Brian Sims
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
One of them is a Latino who is one of the most successful recruiters of LGBTQ people in executive government history in the United States. They all face more challenges than I face. They all deal with those challenges differently than I have dealt with my challenges. And we all learn from each other's, the way that each other's approached challenges and opportunities.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
I didn't have them when I started. I knew who they were and I respected them, but we weren't friends, we were colleagues. And I've made them and they've made me friends. And that has had such a profound impact on my ability to keep doing this work. And I'm grateful doesn't fully encapsulate how I feel about them.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
I'd like to think I do it. I think I'm trying to do it in two ways. The first is collaboratively. I do not think that anybody who behaves like an island lasts very long in this work or lots of complicated areas. Maybe there are other fields that I've never been in where being solitary and being solo is the path to success, but it is not where I come from. I believe in collaboration.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
I believe in community. I believe in putting lots of people, smart, engaged people in a room together and presenting issues and concerns and problems and challenges to that group. And that's what I get to do right now. The sort of unique way that my organization is approaching LGBTQ equality is to try to eliminate the people who are attacking it the most.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Americans are not as anti-LGBTQ as our political leaders. And finding those political leaders that are behaving more anti-equality than their own voters is the sort of intersection that we look for at where I work at.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And we want to teach voters that their elected officials are hurting their families, that they're hurting their friends, they're hurting their communities, maybe more than they actually know about. And I can do that in a way that I feel very comfortable sleeping at night. One of the problems in American politics is misinformation and these attack ads.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
But one of the problems I also think in American politics is that we don't substantively analyze our candidates as well as we should. It's left up to too much about emotion and the sort of the color of ads and not enough about the substance. And especially for incumbent elected officials, I know firsthand, I voted on almost a thousand bills a year.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
There are a lot of opportunities to decide if our incumbent elected officials are serving us or if they're serving themselves. And I don't think that we often get that opportunity to see that. And I get to work with lots of people and say, how can we solve this problem? And I
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
I think being able to now be in politics at a very divisive time without absorbing that divisiveness, that's the biggest change I've seen in myself. It's the biggest change that I'm trying to create in others. We've confused fighting back with fighting dirty. And as a result, we've found ourselves in a time when the worst among us are proliferating.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
In American politics right now, what is successful is being mean, being nasty, being divisive, and taking from others. And that is, for me, that is the opposite of everything I've ever seen and learned and experienced about how I want our government to behave. And so there's two things to do. You either run from a burning building or you run into it.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And in this case, I think the smartest thing that I can do is run into it with the knowledge that I don't have to light myself on fire while I'm there.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Yeah, a clear lens. A clear lens. And how do we get there? In our case, I believe it's being simple. I can use data to tell any kind of a story. And that's one of the problems with storytelling. And it's one of the problems with using data to tell a story. But the more simpler... the data, the more simple the equation, the easier it is to understand the story that it is telling.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
In our case, for example, I don't need to use political ads to teach a constituency that their incumbent senator is a terrible human being who's been philanderer and wasteful and doesn't believe in the public, even though he or she represents them. What I can do is use data to say that same senator has made themselves worth $28 million on a $100,000 a year salary.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
I can use data to say that person has voted against bodily autonomy 14 times. I think we've made the mistake of, in politics, when two candidates run, we're at this point where candidates feel like they have to teach their constituents about who they are and all the unique ways that make them up. And I don't think that's exactly true.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
All I have to do is teach a voter that someone is robbing them or lying to them or taking from them in a way that they weren't aware of. And I think that's enough. I think the mistake we made is trying to be all things to all people and using data to tell all stories.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
