Spirituality as a Component to Intersectionality and Doing Good in the World, with Zhou Fang
Zhou Fang is a diversity, equity and inclusion practitioner in the Pacific Northwest who uses her multicultural and multilingual background to support her clients. She comes from a very different background than our other podcast guests, and she talks very practically about what spirituality means for her, and how she uses it to support her when things feel hard and dark. As she says, her spirituality supports her in demonstrating compassion. In very practical language, she says we practice leadership because we want to do good in the world and spirituality can help with that. At the end of the day, leadership is about the heart, and her spirituality supports her in reconnecting with her heart to be more effective in working with others.
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Spirituality as a Component to Intersectionality and Doing Good in the World, with Zhou Fang
This conversation is very interesting and somewhat different because it’s with a new colleague of mine named Zhou Fang. Zhou is Chinese and has lived in the US for a long time. She is an equity, diversity, and inclusion consultant, practitioner, and strategist. The name of her company is the Intersectional Group. She talks about her background as an immigrant and as a consultant that works in the diversity space, then a bit about her own view of spirituality and how it supports her in her work. Very practical coming from a very different background.
Towards Spirituality
I’m so grateful that she’s part of the community. She talks a bit about her work focusing on equity-focused leadership and how her background as an immigrant, multicultural, and multilingual helps her in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space. The conversation shifted a bit towards spirituality, and she said she never thought she would associate herself with the word spirituality. She is from China, an atheist country. Citizens are never encouraged to practice religion or spirituality. Family members of hers consider themselves members of different religions, including her grandmother who converted from Buddhism to Christianity, which she said was quite unusual in the city where she grew up in China.
Again, the name of her company is the Intersectional Group, and she talks about intersectionality and how the intersections in our lives are key to helping us form our identities. The different directions that we’re going and the places we come from all move and create this intersection that helps make us who we are and shape our identity. She talks about how it’s helpful to understand spirituality in her life and brings her spirituality into her work.
When we talked about how does that happen? How do you use it in a very practical way? She said that her work is about understanding people and societies. It can be very intellectual and very energy-consuming. She said her spirituality brings her back to the why, why am I doing this? It reconnects her to her heart and her beliefs. She said her spirituality helps her support. It helps support her when things feel hard in a very practical way.
One of the things I love, she said, “We practice leadership because we want to do good in whatever that means and whatever our role and our activity may be and how leadership is not a title. It’s an activity and about doing.” She said, “We want to practice leadership because we want to do good, and spirituality can help with that.”
A very simple and practical approach that she has. She says she brings her spirituality to her work, and there are many times when she wanted to tell people to just flip off. She said, “Our world can be somewhere dark at times, but spirituality helps her be compassionate and empathetic,” for herself and others. It grounds her and helps her to be more stable when things are challenging. It’s a lovely conversation. I hope you enjoy it.
*Please note that the podcast transcript is AI-generated, and thus there may be inaccuracies in the transcription from time to time.*
Welcome back to the show. I’m happy to have with me Zhou Fang, a diversity, equity, and inclusion practitioner in Portland, Oregon, US. I’ve worked with a lot of DEI practitioners over my career and a number of people in Portland, but your background is a little bit different. Your approach may be a little bit different from what you do, and that’s one of the reasons that I love having you in this conversation. Welcome, Zhou.
Thank you, Andrew. It’s a pleasure coming to your program, and thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here and chat about spirituality and leadership.
Thank you. As we’ve discussed, this show is about the intersection or the application of these spiritual dimensions of us as human beings or dimensions that many people would call spiritual. It’s not important to me if somebody labels something the same way as me and how the workplace needs those dimensions. These are conversations about how we can bring some of these dimensions into work for the benefit of ourselves, teams, businesses, business results, and our cultures as well.
My suspicion is that you may talk more about cultures than some other people would. That’s your target area. I’d love to hear a little bit about your background as you would describe it. I don’t want to read out your CV and also to talk about your journey and how it has led you to this place to even consider things that might be called spiritual.
I’ll do my best to share my background a little bit. Again, my name is Zhou Fang. My pronouns are she/her. In my identity journey, the most important one is that I’m an immigrant from China. I moved to the US many years ago and have been living here. I started in the Midwest as a student. Another identity is an international student. Then I moved to the West Coast. I eventually settled in Portland, Oregon. I also identify as a woman, as culturally Chinese American, but ethnically Chinese.
I was working as a professional communicator for many years before I moved to the diversity, equity, and inclusion space a few years ago. That’s basically my background in a nutshell. During my professional journey as well as my immigration journey, both combined, I started to learn about diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Through a lot of volunteering, self-educating, talking with my peers and colleagues, other people of color or folks from other represented communities, I realized this is the area I want to be in. I believed that my immigrant experience, multicultural, and multilingual background can help me in the DEI space. When I got my green card, I decided it was a good time to get into the space and try to help other people. Also, create something for myself at the same time. In talking about spirituality, I never saw I would associate myself with the word spirituality. It’s interesting. I grew up in South China. China, generally or politically speaking, is an atheist country.
