Into Liberation: A podcast about transformative change, equity, and working against oppression
Into Liberation is a production of VISIONS, Inc, a non-profit organization that offers effective tools to help individuals and organizations communicate across differences and forge connections 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.
Whether it’s a book club, around the family dinner table, a school board meeting, or within your company — VISIONS provides actionable approaches that empower people to identify actions, explore their motivations, and effectively move through sometimes complex situations with respect and humanity for others and their differences.
Learn more about our work at www.visions-inc.org.
Into Liberation: A podcast about transformative change, equity, and working against oppression
Louise Coggins on Finding People Who Care Like You do
Join us for a conversation with Louise Coggins, longtime VISIONS board member and current board chair of VISIONS, who first met the founders of this organization when high schools integrated in Rocky Mount, NC.
So much of VISIONS history and way of being is rooted in its value of relationality. Louise’s longtime connection and passionate support of VISIONS, and so many other organizations working for justice, is a testament to this.
We start by talking about what it was like to grow up in eastern NC in the 1960s, and the process of integrating the schools. I want to offer a content note for mentions of threats of a couple of different forms violence a few minutes in.
We then talk about her work with VISIONS, her career as a therapist, what she feels has and hasn’t changed in the last 50 years and what message she has for people who are working toward an equitable and just world now.
2024 is VISIONS 40th anniversary and we’re having a big celebration at the State Room in Boston on September 27th! Our guest speakers include Gloria Steinem, Verna Meyers, and The Rev. Dr. William Jay Barber II. Learn more here and join if you can!
If you’re interested experiencing our approach, VISIONS offers a 75-minute public workshop teaching our Guidelines for Effective Cross Cultural Dialogue on the last Wednesday of each month at 4pm ET / 1pm PT. It’s pay what you can, free if you want, and all are welcome.
See what's coming up at VISIONS!
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.
Whether it’s a book club, around the family dinner table, a school board meeting, or within your company, VISIONS offers actionable approaches that empower people to identify actions, explore their motivations, and effectively move through sometimes complex situations with respect and humanity for others and their differences.
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Music credit: Tim Hall @tv_hall
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Hello, you're listening to Into Liberation, a podcast about transformative change, equity and working against oppression. I'm L A, director of Programs with Visions Inc. Welcome, hi, everyone. Today we're in for a treat a conversation with Louise Coggins, longtime Visions board member and current board chair, who met the founders of this organization back when their high schools were integrated in the late 1960s in Rocky Mount, north Carolina. So much of Visions' history and way of being is rooted in its value of relationality, and Louisa's longtime connection and passionate support of Visions and so many other organizations that are working for justice is a testament to this.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:We start by talking about what it was like to grow up in eastern North Carolina in the 1960s and the process of integrating the schools, which Louise was heavily involved in.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:I do want to offer a content note for mentions of threats, of a couple of different forms of violence, a few minutes in when we're talking about school integration. We then talk about her work with Visions and her long career as a therapist, and also something that I particularly appreciated, which is what she feels has and hasn't changed over the last 50 years and what message she has for people who are working toward an equitable and just world. Now I'm really excited to be talking to you today, louise. I'm excited to be talking to Louise Coggins, who has been part of the Visions board almost since the organization's inception. And do I have it correct, louise, are you the chair of the board currently? Yes, I am Beautiful. You have a long background with Visions and also with the founders of Visions, going back to grade school, and I'm really excited to hear that story. So, for people who don't know who you are, could you introduce yourself briefly?
Louise Coggins:Sure, I'm Louise Weeks Coggins and I'm from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where three of our founders Dr Val, Angela and Ida were from. Actually knew Angela from junior high because she went to a white school for her junior high and then we integrated in high school. So I met the other founders in high school in Rocky Mountain time psychotherapist, clinical social worker, for 50 years and have been in private practice for 45 years. So I work in mental health all day long, every day, with every kind of individual, family, marital sex therapy, group therapy with all ages, and love doing social work as an advocate for social justice as part of my volunteer life including, of course, visions. And I'm married to Steve who joins me in all the social justice causes. We just celebrated our 50th anniversary.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Congratulations, thank you. In addition to your work with Visions, you mentioned your volunteer work. I have the sense that it's a lot of fundraising for these issues that you care about.
Louise Coggins:Yes, definitely. I work on the board of at least six other organizations and chair four of those national, international, state universities, human trafficking, volunteer fundraising for candidates and causes that will fight back to claim our country and our democracy. So this year I'm spending a great deal of time on those issues.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:That's busy and seemingly endless work.
Louise Coggins:It is. I'm looking forward to resting on November 6th and celebrating.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:You are from Rocky Mount, so I'm curious to hear a little bit about your childhood and background, and I know it was very different than you know the Vision's founders, and so your childhood, your background, and then when you first intersected with them.
