In this episode, I interview Jillyan McKinney, Senior Director of Projects and Operations at the Equity and Wellness Institute. Listen in as she shares about the time her school’s ethnic studies curriculum was made into a viral video blasting Critical Race Theory, and what it’s like to work in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion space.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
From Teaching to Working in DEI
Daphne Gomez:
Hi Jillyan, thank you so much for being here today.
Jillyan McKinney:
Thank you so much for having me. I just feel super privileged to be in the space with you today.
Daphne Gomez:
I had a little bit of a brief conversation with you before, but I am excited to just get into it and just learn a little bit more about you and the work that you’re doing right now because you have a very impressive background, and a really impressive new role that I think a lot of people will be passionate about hearing. So, do you mind sharing a little bit about your experience in education to begin with?
Jillyan McKinney:
We had a really unique upbringing. We are a multiracial family. And so within that space you sort of border on two different worlds. And I started to see, in the education space, racism and discrimination, some towards my own family, some towards others. And so, those two things sort of intersected. And although as a mixed race person, I present as white, that’s really just not my entire story. And when you live between those two worlds, yes, you are afforded really great advantages that I’m incredibly aware of, yet it gives us access to spaces where racism and discrimination run rampant.
That, in part, made me choose the career of teaching because I’ve really felt like I could do some really good work in the education world. And when I became a teacher, I wanted to teach in the social sciences because I was just so interested in how the world worked, the story of the world, but also reflecting back.
As I started to grow and learn within learning history, I realized that it lacked so much perspective and a lot of truth, and I wanted to do something about that. So, I went into my career as a social science teacher for high school. I taught almost every course in the social science department. I coached really early on. I was also an AP coordinator, an equity and literacy lead, and more I’m sure. I can’t think of it now.
No one is just a teacher. There’s always a ton of things that we’re doing on the side. And I really, found a home in curriculum that was based in culturally responsive pedagogy and anti-racism. I found that in the International Baccalaureate program, and also the ethnic studies program. And I made my main focus was to bring alive those groups, to teach my students about their stories. And the work just really fed my soul.
And I really made a conscious effort to try to make my classroom as culturally responsive and open to all students, especially those ones who have systematically not had or have been afforded certain privileges within the American education system.
Daphne Gomez:
Yeah. And if you don’t mind me coming in.
Jillyan McKinney:
Yeah.
Daphne Gomez:
Some of the teachers that I talked to, it’s clear that they have lost their passion for the career. And there there’s nothing, there’s no shame in that. That was me. I was just completely burned out. And I don’t hear that from you. I still hear that mission and that really powerful, I know it’s weaponized against us, the remember your why.
Jillyan McKinney:
Yeah.
Jillyan explains what led her to transition out of the classroom
Daphne Gomez:
But I still very much hear that strong in you. And you were teaching for 18 years. So my question for you is, did you start looking for careers outside of the classroom for a specific reason? Had you started to explore it, or did this new career just kind of find you? I’d love to hear a little bit about what made you start to make that switch.
Jillyan McKinney:
Thank you for that question. To be honest, I never thought I would leave the classroom. I would’ve literally bet good money that I would retire in classroom 156. I really felt an intense sense of obligation, and also guilt that if I was thinking about leaving, I was letting my students down. If I wasn’t focusing on them 100%, I was letting them down. I really feel like there’s so much guilt and obligation that’s generated from that profession. And ultimately, I knew about five years ago that I, number one, wasn’t going to be an administrator, probably earlier than that.
To be honest, I wanted to do more. But the intersection of my passion and my mission for this work was taking a really serious toll on me and my family.
And just a quick story, right after my third child was born, I was back in the classroom pretty much right away, didn’t have a lot of time off, and was absolutely stressed but kept grinding, and I physically collapsed in front of my students, worst nightmare by the way, and hit my head on the side of a desk, blacked out, had a student have to call 911. I woke up having an anxiety attack, and they didn’t stop from then on. And so, even though I realized at the time, “Wow, I’m going to really need to figure out what is causing this,” I continued to keep going back because it’s just what I felt like I knew and I was good at. I honestly didn’t think I could do anything else. I’m just going to be really, really honest.
