Welcome, I'm Angela Bryant and you're listening to The Angel Rated Show, where we have inspiring conversations with the people behind the products and services most often used by online business owners. On the show, you'll hear how their personal beliefs and values have influenced their businesses. If you're an online entrepreneur who wants to know about the integrity and impact of the businesses you're buying from, then this is the show for you. Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Angel Rated Show. I'm Angela Bryant and with me today I have Anuradha Kowtha. So Anuradha is a catalyst, an educator and consultant who works with individuals, small businesses and organizations to liberate their essence, so that they can meet these uncertain times with resilience and courage. Anuradha's journey across both public and private sectors has has led Anuradha to see systemic issues like hierarchy and exploitation, and find ways to address systemic issues at their root cause. The thread that runs through Anuradha's work is illuminating and liberating individuals and small teams from the indoctrination and cookiecutter thinking that comes from capitalism and colonialism, so that they can provide bold, innovative solutions rooted in justice for their clients.

Thank you. What an introduction, thank you. I don't know where to start. A lot of things I have done, as I as I said, and as you said, in the bio, I have been both in the public sector more in the public sector and some in the private sector. And just keep seeing the same things actually started my work in environmental activism, I was actually working with New Mexico parks or New Mexico Public Interest Research Group, and we were working on water, we had a, you know, campaign around water loopholes that developers were using to create more subdivisions that didn't have to have metered water in a desert environment like New Mexico. So that's where I started, but I went into, you know, I went, I was a school teacher for many years, high school science, teacher, and so on. And then I, then I moved into doing my master's work, and I had an opportunity to look at the impact that British had in colonialism in India in a very specific area, and in this specific dance form. And that kind of was a really healing moment, because I got to look at patriarchy, and colonialism, and so on. And it was such a healing point in my life. And for them, I was like, Oh, I need to bring more of this into the work I do in the classroom, I need to, you know, what's missing from the environmental movement is this lens. So wherever I kept, wherever I would try something, or do an internship or whatever, because I like to butterfly in terms of like a lot of experiences, I like to network, I like to connect, I just kept coming back to, oh, if we don't dismantle this at the root, this is this is where we keep finding the same situations where, like I said, cookie cutter thinking that we can't get past that we can't get to something new and innovative. We can't access the indigenous wisdom, we can't do so many things, because we're limited by this thinking.

So that that brought in some of your thinking around sort of colonialism and the issues that that came with that. Were the this interest in sort of post capitalism, where does that come from? And how, how did you bring that into your work?

That's a good question. I think the interest in looking at the root, when we're talking about the root of all of this, the root is capitalism and colonialism. First, it started here in Western Europe. So the idea of the enclosures many of us maybe in Europe, maybe talked about it, learned about it, I didn't I wish I'm from the US. But that's that was part of the insidious nature of let's close off land that was public, freely used for public use. And so we can start to see Oh, my gosh, this this specific use of propaganda, the benefit system that we see now was all in first envisioned here, and perfected and then we took it abroad with different mechanisms of what we now call colonialism to extract and exploit.

So this is obviously I mean, it's a massive topic and it clearly now drives everything that you're doing in your business and in The Kowtha Constellation, which is your business. So where where do you want to take that I mean, have you got a legacy you want to create? Have you got a big vision for where you're where you want to take your business and the work that you're doing?

I have so many visions I am, I have too many visions, that's really the thing, I would like to do so many things. And to be honest, the place where I, the tension, I often bump up against this being in a disabled body being, you know, neurodivergent, I often run out of capacity to do my big vision. So that's kind of the thing of how can I balance these two, and some of my vision is making sure this information is in more people's hands, right? So we can actually understand the roots of it, because we can't help to, like bring up the whole thing, if we're not looking at the roots, if we're not looking at how it is impacting it even in us, like a lot of us say, oh, okay, you know, it's not a white supremacy of I'm not racist, or I'm not, you know, I'm not. And it's like, No, these things live in us, like, actually how propaganda and indoctrination works is, it comes into the way we do the way we think the way we be in the world. So we need to examine that. So that's one piece of it. I also have an idea at some point to create with Sowing Post Capitalist Seeds, some more training, some more useful things that businesses could be using it because what we're going to be talking about today, Sowing Post Capitalist Seeds is a foundation course what we recommend everyone to take, but we want to create some more specific business trainings. And then I have this a media company kind of that I think is coming out of all of this, where we can actually learn how my master's is in rhetoric. So how do we actually use media to influence to change minds and hearts? Right? How can we do that? And how can we do that with the decolonial lens, because so many times I want to tell my story. And if I want to find South Asian images, I mostly have to be B roll footage or images, I am looking at White gays, colonial gays in the images that are in my selection. And I'm like, I would like to tell my own story of I don't have access to these things. I'm limited to tell the story in the way that white gaze or these kinds of things show up right that they are those things, those tropes tell our story. So I want to play in the media space. I don't know how it's going to look right now.

