we first chatted I learned so much about you that I just didn't know. And I'm really, really excited to be talking about your professional and also personal trajectory, because it's so deeply intertwined, especially given how we do things at Visions. I'm excited to talk to you about that here. So for people who don't know you, can you introduce yourself briefly?

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Sure Cassandra Joubert, Visions Consultant, retired university professor, grandmother of five under the age of eight. I live in Vallejo, California, which is in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Beautiful. And then, how long have you been with Visions, or Visions Consultant?

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

So I've been actually working as a consultant since about 2014. However, I was introduced to Visions back in Michigan, probably in the early 2000s, when I first joined philanthropy and got to know some of the early, got to know the founder of Visions one of them, dr Valerie Batts, and we were working on a school-based healthcare project together.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Beautiful. I always appreciate hearing how people, what their journeys into the Visions orbit were like and, as you know, this is one of our elder stories that we're doing in the lead up to the 40th anniversary celebration that we're having later this year, september 27th in Boston. So, in that spirit, starting with the early parts of your story, we talked a little bit about how you grew up and I really appreciated hearing the diversity of your experiences like before you came to Visions and the things that shaped your perspective. So, starting with your early life, you mentioned that you grew up in Houston, which I didn't know about. Tell me a little bit about that.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Yeah, so right. I was born in 1954. So I'll be 70 years old this year and was born in Houston, texas, which, of course, was definitely racially segregated at the time. My father was a mailman and my mother was a beautician, and there were eight to 10 foot fences that divided neighborhoods black and white neighborhoods predominantly at that time and grew up there, you know, went to Houston public schools until the ninth grade and then I went to a Catholic high school.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

But the experience of growing up in Houston was that there was no escaping the impact of racial segregation. An example would be that we would load ourselves onto public school buses to go downtown to the Houston Opera, on to public school buses to go downtown to the Houston Opera, and as we got to the opera building, two things happened. One, we noticed that the yellow school buses that we were in, none of them had air conditioning, and then up would roll the white kids from neighboring schools, and they were all in air-conditioned buses. Then we would make ourselves our way into the orchestra hall and we could only sit up high in the balcony. As Black kids we were not allowed to sit on the lower levels or mezzanine, and so it was just always. Just the fact that we were viewed differently and treated differently was always up front and center in our, in our lives. And with my father being a mailman, he would deliver mail into predominantly white neighborhoods and come home with, you know, splattered tomatoes on his shirt or practice, just humiliated and angry and just tried and tested. So I'll never forget that that was the experience until later. I guess Houston Public Schools might have been integrated when I was in middle school, perhaps, maybe high school, I'm not sure, probably middle school.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

And then the other racial dynamic growing up in Houston is that I am Creole, my last name is French. There's a whole culture and community of Creole people, particularly in Texas, who largely came to Texas from Louisiana, particularly in Texas, who largely came to Texas from Louisiana. And you know Creoles by the fact that they have French last names largely and are lighter skinned and are the offspring of slave owners by and large. And so there was a color line not only between Blacks and Whites line not only between Blacks and whites but also between Blacks and Creoles. So I experienced a lot of antagonism and challenge going to predominantly Black schools because I was lighter skin and had a French last name.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

For that reason I shifted to a Catholic high school. My father took me out of public school, put me in Catholic school because I was always being threatened in the predominantly Black public school. So my Catholic school experience was interesting because I had never gone to school with white kids, I'd never met anybody white, quite honestly, before that. Overall it was a good experience. It certainly had its bumps, but overall I had a good, positive experience in Catholic high school in Houston. And then the rest is history in that I left Houston and went off to college, to a historically Black college, howard University in Washington DC, and then on to grad school at Hopkins and sort of left that life of segregation behind sort of left that life of segregation behind.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I'm really struck by. Well, I was struck the first time you said what you said about how your father would come home having been pelted with things. It sounds like you could sense his anger and how he felt about it. I'm curious how something like that would land on a small child, how it was explained, was it explained, or what meaning you made of it.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