Louise Coggins:Well, I was very privileged. I was my family still my brothers live in Rocky Mound, had great grandparents that lived there and I was always in environments where I felt that I could really do anything. And I was from a white upper-middle-class family and my father was a senior executive for the oldest cotton mill in the South White Mount Mills and both my parents were college educated and my mother stayed at home did volunteer work. She was also a sociology major at Carolina where I went to school and I had two younger brothers.
Louise Coggins:I grew up going to the country club, being a debutante, you know, just really not worrying about things, feeling like the world was a good place and I knew about things that were going on and my parents were. They were Democrats. They were definitely more liberal than many people in Rocky Mountain, any white people. They were more with the educated intellectual group who really understood some of the bigger issues, and they taught me always we were Piscopan, always that we were never better than anyone else, that you know to whom much was given, much was expected and that everyone was God great thing.
Louise Coggins:Didn't really know what it would mean until we were a pilot project to integrate the schools in North Carolina a year ahead of mandated integration, who were in my newly integrated high school and we began to know each other and visit with each other, really learning about the different lives. And the only time that I would really have gone to the black section of town was that sometimes I would ride with my mom to take our maid home and she lived in one of the projects and, you know, was like a member of our family. But I'd never really known, never known any Black friends, because the town was actually divided by a railroad in two counties and more of the black citizens lived in one county edgecombe county, and we lived in nash county, but it was all the town of rocky mount, about 40 000 people, so it was a very segregated town till the late 60s I know about the train tracks because I mean a lot of us in the course of our visions, training or various retreats have been to Rocky Mount.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:I did not know that that was the dividing line for the counties and I'm curious is that intentional districting?
Louise Coggins:Well, it is from the 1800s or earlier. So, yes, I think that was just the line, and there's less wealth in Edgecombe County, and that is where more of the Black neighborhoods were, where Val and Ida grew up. Angela was just on the white side of the tracks, but still a very distinct Black neighborhood.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:How old were you when the pilot integration project was happening?
Louise Coggins:Well, I was 15. Our sophomore year. They knew it was going to happen, so they chose one Black and white boy and girl from the high school. Booker T Washington was the black school and the white high school Sparkmount Senior High School. And so I was chosen from my class and we met a year ahead and we would meet at Booker T one week and meet at Senior High. And we met even without teachers. They wanted the students to decide things like how many black cheerleaders, how many white cheerleaders, based on that 60-40. There were 60% white people in Rockville and in the, and then it would switch. The next semester we chose the name of the mascot, which was a joining of the Bucatis lion and Rocky Mountains blackbirds, which were a reference to railroad workers. And so we became the Griffons, which is a mythical beach which is half bird and half lion.
Louise Coggins:And nobody knew what it was. So everybody asked us and people wrote about it, because that had never been a mascot anyway.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Sweet. What a beautifully inventive solution. Yeah, now I'm curious. You thought to join this committee, this effort, and from what you've said, I imagine that this would have been your most long-term proximate encounter across that form of difference. Right, were there any formative experiences or just things that you noticed or experienced or saw or heard about that sharpened your awareness? Because I'm really struck by what you said about. I forget what the phrase you used exactly was, but you felt good and like the world was a good place. What changed that awareness for you, if anything?
Louise Coggins:Well, I remember, maybe my first experience was probably as a five or six year old, and in Rocky Mount the meals is two industry town tobacco and cotton and the black citizens mainly could work in the fields in tobacco and the white workers these were the working class people worked in the mills, and there were several of those, and the mill was from the early 1800s and there were mill worker families that would live in these tiny mill village homes like little shotgun houses for generations of you know five generations of mill workers. But they were never able to own the houses. They worked for a very low wage, better than the black wages. But in Christmas time we would have a party, the meal would, and so my father and his best friend, whose family had owned the meal for generations, we would give out gifts to the meal children, so they would have Santa, and then I would go and give little gifts to some of the meal children and I would ask my dad why do they not have presents, or why are we giving them presents and why don't they have Santa Claus? You know, the same way that we had Christmas and of course he would try to explain it, but you know there was no good reason except classism and what had been going on for many generations. So I just remember thinking this is not right and that was just looking at white poverty and class issues. And then I would remember driving into the Black neighborhoods with my family and you know, to pick up or to take our maid when she couldn't get a bus, and I would notice the housing and just look at how different it was and I would question it. And even from our faith, the Episcopal Church began to work with the Black Episcopal Church, which Dr Val that's her family went to and I went to the big white Episcopal church and we had some interracial services and the church, the Episcopal church, is very progressive and I started meeting people even before going to school through church things, even before going to school through church things.
