August 2022 by Austin Woman Magazine

Celebrating 50 years! Austin true since 1972. Why shop Roger Beasley Mazda? • One of the largest Mazda dealers in the U.S. • Locally-owned with 3 convenient locations. • Offering the same great prices as always. • Trade-in values remain extremely high. • It’s a great time to shop Mazda!

ONE OF MAZDA’S HIGHEST HONORS AWARDED TO ONLY 50 DEALERS IN THE U.S.

ALL 3 ROGER BEASLEY MAZDA DEALERSHIPS EARNED THIS DISTINCTION FOR 2021

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PROVEN CUSTOMERCENTRIC CULTURE AT ALL 3 LOCATIONS AND IN OUR COMMUNITY

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36 FEATURE

GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN BY JENNY HOFF PHOTOS BY KYLIE BIRCHFIELD

44 FEATURE

STEM LEARNING TAKES FLIGHT BY STACEY INGRAM KALEH

ATXWOMAN.COM | 5

August CONTENTS 16 26

STAFF PICKS What’s Your Favorite App?

COUNT US IN Still Runnin’ Up that Hill

GIVE BACK Fox Robotics

FASHION Rebecca Phillips

ON THE MONEY How to Prepare for Recession

AUSTIN ARTS Edit Annie: A new play by Mary Glen Fredrick and Directed by Will Detlefsen

56 ATX

WOMAN to WATCH WATCH

HEALTH & WELLNESS Ethical Porn for Everyone’s Gaze

RECIPE REVEAL Celeste Gustafson Cooks Sustainably

32 JESSICA CANTAVE 33 LISA JAUREGUI

I AM AUSTIN WOMAN Meme Styles

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DollMaker Lashes CEO learns finance and social media marketing strategies with Verizon. Eyelash artist Nakia Vestal says the Verizon Small Business Digital Ready courses help her run her business professionally.

Nakia Vestal, CEO and owner of DollMaker Lashes in Houston, TX, says that she never dreamed she’d be able to pull off running a business—and creating a brand, too—while doing it all on her own. But the beauty entrepreneur is doing just that. Her eyelash salon has been in business for over six years; this year she added a product line. Vestal loves her clients and says they treat her like a therapist. “What goes on in the lash room stays in the lash room,” she jokes.

Vestal applied for and received a $10,000 small business grant through the Verizon Small Business Digital Ready program. She used the funds to create branding for her new four-item product line, hiring a designer to make over her logo: a distinctive graphical image of eyelashes in popping girl-power pink. The grant money also allowed Vestal to create a website that could handle e-commerce, and to buy the supplies to start mass producing her product line. In the meantime, Vestal is building the business and expanding her beauty line with new products. “The world’s going to know who DollMaker Lashes is,” says Vestal.

By taking courses on the Verizon Small Business Digital Ready portal, Vestal was able to upgrade her business know-how on topics such as finances and social media marketing. “Everything was a learning experience for me—from A to Z,” she says. As a busy business owner, mother and grandmother, Vestal carved out time to take the Verizon courses— she’s completed 20 courses on the portal—on Saturday and Sunday nights. Now, says Vestal, she makes sure not to mix personal and business accounts or lines of credit, she personalized her website, and she discovered how to target audiences with online ads. “With the Verizon Small Business Digital Ready program, I was able to learn how to run my business professionally,” says Vestal.

verizon.com/digitalready ATXWOMAN.COM | 21

Give BACK

Pain to Purpose

Fox Robotics is a company dedicated to amplifying the quality of life through robotics. BY KATHERINE POWELL

ox Robotics was founded in Desiree Fox’s garage. She had a simple mission in mind: to improve the quality of life for those in certain professions that often caused unnecessary harm. The automated forklift company creates machines that are able to operate completely autonomously. The autonomous operation allows for human workers to fully manage several forklifts at a time. This not only allows for safety to be at the forefront but helps professionals to elevate their knowledge of the industry in a managerial role. In forklift-related jobs, Fox details how a large portion of injuries that occur are catastrophic. By redefining the corporate structure and the definition of jobs within this industry, integration-free automation technology can emerge.

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Fox Robotics founding members: (left to right) Charles DuHadway, Desiree Fox, Peter Anderson-Sprecher

Photos courtesy of Fox Robotics.

How did you begin working in robotics? The company was built on the ashes of grief. We lost our daughter Aurora in a tragic accident. When you’ve lost a child, you realize there’s not one problem that matters anymore, and it creates space to work from your heart. Anything you thought about life changes. My husband and I, at the time, looked at the whole picture and we thought, ‘What do we have to lose?’ We knew we could survive for eight months, and that’s what we did. We brought on our chief technical officer and built the company from there, one engineer at a time. My husband was a software engineer and came up with the idea of self-driving vehicles that created fewer human safety issues. However, no matter where he brought this idea it failed due to a lack of execution. I had experience in company creation; this is the fourth company I started from the ground into existence. In the beginning, we had enough momentum as a startup, and we were also not held back by large institutions. A key to getting brilliant ideas, like autonomous forklifts, takes excellent talent acquisition. We hire the right people who have the skill set for execution, our recruiting members are very unique and the culture of the company is human based.

ATXWOMAN.COM | 23

Photos courtesy of Fox Robotics.

“

It’s this unbelievable feeling of honoring [Aurora]. We’ve used this feeling to create a better quality of life. —Desiree Fox

I also made it conducive to working mothers and parents. We do anything we can to support this dynamic. I myself have seven children. When you become a mom, you learn how to do something in 20 minutes that would have taken me two hours to do before. I think the key to our success is embracing different diversities. That tapestry is rich and comes from multiple perspectives. On your website, you describe how Fox Robotics creates “robots that do useful work.” Can you elaborate on this? The point of a robot is to do useful work. There are a lot of shiny, sexy robots that do shiny, sexy things. Robots that do useful things improve the lives of people globally. It’s the boring, mundane and unsafe work that translates into a better quality of life. With inflation on our heels, it fills jobs that no one wants to do. Now we’re putting people behind a tablet and teaching low-level software skills in airconditioned offices. I was at the warehouse late one night, and there were installers there who had experience in this industry. When I described what we were doing, one guy became combative and offended, and I listened. I grew up with a single mother in New York, graduating from college first in my family. I knew he was just trying to put food on the table. I asked him if he has ever been someone’s boss? He said no. I am training people to be the boss of robots; people can now be in charge of a fleet of robots. His whole demeanor swapped, and he asked if we were hiring.

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Can you describe the mission of your charity work? It was really important to me from day one that we work hard to be mindful of people outside of our company. We know that people are suffering around us, and we wanted to cut out any highlevel privilege and elitism. Somebody somewhere is grieving and suffering, and the charity came from a place of bereavement. Fox Robotics is intended to send two messages. First, there’s no level of leadership where someone is too good to help another person. Second, you must acknowledge those who are in pain. I call it corporate empathy. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve talked to customers and seen their eyes light up. It’s this unbelievable feeling of honoring [Aurora]. We’ve used this feeling to create a better quality of life. She pulsates throughout the whole company. It’s such an honor to be able to honor her in this way. In Aurora’s honor, we donate to Dell Children’s Medical Center. We send out a survey to every employee and ask what they care about. Anything [benefiting] children is high on the list. We’ve supported budding robotics teams, cleaned out public parks and collected toys for children in the foster care system or who may not see another holiday season. It’s all voluntary; we have employees who attend every event and employees who send us a [donation via] Venmo. All is okay. The charity has quickly become ingrained in our corporate culture. I am very proud of this section of our company. We make sure to build robots and corporate empathy side by side.