Daphne Gomez:
Both of those things are so common. It’s so common. But even just going into this really extreme physical health deterioration is something that so many teachers actually face in younger years of their life. I was going to the doctor my last year of teaching. That was ultimately what led me to say, “This is enough. I have to try something else.” Because I went to the doctor probably five times that year for really extreme, just strange symptoms, not just like teeth grinding or whatever, but just extreme like stomach issues and things where I was nervous that something was very wrong with me. And they just kept saying, “This is what happens with extreme situations of stress.” And I’m sure when you went to the doctor after that, they probably let you know that it was probably impacted by your work environment. Did you have any conversations with doctors or therapists about it?
Jillyan McKinney:
100%. And I didn’t listen to them at the time. And I’m an oldest child, so I feel like quitting is really a difficult thing for me. And that was just the start of the anxiety. And my poor family had to watch as I slowly deteriorated over the years, but I just kept grinding because I thought that that was what I was supposed to do because that was my mission. And ultimately, something changed in me. In about 2017, we had a family medical issue. My mom has a liver disease that caused her to need a liver transplant. And we all got tested and the family was on board. Everybody was trying to help to find a living liver donor, and I was the one that was chosen to be a match for her.
And so, I had three young children. It was very scary for me, but I was consistently like, “No, we can’t do the surgery unless it’s during the summer.” And luckily that worked out, but I went back to work six weeks after the surgery to start the school year. I was still having really serious side effects. They pretty much chopped my body in half. And the surgery was successful, but when I woke up, I thought, “What are my children going to remember about me? Are they going to remember…” Because those life and death situations really sort of make you think. And what are they going to remember? Are they going to remember being in my classroom all the time because mom has to grade? Are they going to remember being at a basketball game because mom has to do a duty? Are they going to remember mom not having any patience because she’s so stressed out and parents have decided to descend upon a specific issue?
It became so a cycle in my brain that at that point I decided, okay, I’ve got to figure out what to do next. And that’s when I really started to think, preliminarily think about what was next. Maybe I needed to be in the classroom one period of day, and then maybe be a teacher coach. Or could I go into my professional development background and start working in that space? I didn’t want to stop teaching though. It took everything out of me to even consider those options.
Daphne Gomez:
One interesting thing that I heard you say was just like it took this really extreme crisis for you to kind of wake up from the realization of you were putting your career first. And I think that this is something that’s also very true for so many teachers, because what they are doing is an important job, and it’s helping other people. But if it was any other career, and I’m just going to be very stereotypical, think of like a Mad Men Don Draper at a home missing his children because he is drinking scotch at work and staying there till 10:00 PM just doing some marketing stuff. It’s easy to be like, “That guy chose his career over his family.”
But so many teachers are like, “I can’t do X, Y, or Z. It is impossible for me to commit to these family functions because I have to put my career first.” And that’s not the decision that they’re making. It’s just unfortunately the decision that the entire education system is putting on teachers right now in order for them to support students because they’re given this unsustainable workload right now. But it’s just so interesting how hard it is for us to identify it in ourselves that we’re putting our career first in different situations until it’s something extreme, like not being able to be there for a family member or trying to put it around the different dates.
I’d like to ask a little bit about once you started that process of looking into other jobs, because it sounds like you were going into instructional coaching. What other types of work were you looking into? And how did you ultimately find the job that you’re at right now?
Jillyan McKinney:
Yeah. I knew nothing, to be quite honest with you. And I just started looking on Indeed or ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn, signed up for a LinkedIn Premium account. I listened to your podcast and really tried to learn as much as I could. I wasn’t in distinct crisis at that moment, so it was more of like a, I’m thinking I want to expand my opportunities but I’m not sure what. I got two really cool job opportunities that came across that I interviewed for. I didn’t get either one of those, but it was like, I can do this. Okay, I think that I have skills. I can see what my transferrable skills are.
Jillyan discusses her experience becoming the face of a CRT smear campaign
And then about the beginning of 2021, I had brought the ethnic studies curriculum with an incredible team of folks in my district to my school and co-wrote it. And it was really revolutionary. It shouldn’t have been revolutionary, but it was, specifically for the very predominantly white suburban school that I was teaching in. And it changed the game. All of the micro, macroaggressions that I had been dealing with up until that time, the racism against my students, the discrimination against my LGBTQ kids, the sexism, the prevailing educational system as it was, I know this is going to sound crazy, but it was tolerable. I felt like I could still do the work inside the system, and I feel like I was doing good work.