It was definitely explained. My father was a bit of a social justice advocate himself. He would always talk about unfairness and injustice and how it surfaced in different ways in society. So there was no hiding that reality. If anything, there was more pressure put on us as Black kids to do well, to achieve, to be the best that we could be in light of the obstacles in life we were likely to face. And my only regret is that my father never lived to see Barack Obama become president, because certainly it would have been his view that that would never happen, that America would never elect a Black president. So, yeah, it was to our advantage. I think that we were always clear that, well, the experience of Black folk in Houston, texas, was not a good one and that it was something that we should take up our armor, if you will, against injustice. That was sort of my father's position.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Okay, and then you mentioned that your schools were integrated for the first time in middle school and you went to a Catholic high school, and you know the demographics were different there too. What were those experiences like for you?

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

It was very, very challenging on two levels. One, in the predominantly black elementary schools we had all black teachers and that was a really important factor, I think, in the success of Black kids in that school. If you go back to, you know the years that I was in elementary and middle school. Some of the people that we know today, some of the African Americans that came out of the South and did very, very well, like Debbie Allen, for example just as one example and Felicia Rashad Allen, both went to Black public schools. I think they both had teachers as parents, because Black education, you know, teacher being a teacher was one of the few professions that was really open to African-Americans back in that time. So having Black teachers was so instrumental in making sure that we really truly got a great education and put that education to good use. So that was a gift. Sometimes I actually refer to segregation as a gift, because once I got to middle school I had my first white teachers and it was difficult to navigate with white teachers. They didn't really understand necessarily Black children, the expectations and the experiences of Black children, and so sometimes that was a bit of a challenge just navigating the cultural differences. And then, of course, when I got to high school Catholic high school I had no Black teachers at all, all white nuns and priests, but overall, again, I had a pretty good experience.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

I had a couple of experiences that stand out in high school. One was that my high school had as its mascot the Confederate flag as its mascot, the Confederate flag, and there were a couple of radical Black students. When I entered in my freshman year, there were a couple of radical Black students, who I admire to this day, who took on the administration and said that the Confederate flag needed to come down, and so it was the first time that the Confederate flag at this school had ever been challenged. And what ended up happening is that they did not change the mascot from the Confederate flag, but they changed the colors of the Confederate flag to brown and gold and white instead of red, white and blue. So the same rebel cross Confederate image in a different color, which I actually thought for that day and time I'm talking 1970, was a pretty decent concession, and we can attribute that to some of the Black students who took on the administration.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Wow, so wait, the Catholic high school had a Confederate flag as its mascot, correct, wow, that's a lot.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Right, they called Carmel rebels. That's right. Oh, wow.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

So yeah, I mean, even during that time, at football games games, the black students did not stand for the american, the what is it? The anthem, the national anthem. We wouldn't stand. I mean. So the combination of growing up in segregation, having a fairly progressive father who always talked about injustice and what was right and what was wrong, and then having radical what I call radical, I should just say honest upperclassmen when I went to high school, all of those things kind of factored into my becoming very much a social justice advocate at a very young age.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Amazing. Tell me about when that started.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Well. So the bad news that I didn't share is that when I was about nine years old, you recall that I said that the neighborhoods were divided. Black and white neighborhoods were divided by, like this eight or 10 foot fence that ran for miles and we knew better than to go into the white neighborhoods, but the whites came into our neighborhood all the time. So as we're walking down a street pretty well traffic street in Houston called Jutland Avenue, one day there were about six or seven kids my age say, between nine and 12 or whatever walking down the street. White boys flew by in a station wagon with a gallon jug of Clorox and threw the Clorox into my face. I happened to be the one to get it.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