Louise Coggins:But going to school was a very powerful experience because there were people who did not want the integration to work, both white and black, and lots of my friends went to private academies that were just race academies, that were started to just be sure that children didn't have to go to school with black people. Then a lot of them went to boarding schools and my parents, you know, were somewhat afraid just because there was so much talk about it's going to be dangerous. And I told them, if they tried to make me go to St Mary's and Episcopal Girls or anywhere, I would just walk home. I mean, no matter what, I was going to this school and they believed me. I was pretty strong-willed, so that was fine and they supported it.
Louise Coggins:But then after about the first six weeks, there were race riots at the school and the country was looking at this and it was Howard Fuller, who's still alive. He was a black separatist who believed that integration would cause the loss of black leadership in their own legacies and identity and they would be swept up into whiteness. And of course it's true, the black principal became the assistant principal. The black teachers were not the highest level of the teachers, it was all. They came into our school and did it our way. I understand now exactly what they were doing, but they brought in busloads of young black militants who looked like students and they came in with, you know, knives and chains and whatever, and some people were injured. Nobody died and I was.
Louise Coggins:They had a rape list and a kill list which was published and I was, you know. Eventually I was head cheerleader. I was on the student committee that had a plan did. I was became number one on the rape list and so then the most well-known white boys were on the kill list and it did terrify people. And so they brought in a 65 man police force from all over eastern North Carolina. We were given on the girls on the list and the cheerleaders and whoever. We got a ammonia spray gun and we got like a little plastic spray gun. We had tear gas guns because they were not illegal yet and we had a police escort that came.
Louise Coggins:They were in our school, which was a big, sprawling school with a lot of trailers, because we had to integrate 600 students from the black school with the 1,200 who were already there, and so you would have to go to parts of the campus and not right inside the school. So I had a policeman pick me up at every class. Then we were given they brought in a black belt. Nobody had ever heard of that in the 60s. We had to take judo, jiu-jitsu, karate, the girls on the rape list.
Louise Coggins:We learned 10 ways to maim and kill. I mean this was not my life and I'm thinking this is just kill. I mean this was not my life and I'm thinking this is just wild. I mean it was life changing, but it never occurred to me. This wasn't where I wanted to be and I went to those things because I had to and you know, I felt perfectly safe.
Louise Coggins:I never felt threatened by Black students in any way and we had police protection at games. The cheerleaders had an escort that go to the bathroom. There was a white student that was shot when he made a football touchdown and it was at the black high school in Durham. They never found who did it, and so we had to start playing games in the afternoons, not at night. We were, I was like the homecoming queen, but we couldn't have open cars and ride around in convertibles.
Louise Coggins:We had to ride around in little red wagons inside the school gym for our homecoming. Everything changed. So it was a time where a lot of people then took their kids out of senior high and five of my best friends stayed and we worked with the black students and we worked MLK celebrations that Val and her friends led way before MLK Day. But anyway, it was just life-changing. I knew from that point on I was not going to have the same life that would have happened if I went to all segregated schools, you know, like people who were just a year older than me had done.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Now, you said something when we spoke before about the KKK showing up. Was that in connection with your efforts to integrate schools?
Louise Coggins:Well, indirectly. So. It was again 1969, 1970, the first year and I was cheerleader, val's brother was the quarterback of the football team. We were in a class together, we worked on the yearbook together, we were both Episcopalians, had gone to Episcopal camp together, you know, and we just fell in love and that became something that terrified a lot of people in Rocky Mountain. We had to keep it a secret. My parents knew and they were just really afraid for my safety and someone had slid. Her brother's name was Roscoe, we called him, he was her young brother, so they had slid his tires when he had come near my neighborhood, and so we basically just always had to meet in his side of town with his parents and friends and whatever.
Louise Coggins:My dad did not tell me, but years later he told me that someone tipped him off, that the Ku Klux Klan was going to come to our house, which was on a small cul-de-sac on the lake in Rockmount, and so none of my dad's friends were in the KKK, but someone found out. So in the middle of the night he sat out there. He didn't have guns, but he had a hunting gun, a rifle, because everybody in eastern north carolina hunted, and so he just sat out on our front porch with his gun across his legs and then the trucks sort of driving in the middle of the night and he knew that's who it was. So he waved to them with his gun and of course they just went around the circle and left and did not burn across. Nothing happened. He did not tell people, did not get into the newspapers and he only told me that after I was grown. But it was just a. It was just a time where we were living out what we had been taught. You know, yeah, everyone, and that we were working.