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Fashion

Gowns and Gadgets Rebecca Phillips balances both pageantry and a career in technology. BY ELLE BENT

According to Phillips, most people wouldn’t expect her to go into pageantry. Diving into Miss America Plus was out of her comfort zone, but as a woman in STEM, breaking barriers isn’t something she’s unfamiliar with. Joining the pageantry community was a way to join a network of plus-size women making positive change. “One of the biggest benefits of all of this is the amazing sisterhood. You have a bunch of women who have had somewhat similar life experiences to what you had,” she says. “As a plus-size woman you deal with a lot—snide comments, people talking about you, your weight. So we instantly had this common bond. Then we have this other bond that we’re here to break those barriers. We understand there’s a barrier there for plus-size women; we’re ready to knock that thing down, and we’re united in doing that.”

Photo by Eric Coleman.

ebecca Phillips’ journey to become Mrs. Heart of Texas Plus America is an unorthodox one. As a woman working for a tech company in Austin, Phillips signed up for her first pageant at 50 years old, a short time before it began…and with her wedding two weeks before the competition. “I was like, ‘I wanna do this while I’m still 50,’” she says. “‘I wanna be able to say my first pageant was when I was 50 years old.’” After watching pageantry for several years, Miss America Plus sparked her interest. So in March, Phillips competed in the Miss Texas Plus America pageant and earned the title of Mrs. Heart of Texas Plus America and Mrs. Austin Plus America. “I just dove in headfirst, honestly. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so I just did it,” she says with a laugh. “I had to be in a place with myself to be able to say, ‘I’m gonna get on that stage in front of a whole bunch of strangers and let them judge me.’”

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“

I had to be in a place with myself to be able to say, ‘I’m gonna get on that stage in front of a whole bunch of strangers and let them judge me.’ —Rebecca Phillips

Left photo courtesy of Rebecca Phillips. Right photo by Eric Coleman.

Miss Texas Plus gives plus-size women the platform to promote causes dear to them. For Phillips, this was an opportunity to promote curiosity about STEM for youth and women. With experience in mentoring young people to pave their careers into technology, she was able to use the platform pageantry gave her to launch Robots and Rhinestones, with the mission to make STEM accessible to everyone. “When I was in high school, I wanted to join the computer club. I was told, point-blank, ‘Girls are not in the computer club,’” she says. “We are in a different world now. Girls are in the computer club; girls learn how to code. We see more and more women going into the industry. But there’s still a challenge: We still see girls get discouraged by others around them.” Phillips spends time volunteering and mentoring students at robotics competitions at For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), an international youth organization that promotes education in STEM. “If you ever go to one of these competitions, you’ll never want to leave,” she says. “It’s the coolest experience ever because this is really where those kids who maybe aren’t into sports but are super smart get to have that team experience.” Alongside FIRST, Phillips volunteers with the Westlake High School and Anderson High School robotics teams to offer guidance and encouragement.

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—Rebecca Phillips

Photos by Eric Coleman.

Thanks to her pageantry, Robots and Rhinestones is an extension of that encouragement. The name itself encapsulates the idea that you can be feminine and into the sciences and technology. Through her platform, Phillips is currently working on creating social meetups for women in technology. “We see that women are leaving technology fields because they feel a lack of support, high stress, discrimination, so I really want to create social groups for women to meet and connect,” she says. She’s also partnered with a life coach who can help offer guidance to women who seek it. “When I get with my girlfriends and we start the conversation, either I need your advice, or I just need you to listen,” she says. “From there we go on, and so I really want these social groups to be the same way.” Phillips continues to keep up with her own career in technology, her volunteering efforts and the opportunities her title as Mrs. Heart of Texas Plus America has granted her to do the work that’s close to her cause. “I want girls to still feel like they can ask the why, and it’s okay to ask the why, and they can still stay curious about the things they want to know about.”

“

I want girls to still feel like they can ask the why, and it’s okay to ask the why, and they can still stay curious about the things they want to know about.

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Sponsored Content

ADRENAL FATIGUE No one will forget March 2020 and what it looked like to navigate the COVID

world. No one will ever be the same. We are seeing more exhaustion coming through the doors than ever before. There is a very high chance 2020 will have left many of us with chronic fatigue/ adrenal fatigue, which can lead to inflammation, thyroid dysfunction, sometimes autoimmunity and even cardiac issues. Meanwhile, we are socially distanced, masked and continually the most hyperconnected to information yet disconnected from humanity and nature the planet has ever seen. It’s a perfect storm for chronic fatigue/burn out! Human physiology is designed to adapt to stress for short times and then return to homeostasis (normal). Think running from a tiger or bear. We are not built for this. Not 2 years of missing your friends, your community, your people. Not 2 years of watching the world hate one another. Not 2 years of the unknown: Will I get sick? Will I get laid off? Will my business thrive? Will I get to travel this year and see family? This is leaving us in fight-or-flight for hours, days, weeks and months instead of minutes. The problem with our world as we know it is that we were never far away from stress as it was. Insert 2020 and it all intensifies the fight-or-flight response and burns out our adrenals. This level of stress, for this amount of time, leads everyone (not an overstatement, everyone) to be overly stressed or, to put it another way, adrenally fatigued. We see it every day in almost every patient right now. The exhaustion in their eyes, the worry, the stress. In practice right now, most people walking in the door have some adrenal fatigue, not a medical-level condition of adrenal insufficiency or Addison’s disease yet. But we are seeing adrenal exhaustion, causing all kinds of other imbalances.

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essica Cantave is the senior manager, customer success operations at SailPoint Technologies. With more than 20 years of experience in tech, this Brooklynite migrated to Austin with her husband and son back in 2015. As a wife and mother, she prides herself on volunteering and checking in with the mental wellness of those around her (both in and out of work), creating a sense of community wherever she goes. “Tomorrow isn’t promised. Live a life doing what you enjoy, and tell your loved ones how much you care every single day,” she says. On her down time, Cantave enjoys experimenting with cooking, hiking until she gets lost and all things basketball. sailpoint.com

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Photo by Joi Conti Photography LLC.