Did you grow up in a big city or smaller?
A smaller city. It’s like size or not even mid-size by China standards.
The smaller cities in China.
I grew up in a small city. It’s called Guilin in South China. We have temples, synagogues, and spirituality practice all over the place. However, by definition, China is an atheist country. That’s like a political thing. We were never encouraged as citizens to practice religion or spirituality, but it is allowed. It is interesting what people practice and choose not to practice. Some of my family members considered themselves Buddhist. I had my grandmother who passed away a few years ago. She was a Christian.
Was that unusual for her generation?
For South China, it’s a little unusual because we had a lot of missionaries in China. Say, very deep West China, Northeast China, and East China as well. For South China, I’m not an expert in that area, but in my household growing up, we never had a Christian. My grandmother was a Buddhist, then she came across the Bible. She was a big reader, so she read it. She was like, “This is great.” She decided to become a Christian in her later years.
That’s why part of the reason spirituality is interesting is it doesn’t have to stay the same. It changes as we grow and age. When she passed away, she was a Christian, but my entire life until quite recently, I considered myself an atheist because I didn’t think spirituality was something that would resonate with me. Also, because of my own limitation, or maybe it’s a language thing. I don’t know. I had always considered spirituality as religion.
They are very different things the more I learn about them. Religion and spirituality can overlap, but spirituality in a sense is bigger than religion. Spirituality is about your mind, heart, and connection to nature, the world, a community, and other people around you. I’m 35 years-old, and I have a lot to learn, but as I get older, I discovered that spirituality can be helpful. Not only for someone’s personal growth but also for career and leadership practice.
It’s particularly important for my equity, diversity, and inclusion work because my foundation is intersectionality. We’re all intersectional beings, humans, and animals, and understanding that, the intersections in our lives, has been helpful for me when it comes to understanding what spirituality looks like for me because it’s all fluid. It’s not always set, and there’s always something new. It always changes. My work and spirituality are very well connected.
Intersectionality
When you talk about it as fluid, as I have heard, you define intersectionality before, to me, it has to be fluid because it’s constantly in motion. I don’t want to say circularity. Maybe that fits, but there’s a motion to it. First of all, I’d love for you to define what intersectionality means for anyone who’s listening, but then to go back and why you say, “Spirituality relates to the work I do in DEI.” You said that very matter-of-factly, but I’d love it if you could make that connection a little more explicit, please.
I’ll do my best. Intersectionality is a relatively new term. It was created in 1989 by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. It was used in legal settings. It was a serious term and framework because it helps and guides people through sometimes very complex and challenging social and racial issues. When it comes to injustice, people of color, especially Black people, face more challenges and sometimes very dangerous challenges when it comes to social issues.
They are more marginalized and discriminated against as well. Intersectionality was created because of that, like your skin color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, sexuality, religion, spirituality practice, ability status, socioeconomic status, and if you were a veteran or not. All those create, not necessarily define us, but they make us who we are.
Would you use the word identity? They shape our identity. Is that not the right word?
They do shape our identity. Our identities can be multiple. It doesn’t have to be singular. It can be plural. Intersectionality addresses that, and because of that, when we live our lives, we sometimes face challenges because of the intersectionality in our identities. A pretty easy example is age. When we are younger, we experience life and are treated differently, versus when we are older.
Identity can be multiple. It doesn't have to be singular. It can be plural. Intersectionality addresses that.
If we add gender and sexuality to that, then that even makes it more complicated. If you are an older woman, your treatment from society may look different than an older man. If you are non-binary, your experience will definitely also be different from an older man or older woman. That’s a real-life example of how intersectionality can change and affect our lives in different ways.
A more fun way of looking at intersectionality, I think we might have mentioned last time, is we can see ourselves as like a traffic roundabout. Every roundabout is connected by different traffic lanes, ways, roads, and into it. Those roads can change as well. Sometimes, they are more straightforward, more crooked, wider, or narrower. Sometimes some animal would run across this roundabout. Who knows? There are trees, flowers, and a bus stop there.
Sometimes some bike will come across these roundabouts, too. If we look at ourselves and individuals as a roundabout island, the intersectionality makes a lot of sense. We are the center of our own identity, and that changes over time as well. It doesn’t stop evolving as we grow because it will always evolve and change. That’s another visualization of intersectionality.
We are the center of our own identity and that changes over time as well and it doesn't stop evolving as we grow.
EDI And Spirituality
That helps me understand it better. for you, how is it that it’s so clear that there is a connection between the DEI work that you do and things that may be called spiritual?