I'm using data to identify very particular places where a simple, singular message is going to change someone's ideas of who they are or who someone else is.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Yeah, exactly. Giving somebody a story based on data where they don't trust you does nothing. And so you have to make the story or the data inherently trustable. And the more simple it is, the more easy it is to understand. I don't expect people to do their own homework. I expect people to decide I'm not going to do my homework. So therefore, I either trust what you've presented or not.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And so the simpler it is, the easier it is to understand, even if that means little bits and pieces of information rather than a whole story all at once.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
and and that's okay and i've seen that be very successful long-term approaches to change are often not huge big cataclysmic understandings there's not a a switch that gets flicked and suddenly we understand this when we didn't before it is often the culmination of a lot of little opportunities to think about something differently and so if we present a lot of little opportunities based on very digestible information that is easy to trust
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
The narrative over time is one of someone's own trust, not something that you've asked them to trust you.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Incremental way? Accessible is, I think, what we're looking for. I think what I'd like to think the approach that I have is seeing what's been successful and what is not. Anything that I think of as a big, massive societal change in American civil rights, from Roe v. Wade to marriage equality to Loving v. Virginia, where interracial marriage was allowed to exist,
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Lawrence v. Texas, where sexual relationships between same-sex people were allowed. They all felt to people who didn't know any better, and maybe to me before I knew better, like big, massive, giant chunks of change. And not a single one of them was. They were all years, and in many cases decades, of thousands of people's hours of work. Not one person, and certainly not one moment.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
It's actually really easy for me. I have always believed That while it is good to change the minds of decision makers, it's better to change the decision maker.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
In my life, when I think about the places where I have put resources, my energy, my time, and seen actual change, it's that there are more women, more people of color, and more LGBTQ people running for office in the United States right now and winning than ever before, despite everything that's going on. In fact, because... of everything that's going on.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
It felt like a big responsibility, no question. All of us have had big responsibilities in our lives, and some of them we recognized in the moment, some of them we recognized in hindsight. I was very aware from the moment I won my election until I took office eight months or so later that I was the out person there. Now, I served with over a dozen closeted elected officials.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
We are seeing a lot of change when it comes to who our elected officials are. They are looking more and more like the country and like the people that they represent. And the more that happens, the more our politics get better. I'm so proud to have been able to participate in urging more women to run for office and more people of color to run for office and certainly more LGBTQ people.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
In the United States, they say it takes asking a woman to run for office seven times before she will consider it, and a man only three times. In the United States, when you ask a woman to run for office, the first response is usually, am I qualified? A really great response. When we ask men to run for office in the United States, the first response is often, can I win?
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
I understand that, but that's a different thing. Our country, every single thing I have ever cared about gets better with more women, more people of color, more first, second and third generation immigrants and more LGBTQ people among the decision makers, both in that moment and overall empirically. decisions that they all make will be better. They will be more inclusive.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
They will be longer lasting. They will be more considerate than the decisions that are being made right now by people who look just like me from across the room. I'm very proud of that.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Vince, what a pleasure. And thank you. Thank you for doing this work. It matters now more than probably ever.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
I'm very proud of that. Very deeply proud of that.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Almost all of whom, 90%, 80%, were supportive of anti-LGBTQ bills. It wasn't just that they were not out. It's that they were actively hurting the community. And so I knew I needed to focus on them first, which I did do. But to answer your question...
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
What I remember thinking at the time was, I've learned to be the advocate I am that just got me elected because of my work with women's and reproductive rights and racial and ethnic justice. Two things that need lots of work still in our capital. And I look just like the people who attack women's rights and racial and ethnic justice.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And so I decided that my first term, especially my first year, everyone knew I was LGBTQ. Everyone knew I was an LGBTQ activist. There were a couple of really bad moments. I'd been shut down on the House floor from speaking because of it. I'd been discriminated against in front of my colleagues a few times. And...