It shifted with ethnic studies because it brought about what many communities are seeing all over the place is an intense backlash that it makes me pause because this part of the story is really difficult to tell, because it became targeted. It became very targeted into whom was teaching the course. And you then became this person who just was teaching this course who loved it and cared about it and thought it was doing amazing thing for kids, all kids, and then I became the face of smear campaign in the local community. It happens all the time, specifically to Black and brown women. It’s not ever talked about, but it was something that I hadn’t experienced to this level at the time.
Daphne Gomez:
Were they parents of your students, parents at the school, random strangers who had nothing to do with the school whatsoever?
Jillyan McKinney:
Mostly strangers. And that’s what the scariest part is, because I was in the classroom for almost 18 years. I’m a parent. Parents are difficult because you have their child and your care, so it’s understandable that they care about their kids and what’s happening to them. It turned from a low level, “We don’t like this class, we hate the curriculum, it’s CRT,” to then ramping up to hate groups showing up at board meetings. And a video that we had recorded the year prior due to COVID about equity in the district was spliced together and created a propaganda video that was circling through YouTube, and I was the face of the video. And when I found it, it really hit me. I think it had all had come together and culminated, but it hit me so hard, I couldn’t get back up.
I found myself outside of my classroom having a full panic attack the day after I found the video. I don’t know how I even made it into my classroom. I had first period prep. Thank goodness I didn’t have to see kids. And my principal who had been aware of what was going on, who was fantastic, came up and saw the way that I looked. She saw that I needed to go home, walk me to my car, and pretty much took care of me. I didn’t step back into the classroom for six weeks after that day. And I was put on a medical leave. I was so depressed. I could not get out of my bed. It’s like all of the things that had culminated for 18 years came to a head and I couldn’t push it down anymore.
And I laid on the bathroom floor, I cried in my closet so my kids wouldn’t hear me. I felt really defeated. And I was so upset because at the beginning of that, I was still so worried about my students, about my colleagues and how they had to pick up the pieces with me not being there. I felt bad about my family having to go through it, all of the things. Not once did I think, you need to take care of yourself. You’re not in a good way.
Daphne Gomez:
I’m so grateful that you came on to share this story and to be vulnerable here, but I have to acknowledge this is every teacher right now’s worst nightmare.
Jillyan McKinney:
Absolutely.
Daphne Gomez:
This is exactly what everybody is terrified is going to happen to them. And I’ve known a couple of other people who are public facing who have had accounts target them, some… I don’t know, lib teachers of TikTok or something like that, that started to target them. And it becomes very scary, and it can… Just the intensity of people recognizing you on the street, whether it’s good or bad can be something that people just aren’t ready for emotionally, but just the weight of knowing how heated and hateful people can be and you being the face of that, I am so sorry that that happened to you, especially for what you were trying to achieve, which is just to support your community and to support students. So thank you for even opening up about that.
Jillyan McKinney:
Well, I thank you for saying that. It really does mean a lot. I had an incredible support system. I have an amazing husband who watched my career unfold from the beginning. And then I have these beautiful children that I needed to get up for every day. My parents, my brother and sister, run the gamut on support system. I had friends, my sister and brother-in-law. These people kept me okay. If I didn’t have them, I can’t tell you if I would be here speaking to you today. And now looking back, this only happened about a year and a half ago. It’s still very fresh. And the thing that I don’t think people understand is that no one goes into teaching going, “I can’t wait to harm kids. That’s my jam.” You are there because you have this… It’s like a calling of feeling like you have something to offer to the next generation. And when that video came out and it was I was hurting kids, it hit me in a way that I don’t think I could have imagined, and it took me to the darkest place I’ve ever been in my life.
