Leander Lacy: ALC ChangeMakers Podcast Interview
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Audio Only - All Participants: [00:00:00] Hi everybody and welcome to the ALC Changemakers Podcast. I'm your host, Jennifer Sconyers. And on today's episode I have Leander Lacy with Lacy Consulting. Um, Leander and I have worked together in the conservation movements. Space, which we'll define for you. And Leander Hass got some things cooking, so some workshops happening in the future, et cetera.
So I'm super excited to have you here. Welcome Leander. Nice. Thank you so much. I love that you use cooking 'cause you know, I love to eat, so, uh, that's cooking. Metaphors are always great for me. Love it. Why have it? Well, I would love for you to share with our listeners your. Leadership journey. Yeah. Happy to do so.
Um, so yeah, let's just dive right on in. So, yeah. Yeah. I, what I find about my leadership journey is that, uh, the most recent part of my journey is like going from trauma to healing, right? That's, that's where I feel like leadership was. Like for me. I think in the beginning it was all about me getting [00:01:00] into the conservation space, being the only person who looked like me, who had my background.
And understanding what it meant to be in the environmental space. I mean, I had no intention of being in conservation whatsoever. Um, it was something that I stumbled into. Yeah, I was going for veterinary medicine, actually. Um, had no intention. I was going to community college, you know, doing the classic struggle of pain for my college by myself.
With a full-time job. And you know, what was two years should have ended up being four years. And before I transferred to the University of Florida where I got my undergraduate in Wildlife Ecology and conservation, the counselor said to me, well, you can do cows and chickens, which is animal sciences, or you can do bears and tigers, which is the conservation track, the wildlife track, and both will get you to vet school.
And I was like, well, neither one of those are cats and dogs. And so I saw Dr. Doolittle one time, I know Ace Ventura. I guess let's do, uh. Bears and tigers and see where that takes me. And if it wasn't for that one decision, I would not be here talking to you right now about conservation work at all. [00:02:00] Um, and so when I got into that field, I was told that this is a field where people are super passionate and they're super engaged.
And I saw that in the students and in the teachers, um, in my courses at University of Florida. And I really fell in love with their passion. But then one day I remember asking the question to the students and the teacher, I was like, Hey, after we do all these great studies and we talk about, you know, how.
Great. It is to protect the wildlife and their habitats. Who goes? And I said, the time who goes into the hood and talks to those people. 'cause no one came into my hood and talked to me about any of this stuff. Right. And they were, the teachers and the students both said the same thing. They were like, first of all, we don't know what the hood is.
Um, second, uh, the reason we got into conservation Leander is to not talk to people. And I was like, oh. Oh, you poor babies. Like this is not gonna work. Like all this passion that you all have is not sustainable if you're not willing to talk to people. I knew that, you know so young as an undergraduate student, I was like, I think I'm gonna change my career and I'm gonna help these [00:03:00] people.
Who don't know they need help and make sure that the conservation movement is better off for it by having someone who actually cares about people in the conservation movement. And so I dedicated my entire life to doing just that. And so I went on to be a bear biologist in Florida, um, for about two and a half years.
Uh, again, no one looked like me or had my background when I was in working for the state agency at that time. And then I went on to get my master's in Human Dimensions of Natural Resources from Colorado State University. It kind of helped me to realize further and further the work I do around engaging and loving people was super helpful.
So my leadership journey really is around how do I stay consistent in my values of helping people? And as I worked in the environmental field, I was just subjected to a lot of. Microaggression/racism, and I realized that this can't be for me, like I can't be in this field and be subjected to this level of racism and systemic oppression.
And so I ultimately [00:04:00] left from a traumatic experience and then decided, well, do I even have worth anymore here in the conservation field? Like should I just leave the Constitution field completely despite my. You know, sacrifices I've made to, for friends and family to be in this field. And ultimately I decided, well, maybe I'll start a company, maybe I'll see if I have any value if anyone hires me.
Maybe that's how I show my worth. Right? And so I started my company in 2019 and. It was based in trauma. But what I began to understand is that I am an entrepreneur, period. That's who I am. I am the leader. I am the CEO. That's is what I'm supposed to be doing, you know? Um, and so that's what I became. And so I'm so excited to share furthermore about my story, about how I ultimately have flourished in this space as the CEO of Lacy Consulting Services.
That's awesome. Thank you. So for sharing that story, I think there's something about. The ways our leadership journeys can start with some trauma or just. Feelings of, or real experience of exclusion. Mm-hmm. [00:05:00] Or, oh, we don't know that, do you? You know what I mean? And the ways when we build our companies, we are filling a void or a niche that people don't know that they need.
Yes. So there's a lot of education that happens at ALC. We talk about enrollment, which is really, how do you. Work with people who are values aligned. How do you do bridge building work? How do you, along the path for those who are willing and so consultant, my my estimation is, you know, consulting work ends up being a lot of that, right?