But it's great to have that that idea and that ambition and that vision for where you want to go. So you mentioned Sowing Post Capitalist Seeds. So this is the course that you've developed. And you've got another intake of it coming up in September. So we titled this are sowing post capitalist seeds in your business, because there's a lot of online business owners here who might be watching this. So tell us what that course is about what it means to sow post capitalist seeds in your business.

Yeah, absolutely. First about the course it would. It's not just my creation, it was co created by my partner and I, business partner, co facilitator, Mariah Helms. And we started basically, it was really amazing how we

It just sounds so I mean, I know you called it a even met, I was at the time working on kind of an Asian and Pacific Island space, where we could kind of do our reclaiming journey. And she is she is a yoga teacher. And she said she wanted to give a percentage of her profits, or her earnings from yoga, to support someone who is South Asian to get the support with me. So that's how we first met, she wanted to just have my pay pal, so she could send some money monthly amount to me. And I said, Well, if you're gonna send money, I would like to get to know you. And we started talking, and maybe we spoke every, maybe every week. And then we started developing this curriculum. First we said, Oh, is it cultural appropriation, and we kept digging, as this is anti racism, they'll keep digging. And we were like, Oh, no, capitalism is the underpinning of this. And that's where we started this course. So this is the sixth time we'll be teaching it. And it every time we have different people and we want to keep, keep that, you know, sharpening the saw, we bring in new speakers, or we try to bring in new fresh perspectives, because we are also continuing to learn and unpack, and it's a 14 week foundation course that anybody can take and we've had people, who are teachers, who are students, who are disabled, who are under underemployed or unemployed, taking it we've had online business owners, we thought nonprofit owners, you name it, a lot of artists, so many different types of people and they and we really look at so, you know, the political, economic, socio political, the different lenses of how we can foundation course. But it sounds so interesting to just keep look at anti oppression work. And the first part of the class is looking at the roots of how capitalism and colonialism came to be. And really not just in an intellectual way, but what does what is the meaning of that on our bodies, because that is a big part of this, the inter personal, the personal, the embodiment of how these things impact us. And then the second part of the journey is we look at different ways we can look at money, land ethic, mutual aid, the body, so many topics, and we start to come up with our own praxis within community, how do we now change our, our mind around our own land ethic or our money ethic, because when we start to see Oh, there's a mutual aid piece that we need to be considering or, you know, so on, we look at other movements that are going on. So it's a really rich course, that is like, we don't want people who are just beginning their journey, in terms of, it's not peeling away all those layers and looking down right into an anti racism 101 or an anti oppression 101, we want people who've done a little bit of work. And then we really create this really good foundation of now from here, I can start to see possibilities like because, because colonialism and capitalism live in our bodies, like trauma. And so if we're not, in this, I'm not, I'm not a therapist, or anything. So I don't want to make any claims in that. But the trauma does live in our body. And what most people say about the course is, oh, I can be in my body. Now I can see possibilities that I couldn't see before. Like before, I just thought Oh, this is like, oh, capitalism is amalgomous. I don't know what it is, I don't know how to name it. I don't know how to relate to we're already relating to capitalism, whether or not we, we want to or know about it. But people will say, Oh, they have this new perspective, they have this new way of looking at things and they start to create this possibilities, they can lean into the possibilities that they couldn't even see before. And they can see, oh, I might have been actually doing the right things. Now I know, I have some steps, or I have some community supporting me that maybe they didn't feel they had before. those seeds to really understand that capitalism is the thing that has underpinned a lot of those issues, and then really unpacking that to understand the impact it's, it's had on you, on individuals on other people. So if you were if someone was an online business owner, or you know, an entrepreneur of some sort, and they took this course, what sort of impact because they're obviously working in a capitalist world with because they are a business owner? So what how would that then work? What what impact might the course have on how they see doing business? And how they structure their business? Or how they operate their business? What's Is it something they should be scared of? Or, you know, run towards what always it's more intellectual exercise? Or will it just really change things about their, how they operate? That's there's so many questions.