But now, I know I had to get to that place so that I could leave. So it almost took me not surviving it to say, “I’ve got to move on. I have to do this for me. Not for anyone else, but for me.” And I never lost the will or the want to create change or to bring attention to historically excluded groups or… I’ve never lost that, even in the lowest points. But when your family doesn’t feel safe, it changes everything. And it’s hard to explain that to… It was really hard to explain that to my own children at the time. And I was like at the pinnacle of what I thought I wanted my career to be. I had this amazing program that was going to go full-time the next year in ethnic studies. I was the equity lead. I was working directly with the National Equity Project. They are phenomenal.
My daughter was coming to my high school the next year. Everything on paper looked like, wow, Jillyan’s got it together. She should stay. This is going to be a great 20 year career past this. And I just couldn’t do it anymore. And I had to go. And I left mid-year.
Daphne Gomez:
Yeah. And that’s such a hard and challenging decision, but so many teachers find themselves having to make that decision for either their own mental or physical health, or because a job opportunity comes up. And unfortunately, that’s part of it. The teeny application window, it’s not realistic, especially with just how competitive jobs can be. So let’s talk a little bit about the process of you actually finding this job. So you were kind of a fly on the wall. You were not really looking for other work.
Jillyan shares what it was like for her to apply for jobs outside of the classroom
Something very extreme happened to you. You probably took some time to heal from that. And then did you hit the ground running, or was it just a slow little trot towards this?
Jillyan McKinney:
Yeah, I hit the ground running because I feel like that’s just my only pace, to be honest. But I was out for six weeks. I there my support system. Specifically, I had friends in the corporate world, and also a friend who had left the year prior, and I knew I needed to go. I knew I needed to leave. And so he and others helped me craft my resume and get it out there. I applied for 40 jobs within a two month span, and I didn’t get a lot of callbacks. My resume was still geared towards education. I had no idea of the corporate world or nonprofit world or any world other than education. I was trying to get letters of recommendation. Nobody cares about those outside of education.
Daphne Gomez:
Well, state departments do. So if you’re trying to work for a state department, they may ask. Or if you’re working for the police department, they may ask, I think so there are some jobs. But yes, it’s many of the things that you’re so terrified of in education, that like-
Jillyan McKinney:
They’re going to call my principal and ask how I am.
Daphne Gomez:
Right. It’s just not realistic. So at the very tail end of these 40 applications, is that when you got an interview for this role? And can we talk a little bit about what this role actually is?
Jillyan McKinney:
I did. I got a call back. It was a job that paid way less than I made at the time and had no retirement. But I was in such a dire place that I just applied, I didn’t think that I was going to get hired. I did a coffee chat with the person who hired me, who had had the job prior, and it was a nonprofit for the unhoused population of our county, and it was to be the racial equity specialist. And I was like, great, this is an amazing opportunity to understand a different sector and use my skills, but also to actually have this be my title. This is what my work and my job description says I get to do every day. And so I went on this coffee chat and was blown away by this person. And I’m going to talk a little bit about her later because she’s amazing.
But I connected with her. I got a second interview. I then got a third interview. And right before Thanksgiving week of that year, I was offered the position. And it was so difficult because I didn’t know how to ask for more money or negotiate. I had never done any of that before. I also was scared about breaking contract. So it was told to me for as long as I can remember that if you break your contracts, they’re going to take your credential would. That was a very serious fear for me. So I had to time it right where I could try to leave at the mid-year. So I ended up having to go back to school and teach out the rest of the semester, and then leave at the winter break. They did not want to let me out of my contract, but I think that they felt like it’s probably better because dealing with her continually is not going to be easy for us.
And so I left. I worked in that sector for nine months and then the person who had hired me, Dr. Tamu Green, she had founded and was a CEO of the Equity and Wellness Institute. This is a consultant firm that really strives to help communities serve the most impacted folks. And we work with organizations. And about nine months in, I got a call from her asking if I would be willing to come work for her in this boutique firm, and I jumped. I loved what I was doing. It was great work, but this was so exciting to help build a business from the ground up. I did not think I could do the job because I had never done anything outside of education before. And I came over, and a lot of my skills transferred. And I’m the senior director of projects and operations for that firm, and we’re growing so fast. And now getting to work with somebody that you really idolize and is an amazing mentor, it’s such a 180 from where I was a year and a half ago.