We're not, we're not making widgets. So it's, it's a lot of, it's a lot of that work. Um. So conservation, I just want to, I want us to unpack what the heck that means, and I say this. So for listeners, um, in an earlier episode in our first season, you heard us talk to Carol Kauffman, who is the CEO of the Ohio Environmental Council.
And so she was talking about the work in really like the more broad environmental space. Um, that space is [00:06:00] quite vast. And there are different segments of the sector, and there is this segment known as conservation, and I'll also name it a LC. We've worked with different conservation organizations and they've all had.
A slightly different interpretation of what that actually means. So Leander, from your vantage point worldview, the work that you do in the world. Yeah. How could you, for our listeners, really describe and define What are we talking when we say conservation? Ooh. Ooh, ooh. I love it. I love it. Um, because, you know, as a social scientist, words matter.
And yes, the way that we define things matter and what you find. And, and as a social scientist, we know that there are multiple definitions for the exact same word. So sometimes you're trying to figure out which definition are we talking about here? Right. And so I appreciate this question. So from my perspective, I at first have to root it in the fact that I understand that conservation, [00:07:00] as I'm about to initially explain it, is rooted in white colonial kind of.
Foundations. It's about protect, exclude, so buy land, protect that land, make sure no one else can really engage with that land so that we can say that we protect it by buying land, we're protecting that land, right? That is not the normal worldview from a lot of the cultures and perspectives, but that is a cultural.
Cultural perspective of the founders of conservation, um, which were primarily white straight men. Um, and so when you look at conservation as it historically, um, was talked about from the Western perspective, it was about buying and restoring and protecting land and limited access and those access. Tends to be for people who look like the same, people who protected that land.
Um, as we kind of evolve and people get more involved in the idea of conservation and the conservation movement, it becomes a space that's more about how do we heal land and use that healing of land to [00:08:00] also help heal communities. That's how I perceive it now, and so I perceive conservation as a mutually beneficial opportunity to heal the planet and heal ourselves at the same time.
I really love that because there has been an evolution, I wanna say at least since the 1990s, where there was, when you saw the rise of environmental justice movement and really calling, I think, some really important questions, um, around land ownership, land management, because as you were saying, as you're telling your story.
People somehow divorced, protect the land to the impact on people. Yes. But if you're a part of that impact group of people, like you're thinking it's both. And there's actual intersections here that are very, quite real for many of us. Yes. Um, and so it's, there's been, I don't know if evolution's the right term or not.
There's, there's been, um, a bit of one over the last couple, few decades and. I'll just say, I don't know if we've landed the point on that yet. I just, I just know it's, we have not, [00:09:00] we have not people, we are in the air. We are in the air. It is broken, right. The engine one engine is falling off. We're trying to figure out how to do this.
Yes. It's, um, I'll just say it's a continual tension and conversation in the greater space. Mm-hmm. Um, and I think I'll just name from an A LC perspective. One, the tensions. I think people are still not an either or thinking about it. And I think what, what often ends up happening, especially when we're talking about, um, in coalition spaces, right?
So if we're talking about the buying and the selling and the ownership of land, what does it look like in coalition space when you have. Traditional, we'll call traditional conservational organizations, which are typically been predominantly white, I'll be blunt. Mm-hmm. Um, in the same space with tribes, right?
And we're talking about policy solutions. Policy initiatives, but it's not, you know, it's, it's not cookie cutter. A lot comes up. [00:10:00] Right? And so it's, there's this, this friction and tension is something that often happens. And for listeners, this is usually when our team at ALC would come in when there was a tension there.
That people need to work through. Yep. To figure out how, like, how do you work together? How do you find some of these complex solutions? What do you need to wrestle with yourself? You know what I mean, in your own leadership? So that, that's the work that ALC has done. We just turned 10 this year.
At least five of 10 of those years was spent with that, if not more specific. Congratulations. 10 years, by the way. Thank you. So it's, it's very real and it's very emotional and personal for people, and I think that's part of this wrestling and slash reckoning that's been just occurring in the work. Um, Leander, you've been like really vocal, I feel like on LinkedIn about the conservation space and asking.
Some really, I think, tough and [00:11:00] important questions. Can you just speak more to like what you'd like this space to do or what, what you're asking of this movement space? I love that. Yeah. My LinkedIn, I don't know what happened. I just, I just went with it and, and it's become the space where I, where I do most of my talking and marketing and engaging.
And I think that when I think about the Constitution movement, I've always advocated that there should be a higher connection between the way that we. The benefits to people as there is to the benefits to animals and rivers and everything else on our planet, right? And that, and also the weirdness, as if those are two separate things, right?