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isa Jauregui is founder and CEO of BK Beauty, a cosmetics brand that develops vegan, cruelty-free, purpose-driven products. Jauregui launched the brand in 2019, inspired by her daughters Brooklyn and Kate and the message she wanted to teach them around what beauty truly is: beauty is kindness. A former MAC cosmetics trainer and makeup artist, Jauregui has built a community through her videos on YouTube teaching women how to use makeup in an easy and attainable way. She has created hundreds of videos that have been viewed by millions of people around the world. BK Beauty is a committed partner and supporter of The Kindness Campaign, giving back a portion of sales to support the nonprofit’s incredible work. Today, BK Beauty is actively expanding its product portfolio to include new beauty tools and makeup products that help make application effortless and inspire creativity, while celebrating beauty inside and out. bkbeauty.com

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Girls Just Wanna

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Gretel Perera wants to show you the world. BY JENNY HOFF PHOTOS BY KYLIE BIRCHFIELD STYLING BY PARKE BALLANTINE (@parke.ballantine), INSPIRATION FROM KORMAN FINE JEWELRY (@kormanfinejewelery), THE GARDEN ROOM (@gardenroomatx) AND NORDSTROM (@nordstrom) SHOT ON LOCATION UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN MOODY COLLEGE OF COMMUNICATION

n the story of Hansel and Gretel, two children who are left in the woods embark on an uncertain adventure. They confront dangers, learn to rely on their own wit and bravery and eventually find their way home. Gretel Perera, like her namesake, knows what it’s like to survive in unknown territories. As the daughter of a Venezuelan diplomat, Gretel started out her life far from home. Born in The Hague, Netherlands, she was given the Germanic name Gretel as an homage to her birthplace. By the time she was a teenager, she had also lived in Paraguay, Barbados and Russia, which she experienced both under the head of the Soviet Union during communist rule and in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Traveling is in my heart; it is in my soul,” says Perera, as she sits in one of the comfortable lounge areas of the expansive Expedia building in The Domain, gazing over the city that has grown exponentially since she first arrived in the mid ’90s to complete her degree in journalism at the University of Texas. “I love experiencing different cultures; I love embracing new cultures; I love learning the challenges and understanding other cultures.” Perera’s unique background makes her ideal for her role as Expedia Group’s head of PR, Americas. The largest travel company in the world, Expedia Group includes the brands Expedia, Vrbo (previously HomeAway), hotels.com, hotwire.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, trivago and carrentals.com. Speaking three languages, having lived in numerous countries, traveling to dozens more and learning how to adopt cultures foreign to her own, Perera can find the commonalities that unite us all and tell stories and share experiences that would tantalize any aspiring traveler. Within her role, one day Perera may be organizing a media trip to Madrid to experience a world-class soccer game, and the next ideating which celebrity would be the right fit for a storytelling campaign. Her work meetings take place in locales like London and Paris. It’s the kind of job most people dream of, but for Perera it was earned through years of seizing opportunities, knowing what she wanted and focusing on her strengths. “When I first started working in PR, I didn’t know I could use my international background as an advantage,” she says. “But I quickly learned my culture and my language [were assets] to companies. Use what you have to your advantage—what you are and what you aren’t.”

ATXWOMAN.COM | 37

Learning how to capitalize on her differences helped Perera grow quickly in her field. At her first job at Ketchum, a large agency in Washington, D.C., a manager of hers didn’t want to do work in Puerto Rico because she had young children and couldn’t speak Spanish. So, she sent Perera instead. Because of her background, Perera was put on the international council, with more exposure to clients abroad. By the time she moved on to Dell in Austin, she had formed a niche talent of working with clients in Latin America. When the opportunity came to move to Brazil for a year, she jumped at the shot. She packed up her family, including her parents, firstborn son and then-husband, and moved abroad, studying Portuguese on the way. “I think growing up in different countries and having to learn different cultures and starting new friendships, you’re not afraid of a new start or a new beginning,” remarks one of her best friends, Leticia Schmaedecke, who is from Brazil and worked there with Perera at Dell as a field marketing director for Latin America, before she transferred to the Austin headquarters. “The other thing I always see is [that] she is clear in what she wants. She wants to succeed in her career.” CREATING COMMUNITY

When she finally got the chance to live in her home country of Venezuela at 15 years old, Perera was shocked to find it was the first place where she couldn’t easily assimilate. “They called me ‘la rusa’ [the Russian girl] because I wasn’t into the same things as the other girls,” recalls Perera. “At that time in Venezuela, it was all about makeup and designer clothes, so different from what it had been in Russia.” To be a teenager, a budding young woman, and feel like a foreigner in your own country has its emotional lows, but it gave young Perera a chance to learn that if you’re not born into the community where you live, you build it. It’s a lesson she put to use years later, when she was working at Evernote in Silicon Valley. She started meeting up with other Latinas in her industry to talk about personal life, professional life, goals and ambitions. As the crew of girls grew, they eventually had to move their meetups from bars to conference rooms. Finally, Prerera decided to formalize the group, and in 2014 she co-founded Latinas in Tech.

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“

We are focused on changing the face of leadership. I want more Latinas at the table, on boards, C level, CEO. We are laser-focused on the top.

—Gretel Perera “One of the reasons I did it was the storytelling,” recalls Perera. “For Latinas, there are few stories in tech about us. At every event we went to, it was the same two Latina women featured. ‘Why is no one inviting the Mexican engineer that works at Google,’ I wondered? If they won’t tell our stories, why don’t we tell our own?” The organization now boasts 16,000 members with chapters in 20 cities and more than 200 events around the country, where Latinas are telling their stories and helping each other rise in their companies. “It’s all about connecting and learning to embrace what you have,” explains Perera. “Don’t feel like you can’t get a job if you’re competing with a guy from Harvard; that guy probably isn’t bilingual. Focus on what you have to get in the door. Once you’re in the door, the sky is the limit. And once you have a seat at the table, pull up a chair so that others can sit too.” Now that she has settled back in Austin—a city that has continued to lure her back with its siren call for the past 25 years—and works in a high-profile position, Perera has stepped away from Latinas in Tech after serving at its helm for five years. As she has continued to climb the corporate ladder, she’s found a new need that she wants to address: seeing more Latinas in the highest roles of companies. With that goal in mind, she created L500, a new organization whose aim is to attract the top 500 Latinas in the industry. “We started thinking how we could take Latinas to the next level, to the executive level,” recalls Schmaedecke, who helped formulate the plan for L500 with Perera. “At a certain level, it’s hard to be open and transparent; we need that support. That’s what L500 provides.” Perera agrees. “It makes me feel heard and okay with decisions I’ve made in my life to be so driven, to always want to focus on my career and be an executive woman,” she says. “Sometimes I feel the guilt and the judgment because I travel a lot. I feel seen with these women.” If there is one thing Perera has learned from having a front-row seat to some of the greatest movements in history, power shifts can only happen when a group of people, with the same goal, come together and move in the same direction. “We are focused on changing the face of leadership,” says Perera. “I want more Latinas at the table, on boards, C level, CEO. We are laser-focused on the top.” She also wants to see more Latina-owned companies. An entrepreneur herself, in 2012 Perera and a former coworker at Dell jumped ship from their well-paid corporate jobs to start Q Communications, a 100% Latina-owned full-service public relations agency. But startups are hard, and competition is rife. Perera believes 10 years ago, the world wasn’t quite ready for a Hispanic-owned agency.