Louise Coggins:That went to carolina, working for women's rights, marching for the era, marching for civil rights. Everything was a protest and I had been this cheerleader debutante would have been in a sorority. My mom was in a big sorority at Carolina and I said, no, you know, gonna be a social activist, I'm gonna be a rebel, I'm gonna be, you know, a hippie. At that point I wasn't really into drugs, but I was with that counterculture and Val was at Carolina and she and Angela were a big part of the Black student movement and my best friend and I helped start the Association of Women Students and we brought Gloria Steinem and Jane Fondant and all kinds of famous women to the campus and protested just all the time. So we were doing movements together and that was just really what college was about. I mean, I was majoring in psychology, taking sociology and just living it out. It was more about what you did not in class that the education was about.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:I want to backtrack a little bit and ask you about getting to know them in junior high and high school what that was like.
Louise Coggins:Well, angela was two grades ahead of me, so I was in seventh grade, she was in ninth grade, which was still junior high. Back then I was in seventh grade, she was in ninth grade, which was still junior high. Back then she came, the mayor of Rocky Mountain, who were neighbors, and he was a liberal, for the but equal had changed to freedom of choice in the South, which meant that a Black student could go to a white school. So she was the only person Black person in a tremendous junior high over in our neighborhood and I didn't really have classes with her because I was younger, but I would see her in the ninth grade hall.
Louise Coggins:And one of the most popular girls who was a cheerleader with me, susan Gravely, who is now on our Visions Advisory Board for many years and founder of a famous Italian pottery company, vietri. She was very popular and she just said Angela, you're with me, took her, let her sip with her. So she sat in the lunchroom or in assemblies with Susan. Susan's father was president of China American Tobacco Company, so she had been all over the world and seen the world as a multicultural place and so Angela basically gave up her childhood to go to white schools and they did not integrate until the year after Angela graduated.
Louise Coggins:So she never, never got to go to the integrated school. So then Val and Ida and Patricia Penn, who's been on our board since the beginning I joined the first year after they had formed it. They asked me to join it, patricia and I joined. They had formed it. They asked me to join it, patricia and I joined, and they were seniors and I was a junior during that first year. So then I got to go to school with them for a year and then, of course, went to Carolina and they were already at Carolina and just you know would see them on campus and talk with them and just you know it was totally life changing because they were some of my favorite people. And I remember I was still dating Val's brother and he became the first white quarterback at a white university. He went to Appalachian State. He was nominated for the Moorhead but went because they told him he could be the starting quarterback and so I would travel to see him there. He would come to Carolina and we eventually broke up and I met my husband, who has joined me in this movement, and marched with me for everything at Carolina.
Louise Coggins:But it was a very powerful time and so we continued to say this is wrong. We have to change the world. And you know the innocence and the enthusiasm and the passion of youth who believe we can do anything. Who's going to stop us? We said, ok, we're going to fight racism and sexism and every other form of oppression. And so Val gets her PhD, angela gets her law degree, ida gets her education degree, becomes a principal. Val meets John, the fourth founder at Duke, at the PhD psychology school, and they then have the grounds to start something as a therapist and they Val writes the theory of modern racism, which is such an amazing, groundbreaking truth to power. And we, you know, kept always saying how are we going to change the world? So they formed visions and they asked me to join the board. And there are a few white members and a few white staff, but largely a woman-owned, black-owned organization, non-profit. So I've been on the board now, for this will be my 40th year coming up and it was a lot of family and friends board.
Louise Coggins:Val's father was the chair and then when he died, her mother became the board chair and then her mother was not able to do that in her older years, so they asked me to be the chair, which I have done for decades and have loved it, and we have looked for new chairs, and we always are. But we have new board members and I've just said I would stay on as long as my long history and legacy could be helpful to the newer board members and the changing of the board to be more of a real governance board. So that's where we are in the past 10 years or so and it's been great to see the growth of the board Really just a wonderful thing. And so many people say they get on this board, they do not want to leave, and we've had people Patricia's going to rotate off off and I will as soon as they choose the next year. But you know, for 40 years this is, this is life for, and of course, what we thought is we would be finished, but the world itself would have become a progressive place where you know training about the evils of oppression would not be an everyday need. And the disappointment is, of course, that it's more than ever and it's a lifetime work and we train people around the world.
Louise Coggins:Lena, I went to South Africa for weeks with Val. I was the only white person on that trip and seeing the way white South Africans treated me was amazing. You would have thought I was, you know, safe traveling around with them and what kind of stuff went on. We went to Brazil and worked in the favelas. We went to Cuba and we were working in so many places and board members and consultants could go and see oppression very much active. But now the United States is worse than so many places that we did groundbreaking work in.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:So here's a question that I have for you the work we do, it is still needed. I'm not going to say more needed than ever, but because it's hard to draw that kind of comparison and for a model that was pioneered 40 years ago, I continually am amazed at how robust it is and how applicable it is. I did most of my growing up outside of the United States and there are not many DEI approaches that I resonated with, and this one I resonated with because it does work across variables of oppression. It is adaptable, as you've said, to different contexts. So, in terms of how your experience of the isms, which are still there, right, there's still racism, there's still sexism, there's still homophobia Would you characterize it as manifesting differently now than it did before?
