Becky Daggett has been a volunteer leader in the Flagstaff community since she was an eleven year old organizing fundraisers for the Humane Society. After a career that spans the sectors of art, economic development, environment, education, and politics, Becky is now running for City Council in 2020. We discuss her experience as an ongoing volunteer at an elementary school, her perspective on serving across sectors, the concept of network weaving, the role of the arts in community building, and her inspiration to run for political office.

Mentioned in this episode:

Becky Daggett for City Council

Network Weaving

Playback Theater

Asset Based Community Development

Podcast Episode about Creative Placemaking in Local Government

ArtPlace

Creative Placemaking guide

Theatrikos Theater

Flagstaff Arizona

Killip Elementary School

[music]

00:06 Speaker 1: This is Do Good, BeGood. The show about helpful people and the challenges they face in trying todo good. Your host is Sharon Tewksbury-Bloom, a career do-gooder who also lovescraft beer and a good hard tackle in rugby. Sharon speaks to everyday peopleabout why they do good and what it means to be good.

00:27 Sharon Tewksbury-Bloom: Hello,I’m your host, Sharon Tewksbury-Bloom. My guest today is Becky Daggett. Beckydirected the very first show that I ever got to have a role in, at our localcommunity theater, Theatrikos. You’ve been hearing a lot about Theatrikos sincemy last guest was Michael Rulon. Becky and Michael were also co-directors ofthe last show that I got to be a part of, Legend of Georgia McBride, and I justlove volunteering with Becky, especially at the theater. I’ve also known herthrough various different organizations. As you’ll hear in this episode, Beckyhas been involved across the spectrum of different types of organizations inour community here in Flagstaff, Arizona. We will talk about it, but in caseit’s unclear, Becky Daggett is currently running for elected office as CityCouncil member for Flagstaff, Arizona. She has previously worked in nonprofitleadership for organizations such as Friends of Flagstaff’s Future, FlagstaffFamily Food Center, Flagstaff Arts Council. She was also the executive directorof the Flagstaff Arts and Leadership Academy, which is a public charter schoolthat we talked about way back in Episode 16 with Deidre Crawley. Currently,Becky is the manager of a campaign called Outlaw Dirty Money, which is workingto add a constitutional amendment to the 2020 ballot in Arizona.

01:52 ST: You can see why I wantedto interview her. So let’s jump into it. As with many of my guests, I startedby asking her if she was an active helper as a kid.

02:04 Becky Daggett: We would do oddjobs for people. Well, actually, we went door-to-door and we offered to do oddjobs, and I think people gave us money just to make us go away.

02:16 ST: Just to clarify, you weredoing odd jobs in order to then earn money to give to the Humane Society?

02:22 BD: Correct.

02:23 ST: Nice, we did somethingsimilar in college, which we called… Which I came up with, calledRent-A-Rugger.

02:29 BD: Yeah?

02:30 ST: ‘Cause I played rugby incollege. And so that was our fundraising strategy, was we made ourselvesavailable to clean out people’s garages and pick up firewood and do otherthings.

02:41 BD: And did they take you upon it, or did they just give you money?

02:44 ST: They did, because, unlikea precocious child, we were 20, very strong young women who were capable ofdoing lots of heavy labor.

02:53 BD: Yeah, I was just cute. Mymom took me into the Humane Society to give them the money that we raised, andthey thought it was so cute that their community outreach person… They usedto have, and I don’t know if they still do, but they used to have a weeklytelevision show called Pets On Parade, and they had me come on that with a hugecheck that they made, and I gave it to her on air on pets on parade.

03:21 ST: That’s amazing.

03:21 BD: Yeah, that was kind of…It was unexpected. I just thought I’d be raising money and give it to them.

03:29 ST: Did it affect how you feltabout doing good when you became a promotional opportunity?

03:41 BD: [laughter] I didn’treally… I don’t know that it even really phased me, because this friend ofmine, I called her Maychon, her name is Mary, and she grew up in Flagstaff. Wedid all kinds of things to raise money for different causes, when we were bothin middle school. We started a dance studio in our garage in Mountain Air andtaught tap and ballet and jazz to little children. And muscular dystrophy.Wallace and Ladmo was a show, they would have kids do carnivals and dodifferent things to raise money to research muscular dystrophy, and we wouldhold carnivals.

04:30 ST: You weren’t just lookingfor your next chance to be on TV? [chuckle]

04:34 BD: No. No, no, no. Well, Idid go on the Wallace and Ladmo Show twice, but that wasn’t why I did it. Ipromise you. [laughter] In fact, I was really uncomfortable being on TV. NowI’m all self-conscious and I think my face is getting red.

04:57 ST: I was gonna say, are youjust remembering now that you were self-conscious?

[laughter]

05:03 ST: Well, I’s interesting,’cause I was actually just recently talking to some college students about whatit meant to do good, and can companies do good? If the company is getting goodbrand recognition out of it, does it still count as doing good? Are there anyethical concerns about having them come and do some charity work and then usingit to promote their brand. And it was fascinating, ’cause the kids definitelysplit half down the middle around which ones were like, “If it’s good thenit’s good. And we might as well get people to use whatever resources they have,as long as the outcome is good. The ends justify the means”. And thenothers were like, “No, if it’s not coming from a fully authentic place ofdoing good with no extra incentives then, poison the well of goodness.”