And back in that day we had large, very, very deep ditches, because Houston is below sea level, so it floods a lot. So we had these huge ditches that typically would have, had it'd been raining, would have been filled with water, but luckily they were not, because when these white boys came by and threw Clorox in my eyes, I of course tumbled down into the ditch because I was blinded temporarily, and then of course they sped off and one of the neighbors the kids were screaming and one of the neighbors came out and took me into her house and doused my eyes with water and called my parents and I just knew I would go to the hospital. But guess what? I didn't go to the hospitals because the hospitals were segregated and my parents felt well, no use taking her to the hospital, you know she's not going to get good care. So they basically treated me at home and I did have some blindness for a short time, but it didn't last, thank God, and I recovered, you know, pretty quickly from that, at least physically.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

I recovered from that. No one ever talked about it again, no one ever talked about it. So the reality of being Black in America and the implications of that I just have been keenly aware of all my life.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Oh, Sandra, I'm so sorry.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

And I think I shared with you that I didn't give any thought to that incident and certainly did not talk about it anymore until I started Visions work. I just put it out of my mind. And when I started Visions Work and was introduced to concepts around racial violence as well as internalized oppression, modern oppression, I started to wonder about the impact that that event had on me, not only how I reacted and interacted with others so interpersonally, but also intrapersonally. What impact did that have on the personality and the person I became later in life? And that was when I really realized that I had work to do around internalized oppression and I had things to heal that had never been healed, never been talked about.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Was that just out of curiosity? Was that one that you talked about in the context of the earliest encounter exercise, or?

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

yes, I think I did.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

I think in my first pace I did talk about that incident and others that then started to come up for me.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

For example, I'll never forget a day in my home, with my mother in the kitchen, when someone knocked on the door and she opened the door and it was a white man who was coming to maybe repair a utility or something and she, her whole personality, changed when she interacted with him. She became very differential and very sort of yes, sir, in her responses. And I wondered about, I questioned that, I wondered about that, you know, and clearly it was a survival behavior that she had adopted in order to manage fear, anxiety and everything else that comes up when a white person knocks at your door. But again, I didn't have any language or context or meaning making of that at the time. And it wasn't until I came to Visions and learned some of those concepts around modern oppression and internalized behaviors and survival behaviors and all of that, that internalized oppression, that I started to kind of put the pieces together and the ways that I had really silenced my voice in a number of ways and in a number of different settings.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

in a number of ways and in a number of different settings, not just cross-racial settings, but it just had this huge impact on my own personality development as a child to watch that kind of adaptation that had to occur and what do we call it now? The coding behaviors that you know that, as people of color, we I had adopted.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Yeah, yeah, code switching.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Code switching.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Yep, and for people who might not be familiar with PACE, pace is our four day workshop and it's a foundational workshop and it also goes really really deep. As you probably surmised with the earliest encounter exercise I mean, that one was, for me, really profound in terms of making me realize, oh, there's so much early, these are early templates that have this way of following me around in other contexts of my life, in other places, and that was, that was a really powerful realization, just how influential those early experiences, how, how deeply they can be etched into us right.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

yes, yeah, in our cultural sharing exercises, when we talk about who did you learn to trust and not trust? Very, very impactful question. And again, though, the complexity of being Black and Creole I learned to distrust whites, but I also learned to distrust Blacks who didn't embrace me or, you know, I didn't necessarily feel safe with either.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Yeah, so when you left Houston after high school, you left huh, Okay.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Never go back.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I mean I hear you with that. There's places that I have no desire to go back to too. So and so, what was being in DC, like what was going to school over there, like being in DC was wonderful.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

So, first of all, one of the things that happened when I was in high school, before I left Houston, was I joined a Pan-Africanist group that you know was very much fans of Stokely Carmichael and Stephen B Coe and different Pan-Africanists around the world. And so when I got to Howard I mean 1972, we were in the middle of all sorts of protests against guff oil and anti-apartheid protests and it was really a wonderful space. I mean, howard University in 1972 had 10,000 students even then and they were from all over the world. You know, I met Black folk, not only from the African continent but also Black Canadians and Islanders, and you know, it was just, it was just a wonderful space. It was a place to really feel and learn the pride and the beauty of being black, and so that was very, very, very positive, very positive experience.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

And a period of a lot of activism.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