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Myself and my staff and my team, we decided to use that attention to show people what an ally looked like. I introduced a whole bunch of women's rights bills. I signed on to every women's rights bill. I introduced a bunch of ethnic intimidation act bills and a bunch of racial and ethnic justice bills to show people, yes, I am gay.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Yes, that's a part of the reason I was elected here and it informs the work I do. But I can introduce these bills and show you why that matters. And hopefully you will understand why the things that impact my life matter. And it did have that effect, which I was grateful for. I'll give you a really good example.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Very early on in my first term, before I had ever spoken on the House floor, there was a good ruling from the Supreme Court came down about marriage equality for LGBTQ people.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And at the end of session that day, at the end of our legislative session, a couple months into my first term, there's a moment where legislators get to stand up and talk about major events and how they will impact law and policy. And I rose to speak about that. And I got a half a word out and my microphone was cut. And I didn't know it at the time. I actually, I thought I like broke it.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
But the person who controls the microphone is the speaker of the house. The person who had just given me the opportunity to speak, as soon as I did, he just pressed a button and cut my mic. And it was because someone in the audience had objected. Another one of my colleagues had objected to me speaking, but they wouldn't identify themselves. And all of this was new to me at the time.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
But my colleagues, especially my Democratic colleagues who were new to me and I was new to them, they were furious. And a couple of them tried to get up and speak and they were all cut off. And it created this big hubbub. And when it was all said and done, I wasn't allowed to speak.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
But over the next couple of days, because everyone got to see that overt discrimination happen against one of their own colleagues, I decided to go out and meet as many of my Republican colleagues as I could. They all knew exactly who I was and what was going on in that moment. And I didn't raise it. I would just go, hi, I'm brand new. I'm Brian. It's nice to meet you.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Now, it wasn't often nice to meet them. And I would learn as I served with all of them that 100% of them voted against LGBTQ equality every single time. It's a misnomer that there are some people who dislike us and some don't, but 100% of them voted against us. But at the time, I just wanted them to meet me.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And I wanted them to meet me in the context of, look, I'm being discriminated against by one of your own colleagues and one of mine, but we can still talk and meet each other.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
There is not common ground existing right now in a lot of political environments, including the one that I was in. The background is that the state that I was in had a majority of Democrats, so a majority of people that had political views like mine.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
But Republicans in control of the state's government 30 years ago had set up a system where they would stay in control even though they no longer had the majority. And one of the things that you do when you falsely are maintaining control of a democracy is you do not allow that democracy to flourish. And so in my case, I mentioned it earlier.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Yes, I have many Republican colleagues that I had dinner with, that I co-sponsored bills with, that I introduced ideas with. But when it came down to the moments where it mattered most, our actual votes to allow something to become law or not, 100% of them voted against every single LGBTQ equality bill that came up in 10 years. And so you decide, can I share a dinner table with this person?
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
I can under lots of circumstances. Can I share a cab with this person? Do I hold a door open for this person? Of course you do. Do I consider this person a friend despite these things? Absolutely not. My friends believe that women are equal. My friends don't believe that a haircut has a gender. My friends believe that I should be able to get married. Those are different.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And no, I'm disappointed to say that while there are a lot of my Republican colleagues that I would speak well of and can tell you good things about them, not a single one of them cared in even the basics about me enough to consider me a friend.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Within my own political party, all 10 years that I was there, I was essentially on one side of the policies of my own political party. And my party was often on the other side. I'm a significantly more liberal, a more progressive person than the Democratic Party was that I served in. And so there was lots of opportunities with people who I casually agreed with.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
to find more opportunities to agree with. And I can point to an entire 10-year history of having Democratic colleagues that we didn't always get along, but we carved out friendships and we carved out collaboration. And so there was tons of that.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And I actually, it's an important lesson that I've learned moving forward is that, and if you're not finding ways to reinforce the relationships and the friendships and the partnerships that you have and finding new and common ground, often those things fade away and you find yourself with significantly less of a relationship, less of a footing, less of a base than you thought you had.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
