Angela welcomes back the very first Black Oxygen guest, Opal Tomashevska — a Madison native, credit union leader, poet, and newly elected board president of the Lussier Community Education Center — for a rich conversation on community care as resistance. Rooted in Opal's story of growing up in Wexford Ridge and coming of age through community institutions, they explore how the cooperative model of credit unions, Black professional affinity spaces, and tight-knit circles of accountability have sustained Black women through systems that were never designed with them in mind.
The conversation takes a deeper turn as Angela and Opal examine what it truly means to belong — not just to be welcomed — and the quiet cost of spending years hustling for worthiness in corporate spaces. Against the backdrop of an alarming and underreported wave of Black women's displacement from the workforce, they reflect on codependency, self-abandonment, and what it looks like to finally stop making yourself smaller to stay safe. Opal's closing vision: a Black Women's Renaissance is already underway — and it is being built on belonging to oneself first.
Key Themes Community care as resistance · Welcoming vs. belonging · The cooperative finance model and credit unions · Black professional affinity spaces and ERGs · Hustling for worthiness · Self-abandonment and reclaiming agency · Black women and workforce displacement · Modeling self-care for our children · Intergenerational community impact · The Black Women's Renaissance
#BlackOxygenPodcast #BlackPodcasts #Wisconsin #BlackInWisconsin #UpperMidwest #Diversity #Inclusion #Belonging
