#54. How To Engage In Cultural Appreciation with Lily Lynch

Jan 24

SUBSCRIBE: iTunes | Stitcher | Spotify | Download | Duration: 42:43

“If I am able to access certain spaces or certain conversations, I do it knowing that I’m bringing forward with me all the people that we represent as partners in our platform.”
- Lily Lynch

Hey you wild women!

My next guest is the co-founder of Sankara, a social enterprise that operates an Online Multicultural Marketplace platform. It enables clients to access authentic cultural services and products like Catering, Meal Plans, and Arts & Crafts. Everything is made hyper-locally by a collective of vendors from diverse cultural backgrounds.

As a multiracial individual herself, Lily Lynch is passionate about creating experiences and public commemorations centered around BIPOC history and culture. In February 2020, the month after the passing of her paternal grandfather, a descendant of Black Loyalists, she organized the inaugural raising of the Pan-African flag in New Brunswick to commemorate Black History Month. When the flag raised overhead, she felt the pride and presence of her Black ancestors, including her grandfather. In February 2021, she’s planning an even bigger flag-raising by activating cities and communities across her province.

Over two years, she curated and operated over two dozen pop-up restaurant experiences in order to highlight the culture of Sankara's partner Chefs and their cuisine alongside informed conversations about various cultures from Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Africa. She is drawn towards creating opportunities for the community to participate in cultural appreciation, ask deeper questions of one another and welcome opportunities to build cross-cultural empathy with open arms. Sankara allows her the opportunity to actively express these values to a wider community and witness them reach back excitedly for more.

In this episode, you will learn about:

What Lily’s background is
Why Lily loves this quote from Nina Simone: “This is the world you have made yourself, now you have to live in it”
The biggest pain point in starting Sankara
Navigating being an online food ordering service in a physical market place
“You have to start from where you are”: Learning to let go of the notion of perfection
The importance of working with people that share the same values as you
How your relationship with your culture and upbringing influence how you show up in business
Why Lily decided to create Sankara
Experiencing other cultures through food
How Sankara strategically pivoted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic
Removing expectations and embracing curiosity
How consumers can better participate in cultural appreciation
The importance of listening to feedback from vendors
Getting out of your comfort zone to allow yourself to grow
What is “Coding as White” and how does it impact multiracial people?
Using privilege to elevate and support others
How to better face the issues of equity and race in our society
The damage that apathy does
Challenges that Lily has had to face and continues to face in business
Why there is no divide between work and personal life for Lily.

What it means to be a WILD woman:

“Someone once asked Nina Simone what freedom is and she said that it is to have no fear. I think fear is something we often shy away from. Doing new things, we shy away from because we are not sure of the outcome or we’re not sure if we have it in us to do it. That fear can be personal or circumstantial or historically based, but thinking of freedom as an absence of fear puts you into the position of being able to actually act on your freedom and recognize it as your own.” -Lily Lynch

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