Big questions, too. And I love it. And I love it. I kind of wanted to focus in on a kind of a small case study that we had business owners who are course creators, who took our class, and they both took it as as you know, they signed up and took the same round together. So they went through the material together. And I presume they also had discussions besides our 14 weeks together, they also had some discussions of their own. And, you know, that they before that weren't didn't feel like they were on the same footing about

That really sounds like there's almost as an how radical their material needed to be their political stance, how do they set things up in an accessible way? So they weren't they weren't matching in terms of, you know, maybe having slightly different foundations they were resting on. They took this course together showed the possibility showed something new that before there was this, you know, dissonance to some degree. And they said afterward they came together, they felt that it saved their business relationship because they were both coming at it from the same place and they are innovating the heck out of how do they now do really alternative pricing so that that was a place? How do they deliver services, what's the equity within their own business working relationship, so a lot of that money ethic has shown up and, and because of the pandemic, they were able to agree to some pricing that would support their community. And opening it up for different types of capitalism, ie not just payments, opening it up to pay what you can models. That's not the only way that a company can become more accessible. But that was the way they chose to embody that. And so I think that's the thing that is surprising to us that time after time, we get comments on the embodiment factor of I can live in my body, I can now live in my body and relate to other people. So that's a big one that we get a lot of, and then this community, we didn't plan to have a community, but the people who show up and they connect, and they really, some people really become really good friends, or so on. And we try to do, we're starting to introduce an annual retreat or an annual conversation or a reunion of sorts, once during the summer. So our reunion for all anybody who's taken any of the previous five rounds we're going to be having in a week or so, impact it The course has on you, as a person, your body, your beliefs, your understanding how you live in your own body, and then that has then ripples on knock on effects and makes you think about probably different areas of your life, not just your business, but then it could also have an impact on how you work and how you. Yeah, pricing models or how you choose suppliers, how you choose staff, how you make your business more accessible, how you make it more just or equitable in different ways. So and I know, I'm always really interested in getting to know the people behind courses and sort of what their values are. And obviously, your values come out incredibly strongly and what you're offering. And I know in your pricing you you have specific offers you have tiered pricing, talk us through how that works, because I think there's also some sort of a different pricing for Global South or and they're sort of Yeah, other ways that you're offering things. So give us some examples of what you do with your pricing.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we started the course at 300 US dollars a few years ago. And we've now as we started to understand, hey,

Which I have to say, for 14 weeks. Seems Yeah, incredible.

It was only 12 weeks, then we actually since then added two weeks, we added a body week. And we added a week on colonialism specifically. So we've expanded, we've actually brought in some guest speakers. So the extra tiers help us now pay for the guest speakers, we want to be paid a living wage as much as possible.

So yeah, sorry, I interrupted, you explain your

Yeah, that's right. That's right, you're tiers. excited, I'm excited. We're now the tiers start at. So we've kept that as the 300 300 US dollars is the minimum tier. And then we also have a number of tiers going up to 900 US dollars, I mean, with the exchange rate we charging in pounds, just to make that clear, and so on. And so the exact numbers in pounds are on the website, I will let people read that or on your Angel Rated site. But we also this time, I said it was necessary because we've had people interested from the Global South and two or three times we heard last year, hey, I want to join but the amount I make in my whatever x currency is just not at the level that I can afford it in your in your currency. So we created a new tier for pay what you can for people from the Global South. And so I think we've already had a couple of people interested in that. That's amazing. And then we have two people of colour, black indigenous people of color scholarships. You know, I guess here in the UK, we use the term BAME, but similar, right? Since we have a global audience, we chose that language. And then we also do two, Well, it depends, depends, but at least we'll have two work trades. And that is somebody who can help us by doing labor for us in exchange for the entry to the course. So that generally is some sort of administrative work or something special, like a special project, we need some, you know, some hands, hands on help with stuff.

That's an idea I'd never come across before that was like, I mean, I've seen it in things like woofing and like people just volunteering and getting an exchange for their labor bed and board or something. But I've not seen it in the online business space. So that's quite a really interesting way of offering something a different way of doing a pricing model.

Yeah, I love that whole thing is a great model because it shows people I mean, it can it can also become exploitative. So we have to be careful, right because I've heard of Wolfers having not great experiences. But similar here. You know, if we set up the container of what is expected, it's a good way to do it, but because not everyone has access. And so our goal is each time each round, we want to make it a little bit more accessible. So we didn't start out with the closed captioning and so on. We added that in. And then we added in, we started a lending library. So if people so some of the books we use Sylvia Federici's Taliban and the Witch I don't have my copy here today. But we use that in the, in the book in in the course. So we have four copies in the US the Mariah has, and I have a copy here that we can lend out. So and we've and people have added other books to our stash that we might reference, you know, we don't we don't use them by and large. But they're optional readings. So some people will check out a book for this semester.

Fantastic. So if people wanted to learn more about this, tell us where they would go how they would get involved. Yeah, what was that? What would their next step be?

Yeah, that's a great question right now is Sowing Post Capitalist Seeds, finally has its own website that was just a few months ago that that is now a reality. And now it lives at so www dot sowing, post capitalist seeds.com. And forward slash forward slash course is where you can find it.