I know people in my life that it seems like every five, six, seven years, they're onto a whole new personality, a whole new group of friends, a whole new thing. And while I, as an adventure, I want new things all the time. I also recognize that you have to, you have to nurture your own garden. You have to make sure that you're, it seems trite, but it is simple to,
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
that if all relationships take work and sometimes the longest relationships require work about finding new ways to refresh them. And I think I did a lot of that in office and it's something that I've carried with me.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
My friends, politically, my friends professionally, deserve and I deserve to have those relationships renewed as often as possible and to make sure that there are fresh ideas and fresh excitement coming from them before we could ever think to be doing things with people that disagree with us or that we don't want to be spending time with.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Yeah, I have two. Two of the biggest bills that I ever wrote while I was in office have yet to become law. One is an amendment to the Equal Pay Act. In the state that I come from, women earn about 72 to 80 cents on the dollar to a man's dollar. In a state where we say that we're not allowed to discriminate against someone and pay based on their gender... Women earn 80% of what a man is earning.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And there are lots of reasons for it. And there are lots of ways of fixing it. And I wrote a law that accomplished a lot of those. I wrote them along with some of my women colleagues, my first and second term. And there are women Republicans. There are... Men Republicans married to women in the workforce. There are men Republicans that have daughters.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
We really tried to cover the gamut, everything that was important about why equal pay mattered. And it never became law, in part because the most powerful people in our government were men. And those people believed that they had to give up something of themselves in order for others to have equality, a longstanding mistaken belief of a lot of men in this world.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
The other bill that never became law, and it's something that is painfully prescient for me these days, is I wrote the Marriage Equality Act in Pennsylvania. In the United States, marriage laws live at the statewide level, and my state did not have marriage equality. And so I wrote that law in 2013. And by then, pretty soon thereafter, the U.S.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Supreme Court said that all states had to have marriage equality. And so it never was passed. And now that we are at risk of losing marriage equality at the federal level, Pennsylvania, where I love and where I'm from, will no longer have, at the statewide level, will not have marriage equality on its books.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
Well, I will tell you that one of the lessons that was, I've learned a couple of painful lessons. And one of those lessons, maybe that is based upon the two examples I just gave you, was it is hard to both be in the moment, present, working on something and be an active student of something. But it is important to understand the history upon which we find ourselves.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
For example, it deeply frustrates me that we weren't able to pass the Marriage Equality Act in Pennsylvania. That is not a personal failing of mine. It's something that began 80 years before me. I can draw a direct line from the Mattachine Society and from Stonewall and from... women and men serving in World War I and World War II to marriage equality in the United States.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And so the fact that I wasn't able to pass a bill doesn't mean that I failed. It means that I'm a part of a tapestry of people that I respect and some that I will never know, and they'll never know me, that worked on a thing because it was the right thing to do, and it will happen. I'm pretty optimistic when it comes to civil rights.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
I think that history teaches us that civil rights wins in the end. And that we didn't accomplish many of the things that I wanted to accomplish while I was fighting for them. In the moment, I felt like a failure. In the moment, I felt like I needed to keep changing up the strategy and eventually I would find something that hit. And when I couldn't, it was about me. And that's arrogance.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And I think that was one of the really important lessons is for a lot of my time in office, I was the only person of my kind doing work that no one else was doing and garnering tons of attention for it. And I had the mistaken belief that meant that everything I was doing was right. What I was saying was right. If I thought it and I did it, it was the right thing to think and the right thing to do.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And that is not true. And it's not a good approach. And there are lots of people that aren't put in those situations that amplify or create more arrogance in them, but I was. And it didn't help me. It did help some of the causes that I was fighting for, that I was bigger, bolder, and brasher, but it didn't help me. And ultimately, there's the balance.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
And I wasn't living a very balanced life and a very balanced approach. And I very much had to teach myself to remove myself from so much of the things that I work on in a way. Because it was arrogant for me to place myself where I did in them.
