Ally Coll on real change after #MeToo: "I was looking for a way to incentivize good actors."

It’s been more than two years since the modern-day Me Too movement took off. Earlier this spring, Harvey Weinstein was sent to prison for 23 years. It was a moment for me. It made me reflect on all the important things that have changed for women at work since then. Also, I thought a lot about the things that haven’t.  

So, this week I wanted to talk to someone who is working to the turn viral outrage of #metoo into real systemic change. 

In 2017, Ally Coll was fresh out of Harvard law school and she’d scored a big job at the law firm Boies Schiller. Then she learned her firm represented Weinstein, and it had hired spies to track his victims and attempt to discredit them. It was a practice that she found so despicable she couldn’t live with it. So she quit, and started the Purple Campaign. This week, I talked to her about what real change is possible for companies. We also talked about her own Me Too story.

And: this is the first episode we recorded entirely from home. You’re going to hear it in the sound quality. Bear with us. It’s worth it. And stick around after my chat with Ally for this week's check-in as we live through this global pandemic.

You can download the episode to hear all of this. Then, please, share your own thoughts and tag them #HelloMonday so I can jump into the conversation.

Here are some highlights….

On why she started the Purple Campaign: "I saw so much dialogue around bad actors in the Me Too movement.  But I was also looking for a way to incentivize good actors to follow each other so that we're creating a world that's more like the one we want to live in."

On the meaning behind a spike in reports: "One metric of improvement is seeing more people willing to come and report these issues. That doesn't necessarily mean you have a spike in prevalence. It means you have a renewed trust in the company."

On what has surprised her: "I think I've been surprised by the extent to which there are good male allies in positions of power in a lot of these organizations. And maybe not just male allies, but unexpected allies."

On the advice she got after her own Me Too story unfolded: "I think the advice that I got at 18 not to report it was probably the right advice from a pure career perspective. That cannot be true and that is what motivates me to do the work that I'm doing now.

Feeding the frontline fighting COVID-19

Listener Jeff Berman emailed me this week about an amazing grassroots project that came together in less than a week in Los Angeles. So, I invited him on the show to talk about it. It's an idea that started with a group of local moms who wanted to help out. They asked an ER doctor what she most needed. She had two immediate requests: protective gear and meals for people working on the frontline. Protective gear is hard to come by, and many people were working on that problem. Meals, however, they could cover.

They organized dinner delivery from a local LA restaurant. That's when Jeff and some of his friends got involved. Separately, Jeff was working with local restauranteurs to figure out how to keep their businesses up so their employees would continue to get paid. In less than a week, they built out a progam to pay local restaurants to deliver healthy meals to frontline workers at medical centers. Their goal is to feed 450 hospital workers in ICU and ER units in six hospitals around LA--the Covid-19 frontline. To raise money, they've set up a Go Fund Me page.

For those of us who aren't sick or helping out on the frontlines, one of the most challenging things about this moment is that it's hard to figure out how to be helpful. But when we figure out how to put ourselves to work in service of each other, we feel better. Helping others helps us. It cements our connection to each other. It is a form of relief, as much for the helper as those who are helped. That's why I threw $25 into the virtual hat for Jeff's group.

I want to hear from you…

So many initiatives are popping up right now. Please send me the most interesting things you are seeing. Write to me at [email protected]. Tell me what you are working on.

Best wishes from last week's temporary podcasting studio: my closet!