Fantastic. And people then apply to join the course. And yes, do you know how their application?

That's right? That's right, we have an extensive application. We don't want that to deter people. This is not like there's not a right or wrong answer. There's not like we're not ranking or anything like that, we want to know if you've done the work because we might find, you know, if people haven't done as much work, we want to keep a closer eye on them in the class, in terms of, you know, let's say anti racism work. It's a mixed race space, it's a mixed ability space. So we want to make sure that we're keeping an eye on certain people. People can apply orally, or submit their application in another format if they would like. And then we review it. And we haven't not accepted anybody. We're generally in this time, we've opened it up to all genders, so anybody can apply and where we might flag certain things, when we kind of respond to you to make sure Hey, are these things going to be set up? Or what are your access needs? Right? So we want to make sure we're covering as much as we can. And then yeah, and we start September 12, in just a few weeks?

And who would you if you had to describe the sort of ideal? Is there an ideal person that you that would get the most out of it? Or that would be? Yeah, that that is? That is grate for? Or is it? I mean, I know you've opened it to everyone, but is there someone that who would you describe as being somebody who would get the most out of it?

Yeah, well, since we're speaking about business and business owners here. In terms of business owners, it's people who have been kind of questioning how do I bring social justice? How do I bring the ethic like, different money ethic or like rooted, like, Justice oriented solutions to my business, right? Because here's the thing is people think, Oh, I have to now pivot and and start talking about anti racism to do my business. I don't think that's the way it needs to be. There is a way to embody anti racism or anti colonialism or anti capitalism in your business in such a way that you don't need to now change what you're doing, you may be changed the hell, like you said, we might look at your supply chain and say, who is actually in? Where's the money going? Right? Am I putting it back in the hands of the historically disenfranchised or not? Am I lifting them up? Or maybe that's actually not a good model for me, right? Because some people say, Oh, I want to let everyone into my class. And then they, you know, want to invite people of genders, they're not necessarily used to working with or, you know, making it a mixed race space, and they bring in people and then it's like this tokenism, and they're not necessarily ready to handle it. So if you're on the fence, like, hey, how do I embody this ethic in a new way? Because, quite frankly, I feel like and statistics are showing this to be actually, you know, like, people are losing business because they are not embracing anti oppressive work in their business. So it's prime time we get on board with that, I think, across the board. And here in the UK and Europe, I see that we are behind the conversation of what's going on in the US. I mean, I just so many of us have commented on that. So if you're just a beginner in those ways. It's a great place to have that conversation, maybe for the first time some of these conversations for the first time and say, Oh, I haven't realized that I haven't had a chance to unpack it. So there because, as you said earlier, we can't go to this place of first we start here, and then we maybe start moving outward and concentric circles around us. And so it sounds Yep, go ahead. Good.

I was gonna say, it sounds like it's you, what we've created is a really safe space to, to do that thinking, do that learning, and then start understanding and thinking about how you can apply that learning to your to your business, for example, in innovative ways, and there's no what is not a one size fits all, it's not a, you have to go and plaster this all over your website, it's very much thinking about, you have different ways of doing things, what might work for you and your business.

That's right, it's not one size fits all thing can be really hard. Like, that's not gonna work, right me in a disabled body and a neurodivergent. That's not the same experience or the same ethic that I can bring that you know you do in your business, you have different things you can leverage perhaps that I can't and vice versa. So we need to be. So we actually have activities that can help you tease some of those out with a little bit more nuance.

Fantastic, isn't it before we wrap up? Because we've been going for quite a half an hour, I think so just Is there anything else you want to share about the work you're doing or about Sowing Post Capitalist Seeds?

There, the thing that I would say is, if this program resonates with you, awesome, we'd love to have you and if this program doesn't resonate, there's someone else doing something else do that. It I'm not like as a teacher, I really not attached to you doing it with me in my way. I want you to find spaces that support you in your journey where you are. But the thing is, we can't like allow this to keep going, right? The thing is, we all urgently need to take action because the environmental situation, all of the things that are going on in the world. It's all related back to capitalism. So we need to be dis dismantling it where we can. So do that work, please, if you do it with us. Awesome. And if you don't deal with us also awesome.

As long as you do. Yeah, amazing. Well, I've definitely learned an awful lot. And I'm so interested in I love what you're doing. I'm really wanted to I know we've sort of been quite brave doing something that neither of us have done much of before. But hopefully sharing or having this live conversation is Yeah, getting the word out to more people and we can share what you're doing. And what we're make sure we do is put links in comments and make sure we've got all the links added so that people can find out more if they're interested. I think we'll leave it there. Thank you ever so much.

Thank you so much Angela.

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