Chief Change Officer
#343 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part Two
I no longer do because I learned to surround myself with people who do a lot of this work in similar ways. And I'll give you a really good example. My four or five closest friends also do LGBTQ plus political work. They do it from different angles. One is a black man that worked at the White House. One is a trans Latina that has worked in everything from civil rights to transportation.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
Yes, I was still in the closet and I heard I was an athlete and I heard lots and lots of awful things in my teens. And I, yes, I had lots of insecurities. But when I did finally come out, I did so to the support and love and kindness of a bunch of people who often, who I even now joke, they didn't know how to offer love and support and kindness, but they did in their own ways.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And these are people that I'm still close with 25 years later because of it.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
I sure hope so. I sure hope so. I believe that. I have a plaque that my parents gave me when I was 22 years old. When I got into law school, they mailed me this plaque. And there's a quote by one of our former presidents, and it's about law and human rights and kindness. But my parents bought it when I was maybe 12 years old. They waited 10 years to give it to me.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And I knew from a very young age, I told people I was going to be a feminist lawyer. As a little kid, that was the job. Some people wanted to be a firefighter or an astronaut. As I got older, I learned that I meant women's and reproductive rights and civil rights. And I meant access and agency and autonomy. But at the time, I knew what feminism was and I knew I wanted to be an attorney.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
I took my entrance exams to law school when I was 16 years old the first time. long before college. And it was just, I knew I wanted to be a feminist lawyer. And when I finally got to law school months after I came out of the closet, it had already begun my approach to what I wanted to do. It already changed a little bit.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
I was doing international law, largely international human rights law, mostly European Union and South American law, along with what I was doing, having to learn all the laws of the United States. And I think the language that I learned in feminism
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
The approach to equality that I learned through feminism, luckily for me, was then the lens that I got to look upon myself when I finally came out of the closet. When I fully realized that I was a gay man, I had five, six, seven years of the language of feminism to help me see myself through that lens. It was a savior. And it just reinforced that I wanted to do that work professionally.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
It felt like a big responsibility, no question. All of us have had big responsibilities in our lives, and some of them we recognized in the moment, some of them we recognized in hindsight. I was very aware from the moment I won my election until I took office eight months or so later that I was the out person there. Now, I served with over a dozen closeted elected officials.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
Almost all of whom, 90%, 80% were supportive of anti-LGBTQ bills. It wasn't just that they were not out, it's that they were actively hurting the community. And so I knew I needed to focus on them first, which I did do. But to answer your question,
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
What I remember thinking at the time was, I've learned to be the advocate I am that just got me elected because of my work with women's and reproductive rights and racial and ethnic justice. Two things that need lots of work still in our Capitol. And I look just like the people who attack women's rights and racial and ethnic justice.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
About two years. Good morning or good evening, Vince.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And so I decided that my first term, especially my first year, everyone knew I was LGBTQ. Everyone knew I was an LGBTQ activist. There were a couple of really bad moments. I'd been shut down on the House floor from speaking because of it. I'd been discriminated against in front of my colleagues a few times.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
Myself and my staff and my team, we decided to use that attention to show people what an ally looked like. And that I introduced a whole bunch of women's rights bills. I signed on to every women's rights bill. I introduced a bunch of ethnic intimidation act bills and a bunch of racial and ethnic justice bills to show people, yes, I am gay. Yes, that's part of the reason I was elected here.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And it informs the work I do. But I can introduce these bills and show you why that matters, and hopefully you will understand why the things that impact my life matter. And it did have that effect, which I was grateful for.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
It is. I'll give you a really good example. Very early on in my first term, before I had ever spoken on the House floor, there was a good ruling from the Supreme Court came down about marriage equality for LGBTQ people.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And at the end of session that day, at the end of our legislative session, a couple months into my first term, there's a moment where legislators get to stand up and talk about major events and how they will impact law and policy. And I rose to speak about that. And I got a half a word out and my microphone was cut.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
