Listen to Black American Melissa C. Potter — born in Jamaica, Queens, raised in Rockland County, New York, and residing in Westchester County — share about pivoting into social impact and strategy work in TV from the music industry. She shares about how the 2020 Q3 and Q4 was a gift and curse for a lot successful professional Black folks where companies were scrambling to hire heads of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Social Impact. She also talks about buying a home during the pandemic when interest rates were very low.
Prior to the pandemic, “On the work front much of the work that I did was in person: hosting film screenings and panel discussions; so, it was all hands-on deck, very high stress, figuring out how to adapt this in-person company model to a virtual space.” Melissa recalls.
“So much of the messaging at the time was surviving isolation for those that lived alone or just weren’t accustomed to virtual-work-life and how could we strive for togetherness.” Melissa remembers.
“Working in the social impact space, for myself in particular, it proved to give opportunity for companies to address issues of unconscious bias that I think had been accepted as the norm and okay for far too long. And I remember the company that I was with having an open space for us to unpack it as employees and to come to Zoom, and I was one of two Black women working at a small company, and obviously I felt a duty for my voice to be heard and my experiences to be heard and my fears to be heard and understood by my colleagues; and I think that was the first time for so many of them, so many, you know, non people of color to hear from their peers and to hear from their colleagues what life was really like for us, or is really like for us, on a day-to-day basis, and that this threat is something that even in your best most successful living in moments is looming and something that could impact any one of us or our loved ones. So, I appreciated that the company that I worked for allowed that open space, allowed time off for us to process what happened; and I don't take for granted that that was a gift that a lot of people were not given at that time until the public pressure continued to mount corporations to face what was happening and that was like a groundswell moment as we went into July…”
“And after being stuck in the house for so long, you know during Covid, was like, no, we really need to space. We really need some fresh air. Crime had increased in our area. We were just going stir crazy. We wanted to be outside and wanted to get into something… The interest rate dropped to 2.4 for us, and so, we like everybody else in New York City were fighting to get into the suburbs to have that space, because we knew what being stir crazy looked like… So it took us about nine months 30 + bids that we lost out on cash offers, buckets of money coming from Wall Street, coming from the Upper East Side, trying to get into Jersey suburbs, Westchester suburbs, and after seeing so many homes I kind of felt like the Princess and the Pea…”