Louise Coggins:differently now than it did before. Well, yes, I mean you know from being a consultant, the four levels of the isms. We've dealt with the legal, although we're going backwards on laws, as you know. But we have the institutional protections, at least in this country those are threatened every day by a former president. But the interpersonal and, of course, the internalized oppression is still there. At the cultural level, yes, there's more black-white marriages. There's no law against it. There's more black white friendships. There's people at work, but the basic society is still very segregated. Even if they're black people in a neighborhood, it's not always that that is a friendship as typical as the white-white friendship. So the black-black friendship. So I think it is just more nail.
Louise Coggins:With all of the hate that has been spewed and with racism becoming very much accepted and sexism and homophobism and religious discrimination and everything. Every ism is now just out there and it's considered to be quite fun to say outrageous, untrue, illegal, horrible statements about anybody. Because of certain political people who have a tremendous following and because of media. There does not need to be any fact check to anything that is said about a transgender person or about a black person, or you know a gay person, or you know, women, what they've done. They are scorned. They're just crazy things said. So it is less outrageous now than it was.
Louise Coggins:There is a whole movement against quote political correctness, which was a protection against saying horrible, racist statements. Why is that called politically correct? That is humane, that is interpersonal caring, and that all people are worthy of respect, of God's love, of the love of other people, of other people, and that is just no longer believed by a large segment of people who have been taught to compete with Black workers, with Latino workers, with whatever it is. It is a setup so that there is hate, that is fueling the political division and the fight for resources, and it's just insane.
Louise Coggins:And lies are told all day long on TV, on news stations, and some people do not realize that what they're reading or seeing is not the least bit true. So that is where I see it being worse. So that is where I see it being worse and that there's really not truth known for large segments of the population. I mean my friends, and I say can you believe that somebody believes that? And then I'll listen and I hear. I. I hear people, not people that I really spend time with, but people who vote.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Yeah, it's there. Yeah, I appreciate that perspective. I appreciate hearing your perspective as somebody who's lived through it and really seen the arc of it over the last several decades. So yeah, so you joined the board a year after the organization formed. When did you attend your first PACE?
Louise Coggins:I believe that was so. That was 84. I think it was like maybe 91 or 92. And it was the first time it came near. You know, I work full-time, see patients all day long, so I had enough notice. And it was the four days that were going to be in Rocky Mound.
Louise Coggins:I was in Raleigh so I was able to travel back and forth, stay with my mom and actually Angela was one of the trainers and there was always a white person, a black person, a male, a female, you know, among the three. It was a great mix. And so I knew the theory, I'd read the papers, but the experience in it was wonderful and met people just said common everyday work sites in Rocky Mountain and the surrounding counties, a large manufacturing corporation which was trying to do some multicultural work, as they called it then, and we had the inner group, you know. So we would meet with just the white people and then you would meet with the integrated group and we had all the different exercises, which was fascinating to watch how it unfolded, especially me being a therapist who did word therapy all the time, and watching those dynamics and how different the conversations were in all the exercises that they asked us to do. It was very powerful experiential work and very deep work. And throughout my time it has been easy to promote the work of visions because anybody that I would talk to friends that ran nonprofits, friends that were in the government or medical educational churches I would say this is really the real thing. And they would say, especially as diversity work became more common in the 90s, early 2000s, they would say we've been to this training for four hours at this and my church got this and it was just meaningless. It was checking the box.
Louise Coggins:And one of my good friends is an Episcopal priest. He had a 4,000-member church in Atlanta. After Val came. It was one of the trainers for the leaders of his church. He had like 13 priests and they were all different races and sexes. He said this changed my church. It was, you know, such an amazing transformation downtown Atlanta and he said this is the work. I want to do something to tell people about it. So he became a board member. You know, donor obviously writes comments like this is the one that if you're going to have training, take this one. And then, of course, as you know, we did massive interventions throughout the National Episcopal Church and other churches and everywhere, people would say this is the real thing. This one changed me from the inside out. This is what I remember. I remember the experiences of the training. I don't have to go back and read the articles that we were given. I remember what.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:I felt.
Louise Coggins:I remember what the other people were feeling and it was transformative and that is why people will choose us. It's more in-depth work, it's harder to do it, it's at more of a personal cost of confronting feelings and it is confronting our own racism, confronting internalized oppression, whatever. I don't see other trainings that do that at the same level. So as a lifetime therapist, you can tell that psychologically minded people, valent, john and whoever else, are part of it.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Yeah.