As if like humans and planet are like this weird, two different things. It's all the same thing. We are the planet. Um, and so when I think about what I'm asking for on LinkedIn is I'm, I'm just trying to get people to. A, the first thing you're gonna see if you go to my LinkedIn is I'm trying to get you all to stand back up and like this cause we've been beat down in the last couple of [00:12:00] years for sure. Around conservation. People have been losing their jobs. They've been dozed, they've been told they can't have funding, they can't talk about DEI anymore. Uh, they can't really care about communities, which is also perceived as DEI work. Right?
It's like, oh, if you're doing community work, what does that really mean? Is that DEI. Um, everyone's afraid. Um, and so my first and foremost perspective is to get people unafraid. Uh, we can't be afraid. We can't stop doing the work. We have to keep doing good conservation work. And on top of that, um, what I'm trying to do is advocate for more social science happening in the environmental space.
And so. More of that way. How do we tell stories? How do we get stories from people on the ground and people who are impacted by conservation work? And how do we translate those stories to the leaders who need to make decisions? And as much as I would love it that the leaders can just listen to the communities and understand what they mean, that just doesn't happen that way.
Uh, they're so hardwired to want data, and so social science is a way [00:13:00] for me to get community stories, translate that into data. The leaders are gonna use that are actually going to benefit communities and make decisions on how they improve the environment. I love that. So I think for listeners, you know, how we've connected is you really use, you're the, I think you use like the conservation data specialist really.
Mm-hmm. Like you are, you are taking that information, you know, whether it's through storytelling, whatever, the things that may happening and, and really, um, harnessing the data. So can you tell listeners more about your approach and like just the uniqueness of Lacy Consulting Services? Yeah, so we're a very equity forward company, and so when we do engage with communities, we mean.
The whole community. We're not talking about what we're traditionally used to, which are people who mostly benefit from conservation historically have been wealthy, generally white, um, individuals who really can benefit from, you know, most of the conservation projects happen in those neighborhoods, is probably the best way of saying it.
Right. And so when you think about [00:14:00] historically how conservation groups have viewed. Communities, they see them as the enemy, right? Like, oh, they're the ones who are causing the problem. If we didn't have so many of them, they wouldn't, you know, destroy our lands and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, and so then you have, they, these folks tend to build biases and stories in their heads.
And so my job is to cut through that. And so our tagline, example for at least a consulting services is to stop assuming. Start knowing, right? Mm-hmm. Because we make a lot, conservation groups makes tons of assumptions about communities, and our job is to cut through that. And so when we engage, uh, when we are doing our engagement work, we're looking at, we engage with mosques, we engage with the Latino community, and they're, you know, the community center, we're going to barbershops, you know, we're going to wherever we need to go to make sure.
That we're getting diverse perspectives across the community and we're not limiting or discriminating against anything. We just wanna make sure that we hear voices that have been historically unheard while, of course, making sure that [00:15:00] we hear from the voices of the majority, but their voices are everywhere, like those are represented easily.
We can easily get those voices. What is harder and what most? Groups that do social science work for the environmental work, miss is getting those unrepresented voices and the majority of the reason why is because none of them look like anyone from those underrepresented communities. And because we have staff that reflect a variety of underserved communities, it's so much easier for us at Lacy Consulting Services to move within those spaces while still also getting the voices of the majority.
I love that Leander. And, and can you share, you know, we're in an interesting time to say the least, right? Mm-hmm. The least. Least, right? Right. Um, in what ways have your services perhaps evolved or changed just to meet the current moment? Ooh. Yes. I love that. Um, so I mean, last year it was about survival. It was about like, you know, where is the bomb shelter?
Let's get in there. [00:16:00] Let's just stay alive for a year and then we can stay alive for a year. Then we can figure out what to do next. Right? And so, like I scrubbed DEI off my website and that was scary. Like I was really hard for me to do initially. But then it wasn't because I realized that unlike every other organization and agency or business or et cetera, I don't have to, I don't have anything to prove.
I have zero to prove. Um, my work speaks for itself. I do diversity, equity, inclusion work, even if I never say the letter, use those letters ever again. Right. And so initially it was a little bit of a scrubbing just to survive. Uh, a little bit of also changing my tactics to focus more on doing the, the, the social science data, that social science work that I love doing versus DEI workshops, which is what I used to call them right before.
And now I don't call them DEI workshops anymore. I just call them what they are. Right. Um, um, I do workshops on building trust with relation, uh, with communities and partners. I do, um. Workshops on understanding the history of different civil rights and how that intersects with the [00:17:00] conservation movement, and then why it matters.
So why women's rights matter, for how it matters in the conservation. So you don't really hear voices of women until women get the right to vote, and then all of a sudden you start seeing their voices in conservation more prominently. Um, same thing with L-G-B-T-Q rights, et cetera. And so. We talk about the rights movement and the conservation movement and how it's so important that until people have basic rights, it's hard for them to engage in conservation work.