It always feels like such a loaded question. And I'm at least here in the United States, especially where minute by minute, hour by hour, things seems there's a lot of change, often change for the bad. I find myself asking people how they are today. How are you this moment? To answer your question, in the two years since we've seen each other in person, I've gotten married.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
um i actually right about the time that we were meeting i proposed to my then boyfriend and we've been planning a wedding for the this upcoming september for quite some time with friends and family but with the recent political changes in the united states i'm extremely fearful that a marriage equality won't exist for lgbtq people by the time that we had our wedding plan for so we went ahead and got married just about two months ago and and so to answer maybe more of your question i'm personally
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
I'm in love and I'm living with the person that I love. And those things are important. But I also, I not only work in politics, I work where politics meets civil rights. And here in the United States, those two things are colliding right now in ways that we've never seen before.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
I started my career as a lawyer in Philadelphia. I moved to Philadelphia after law school and practiced first disability law and civil rights law. I became what's called the in-house counsel for the Philadelphia Bar Association, the sort of collective of lawyers in Philadelphia, which still is the oldest in the country.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
and really began my career around lawyers, being a lawyer for lawyers, in addition to doing civil rights work. And as is often the case with people trying to pay off student debt and student loans, there was work I needed to do to earn an income, and there was work I needed to do to sleep well at night. And those two things happened. I had a day job and a
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
the privilege or the benefit of being able to make a decision between doing work that was more morally important to me, that was more ethics and value driven than income driven. And I left my work as an attorney to run our LGBTQ equality organization in the state that I lived for some time. And in doing so was required to interact with the politics of my state.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
I was living in a state that had very little civil rights for LGBTQ plus people like myself, even though I was living in a city that had almost all of the equality that we could ask of a municipal government.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And I existed in that space for a little while, trying to impact equality through an equality organization and hoping that we could have an impact on our elected officials, on our decision makers. And at some point, after being unable to change those minds, I decided I needed to change the people whose minds we're focusing on. I focused a little bit more on electoral politics for several years.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And at some point, my close friend sat me down and said that I was the person that I had been looking for to run. And I ran for office when I was 31 years old. I ran against a 28-year incumbent. She had been in office since I was three years old. And I won my very first race on a very small margin, 233 votes.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And I was the first out LGBTQ person ever elected to my state legislature, which came with both a lot of responsibility and a ton of opportunities. And tried to avail myself of both of those as often as I could for the 10 years that I served in office. At the end of it, I retired from my seat in the House of Representatives and actually supported a close friend who ran for my seat.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
I also ran for lieutenant governor of my state, a race that I was not successful in. I, during that whole time, I spent a lot of years teaching colleges and companies how to be active in LGBTQ equality and civil rights. And so I did that for my career for the first year that I was out of office, which is when we met.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And now for the last six months or so, I've run an organization that uses a lot of data and campaign information to focus on elected officials that are attacking civil rights the most and to try to knock them out of office.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
I certainly agree. I think good behaviors and bad behaviors often have a lot of roots in how we were raised. In my case, I was lucky enough to be raised by two incredible parents. They were both still alive. They were both still in love. And my mom and dad are retired lieutenant colonels in the Army.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
In the 1960s, the United States was involved in the war in Vietnam, and my father was drafted and sent to Vietnam. And my mother left college and went and joined the Army as a nurse. And my parents met soon thereafter and stayed active duty in the Army for most of their adult lives, which meant for me as one of their children—there's four of us, I have a twin brother—
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
an older brother and a younger sister, that we got to grow up all over the continental United States, from Kansas in the very middle of the country to Alaska and the sort of wilderness of Alaska. And I think when people hear that my parents are military, they assume that there was a lot of discipline, which there was, but there was also a ton of creativity.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
There was a ton of love in my household. There was music in my household. There was good food and bad food in my household. And one of the ways that I know it shaped me, aside from that I'm very proud to be an adventurer like my siblings are, I think we're very comfortable being in places that are new to us and that we don't exactly understand.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