A lot of activism. Yeah, I laugh now, when I talk about how we back in 1973 or so, took over the administration building at Howard and locked the president in his office. Luckily we didn't do anything that harmed physically harmed anybody, but we did block access, uh, block his access. We were demanding that, you know, there were tuition increases happening and all sorts of things we didn't like, the things that the money that howard was receiving from investors in south africa, and all sorts of things we were yeah it's dirty money too.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Dirty money. We were taking it on. Dc had something called ALD African Liberation Day once a year every year and there were parades and speeches and flags and just it was just. It was wonderful. It was truly wonderful. It was a wonderful experience. I enjoyed being at Howard. I really did.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Amazing.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

But you know the student movement and I have to say that I'm really impressed with the students that have been speaking out against the genocide in Palestine at all these major universities, and how because it's reminding me that that is in my day that was how a lot of the divestment and a lot of the shift in policy towards South Africa occurred. It was prompted largely by the student movement and, of course, locally, domestically, the sit-ins at the lunch counters and all of that. You know those were students that were taking that on, and so I really was glad. I am glad to see that students aren't backing down to this day against injustice. It's really wonderful to see.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

You know, on the one hand, what you're saying is hopeful and I also feel like a twinge because you're talking about a protest, that movement that was active in the night in 1973.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

And it wasn't until 20 years later. Right.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I mean, apartheid fell in 94. Like you know so, and I also know, I've also been talking to activists in South Africa about what it was like in the 80s and it was just so hairy. Anyway, yeah, that is an aside. So college in DC. What happened after that?

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

So finished up my work at Howard and was really encouraged by my one of my advisors, my instructors at Howard, to get my doctorate. And then so I moved on to Johns Hopkins to get my doctorate in public health and I have to say that that also was really a positive experience. I went to Hopkins on a minority faculty development scholarship and I was blessed to come through, you know, undergrad and grad school during a time when affirmative action was alive and well. Of course we know that I would not be sitting here as the child of a mailman and a beautician with a doctorate degree had it not been for affirmative action. And my experience at Hopkins was very, very good, you know, again not without bumps, but it was a wonderfully stimulating intellectual environment and that I really thrived in and really enjoyed that.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I'm really glad to hear that. I mean, being a grad student can be very dicey because there's so much that can happen at the institutional level and then with the power dynamics in the department. That's really really good to hear.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

I feel that I don't know. I feel like I had a fair amount of support and I'm thinking, as we're chatting, about my advisor at the time and other faculty members. I did, you know, have one faculty person that basically said you're really not as smart as you appear and that you have the halo effect. But within a year he was booted out of the university. So that was.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

That must have been satisfying.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Not because of what he said to me, but he was now granted tenure and was kicked out. But you know, so it was not an easy experience, but I actually think I thrived in that environment of sort of nose in the books and you know we we studied 40 hours a week. You know, really, we were in class or studying 40 hours. It was like a full-time job and I loved it. I loved it, I did, I did well with in that environment you mentioned to me when we talked that pathway was not inevitable.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

By any means, I hate that's right.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

I didn't know. I didn't really know how smart I was and I didn't know my potential. It had never really been. I mean mean, despite having you know I had straight A's in college. In fact, I went to Howard University with $500 in my pocket that I had earned the summer before by working in a record shop. I'm the youngest of five children, so I'd asked my father if he was going to be able to help me go to college and he said basically no, that he was out of money. He had sent two of my brothers to Morehouse and my sister had gone to college here in Mills College in Oakland but then ended up transferring back to Texas Southern and finished her degree there in finance. But by the time it got to me as the fifth child, he said he had no money. So I said, well, I'm going to college anyway and I'm just. You know I'm casting my fate to the wind and stepping out on faith. So I went to Howard University with $500, which is what a semester tuition was in 1970. And my father did pay my room and board At the end of the first semester. I got a full ride because I had made straight A's. I got a full ride for the rest of my time at Howard. Wow, that's how I, that's how I graduated.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