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“It was the most empowering year,” she says. “But it was hard. You also learn what your strengths are. My then-husband got laid off from his job, and that’s when you make decisions. I was really the one with the career. I said, ‘If we get a good client I’ll stay here, or if I get a great job, I’ll do that.’ I got the great job.” Had an organization like L500 existed when Perera started her business, perhaps she would have had the support network she needed to keep going and the connections required to get that great client. KEEPING FAMILY CLOSE

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Gretel’s middle name is Alejandra, after her father Alejandro, the world-traveling diplomat She is a professional that can engage in many whom she idolized growing up and still considers one of the greatest influences in her languages and can conduct business anywhere. life. Now that he’s retired, he prefers to tend his garden rather than board planes, and he —Alejandro Perera, speaking of his daughter gets to see his grandchildren every day. Both he and Gretel’s mother live in a second home on her property. A tight knit family, they’ve moved with her around the country and to Brazil, helping her raise her sons and giving her the support she needs to fly in her career and to build organizations that create impact. “She’s got the experience of being a daughter of a diplomat, but she is better than a diplomat,” Alejandro says proudly, speaking with the elegance and dignity of one who is accustomed to interacting with world leaders. “She is a professional that can engage in many languages and can conduct business anywhere.” As a divorced mother with three sons, ages 5, 10 and 13, Gretel is aware of the balancing act she must perform to be present with her children, as well as diligent in her career aspirations. During the lockdown of 2020, her work structure changed from jet setting around the world to dealing with global clients from a computer in a house with three boisterous boys always a few feet away. “Travel had always been my escape, so at first it was hard,” she recalls. “After a few months in, I loved it. I enjoyed and embraced that alone time with them. Now life is coming back again, but I’m trying to have a balance; I don’t want it to be what it was before.” While Gretel acknowledges her sons are having a similar experience she did, with a parent often traveling for work, what she values the most is making the time they do have together as memorable as possible, from the first moment they see each other after being away. “I always remembered my dad would return home with a little bag of gifts for us,” she says with a smile. “Now I do that with my sons.” When she is home with her boys, she does her best to be present, banking on quality over quantity. That means being out on the boat exploring Austin’s lakes, making the drive down to Schlitterbahn, taking beach vacations to Port Aransas and prioritizing experiences to come together as a family. Of course, she acknowledges her parents’ support is a vital part of her ability to do it all. Their constant presence allows her to say “yes” when opportunities arise, a necessity for career advancement. Her father says being needed in that way is also a gift for them. “Instead of me providing for her, she is providing all the happiness for us in our golden age,” says Alejandro. “All our life we have been together, and we continue to live that way.” Gretel’s brother, Javier, lives in Houston, where Alejandro was stationed as the consul general of Venezuela, and the families see each other on a regular basis. Though Alejandro’s own 32-year career was cut short not long after the Chavez regime took over, the whole family still shares a deep pride, both for their native country and the country they now call home.

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“I’m longing to bring my boys to Venezuela; they don’t have a very strong connection with it,” says Gretel. “But with the state the country is in right now, it’s so expensive to fly there, and it isn’t really safe. Hopefully in the future, we’ll have more opportunities. WORK HARD, PLAY HARD

Cruising down Lake Austin, bouncing over the waves when other boats come close, Gretel cheers as one of her favorite songs comes on the playlist she curated for trips on the lake. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” blasts through the speakers as she moves her body to the beat, waving as fellow boaters pass by. While she is a driven career woman with a high-profile position at a major company, a community organizer who created a nationwide nonprofit, a devoted mom, daughter and sister, she also demands that life be fun, both outside and inside of work. “My favorite Gretel story is the time we needed to meet with our colleagues from Europe, but plane tickets from here to there were crazy expensive,” recalls her boss and former VRBO colleague, Melanie Fish, head of global communications for Expedia Group. “She did the math and figured out our meeting was doable within the budget if we all met in the middle. So, we met up in Iceland and rented a VRBO. We had some explaining to do when she posted photos of us in the Blue Lagoon,” she chuckles. “Luckily, she had the math to back it up. I always tell her that it was the closest I’ve ever come to getting fired.” When Gretel’s kids are with their dad, she doesn’t hesitate to call her best girlfriends and plan a trip to Tulum, or fly to Miami to see her beloved Ricky Martin perform, or invite new friends out on the boat to experience Austin summer in breezier conditions. She rightfully doesn’t feel guilty enjoying herself, signaling to her other mom friends that it’s okay to have a life outside of work and home.

In a world of rigidly scheduled playdates, Gretel Perera is that refreshing friend who will spontaneously call you and ask, “What are you up to today?” “Gretel will get the job done; she will work hard, but there will never not be time for fun,” says Fish. “That’s one of the reasons she’s so good at team building and why I needed her back. She brings people together in a fun way.” COMING HOME

Having bounced around from country to country every few years her entire life, Gretel is hard-pressed to describe one place as home. Austin comes the closest. A die-hard Longhorns fan, her family has had season tickets to the football games for seven years. She sits on the board of advisors for Global Business at the McCombs School of Business at UT, with the goal of supporting the school’s mission to connect students with international roles within global companies, such as Expedia Group. She was lucky to get into the Austin housing market at the right time and owns a home in North Austin, with a guest house on the property for her parents. “We are a typical Latino family; we are super close,” says Gretel. “I think it’s because of that life we had growing up. It was just the four of us. Home for me has always been where my parents are.” While Gretel admits she gets antsy once she has been in any one place for too long, she plans to stay in Austin as long as possible, so her kids will always have a place they can call home. “The way I grew up I had a clock inside of me every two or three years. That happened a lot in my career too,” she says. “I love Austin; I want to stay here and give my kids a more stable life than I had. There are advantages to living in other countries, but [there are] disadvantages too. As a teenager it was hard. You are moving to a new language and culture. It takes a year to make friends, year two you’re feeling good and by the third year you have to leave them. As you get older it starts to affect you. It also makes you resilient. I think that’s why I always try to enjoy the moment, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.”

LOCATION: UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN MOODY COLLEGE OF COMMUNICATION Communication is our most fundamental skill. It is humanity’s root behavior, a connective fiber that weaves relationships, binds organizations, and unites cultures. As one of the largest and most comprehensive colleges of communication in the country, Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin is a leader in shaping how the world connects. At every turn, every shift in media, the Moody College of Communication has been a pioneer, producing confident, prepared thinkers and leaders. 300 W. Dean Keeton St. | moody.utexas.edu

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STEM Learning Takes Flight The women of iFLY take STEM education to new heights. BY STACEY INGRAM KALEH

FLY is taking STEM education to new heights…literally. When it comes to the indoor skydiving adventure, there’s more than meets the eye. A team of women leaders at iFLY is passionate about making flight experiences educational and accessible, and they’re inspiring many young people to get interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics in the process. Through experiential learning—hands-on interactive learning experiences—iFLY’s educational field trips help K-12 students get excited about STEM fields and better understand how they can apply STEM insights in the real world. These field trips follow expert-designed curricula that align with state-specific education standards, serving as a resource for students and educators nationwide. Each trip is led by a highly trained iFLY educator, many of whom come from teaching and engineering backgrounds, and features grade-appropriate lab activities, experiments, physics demonstrations that come to life in a state-of-the-art vertical wind tunnel and one-on-one flights with a certified iFLY bodyflight instructor. These experiences provide students with a memorable experience that has the potential to spark curiosity and interest in STEM fields. BRIDGING THE GAP FOR WOMEN IN STEM