Daphne Gomez:
Yeah. So do you feel like taking that first stepping stone job that was lower pay helped set you up for success and open up the opportunity for this new advancement in your career?
Jillyan McKinney:
Yeah, I think that I had to realize that I had to leap and be scared to fail, and that it was going to be okay if I did. It’s scary, but I had to figure out if I could do it. And so yeah, I took a job that didn’t pay me as much. It had no retirement, but oh, I learned so much in those nine months that it catapulted me onto the next level, and I just have so much respect for the work that I did with the folks there at the nonprofit. We just made some amazing inroads, but this was the next stepping stone. So I do believe that really being honest with yourself and being okay with saying, okay, can I financially take this risk? But then also if you’re in such dire straits, you have to. Not everybody has… I’m very fortunate. I had and have a partner who was supporting me at the time. Not just financially, we were supporting each other, but emotionally, and I was able to say, okay, can we afford this?
Not everybody has that, so I can understand how difficult that is, but doing something that is hurting you every single day, you can’t withstand it. It’s not something that you can come back from sometimes.
Daphne Gomez:
Yeah. And even just what you were talking about, them making you stay a couple extra months or weeks, or however long that period was, is just a really clear example, in my opinion, of it’s not about keeping teachers that, “Oh, we want to help support our teachers, we want them to be happy in the classroom, we’re going to give them actionable solutions, and we’re going to give resources.” It is bodies in the seat. You were not only an unhappy person as a teacher. You felt physically unsafe, and they were still trying to keep you there with their hands on your shoulders sitting in your seat as long as humanly possible.
And there is no way that someone can say that that is what is best for the kids, a person in that hostage situation in their career choice. But I’d like to not dwell too much on that and talk a little bit about your wonderful job.
Jillyan McKinney:
Sure.
Jillyan talks about what it is like to work in her current DEI role
Daphne Gomez:
Do you mind if I ask now, the first role, you said nine months of a pay cut, the role that you took after that, is it a pay cut still or is it a salary increase?
Jillyan McKinney:
It’s a salary increase, higher than what I was making as a teacher, and also negotiated for retirement. So pensions are really interesting things. So it’s difficult to sort of go from a pension to like a 401k.
Daphne Gomez:
We do have a podcast episode all about that, walking you through it. If anyone’s listening, go back and find that episode. So if you need to figure out where you’re at the scale-
Jillyan McKinney:
I was just going to say that.
Daphne Gomez:
Did you listen to that episode?
Jillyan McKinney:
I actually did. I did listen to that episode, because during the time I was like, oh, I’m going to ruin myself here, because that’s really what the pull is, right? So many folks go into teaching. Yes, they love it. But before, the benefits were so good, the time off was good, and you also had this really great mission, mission-oriented job that you loved, that you got to make an impact on. So the pension kept me for a long time. It was scary for me to leave. And again, I’m very fortunate to have options. But yeah, it was one of those things where you… Now, I know. I have actually negotiated and learned that skill. I’m not great at it, but it’s one of those things that you learn after you leave education. It’s leveling up your skills. My skillset now is just so much greater than it was, but I had so many transferable skills that I didn’t know were transferrable.
Daphne Gomez:
So let’s talk about what your day-to-day role is as… You’re the senior director of projects and operations. So what is it that you do on a day-to-day basis? What types of skills do you use?
Jillyan McKinney:
So well, I’m just going to say it again. Every day I really love being able to work with the team that we do. And so I lead a team, and that team, we work very closely together. We meet often to take a look at specific projects. So we could have approximately… Right now, I think we have about 12 or 13 active projects that we’re working on. Early on in the position, I was running all of those projects and I was project managing, and that was really kind of crazy. But now we’re able to have more team members. And so it’s just an overview of what’s next? What deliverable is due to the client? How does racial and health equity intersect with the work that we do? On any given day, we could be writing a strategic plan for a client or racial equity action plan.
We could be running community forums, which is one of my favorite things and aspects of my job, is working directly with the public because it sort of gets me back to my roots of teaching. I also could find myself doing a lit review of specific documents, which coincided a lot with me grading essays for so many years, and research. But the one thing that is just so exciting about my position now is that I get to lead facilitation and professional learning. And so I get to really dive deep for organizations or state government entities that are looking for DEI or anti-racist professional learning, and we create that curriculum and deliver it. And that part of it is really speaks to who I am.