Louise Coggins:They came up with the theories and they found the work that would be truly changing. That would change any organization, including, you know, tens of thousands of procter and gamble workers, whoever started working with us. It was like I want everyone in our company to know. I want the whole international force of leaders, salespeople, whatever I want them to have this training. It was very compelling.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Yeah, yeah, I hear that, and I think one of the both smartest and key features of this model is how it does scaffold people for the difficult emotional work. It doesn't just leave people hanging out to dry with them.
Louise Coggins:Yeah.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Great. I see your long resume here and I have some curiosity about your work as a therapist, so I want to ask you about that in a minute. And before I ask you about that, you are clearly very involved in fundraising and working on these really important issues from that really key angle. How did you get into that and how do you think about it? It's a world that I'm very far removed from, so I am curious.
Louise Coggins:Well, I think I just had a natural ability to sell what I believe in In the Myers-Briggs. I'm an ENFJ, so when I believe in something, I can commit somebody. I don't mean to do that, it's just the way I always was, from a child, and I would get on the intercom in high school and say we're going to have 10 buses going to Raleigh, we're going to have more people at this football game than the hometown does, and people would buy tickets and we'd take six buses. But hometown does, and people would buy tickets and we'd take six buses. I mean, I had a sense that when something is good and you want to promote that, you got to sell it. You got to get people to put their money where their mouth is. So early on I started fundraising for any nonprofit that I was involved with, because most people don't like fundraising or they don't like to ask for money. I have so many fundraisers and people like I have one party a year, that's just for friends and I don't ask them for money, and everybody comes and they're like okay, what are we raising money for? Now, for the older people, I've got my checkbook. Well, no, I'll just give you what would you like? I'm like no, this is my thank you for you going to 25 events this year and paying for them all. And it's so funny because they don't mind, because they know I'm only selling what's good, good in my mind, something that is going to help them to know more about, something that is going to help them to know more about, whereas I started working on human trafficking issues very early, from years of working with abused women and children, incest, rape, the whole women's movement. Who's going to be against that? I mean, who's going to say, yeah, human trafficking and used to. Nobody would say, you know, we're pro-racism. Now they do. But I mean it was causes that you could just be sure people wanted to join, it was not hard. So I just felt, anytime I joined a board or you know, people said what can you do? I'll help you raise money. I have wealthy people that live around me, wealthy friends, and they have so much money and they want to know where to give it. And so people call me up what should I give money to? What candidates, what causes? And that is so wonderful because it makes it very easy, and so it was just part of my natural personality.
Louise Coggins:And then, knowing that these organizations couldn't do it without money. Visions didn't have money. We founded the Right Center was one of our spinoffs. It was a vigorous intervention in a natural setting, the first we wanted to show our work on ageism. So we did this incredibly great adult day health care center and John Kapterman is a gerontologist helps us. We get a film done I think it was by Harvard about being one of the first centers in the country to do what we were doing.
Louise Coggins:And so we didn't have money. Nobody in Rocky Mountain had money much. So we would bring in these speakers and have these big banquets and the speakers would come for free Sports people, political people, governors, I would just every year we would ask somebody movie star and they would say, okay, that's amazing what you're doing, bringing black and white elders together in 1984, when nobody was doing that, and having an excellent service and people getting to know each other, particularly that generation. So know, we have this giant banquet, 500 people a year, and it is just. It's just easy to do because it's needed.
Louise Coggins:The work cannot be done without funding grant writing. Val was great at getting Kellogg when the grants were big for anti-racism work. Now people are afraid of it and afraid they'll be fired for even talking about it. And it was a lot of money that we were able to say look what we are doing. And we would just find people and tell them about it. And you know, it's the six degrees of separation, or however many it's always we would know somebody who had power and we would reach out and get money. So it's just kind of fun. It's never, never been painful. My friends are like okay, if you just won't call me so many times, I'll just send it, just send me. And now, since we have email and text, I don't have to call people, but I'll call them. Just tell me where to send the money. I'm fine if you believe in it, it's fine and I'll send you money. I have the. Don't come to an event and don't have to talk to me on the phone. Fundraising plan, which people love.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Yeah, yeah, I imagine that you're kind of taking the mental load for them.
Louise Coggins:Yeah, here's. Here's a good place to spend money. You don't even have to come and hear about it. But here's some info if you want.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Fabulous. I love that. You think it's fun. I love that. Yeah, beautiful. Now you said you've been a therapist for 50 years and in private practice for 45 yeah it sounds from what you said that you've done various forms of practice, like all over the map. I'm curious what led you to become a counselor and a therapist and how your perspective has changed over time, particularly with respect to learning about anti-oppression frameworks.