As women working in STEM, Michelle Brumley, Kelcie Carlson and Karissa Swift are especially motivated to share their love for what they do with young women and girls, and with great reason. According to U.S. Census Bureau data from 2019, women make up 48% of the U.S. workforce but only 27% of STEM workers. Furthermore, reports from the American Association of University Women show that women are significantly underrepresented in STEM majors at colleges and universities due to systemic inequities that impact them from a young age. This suggests that women are being left out when it comes to some of the fastest-growing and highest-paying job opportunities in fields such as computer science, engineering, medical science and robotics. “If 50% of the workforce is excluded, we’re losing 50% of all the good ideas,” says Brumley, iFLY’s associate product manager and an expert in aerospace physiology. She began her career as a commissioned officer in the United States Air Force (USAF), where she taught aircrew about the effects of flying on the human body—from hypoxia to spatial disorientation and G-forces. She flew many different types of airplanes, including a U2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft, which she flew above 70,000 feet at Beale Air Force Base. During an assignment at the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks AFB in San Antonio, Brumley oversaw curriculum development and standardization for the entire aerospace physiology career field and trained new aerospace physiologists across the U.S., Sweden, Germany, Israel and Canada. Add the fact that she’s a mom and has also worked as a secondary school science teacher and needless to say, she brings incredible experience and perspective to the iFLY team. In fact, Brumley has been responsible for STEM curriculum development for more than 30 iFLY locations and has trained more than 50 STEM instructors for the company. Brumley speaks to the need to expand the generally held perceptions associated with STEM jobs and encourage young people to think about STEM careers as creative professions where people driven by curiosity can make a meaningful mark on the world. “For young women to know their input is valuable and to see themselves in these roles is important. To engage women to think about these roles differently is important,” she says. “For example, when we talk about engineers, we talk about creativity, how engineers are creative people. Being an engineer is not a boring job that means sitting behind the desk. It’s your job to come up with new ideas. Your job is never done, and how exciting is that! As soon as you get to the end, you start all over again and ask, ‘How can I make this even better?’ “We like to talk about how scientists ask a lot of questions, so if you’re curious, that’s such a great opportunity to look at all of those types of careers,” she encourages.

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SOARING INTO STEM: THE FIELD TRIP EXPERIENCE

Beyond helping to address a gender gap in STEM fields, iFLY staff inspire learners of all ages to think about these disciplines in new, relatable ways. Their field trips are designed to help visitors see how fun STEM can be and also how connected it is to innumerable aspects of our daily lives. Carlson, a STEM education coordinator who works to coordinate initiatives throughout the U.S., holds an education degree from Arizona State University with an emphasis on math and technology. She has taught in a wide range of school settings, from public to Montessori to virtual. After taking her son and husband to iFLY in Cincinnati, she was inspired to become an educator for the company. A typical middle school field trip begins with a physics demonstration, where participants watch 10 different objects fly in the wind tunnel, a wall-to-wall air column that moves air at speeds high enough to keep a person safely floating. Then students and field trip Kelcie Carlson participants fly for about 60 seconds in the wind tunnel. Finally, STEM education coordinator students conduct lab activities to reinforce what they learned. They work together throughout the pre- and post-fly labs to make and test predictions. “I think we’re kind of born with that love and innate curiosity for STEM, but as you get older and study for AP tests and things like that, some of it becomes not as much fun,” Carlson says. “But when students are at the wind tunnel, that love really comes back, and you can see that excitement in their eyes.” From Carlson’s perspective, that excitement and curiosity around STEM-related jobs has some of the most meaningful impact of each field trip. She, like Brumley, sees significance I think we’re kind of born with in getting students to think just a little bit differently. “These are jobs that involve a wide range of skills—creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving—and they that love and innate curiosity grow at a faster rate and see lower rates of unemployment. When you have these for STEM, but as you get older periods of stagnation or recession, the people in STEM are much more likely to keep their jobs and remain stable in their careers.” and study for AP tests and Brumley details the lab activities, which range from building and testing things like that, some of it parachutes for elementary students to activities that ask high school students to calculate their own terminal velocity—the wind speed that it takes to make them becomes not as much fun. But fly—and then compare it to their actual experience. This, in turn, helps to build when students are at the wind an understanding of what scientists and engineers really do, lifting the curtain to tunnel, that love really comes go beyond the entertainment aspect most prominently presented at iFLY. “We’re able to talk a lot about how, even when we understand the math of something, it back, and you can see that doesn’t always correlate directly when you have a complicated object like the human excitement in their eyes. body. Having a wind tunnel, we can use that to get good, accurate information about objects. So, we then tie that in to how scientists and engineers are using wind —Kelcie Carlson tunnels in the real world,” Brumley explains. Swift, iFLY’s senior area sales manager, helps connect public and private schools, youth organizations and Girl and Boy Scout troops to unique field trip experiences. Swift loves that “they get a little piece of everything. We’re teaching about the science and physics behind bodyflight, but then they actually get to experience it and become part of the science experiment themselves. It’s the coolest thing to see their faces light up, and they leave with smiles from ear-to-ear.”

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Swift enjoys working with educators to be a partner in planning for their academic year. She wants to ensure that a trip to iFLY becomes a highlight of the academic year for her clients. “If we can capture their attention, show them how cool STEM is, and just get their wheels spinning to understand the different career paths available to them, then that’s really impactful,” says Swift. “For instance, kids these days love video games. A video game designer is a STEM job. STEM doesn’t just mean being a science teacher or a math teacher. There are hundreds and hundreds of jobs out there. That’s something that my clients love, that we can highlight those opportunities while the students are in this setting.” WORKING TO ENCOURAGE AND INSPIRE

Though Brumley, Carlson and Swift have dynamic and distinct personal stories about what led them to join the iFLY team, they seem unified in their authentic passion for teaching, learning and challenging the status quo in support of the students they serve. They represent different touch points for iFLY’s customers yet exemplify how their different areas and skill sets work together to provide the highest quality educational experience for their customers from pre- to post-visit. They’re in the business of empowering students with a fun and outside-the-box teaching approach, and they take their jobs seriously. Sometimes stepping outside of the traditional classroom has a way of opening our eyes, allowing us to see things in a new way. Just think of a visit to an art museum, how emotional it can be to see a painting you’ve only ever seen in a textbook up close. You can almost feel the weight and texture of the paint, see the artist’s hand in each stroke. At iFLY, field trippers see science in action, and they become part of a full-body practice in physics, floating in a wind tunnel thanks to feats of engineering. They are exposed to educators and professional skydivers who work and train at iFLY, exemplifying viable STEM careers. The experience makes abstract concepts and career paths real, and this is Michelle Brumley not lost on iFLY’s team. In fact, it’s what motivates iFLY’s associate product manager them. “I was more of a hands-on learner,” Swift remarks. “Interaction is huge for me. Being in a classroom setting, you don’t always have the ability to be impacted in that way, to fuel that spark and interest. With something as simple as a really awesome field trip experience, and getting those wheels spinning for future thinking, there can be so much power in that.” “Naturally, we want students to learn the standards and the educational material that we teach. But I think even more lifealtering is insight into their own skills and passions that they have,” Carlson says. “STEM careers are one of my favorite things to talk about because sometimes people don’t feel they’re interests and skills Karissa Swift are related to STEM. I’ve talked to a student who was interested in iFLY’s senior area sales manager fashion design, and we connected the dots to the science, math and engineering that’s involved in that. I talked to someone who loved