But I didn't. I still even being, you know, doing well, I still never saw myself. As you know, I never really aspired much beyond getting. I guess I never really saw into the future. I guess it was I. It was like really truly living in the moment every step along the way.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

And it wasn't until after I got my undergrad degree that my brother said to me, as I was working as a receptionist at the George Washington University Health Plan. He said so what are you going to do next? And I said what do you mean next? I'm a receptionist, I love my job, I love interacting with people. And he said no, you're not, you're not, you should do more. You really should continue with your education. And he said you know, there talk about the impact of racial violence and growing up in the kind of segregated society that I grew up in. I can't say you know, when I applied to college out of high school, I applied to these. Really I aspired to these schools, like Brandeis and other schools, but my counselors were saying you won't get into those schools. And so when I didn't get into Brandeis, which, by the way, I only was interested in because Angela Davis had graduated from Brandeis.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

That was the only thing I know about Brandeis.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

When I didn't get in I started to look at HBCUs and getting into Howard was I knew other people there, other people that had gone there, and it was just a good. It actually turned out best for me. But I didn't have anyone. You know my parents neither of them graduate. They graduated high school. Neither of them went to college. So I didn't have anyone, you know, prodding me to move forward and do more.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

And no models as well, I'm guessing.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Right, right. Well, my brother, the youngest of my three brothers, he did go to law school, which I had no interest in, but I didn't really really know that there were many other options and I think, a combination of being the youngest of five who kind of I feel like I kind of just did what people told me to do, you know, and these several diplomas later that I see on your wall behind you now.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Yeah, I'm glad somebody was telling me what to do. In that case, speaking about my brother, he was telling me a good thing yeah, you can do more, you can do more, you can do more.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I mean, what a beautiful life, pivot moment. Right. So you did your degree, your PhD in public health, in maternal and childhood health.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Yes.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Okay, tell me about that. Tell me about how you got interested in it, and I mean you've had a storied career in it by now.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

So you know, I think that as the youngest of five, by the time I came along, I wasn't getting a whole lot of attention, quite honestly, at home, and maybe there was even some neglect at that point. You know, my parents did the best they could with what they had, but I just had a love of children, I just loved all young children. From a very young age. I would collect the kids up in the neighborhood and read stories to them and, you know, entertain them, babysit them, and so I knew that I was interested in children and my mother oh, I have to share this part my mother had gotten pregnant with my oldest brother when she was a teenager and she was really, really adamant about her girls not becoming pregnant early and having, you know, having a life without having to think about a child. And she would tell me, you should never depend on a man for your livelihood.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

You have to have your own career, your own money. She would say that even though she you know, she, she was a cosmetologist. She ran her own business next to our home. She was very smart, very smart, but again, only had a high school degree, and and then she got her cosmetology degree, which actually she got a doctorate in cosmetology, but that's still a trade school. But in any case she always felt no, you cannot depend on anyone else, you must be able to make a life on your own. And she seemed to have this keen awareness of how women often are trapped in relationships that they can't get out of because they don't have the economic resources to go out on there, and so she said well, you got to do something.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

And I said to myself well, the only thing I really love are children, that's all. I really just love children. I can't think of a profession or a job or anything else, I just love children. And I just kind of saw myself as just being a mother and that was going to be it. But she wouldn't let that be. So that's how I decided well, since I love children so much, why don't I study children? Why?

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

don't I love children, so that's what I did when I got to Howard. I studied developmental psychology and early childhood development and quickly realized that I was not cut out to be like a preschool teacher or anything like that, but that I was a policy advocate. I realized that the way to make children's lives better was through policy change. And then, you know, when I started looking into public health, I realized that the whole world of maternal and child health is applied science about. How do you use data about the status of children in various communities and at different stages of their lives. How do you use that data to advocate for better outcomes for children, and that's how I ended up going into maternal and child health.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Comes for children, and that's how I ended up going into maternal and child health, ended up doing my dissertation work on children in the neonatal intensive care unit, which back then, in the early 80s by now, neonatal intensive care and keeping very small babies alive was still pretty new and learning. Some of the a lot of the technology, like the ventilators, were causing brain deficits and all of that. So it was a real exciting time, though, that we could keep a preemie at 28 weeks alive with no severe developmental delays. So that's how I got into the field, really having worked at Children's Hospital National Medical Center with my college advisor, one of my instructors was a research psychologist there and she hired me to work in the NICU and the rest of it was yeah. So that's the story.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Yeah, amazing. So from there there was the philanthropy and then doing the going into academia.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