I want to say it’s clear, but it always changes. Sometimes, it’s clear, but some days, it’s freaking murky. We’ve all had these moments of asking ourselves, “Why am I doing this?” As the DEI practitioner, I ask myself that question pretty regularly just because things get hard sometimes. I work on this project and spend so much time. I work with this group of people, I spend so much time, energy, my brain cells, and my emotions. I’m trying to make meaningful changes to the people I serve or the work I put my energy into.
Sometimes, our expectations don’t meet reality. Changes can be hard and also, I do believe change can only happen when you want to change. You can’t make a horse drink water, they have to want to drink water. Because of that, I sometimes ask myself why I haven’t done things differently. We were talking about enjoying our lives, asking, “Why are you not traveling? Why are you not taking time off? Go live your life. You are 35. Do something fun.”
My work is fun to me, and I enjoy my work, but sometimes when things get hard, I’m like, “Why am I doing this?” That’s when spirituality comes in because equity, diversity, and inclusion is very intellectual. It’s to understand people, society, and communities. Also, use your empathy to understand people, understand why this is happening?
It’s very intellectual. It requires a certain degree of understanding of history, politics, cultures, and different rituals in different communities. It’s about respect as well. It can be very energy-consuming when it comes to our diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Sometimes, you get very tired because it consumes your brain so much. So, the way spirituality helps me is: it brings things back to why am I doing this? Because I want to. This is fulfilling to me, and this is good for my heart. My heart wants to do this work.
Not because I’m good at it. Sure, that’s part of it. At the same time, it’s because I have this belief in my heart that this is the work I want to do. This makes me feel happy, and I want to do something good. If I can make a living while doing good, then that’s awesome. Spirituality constantly reminds me where my heart is and why I am doing this hard work.
Spirituality And Leadership
I appreciate that connection, definition, and the practicality of what you’re talking about. “When things get tough, I can go to that place and tap into that purpose and the deeper why.” That’s beautiful.
One of the things you shared with me earlier was some of your ideas before this conversation, you said, “We practice leadership because we want to do good,” and spirituality may help with that. I just love the simple elegance of what you said. Maybe that’s your first book or second book. Whatever the term may mean to us, it can help us with our understanding of what is good, what it means for the world to be good, for us to be good, and be at our best. Leadership is about giving voice to that goodness or contributing to making that goodness happen. Am I saying that in a way that makes sense?
I appreciate you pointing that out. For me, again, talking about evolving, I never considered myself a leader until someone pointed out to me that you don’t have to have “leader” in your title to be a leader. Anyone can be a leader. Anyone can lead. If you are involved in something and you give it a voice, whether it’s an initiative that is awesome and cool, and you talk about it, then you are leading it. By definition, you are a leader.
This is another relatively new thing to me: leadership largely is about compassion. Compassion today is oftentimes overlooked by many leaders, because leaders “do.” Lead is a verb, and if you are a leader, you lead and you have to do something. You are always in motion. You’re always trying to figure things out, answer questions, and solve problems. Oftentimes, there’s no immediate answer or solution to every single problem you run into as a leader.
Leadership largely is about compassion.
Leaders work with real people and communities. It’s not some lofty fancy title like, “They work in leadership.” What does that even mean? You have to engage with people, the communities you serve, and that’s what a leader does. The thing is, we work so much and do so much that we forget we have to be human-centered or nature-centered. We have to connect with the people we work with, the forest, and the river, especially now—there are so many environmental activism activities going on.
We have to have that connection, and compassion helps us with that. I often say DEI work is very intellectual. It uses a lot of your brain cells, your way of understanding or interpreting things. Compassion doesn’t require any of that. Compassion only requires a heart that can feel for other people. I may not understand your struggles or your problems fully, but that doesn’t mean I cannot show compassion for you or show up for you.
That is essentially what a leader should be like. It’s to show up for other people. Compassion enables us to do that. In my way of seeking compassion, spirituality helps a lot with that because I tend to intellectualize everything, and that can be very draining, tiresome, and toxic sometimes. Practicing spirituality, however we want to understand or look at it, helps me feel. It helps me feel and have compassion for other people. I think that’s what leadership is about. When we are trying to do good, we have all those methodologies and ways of doing it. Again, at the end of the day, it still is about our heart. That’s my interpretation of spirituality and leadership.
At the end of the day, it’s about all hearts, and the intellectual conceptual work will get done. It’s not about excluding that, and I agree with you. Perhaps, in our world now, we need to shine a little light on the compassion piece, knowing that the intellectual piece will be there. It’s not one or the other. I was on a call with a board. I’m on a nonprofit board. The board chair and I were speaking about some next steps with the organization in leadership.