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While STEM field trips are marketed as K-12 experiences, iFLY also works with preschool groups, college students and even professional groups interested in team building. Lab and bodyflight activities can be exciting for people of all ages and skill levels. to bake, so we talked about all of the math and chemistry involved in baking and cooking. No matter what we do, I love helping convey that there are aspects of STEM in everything. No matter what your skills and talents are, you work with STEM every day of your life.” GROWING IMPACT IN AUSTIN AND BEYOND

While STEM field trips are currently offered at 33 iFLY locations nationwide, iFLY Austin has a unique opportunity to influence young women growing up in a community that’s quickly becoming a global hub for businesses in tech. “Austin is the Silicon Hills. The young women in Austin have this amazing opportunity to really go into this tech world without ever having to leave home,” says Brumley. Since 2018, iFLY Austin has hosted more than 400 STEM field trips for students in the region.

Learn more and plan a visit at iflyworld.com.

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I literally get chill bumps thinking about this because we’ve been talking about providing this memorable experience of a lifetime, and to see these kids get to come in and do something they probably have never done before is amazing.

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With a vision toward making their programs accessible, iFLY offers different pricing structures for Title I school groups at all locations. It’s an initiative that means a lot to Brumley. “I literally get chill bumps thinking about this because we’ve been talking about providing this memorable experience of a lifetime, and to see these kids get to come in and do something they probably have never done before is amazing.” How does this all come together? iFLY has approximately 100 dedicated educators nationwide who drive the STEM program. The team is growing and the curriculum is evolving each year. “Our goal now is to double, if not triple, our STEM program,” she says, exuding excitement for the continued growth of iFLY’s programs and their positive impact. Brumley wants young women and girls who participate in iFLY programs to be inspired and encouraged. “I hope they walk away with the notion of, ‘I can do anything,’” she says. “That they can visualize themselves in these different jobs, that they feel they can do it and that it’s fun.” She adds that many STEM jobs that will be available to the students they see come through iFLY may not have been created yet. “I like to tell people that you could end up in a really amazing job that you’ve never even heard of.” Brumley speaks from personal experience. Before she joined the Air Force, she had never heard of aerospace physiology. Now she works for iFLY, a company that didn’t exist when she began her career. “What do you really love, and where does that fit in? The answer may surprise you, and the future may hold even more opportunities.”

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On the MONEY

How to Prepare for a Recession

Stock market slumps and high inflation mean it’s time to prepare. BY JENNY HOFF

t’s no secret the economy is in the midst of a slump, and it may yet get worse. With high inflation, rising interest rates, the stock market down, cryptocurrency crashes and low savings rates, some investors are starting to feel some panic when they look at their 401(k)s and other investments. The best way you can prepare is to get your financial house in order. Preparation can help you weather the financial ups and downs of our economy. Track your costs.

Many people don’t really know the hard numbers when it comes to how much they spend per month on their home, electricity, gas, groceries, entertainment, subscriptions, car payments and more. Even if you generally know how much you spend per month on each category, now is the time to sit down with a sheet and look at your bills. By knowing how much you need each month to cover your bills (including credit card statements), you can plan how much you need in emergency savings in case your company starts laying off workers. Don’t track the stock market.

If you have your money in a 401(k) or a basic index fund as an investment, don’t check every day to see how your stocks are performing. This can lead to emotional investing, where fear of a dip results in taking out your money before it’s had time to bounce back. Investments like this should be considered long term; as long as you have emergency funds (if needed), let your stock market investments ride the waves. According to 20 years of investing data dug up by Motley Fool, women are less impulsive investors than men, and reports show that women make fewer trades and even log into their investments less often than men. Keep that trend up!

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Make a financial plan.

If you’re living in a dual-income household, do you have a plan if one of you gets laid off? What are some immediate expenses you could cut? Side gigs that you could start? Network now with other people in the industry so you have a foot in the door. It’s an employees’ market now, with many companies desperate for staff, but that could change. By also staying prepared, you won’t find yourself in a crisis situation. A financial plan can serve as a guide. By writing down what your long-term financial goals and short-term needs are, you don’t have to feel adrift if your financial situation changes. Pay down debts.

If you have high credit card debt that you’re carrying over month to month, now is the time to focus on paying that down. With interest rates on the rise, your credit card bills could get much higher. If you cannot pay it off right now but have good credit, see if you qualify to do a balance transfer to a credit card with an intro offer of 12 or 16 months of no interest. Beware that interest rates will kick in at a high rate as soon as the intro period is over, so it’s not a long-term solution. But if you make a plan to get the balance paid off in 12 months or so and have a good credit score, then making the switch is likely worth the transfer fees so you don’t keep accumulating interest on your debt. The key is to pay down any debt that doesn’t have a fixed interest rate as quickly as you can. It’s scary when you see your investments losing value, watch the news about rising interest rates and hear of major companies laying off workers, coupled with high inflation and astronomical gas prices. Instead of going into panic mode or ignoring the signs and hoping for the best, calmly getting your financial situation manageable and organized will give you the best chance of getting through any recession on the horizon.

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Austin ARTS

Edit Annie

A new play by Mary Glen Fredrick Directed by Will Detlefsen

Sept. 9-24, 2022 The VORTEX

he VORTEX launches its 35th season with the world premiere of Edit Annie by Mary Glen Fredrick, directed by NNPN directing fellow Will Detlefsen for three weeks only at The VORTEX. Detlefsen, is here as part of the National New Play Network’s Director Fellowship program, which began in conjunction with the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation.

qrco.de/EditAnnie

Mary Glen Fredrick Will Detlefsen

Playwright

Director

We are so unbelievably excited to come to Austin for The VORTEX’s world premiere production of Edit Annie. Every single member of The VORTEX and the creative team has been incredible—after each design meeting we turn to each other and go, “Are we gonna move to Austin?” The talent and kindness here are just boundless. Edit Annie will be my and Will's ninth production together—at the root of our collaborationship is a deep friendship and care, and we’re so excited for this, our most ambitious and challenging project yet. On the surface, Edit Annie is about video editing, social media and the relationship between video editor Annie and Clara, the #influencer whose online persona she co-creates. At its core, Edit Annie is about our minds— interrogating the loneliness of living with screens, the implications of being able to edit every aspect of yourself and what’s “real” in a digital age. Defying genre, Edit Annie is a dark, comedic queer rom-com psychological social media thriller. We hope Edit Annie will both entertain and resonate with anyone who loves wild, genre-bending, multidisciplinary theatre, anyone who feels lonely while they scroll through social media and anyone who’s ever felt like the Big Boss they were battling was their own brain.