But my mom was, by and large, one of the only women officers that I ever was around as a young person, that I was ever around on Army bases. Most of my friends' fathers were soldiers or officers, but not ever their mothers, but of course mine was. And
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
It was very apparent to me from a very young age how in my household, my parents had a wonderfully co-equal relationship and they each had tasks and chores that aligned with their tastes and their likes, not necessarily with their genders. And outside of the house, I knew that my mom was treated differently than other mothers.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And I didn't exactly know what that meant as a young person, but the older and older that I got and the more that I began to focus on public policy in my life, It became easier for me to, luckily, to draw from my own personal experiences to understand what not just equality looks like, but being proactive about equality. What being an ally means is about the things you do, not who you say you are.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
My sister likes to joke that when my mom passes away on her tombstone will be engraved. I bet I could do that. My mom was someone who had a confidence that was based upon her output. It was based upon her experiences. It was not misguided. It was not arrogance. But my mom always knew who she was. And it was always very clear to us as her children.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
I can remember very finite, very specific examples of male soldiers not recognizing that my mom was an officer. And that moment where my mom, you know, Let them know that she was an officer and their recognition of what was going on in that situation as a very little kid taught me a lot about about knowing your worth, knowing your value, knowing who you are and why you are.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And those are very elusive lessons, by the way. I don't even know if I've ever fully learned them. But I did know with my mom that my mom was confident enough to not let, for example, bad actors around her behave poorly in front of us. I remember multiple times as a kid, my mom stopping somebody and saying, absolutely not with that behavior, especially in front of my children.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And I learned that the difference between the sort of confidence it takes to intervene. I serve on a board of an organization that fights bullying. And one of the words that they often use is an upstander. The difference between a bystander is somebody that watches something happen and does nothing. An upstander is somebody that watches something happen and decides to do something, engage.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And my mom... is the consummate upstander in my life. And that came from having to decide for her. She was one of the only women of her kind on any base she was ever on. My mom has a short haircut, has her whole adult professional life. I'm sure she was accused of being a lesbian at least once a week in her career in the military in the 80s and the 90s. And it didn't harden her.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
It strengthened her.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
Especially in those days for a woman. And I don't even, to be honest with you, I'm not even certain that she was allowed to have long hair as a woman in the military. But I also know without question that silly bigots who think that a haircut has a gender would have thought that my mother's haircut was inappropriate. And it's just a simple tiny thing. And I've never asked her and I have no idea.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
But I now I've been doing this work long enough and I know where the root of a lot of people's silly bigotry can be placed. And I know that I am certain that she had to deal with men that did not think that she was equal to them because she was a woman. Men that didn't think that her experience as a combat nurse was as important as their experience as a combat soldier.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And I'm happy to say I never confused the two.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
This is... Which have nothing to do with substance or success.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
I like to say that I didn't exactly get to decide. It was decided for me, but in a really wonderful way. I was a much bigger person when I was a teenager and when I was in my early 20s and I played American football in grammar school and in high school and then I played in college. And my college football team went to a national championship and I was the captain of that football team and we lost.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And about a week and a half later, I was visiting another college, a college where my twin brother attended with some of my teammates. And they used that sort of private moment to ask me if I was gay. I think they had, these were my closest friends. These were people that I had lived with or around for the better part of four years.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
And I think they were waiting for a moment when it wouldn't put me at risk to ask me. And I was honest with them. They were honest with me. We had a lot of questions for one another. And it was one of the most uplifting moments because it was extended over months.
Chief Change Officer
#342 Brian Sims: From State House to Soul Work—Driving Change With Smarter Tools — Part One
But for months of my life in my early 20s, after 22 years in the closet, my closest friends really wanted me to know how important I was in their lives, how close we all were. I, in the years that followed, when I was first getting into LGBTQ civil rights, I often would say, I want everybody's experience to be like mine.