It's a privilege to do conservation work because then on a daily basis, you're too busy trying to survive. You're too busy trying to get your basic rights, you know, accounted for that. You can't really do conservation work. And so we understand and respect that. And so as we evolved with the DEI, um. Kind of work.
We now just say that we work with all communities. We work with all communities regardless of anything. And we've been more effective than we probably ever have been before because we're saying, I think what we actually wanted to say. Whereas before DEI was actually a [00:18:00] limitation for us, to be quite honest.
Yeah. It boxed us in into something that we never even, we never, I never put that label on myself. Other people put that label on me. Saying that I should do DEI work and then kind of box me within that space. And so now I'm able to break free of that box and do great community work period that I know is founded in equity work.
But I'm gotta say it. I know I'm doing it. Yeah. I love that. I mean, listen what you're saying, we also saw over here at A LC, you know mm-hmm. We do culture change work. Like that's the work and through, through the gears, based on what's happening in our communities, our clients call us DEI consultants. Yeah, that's right.
Right. So, and that's fine because we do embody those values, whether the algorithms used or not. Um, and so like making those strategic pivots, it wasn't. It wasn't a radical shift for us because we've always done culture work. We've always [00:19:00] done different types of interventions. We've always worked with I kind of the icky, tricky stuff when it comes to just human behavior and relationships.
We get in there and work with groups to solve those really conflicts problems. Now it's evolved into being explicit about mergers and acquisitions work, but we've always done it. We've always done it. You know, no one said post-merger integration. No one used that vernacular in our movement spaces. But they would say things like, we've had a, a radical shift in our leadership from our ED to our CEO to our board.
We don't know what's happening. Or we actually are now merged or come together to the organization in this way. Yes, and it's kind of bumpy and there would be a DEI problem, but that it was a greater culture problem. Right? Mm-hmm. So I think on the one hand, while the acronym is not used anymore and perhaps was even overly used, if I'm being honest.
Yes. Yes. Um, if you're doing the work of people and culture as we do your, or like data as you're doing the work [00:20:00] is still the work we can call whenever we need to call it. But the work is the work. And I've been, I've been saying that the last couple years for our team here at ALC, like the work is the work we can, we can change how we talk about the work.
The work is the work and our values are our values and we're standing on that. So, period. Period. And the clients that we get know that they don't need to. They don't need to see it. They know it. They knew before they even called me what they were getting. Yeah. So for sure, for sure. Well, what are you up to now?
What's next? How can folks engage with you? Do you have upcoming workshops or engagements you want people to know about? Yeah. So I mentioned a little bit about, um, our trust workshop. That's probably our most popular workshop by far that we've been doing with environmental organizations. We have, um, in this workshop you'll learn and understand a framework called the Trust Ecology by Professor Mark Stern.
That was theoretical, that we've turned to practical, and we've been using it for the last like. Five years now to really engage with conservation organizations to develop strategies on how [00:21:00] to build effective trust. And so, um, that has just been an amazing workshop. And we have now an open enrollment that we're doing this year.
We're gonna have three of them. Um, I know the first one's gonna be in June, the last one's in December. I can't remember the middle one right now, but probably like September probably makes sense. But if you really want to know and find out and follow what's going on, at least the consulting services and how to engage.
Um, get on my LinkedIn, like just do it. You can follow me, you can friend me. I don't care. I take friend requests. I am pretty, like, I do do a little bit of looking like if you're just a random person from like, Ooh, are you just trying to get business from me? Or like in a way of like, you're just a marketer trying to get more marketing.
You know, we all get that scam stuff. But in general, um, I'm super, um, active on LinkedIn and would love to engage your audience there. Awesome. And what's your LinkedIn handle? How come I find you? So you just look up my name. So it is my personal, um, LinkedIn. I use more. Anything else? So just look up for Leander Lacy, L-E-A-N-D-E-R.
Last name LACY. [00:22:00] Not ey, which people tend to do sometimes. Um, and you'll find me, I promise there's not, but, but maybe one or two Leander Lacy in the environmental space. So you'll find me. I love it. I love it. Well, this is just. Oh, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I, I forgot to say I also have a podcast myself, which has been on a little bit of a hiatus, but, uh, called The Green Mind Podcast, where I interview individuals around the world who are at that intersection of people in nature.
And so, um, I, if you want to find out more about the type of work I do and find out more about the growing number of people who are really pushing conservation to be more about people in nature, I suggest you take a look at my podcast as well. I love that. And for listeners, we'll provide information to Leander information here, so the LinkedIn and the podcast in the show notes.
Well, Leander, this has been wonderful. Thanks so much for taking time to talk. Absolutely. Absolute pleasure. Awesome. Well, for listeners, we're excited to be back for season two of this podcast. [00:23:00] Stay tuned for more exciting episodes. Until next time.