I was introduced to the brilliant artistic director of The VORTEX, Bonnie Cullum, through the National Directors Fellowship, which I received in 2019 from the O’Neill Theater Center and National New Play Network. When I learned about the wild and bold experimentation that happens at The VORTEX, I knew Mary Glen Fredrick’s Edit Annie would be a perfect fit. Mary Glen and I met in graduate school at UC San Diego in 2015. To date, we have collaborated on eight productions, mostly in actor/director roles. This will be our very first time collaborating as playwright/director, and we are thrilled to do it in Austin. We are bracing ourselves for the heat, readying our bellies for delicious BBQ and TexMex and could not be more honored to present this world premiere production of Edit Annie at The VORTEX.

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BELONGING SEPT. 14-18 & SEPT. 21-24

THE INHERITANCE PT. 1 AUG. 10 – SEPT. 4

NIGHT BIRDS SEPT. 22-23

Blue Lapis Light

ZACH Theatre

Ventana Ballet

Belonging is an original sitework performance by Blue Lapis Light that highlights the beauty of our earth and our relationship to one another. The performance features aerial dancers on the Seaholm architecture with aerialists swinging from the stacks, ground dancers and projection-mapped imagery focused on the sustainability of our environment.

In contemporary Manhattan, Eric and Toby are 30-somethings who seem to be very much in love and thriving. But on the cusp of their engagement, they meet an older man haunted by the past, and a younger man hungry for a future. Chance meetings lead to surprising choices as the lives of three generations interlink and collide—with explosive results.

Celebrate Austin’s local artists and enjoy an intimate evening of storytelling through dance and music backdropped by a colorful art exhibit. Complimentary bar provided by local breweries and distilleries.

Age recommendation: 17 and up (for adult language, sexual siuations and nudity)

bluelapislight.org

tickets.zachtheatre.org

ventanaballet.com/performances

Fill the house! It’s time to get out and enjoy everything that Austin has to offer, including an amazing arts scene. Austin Woman wants to help you showcase the great shows and performances that you’ve been planning. Please reach out to us at sales@awmediainc.com or fill out the form from the QR code!

Health & WELLNESS

Ethical Porn for Everyone’s Gaze

Lilly Sparks is taking the adult industry by storm with ethical standards anyone can enjoy.

illy Sparks has one thing in mind when it comes to porn: making content that helps people have an amazing sex life. According to Sparks, 90% of women watch porn. Everybody is watching, and no one is talking about it. “Ethical” and “porn” are two words that should become synonymous and unseparated. Sparks utilizes her extensive business experience to create the next best, inclusive wave in the adult industry. Thus the creation of her online erotic wellness studio afterglow in March 2020. In your own words, what does ethical porn mean? Porn is the number one sexual resource for people, and this is the problem. It causes dissatisfaction, and we want to combat bad sex and help people use porn for their sex lives. About two years ago, we tried to make films that were more relatable than mainstream porn. We want to tell stories. In our film Lip Service, we show a woman telling her partner how to pleasure her. We also included a video about guided cunnilingus to play alongside the video. We call these “pleasure journeys.” To me, I believe it’s really important that sexual abuse material be removed, that being revenge porn or child pornography. This should never be called porn! Porn is also intended to maximize profits and maximize views; it’s run as a profit engine and doesn’t care about the people. We intend to create a better world through what we’re doing by treating the performers and people on set well. What’s your experience being a female entrepreneur in the adult entertainment industry? I started my career as an accountant. You really can’t make a bigger jump than accounting to the porn industry. After accounting, I started a natural foods company, and that experience grew beyond my wildest dreams. I believe everyone has the power to create change in this world, and I was lucky enough to have an experience that showed me that. I’m super passionate about helping women. I was in a relationship from high school until the age of 30, and I never received sex ed, except for how to not get pregnant or contract an STD. I never learned how to express love to my partner, and I think that’s a huge gap in the market. We learn by watching, and it’s very normal to learn through videos. Porn can be doing so much more for us as a society than it is. I haven’t had any negative experiences with people in the adult industry. The old-school people believe that consumers won’t pay for porn, and I just don’t get that. I do believe people will pay for things that make their lives better. Women are not a niche market; so many men want to better their sex lives, too, and want

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You can find afterglow at: xoafterglow.com Instagram: @xoaftergloww Tiktok: @xoaftergloww Twitter: @xoafterglow LinkedIn: afterglow Facebook: @xoafterglow

educational resources. For me, the challenge as a female in the adult space is getting support from investors who are male. Women only receive 2% of all venture capital dollars in the adult industry. Mental health wasn’t an industry 10 years ago, and I believe that sextech is the next thing that people should invest in. Why is it important to have pleasure and education in tandem on your platform? Pleasure has been absent in the educational conversation, and we all want to experience more pleasure during sex and have more intimacy with our partners. I used to have bad sex, and I didn’t know how to get there. People aren’t Googling for sex education. My mission is to figure out how to get rid of barriers. Making it accessible and fun removes the barrier of dissatisfaction with actionable steps. How do you implement what you just saw? On your site, a pregnant person is starring in one of your videos. Can you speak further about inclusivity in ethical porn? We’re trying to tell stories that aren’t told in regular porn. Pregnancy sex is very common, but we don’t see it represented enough. There are so many stories out there to be told, and I wish I had time to tell them all. We just want to tell stories, provide education and help women see themselves in porn that is accurately depicted and realistic. I would also like to see an erotic film win a short film Oscar. I want to see the lines blurred between erotic film and mainstream media. We were also a nominee at the AVN Awards; the adult industry has been a very welcoming environment for ethical porn. Austin is also very culturally inclusive and grounding; we’ve gotten a lot of support here as a brand.

Photo by Lola Saba.

BY KATHERINE POWELL

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Recipe REVEAL

From STEM to Stems Celeste Gustafson is on a mission to cook sustainably for Austin.

hef Celeste Gustafson, owner and executive chef of Celeste’s Natural Kitchen, is leading by example in her industry by venturing off the beaten path of culinary tradition, leaning into innovation with something old and something new. Having gotten her start in herbal studies, Gustafson brings more than 25 years of experience to the table, combining her herbal knowledge with culinary technique to create health-centered, sustainable meals that heal the body while supporting the larger farming community behind it all. “With the food planning aspect of the business, we’re taking that effort away from [people] and giving them these foods that are just incredibly nutrient dense,” says Gustafson. “You know, sometimes people think that’s a dry chicken breast and some broccoli, but it’s so much deeper than that. I had gone to herbal medicine school and worked in the herbal industry for years, putting 58 | AUSTIN WOMAN | AUGUST 2022

things like tumeric and ginger into the food, lots of fresh herbs that are just filled with antioxidants. Basil is an antidepressant! People just don’t know these things. But the more you can bring those things in, the more you’re bringing in flavor and giving all of those micronutrients to your body that are lacking in our society’s current ‘diet.’” Gustafson takes her ingredient sourcing very seriously since her business caters largely to people with food allergies or health restrictions such as celiac disease. She is adamant that healing the body starts with what you eat, so she has built her business model around the concept

Photo courtesy of Celeste Gustafson.