Daphne Gomez:
What advice would you give for someone who is really passionate about breaking into the DEI or nonprofit space to do mission-based work?
Jillyan McKinney:
I would say know where your heart is, know your why. Also, I would ask yourself, how much training have I had? This is a particularly new space. It’s been called other things prior, but the DEI or justice, equity, diversity, inclusion space, it’s the largest growing space in corporate America right now hiring wise. And I would really take a look at how can I use what I know from the classroom, from my experiences with students and different student populations, and transfer that into my skillset. I think that you have to be incredibly reflective to do this work, and you also have to be really ready for it to be extremely difficult. Again, like I said earlier, I trained with the National Equity Project, and that particular organization really helped me understand what was necessary to create liberatory spaces in all organizations.
And that intense training, I believe, helped me understand what I had been feeling, what wasn’t able to articulate out loud. And so I would just be really reflective. I would take note of all of the different avenues that you’ve worked within the school space. I have to check myself every single day. I’m white presenting in a space that is and should be for black and brown folks. And I understand that, and I’m very aware. And I think that anybody moving into the sector needs to also have that awareness and have a drive to continually learn constantly, and be humble.
Jillyan shares other great organizations in the DEI space
Daphne Gomez:
Are there any local chapters or organizations of different types of nonprofits that you can think of off the top of your head that people could look into for volunteer opportunities or just to advocate, organize, or maybe potentially try and network to find other types of nonprofits?
Jillyan McKinney:
Yeah. Ooh, let’s go off the top of my head. There is a county organization called the Black Child Legacy Campaign that I have found incredibly amazing. They do consistently beautiful work in the community all over the county. So that’s really exciting work. I’m not sure about their volunteer piece. I also know of some groups that are just really great. Especially this one particularly for black women is The Sister Circle. And so that’s really exciting work that they’re doing.
Daphne Gomez:
Those are great suggestions.
Jillyan McKinney:
Yeah.
Daphne Gomez:
Thank you so much. I could talk to you for forever. Our time is coming to an end, and it makes me very sad because this is one of the best, most compelling stories and… What’s it called? A origin story, like the villain origin story. But you are making so much of an impact in your new role. I am so excited that I’ve been able to talk to you. I always ask former teachers on this show one question that I’d love to ask you. What did you learn about yourself during this process?
Jillyan explains what she learned about herself through her transition out of the classroom
Jillyan McKinney:
I learned that being strong all the time does not serve anyone, and that I could not be strong and do everything for everyone, that I needed to look inside myself and be worthy of all good things for myself. And that took me a really long time to figure out, but I think it has worked out so well. I can’t believe where I’m at today. Other people tell me, “Oh, wow, we knew you would do X, Y, Z, but I didn’t believe it in myself.” So I think that I’ve learned that, yes, you can persevere, but you also have to take care of yourself, and really truly understand the why behind your work usually comes from your person inside of your person. And if you’re not taking care of that person, then you’re doing no good to anyone else.
Daphne Gomez:
All of the most cliche things that people say like, “You can’t fill from an empty cup,” or all of those, it’s all so true. And I hate reflecting on the things that were impactful for me in my darkest times that really did keep me going because they all were very much, remember your why, and things that people cringe at. But it’s absolutely true, and you are a really great example of just someone who took the worst case situation and turned it around, and still continued to make an impact. And that is honestly something that I feel like every teacher has, is that desire in their heart to take a crappy situation and turn it into a way to still support and help other people. Thank you just so much for coming on the show, for sharing your story, and just for being here and for being you. This was such a great opportunity to speak to you. Really happy to meet you.
Jillyan McKinney:
So happy to meet you. Thank you so much for having me. This has been such an incredible experience. I truly thank you directly because your work that you started has done such amazing things for folks who are trying to transition or stay sane in their job as a teacher. And I just want to thank you, Daphne.
Mentioned in the episode:
- Our career path quiz at www.teachercareercoach.com/quiz
- Explore the course that has helped thousands of teachers successfully transition out of the classroom and into new careers: The Teacher Career Coach Course