However, I should say that the one thread that has been consistent throughout my career has been working in roles that advocated for women and children, for women and children, having first gotten you know.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

When I first got my doctorate degree, I worked in a community nonprofit that did work around teenage pregnancy prevention and low birth weight children. Then I worked for state government in the state of Michigan, was director of the Office of Minority Health for a short time, but my main role was advocating for family planning services for women. And then I went to work for the Mott Foundation Ruth Mott Foundation in Flint, michigan and in that role I was also over their health promotion programs that focused on children. So children have been a theme throughout my career.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Yes, Amazing, okay, so then tell me about how you encountered visions and came into our orbit.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Right. So I met Val when I was in philanthropy. Dr Batts had gotten Vic Grant from the Kellogg Foundation to do some work with Kellogg and I met the program officer at Kellogg. I knew the program officer at Kellogg who had brought Visions on and she introduced me to Val, invited me to a school-based health conference. I can't even tell you what year that was. I'm going to guess it was around 2003 or so.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

And to make a long story short, it was through Dr Val and Dr John Kabat-Minn that I got to Fresno State because through the network of colleagues I learned about the director of the Children's Institute and the faculty position at Fresno State and moved to California from Michigan, moved to California from Michigan and quickly, being in the Central Valley of California, realized that there was a dearth of information about the basic needs of children and how to promote optimal development of children. Professional development opportunities were very limited for both the paraprofessionals and the professionals that worked with children. So I worked with an agency that worked with children with disabilities to secure a grant to hire Visions to train their staff in the Visions model. I was also very acutely aware of how thick the oppression was. You know the socioeconomic disparities were tremendous in the Central Valley of California and again, bringing in the insights of visions I felt for folks who work for on behalf of children and who work with children I felt was really, really important. So I brought visions in to work with professionals and paraprofessionals up and down the Central Valley eight county region over a three or four year period. We had big grants to do that. I wrote those grants and you brought that money in, brought in visions and then that's when I got introduced really more deeply into the model.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

I had been, you know, I had touched on the model back in in Michigan, but this was when I really learned what visions was all about. And just listening to the visions was all about and just listening to the vision's trainers and consultants work with the providers that were working with children, to see the way the model really landed on those providers. I was really nervous bringing in conversations about racism, modeling, oppression, internalized oppression. I was really nervous because Central Valley is just ultra conservative and I didn't know how this was going to land and people just ate it up.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

I mean I think that's just one of the beauties of the Visions model is that Everyone in the room could find themselves in the model and their experiences in the model and also know and learn about what they didn't know. And there were always aha moments and they kept coming back. They kept coming back month after month, year after year. That work with visions and the early childhood providers that lasted for about five years and just so many people were trained through that and after that I knew a lot about the model and said, oh well, maybe, maybe I'll work a little bit with visions. You know, when I retire, I was kind of looking for a way to stay connected to all the wonderful people I had met through visions and stay connected to the model.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

So that's when I started as a consultant about in 2014, 2015, maybe Wow, and I mean it sounds like the process of being in these trainings and bringing visions in was really transformative for you as well.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Yes, yes, you know the model is so deep and the tools are so extensive. You think you see the slide deck and you hear the tools and you think you're done. You've seen every slide and heard every definition and you think you kind of got it. And then when you get into the process with different groups of people, invariably new things come up, new opportunities to see things from a different perspective. And for me it was most important to really learn to find my voice in cross-cultural conversations and to be able to listen to the multiple perspectives of others. And the most impactful tool, I think, for me was the chart that showed the historically included and the historically excluded groups and the questions that follow that tool. And looking at from your own personal perspective, in what ways have you benefited from privilege and from being in a historically included group and what ways have you suffered or had to face what the impact of being in a historically excluded group?