BY ALLIE JUSTIS

DECADENT PALEO CHOCOLATE MINI CUPCAKES: Grain-free, gluten-free, dairy-free. Contains eggs and almond-based ingredients.

Instructions: 1. Preheat the oven to 350°. Line two 24-count mini muffin tins with paper or parchment cups. 2. Whisk together dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl.

CUPCAKES

3. Warm coconut milk slightly, to melt the fat.

Dry Ingredients:

4. Whisk together the coconut milk with the rest of the wet ingredients in a medium mixing bowl. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and whisk for 1 to 2 min.

3 cups blanched almond flour 1 cup tapioca flour 1/4 cup coconut flour

5. Using a 1-oz ice cream scoop, fill muffin cups with 1 scoop batter each. Bake for 12 minutes, rotating halfway through, until a toothpick comes out clean. 6. Once completely cooled, decorate using frosting from the recipe below.

2 cups coconut sugar 1 1/2 cups fair trade cocoa powder 2 teaspoons baking soda

Paleo and Vegan Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

1/2 teaspoon salt

Ingredients: 3/4 cup organic Spectrum palm shortening

Wet Ingredients: 1 1/2 cups full-fat canned coconut milk (any brand is fine, I like Native Forest Simple with no guar gum) 4 large eggs (pasture-raised is preferred) 1 cup water

3/4 cup fair trade cocoa powder 6 tablespoons dark maple syrup 2 tablespoons coconut milk (Any brand is fine, I like Native Forest Simple with no guar gum) 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup refined coconut oil, melted and cooled 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Pinch of salt Instructions: 1. Combine all ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer (or in a bowl if you are using a handheld mixer). 2. Start on low speed to prevent flying cocoa powder. 3. Gradually increase the speed to high and whip until light and fluffy.

“

My passion is to help people heal themselves through food and cooking, while also healing the planet through organic and regenerative agriculture. —Celeste Gustafson of providing thoughtfully sourced, organic and sustainable ingredients that clients can enjoy with a clear conscience. “If you look at these eggs we’re using, the yolks are deep orange. It’s incredible,” she says. “It’s because they’re so full of vitamin D and all these fat-soluble vitamins that you don’t get from regular eggs, and that’s because [the chickens are] eating seeds and bugs in a free-range environment. Ethically

and sustainably sourcing our ingredients ends up benefiting the end user as well. It benefits the soil, the animals are happy, the farmers are happy and the consumer is happy.” Gustafson chose this chocolate cake recipe in particular because it’s so decadent. She is of the mind that eating “healthily” doesn’t mean that your food can’t be decadent or delicious. In fact, Gustafson thinks eating the food you love sustainably is actually a great first step in living and eating in a more globally conscious way. “Part of what I like about it is that it tastes like what you would think of as a regular chocolate cake. It’s your quintessential chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream frosting, but when we break down the ingredients, you’ll see it’s completely different,” she says. “First of all, everything in it is organic. My passion is to help people heal themselves through food and cooking, while also healing the planet through organic and regenerative agriculture. In starting this business I was learning to heal my body with food, and more importantly, I was trying to empower myself as a woman to be financially independent and control my own destiny. So hopefully in sharing this, I can start others on their own track to the same place.” ATXWOMAN.COM | 59

I am AUSTIN WOMAN

Genuine, Transformative Change MEASURE Austin Founder Meme Styles carries the spirit of the Black Panther Party in both her blood and her work dismantling racial inequities.

imagine I inherited my drive for advocacy from my grandfather. His name was Charles Taliaferro, and he was a man ahead of his time. In the 1960s, he saw the need for Black families to have a voice in their community, and he took action. He organized community meetings to discuss the issues, inequities and injustices that were too common at that time. His work helped to build community power and bring people together. He served as the executive director of the Drug Abuse Project for the City of Pasadena. On the other hand, my drive for activism was passed down from my dad, Chris Taliaferro. While his father worked toward peaceful and somewhat passive solutionism, my dad was a Black Panther. Following his older brother, Little Charles, they both believed in the values of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, initially founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. My dad was everything but passive. In high school, he launched the first Black Power newspaper and worked to get my mom, Lisa Taliaferro, elected as vice president of Fairfax High School. As I reflect on my own story, I cannot help but point to the people that cultivated the environment I grew up in. Unfortunately, most of the issues they fought against are still present today. However, I think the future is genuinely Black female as I carry the torch passed down by these two powerful Black men. My work is rooted in the fact that the powerful Black, Brown and Indigenous people most impacted by complex systems of oppression should be in control of resources, data, dollars and access to exercise their power. In my bold opinion, this is the only way to create meaningful and lasting change. Unfortunately, the status quo benefits those who have advantages while marginalizing those who do not. My work in Austin has proven that those who experience injustice are the best positioned to lead the way toward a more just and equitable society. They have the knowledge, stories and historical lived-experience data essential for genuinely transformative change. My work is about creating opportunities for those voices to be heard and heeded. It is about giving people the data to create the change they want to see in the world.

60 | AUSTIN WOMAN | AUGUST 2022

I launched MEASURE in 2015 as a grassroots project after realizing that qualitative and quantitative data was sorely lacking in the social justice ecosystem. Today, our all-Black woman-led nonprofit has provided over 3000 hours of free data and evaluation support to powerful Black and Brown-led organizations in Austin. Over 45 nonprofits, grassroots organizations, colleges, universities, city departments and local businesses have used our antiracist evaluation tools. Through these tools, MEASURE is consciously redistributing the energy of research, technology innovation and data into the hands of our community. Sociologist Ruha Benjamin said, “We cannot leave technology development and monitoring merely to those with the technical knowhow. The experiences and insights of the marginalized matter.” Today, MEASURE is launching a new antiracist technology platform to support the evaluation work we are quickly mastering. Our solution is called NEXUS, a free social platform where advocates and community leaders can share data, create racial equity-focused impact reporting metrics, champion one another’s progress on social media and get matched to other organizations with similar goals. Last year, MIT selected me as a SOLVE Fellow for antiracist technology. This fellowship allowed me and my team to turn the idea of NEXUS into an actual MVP. This year, I was named one of six fellows by the Social Science Research Council’s two-year Just Tech cohort. Through this program, I will focus my work on moving slowly to pilot and launch our solution with humanity in mind. The goal is not to recreate the harms that technology can perpetuate. By placing the idea, the innovation and the power of creation into the hands of Black women, the same code and algorithms associated with this technology will be intentional and purposeful. MEASURE and its tools—including the developing NEXUS—belong to our community and would not exist without the fantastic Black women and people contributing daily to its growth. I identify as a believer, wife, mom, data activist and Afro-futurist. Each component of my humanity is carefully embraced and prioritized in a way that allows me space to create, breathe, sleep and love. There is no greater expression of my womanhood than to innovate and envision a fantastic future where we have each dream we came for.

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BY MEME STYLES

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