I was encouraging her to mentor someone else on the board, and she said, “Mentoring to me is all about heart. Even when I’m feeling overwhelmed and busy or feeling sometimes unprepared with certain intellectual dimensions of the work, some technicalities or things like that. I always have time to mentor people, and it energizes me because it’s from the heart.” I thought that was beautifully said and made that distinction, where does that energy come from, and that dimension of leadership driven from.
Thank you for sharing that. I agree.
What kind of work do you do for your clients? I’d love to highlight a little bit about what you do.
Equity, Diversity, And Inclusion
Thank you. This is where I can sell. I work with clients, and they can be organizations, teams, individuals, or on their equity, diversity, and inclusion work. It’s largely about people and culture. I believe that EDI is not for you to look good. EDI is for you to do the right thing and be smart about your business or your organization. Equity, diversity, and inclusion should be part of a company’s strategy and business plan. Strategy and plans change and evolve, and so should equity, diversity, and inclusion work.
Spirituality: EDI is not for you to look good. EDI is for you to do the right thing and be smart about your business or your organization.
Say, a team is five people. A five-person team’s EDI work has to look very different from a 50-person team. I want to bring that intersectionality into EDI work because there’s no cookie-cutter approach. There’s no playbook like, say, “We printed it out every year, and you are fine.” That’s part of the thing I do in EDI. This is continuous work.
Another big component of my work is leadership. We already touched on leadership and spirituality. How can we be a good leader for our people, our organization, and our business? Everyone has a different opinion and approach. My approach is equity-focused leadership and intersectional leadership. A big chunk of work I do is to help leaders understand.
You can see leadership as a job. It’s a job title, but at the same time, it’s about how you do things and how you interact with people. Historically speaking, leadership in the United States at least is very White-centered. The way people run an organization is based on the assumption that it is mostly going to be White people working in this organization. That’s changing rapidly.
If leaders, companies, and businesses don’t recognize that, they will trail behind. Eventually, they may go out of business or fade out in history. Inevitably, that’s what happens to every company after a certain amount of time. For the longevity and sustainability of an organization and a business, leaders and people in leadership have to recognize that intersectionality and equity-centered work is good for companies, culture, and business. If you want to grow your business sustainably for a very long time, then you have to learn about intersectional leadership, what’s going on in our world, and bring that equity lens to our leadership work. That’s also another big component of my work.
Would you say that you bring your spirituality, however you would define it, into your work and therefore into your clients?
Yes, because there are numerous times when they just want to say, “F*** you.” It’s true. Things are hard, and sometimes people are difficult. It’s their fault because we are all flawed human beings. In my line of work, and probably in yours too, we work with people who are very different from us. That’s a good thing. That’s what intersectionality is about.
It’s not an easy thing, but it’s a good thing.
As someone working in this space, sometimes I feel like, “Why don’t you get it? Why does it have to be so hard?” I get frustrated and stressed out. Also, our world can be very dark or can make you feel very dark. Spirituality helps me be compassionate and empathetic with my clients. I don’t love the term clients. I should say, maybe, the partners I work with in EDI work. It can be an organization, a team, or an individual, but we are all partners on this journey when it comes to EDI and leadership.
Spirituality helps me bring intentionality back to my work and helps me center and ground myself when I feel unstable or frustrated. Sometimes I feel disappointed even in my own work because I don’t do everything perfectly. Spirituality helps me have compassion for myself as well. It helps my work. It not only helps me work with my partners but also helps me show up for myself when I need to do this work.
I’ve been coaching leaders for a long time. You’re a bit younger than me, so it might shock you how long, but leadership is an inside game. What we do inside first impacts our actions and others around us. Thank you so much. Where would people look to learn about your work? What’s your website?
It’s www.Intersectional.group, and you can also email me directly at Zhou@Intersectional.group. You can also find me on LinkedIn. My name is Zhou Fang. Those are the best ways to find me, get in touch, get connected, and talk.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience. I don’t want to say philosophy, it’s very practical. I suppose it is a practical philosophy and how you connect these things very clearly. I appreciate that.
Thank you. I’ve always wanted to be a philosopher, but that’s not going to happen.
Maybe you are. You’re just a philosopher with a different job title.
I feel I’m more of a therapist. Leadership work sometimes feels like therapy work.
I would agree with that in my experience. Thank you so much. It’s great to talk with you, and I look forward to continuing our conversation. Thanks, Zhou.
Thank you, Andrew.
Important Links
About Zhou Fang
Founder, Leadership, and EDI practitioner at Intersectional Group LLC, with a focus on intersectionality and interconnection, on curiosity, empathy and compassion, helping organizations and teams grow in a meaningful way.
Director of Communications with 10+ years of experience in partnership, account management, business development, people operations, and event planning with a track record of independent execution and building lasting partnerships.
Passionate about women's rights, pay equality, immigration reform, as well as applying my experience and expertise to cultural and social change.
Fluent in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. Learning Spanish and ASL.