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Because my own experience was always more focused on what it felt like to be historically excluded and it wasn't until I could start to really see wow, particularly as I look at my educational trajectory and I look at my professional trajectory and I look at the financial resources I've been able to amass for myself because of the privilege that I've experienced then that I could really see that I have work to do as a privileged person, as well as being aware of, certainly, my historically excluded status.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

But how has my privilege been played out and how does it continue to play out? And that was life-changing for me. That was really life-changing for me to get out of the victim box and to really ask myself what's my role, given the privilege that I have. What's my role? So, yeah, that's just one of many ways, and also, of course, learning about internalized oppression and survival behaviors and different personality elements that I adopted over time just to make it through, just to make it and you know forgiving myself for that, moving on, acknowledging it and moving on, you know, to how can I help change the world?

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Beautiful. Yeah, you know this thing that you said about the responsibility of privilege, that's something that came up in a recent workshop, one of our public facing fundamentals of inclusivity workshops. I mean, I certainly had an uncomfortable first reflective encounter with oh, these are my deeply privileged identities. If any of these were different, my experience in life would be very different. It's not a comfortable thing to think about and it came up in this workshop that a way to fall out of the guilt or shame trap about it is to think exactly what you said. What do I do with this guilt or shame trap about it is to think exactly what you said what do I do with this? So with this, what is the responsibility or what? What can I choose to do with it, which I think is a really beautiful and powerful way out of it? So, the impact of, of training all those 500 people what did you see and I'm asking this just in a professional sense, because it sounds like you trained a lot of people yeah, what was? What was that pipeline change like?

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

You know, I, I know that it was impactful because often folks would leave our training, go back to the agencies that they worked with and design something that they wanted us to either help, you know, facilitate or grow like, take to scale, like maybe they had elements within their organization that looked at diversity, equity and inclusion, but not to the extent or the depth that visions had taken.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

And so you know, to see folks constantly thinking about how to alter professional development within their own organization, sometimes bring Visions in to do that. And to this day, visions has, you know, been contacted by agencies within the Central Valley to come in and do more in-depth work with individuals. Because as we introduce the Visions model to large numbers, as you know because of your familiarity with the model, is that you know, you, you can't do the process things as much in large, large groups. We did divide folks into small, reflective, what we call reflective practice groups to drill down more into the various tools. But again, we didn't have the. We didn't have enough vision staff, couldn't afford enough vision staff to do that.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

So that was often done by other facilitators, but I think that it's had a great, a tremendous impact. I think, to the extent that folks now are aware of what they don't know and the importance of continuing to do the work is a good signal that it was impactful.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

yeah, I good, I'm excited about that beautiful yeah, so central california children's institute and then professor of public health at fresno and then recently ish retired, as I understand it yes, retired actually.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Well, I went part-time okay into the faculty early retirement program in 2016 when my first grandchild was, and then fully retired in 2019, okay, and since then I've done a little bit of visions work here and there, continue to work with a couple of clients now that are smaller organizations, and I really it's really important to me at this stage of my life to be able to maintain some deep connections with people. The consultations that I'm doing now allow for either some coaching, long-term both. In both cases, I've been working with both organizations that I happen to work with now for about five years. So I like that. That visions allow that work allows you to maintain deep connections or to just go in and do a training for a few days and and then the training's done. But, yeah, love the. The value of that for me is that I can continue to go deep and integrate the content in my own life because, as you're having to teach it and work with folks in different settings with the model you know.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

You can't help but absorb that content and take it into situations that you're encountering, that I'm encountering day-to-day basis. So it's the value of staying connected.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I've also been marveling lately at how much I learn in the rooms that I'm in, when people really are present and really in a place that they feel comfortable sharing. I learn a great deal, not just from their experiences, also from the insights and ways of different ways of seeing things that people have. So that's something. I end of my questions. You know you've had this beautiful career doing wonderful work on behalf of women and children, particularly done this wonderful work training people in this sector up and we're in this particular place. You've seen a lot of change over the course of your life and been part of a lot of change processes. Two questions, and you can answer one both in whatever order you want. One is what is it that you still hope to learn? And then the other question is what do you hope to see in the world?