Louise Coggins:Well, there weren't psychiatrists or mental health people growing up in Rocky Mound, but I used to like the guidance counselors. Or I just love to talk to people about problems, or I just love to talk to people about problems and my friends would call up and I would sit on the phone and there was you had these long cords. People would ask me advice and I would give advice. Boys, girls. My parents said you have to find a way to be paid to tell people what to do and to hear their problems, and I didn't know what that was.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Yeah, because look at these phone bills.
Louise Coggins:So then I go to Carolina. Well, I go to governor's school, which is a very progressive thing in North Carolina, and so I'm able to take psychology and sociology. They didn't teach it in high schools and I was like, oh, this is my thing. So I go to Carolina major in psychology. I go to Carolina major in psychology. Then I think, okay, but social work is really the combination of the internal process of psychology and changing the world through that. So got my master's in social work.
Louise Coggins:I chaired a board for the School of Social Work for Carolina, which is number four in the world School of Social Social Work. I chair the board for UNCW, for the College of Health and Human Services, and I just stayed in that form of academics. I'll teach classes. I wanted to always practice full time, but I teach, I train, I supervise other therapists. I teach, I train, I supervise other therapists and basically there's not anything I haven't seen, from addictions to every form of psychiatric diagnosis, every age, two-year-olds to 98-year-olds.
Louise Coggins:So it's never been boring for one minute and it's so involved with what I believe that people can change and I look at the oppression in people's individual families, as well as their societal oppression, to help them find that empowerment and it's just so. I mean, my dad would say you can do anything. As I was a little girl and he just believed my mom was, she was so smart. He would say you can do anything. And girls didn't really hear that. And he would tell me oh, go work for NASA, work for the United Nations. And I was like what are those? You know, I was like eight years old or something, but he believed in girls and he believed in me and so I had that empowerment, even though society said I could not play sports, I could only letter and cheerleading. I could not get the Moorhead Scholarship, which is the most distinguished scholarship in all of North Carolina. I was valedictorian of 600 people, but the boys got the scholarships. I would have probably been nominated for it, but I never felt it internally. I always felt I can do anything. You're not going to give it to me, but I can do it.
Louise Coggins:And so I wanted to teach that to other women who had come from families who didn't believe they could do anything, and to teach it to young children whose parents have problems, but I could teach them a different way, and to just work on whatever mental illnesses people were blamed for and stigmatized, for there were cures and this was not people's fault. And I wanted to change that whole view of mental health. And so that's been the amazing thing in the 50 years what we believed in the 70s about mental illness and what we know now. And it's just so wonderful to be able to say this is how your brain was made. It was genetic. Here's how environment affected it, but here's what you can do about it.
Louise Coggins:And we have this treatment, that treatment, this medication Affected it, but here's what you can do about it. And we have this treatment, that treatment, this medication. It's so. That's why I'm not an oncology social worker, because almost every person that comes to me can find a better life. So it's such an enjoyable career. I'm 70. I'll be doing it at least 10 years more because I'm healthy. I can't not help people. I would be doing it just as a hobby if I wasn't still working.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:So it's been a really amazing career an opportunity to just know so many people at such a deep level. So is there a framework that didn't exist when you started, that exists now, that significantly changed or revolutionized the way that you work or see people?
Louise Coggins:Well, yes, I mean in the seventies we thought the mothers caused everything for the parents. They were the schizophrenic mothers. And pretty soon, by the 80s, we knew that was biological. The mothers didn't cause it a bit, or autism or any of that. And we saw that it's been the brain, the neuroscience and which I love and I study, and genetics and the parts of the brain that we can see are on fire and we know this medication changes that. The person all of a sudden is just able to be so different.
Louise Coggins:But I always just rebelled against it. I always believed that in a relational approach, the relational psychotherapy which was so popularized by the women's movement and by a lot of feminist therapists that the whole I was never much of a psychoanalytic person where I'm going to not interrelate and I'm going to be just. My patients know me. I use personal examples. You can't not be known now on the internet. They know everything about me before they come into my office. But I talk to them in a way that is just relational. I care about them. You know. I hug them if that's something good. I talk to them about their faith if that's something they want. I don't use this very formal analytical way that we were taught. It's just quite different, quite different. I mean, we're in the trenches.
Louise Coggins:People are dying. The mental health crisis since COVID. Young people risk suicide. People of color risk, gay trans people. The risk is so high. We cannot mess around. We have to just talk to people in a way that we are sure that we are hearing them. We cannot sit back and just listen. We have to intervene because people can walk out and kill themselves, and so it's a much more interactive, dynamic kind of therapy.
Louise Coggins:People always said to me I like that, you give me ideas and you will tell me don't do that, that's going to hurt, you Do this. And that was very unpopular. It was like all self-directed, you just listen, uh-huh, that sounds good. Well, crazy. No, that sounds like you're going to die if you do that again, you know, and so I was always that kind of therapist. So people always came to me and said will you please tell me how to stop this? You know, and whatever. So, but it is more acceptable now that we have to be so active. We have to really just be careful. We have to pursue patients. We cannot. Just we know they're in grave danger. We can't just wait to see if they want to come back. We, you know, I talked to family members. I mean, I follow ethics, but I am not going to let someone go down, and so it's just a very much interactive type of work, what you're saying.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:I've experienced the difference in that and there's a degree of really genuine care in your approach that I've been on the receiving end of and it was actually really profound and transformative for me, right.
Louise Coggins:I'm so glad we just. You know, I always thought I was a therapist before I got my master's. I was one of the last people in the state I worked in mental health and didn't have my master's and they sent me. But I always felt like I had more natural instincts. Almost before I got the training I just wanted to follow what I thought, what my mind, having been raised in a normal, healthy family, what it told me.
Louise Coggins:This is something not right, Even before I knew all the diagnoses. Something is really happening here that's bad. So I think training is great. I'm so glad I got my degree and take ongoing clinical, you know education all the time and I think we have to think about what makes sense you know that's crazy sound and and just really listen for what is happening in that person's life and what does that person need, which is very individualized. So that is always what I've done, but it's much more now an acceptable approach, perceptible approach. So I'm just so glad that I got to see it change, to see all the things that weren't right, that we now have research and brain knowledge of what's really going on, right I'm curious now.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:You know at the at this point in your life and in your work, there's two questions that I like to ask toward the end of the conversation. One is what would you hope to teach and pass on to people who are in this work right, in whatever capacity? The other question is are there things that you still want to learn? Slash what would you like to see in the world?
Louise Coggins:Yeah, well, I would like to teach the young people and the people who will follow, all of us, the founders of visions and all of us who are aging, that never give up, that it can look like it's a really bad time and then amazing things happen Like George Floyd, that death was so horrible and yet we could see the world changing. And to always remember that every effort counts, even if you don't see the transformation immediately. That when you look back on 40 years, yes, you can see it Inch by inch. In the trenches it's really hard. And when you're working with the pain of people in really oppressed areas, like Visions has done, worked with bad stuff, or when you work with really stubborn high-level corporate or whoever is running an organization and they're really not wanting to make the change, it's just believing, keeping on with the process, keeping on using the tools. For instance, with Visions, I use them every day in my practice. I give the guidelines for communication every couple or I use them every day in my practice. I give the guidelines for communication Every couple or family that I'm seeing. They have to read those, clarify. Do they understand it, whatever? And so I think I want people to stay encouraged, to encourage each other to seek out communities where, even when you're seeing hate spewed and violence, where you see love, where you see true community, where you see the people of the world in diversity, and to live in that environment with people who don't just think like you but care like you do. Even if they have different thoughts, they still care that problems of the world be solved. They may have a different approach, or where can they work together with other people of any age who are wanting to change something and to try to get away from divisiveness. I'm hoping after November 5th we will have a country that can be about love and care for fellow humanity and not about winning and about competing, and some of the things that we have seen take over the mindsets of so many good people. So I want to encourage them to stay, stay the course and not to give up and not to stop doing their volunteer work.
Louise Coggins:Not to say I'm not going to vote, not all of that just when they see the horror since we integrated the schools, because I feel like I've been leading a vision slide experientially for 55 of my 70 years and I want to see the world that we've all been working for. I want to see it more in everyday life and people that I know who live and are with other people that are different, people of color, any kind of people, and they are just living their lives together and it's a natural and normal type of process and situation where we don't have to teach about it because people are living and the world looks like the Visions community and it looks like we love and accept the wonderful uniqueness of every person. I mean we appreciate differences. I love that Visions was the first group I know of to say that we want to was the first group I know of to say that we want to not tolerate, not just understand. We want to appreciate and leverage the differences to change the world.
Louise Coggins:That's the world. That's what I want to see. That's what I want to keep learning how to do, how to do it in my everyday life, how to teach other people to do it, how to encourage people that they can have a different conversation, just even in their own family or in a book club or in a friendship group of any kind, if there are churches wherever. That the change will keep on, that we won't burn out, we won't give up and we won't become complacent or think it's already happened, because we could see that that is not true. We have to keep at it. We have to normalize it.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Beautiful Louise. Thank you so much. This was really a pleasure. Nice to get to know you in this way.
Dr. Leena Akhtar:Oh, thank you, Lena a pleasure, nice to get to know you in this way. Oh, thank you, marina. On September 27th 2024, we are going to be celebrating Vision's 40th anniversary at the State Room in Boston. Our honored speakers include Gloria Steinem, vernee Myers and the Reverend Dr William J Barber II. There is still time to buy tickets, so I put a link to that and more details in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.