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Well, one of the challenges that I continue to face is that doing visions work can be really difficult, and so having folk in the room sometimes dismiss the importance of the work that's a reality. I mean, that happens. Not everyone, you know, not every organization that we work with has this eagerness and super high awareness of the value of the work. Periodically we run into folks who say, well, why should I care about what my ancestors did? These are, you know, typically white colleagues who are in the room. Why should I care about what my ancestors did? These are typically white colleagues who are in the room. Why should I care about what white people did 50, 75? Why should I care about that? How is that my job or my responsibility? And so it's really work to get people to see how we're all deeply connected to each other and how change in the world only happens when everyone steps up.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

So that's probably the most difficult thing that I'm facing as a visions consultant is just the stamina to keep going back and to hang in there when there is opposition or apathy in the room, and so what I would most want to see in the world is that there is increasingly an awareness of how all of our actions and all of our states of mind matter and how we influence each other, and that working on our own consciousness, our own awareness, our own roles in the world is the most important thing that we can do, and that we have to do it have a world where there's less suffering, where there is greater peace, where there is more joy and more equality and equity for everyone, that all of us have a role in.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

That Every breath we breathe, every move we make, every smile we give, every mean thing we do impacts the society that we live in and the world that we live in, and so taking responsibility for what is created on the planet, I think, is the biggest challenge and the biggest hope for me that we would all start to see the impact of just the smallest things that we do or we fail to do. Yeah, I wouldn't say that I have a dream that suffering will end. I have a dream that we will learn how we can support each other and love each other in our suffering. Suffering is simply a part of our existence. That's my hope.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

That's beautiful.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

That's my hope, cassandraandra. Do you know what I just remembered?

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

what did you just remember?

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

it's the first time I met you yeah and it was at an early training that I attended in the course of becoming a consultant. I think it must have been one of the trainings in north carolina and you and I ended up in a concentric circle activity where we were giving appreciations as an exercise to people we'd just met. And you know I do this in my facilitations to people all the time I say you know, this is a skill, you can come up with something even if you've just met with somebody. Because this is about recognition and I do not remember what you said to me, but I do remember what I said to you because I see the same thing now that I saw then, which is this beautiful, joyful and just wonderful warm energy that emanates from you that I sensed as soon as I was in proximity to you and that I've seen here and now in in how you show up everything you do and also your, your beautiful wishes and desires for the world thank you, lena.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

I appreciate that. I take that in.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

I didn't know anything about you then. I didn't know about the long, storied career or anything like that, and was really drawn in by by your beautiful energy.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

So thank you so much. Thank you so much. I'm so glad that we had this time together that I got to share, and maybe next time I'll be on the other side. I'll be holding the mic going. Dr Lena Oktar, can you call me?

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

it's a point interviewing you as a senior you know, paradoxically, I think I'm a little mic shy about actually being in a very cagey about my stuff.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

I can't believe it. You seem so forthcoming and open, and just an open book. I'd be surprised you'd be cagey. I can't see that.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

Depends what we're talking about. Cassandra, thank you so much for taking the time to do this and for sharing your story Again. I learned so much in these and I feel really privileged to have been able to hear about you and your experiences and the things that you've learned and all of the many, many things that you have to teach. So thank you.

Dr. Cassandra Joubert:

Well, you're so welcome, and I can't wait to hear some of these podcasts.

Dr. Leena Akhtar:

So yeah, about that, if you haven't wait to hear some of these podcasts, podcasts, spotify and so on. 2024 is Vision's 40th anniversary year and we will be celebrating in Boston on September 27th. Please join us, if you can. Links for more information about that. Our workshops and other happenings at Visions are in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time you.