[chuckle]

06:00 BD: It’s interesting. I workedfor Flagstaff Family Food Center and Kenny Construction gives, I don’t know ifthey still do, but they used to give their employees a couple of hours off aweek to go and volunteer. From the standpoint of the food center, I feel likewe took advantage of that. Not take advantage, but I would take their pictureand we would talk about them on social media but I’m confident that that’s notwhy…

06:31 ST: You would leverage thatopportunity. [chuckle]

06:33 BD: Exactly, exactly. But Iknow that their employees went there because they just believed in the causeand they enjoyed volunteering there. But the big corporate events whereeveryone’s wearing the t-shirt and they’re…

06:48 ST: And they’re paying thewall for the 12th time.

06:50 BD: I think photo-opopportunities are… That gets into the questionable range.

06:56 ST: I wasn’t really thinkingthat 12-year-old you was…

[laughter]

07:00 ST: Just to clarify.

07:01 BD: I know, I come on thispodcast and then I’m defending all of my…

07:03 ST: Publicity hound.

07:04 BD: Adolescent. [chuckle]

07:06 ST: It was all for this futurerun for City Council.

07:10 BD: I gotta find that video.

07:14 ST: Though I am curious aboutthe fact that it had to do with animals, and I know that seems like it’s been aconsistent thread of things that you’ve had a passion for. So, do you rememberhow your awareness or care for helping the critters originated?

07:29 BD: I think it was a mixtureof my natural personality and just what I was drawn to, and my mom had a bigheart. And I would often come home with stray dogs, cats. I know she wasn’texcited about that but she would help me find a home for them, or sometimes wekept them.

07:50 ST: It’s interesting, ’cause Ifind that a lot of the people who have learned to help in some way, to themit’s like, “Well what else could I have done? Like, I had to dosomething”. And then, it’s interesting when you do find people who found away to not help in that way. [chuckle] Like even with you bringing home thestrays, like I had a cat that I was feeding at the bus stop, it was a straycat. But we left it there. [chuckle] We kept beating it at the bus stop andthen eventually it started literally following me home. It would walk from thebus stop to my house, and then we were allowed to start feeding it in thegarage. And then… [chuckle]

08:32 BD: Did you keep it?

08:33 ST: It eventually moved in inretirement, with its partner. So we had Lucky and then Oreo. But it wasdefinitely… There were years and years there where it still was an outdoorstray cat, but we were one of the people feeding it in the neighborhood.

08:52 BD: Interesting. When I wouldcome up to Flagstaff on the weekends and my friend Machon was here, we wouldget together and roam the streets and the forests of Mountain Air and we werelike the pied pipers of dogs, because we would just gather this bunch of dogsbehind us, and we would… And the dogs would like hang out at my house overthe weekend, I don’t know where their people were, but there was one dog namedYorick, I even remember his name, who would show up at my house on theweekends, waiting for Machon and I to get there and play with him.

09:32 ST: Was that a name you gavehim or did he have a tag so he had a…

09:33 BD: No. Yeah. Well, I don’tknow that he had a tag. I think that some other neighborhood kid just told ushis name was Yorick. So, maybe his name was Yorick, I don’t know.

09:46 ST: He was known as Yorick, tosome of us.

[laughter]

09:52 ST: So, your mom wasn’t the onebringing the pets into the house?

09:55 BD: Uh-uh.

09:57 ST: You were the Pied Piper ofpets.

10:00 BD: Yes.

10:00 ST: But she was the pushoverwho let you keep them.

10:04 BD: Yes. Yes. Yeah, my mom wasvery sweet that way. My mom was a softy when it came to hard-luck cases.

10:16 ST: Were there other ways thatthat showed up in your life growing up?

10:21 BD: Yes. She was the personwho other people in the neighborhood came to when there was a problem. Iremember one of my neighbors, some young woman that they knew, showed up attheir house. She had run away from home, and I can’t even remember where shelived, but I remember my mom taking her shopping for clothes and then buyingher a bus ticket back to where she had run away from. I don’t even know how mymom came in contact with that young woman, I guess the neighbor said,“Hey, she showed up at our house,” or, I don’t know. So, yeah, my momwas a big softy in that way.

11:01 ST: So, switching gears for aminute, in the last, let’s say, five years, ’cause I know you are involved inso many different things. What are one or two of the things that you feel likeyou’ve gotten the most joy out of being involved in?

11:17 BD: For the past couple ofyears, and currently, I read to kids at Killip Elementary, and I would say thatthat is the thing that brings me joy. Man, like laughing with a classroom fullof kids, I think that’s the best thing ever.

11:38 ST: Are there any particularmoments that stand out to you from that?

11:42 BD: Yeah, there’s one just theother day. I have this book called The Book With No Words.

11:47 ST: I love it.

11:48 BD: I mean, The Book With NoPictures. Yeah. So, it makes you say all kinds of funny things and make faces.And I was reading it to a first grade class, and they were on the groundrolling around laughing. And one little kid, who must have heard this, said tohim many times, said, “This is getting out of hand”, as he’sgiggling. Like, “That’s right, it is getting out of hand. It’s a awesome.”

12:14 ST: “And I’m lettingit”.

[laughter]

12:14 ST: “I’m taking it up to11”.

[chuckle]

12:21 ST: Was there anything inreading to kids that came up that surprised you?

12:25 BD: Looking back, I don’t knowwhy it surprised me but I would, at the end of each semester, I would purchasea bunch of books, a selection of books and then let the kids select one forthemselves to take home, and discovered that for a lot of the kids that theydidn’t have books at home. And so this might be their first and only book thatthey’re taking home, and that surprised me. And also how excited they were toget a book. I remember this one little girl just clutched it to her chest andsaid, “This is for me and I get to keep it?” And I was just like,“Oh, I’m gonna cry. I gotta go.”

13:08 ST: So, I’m curious, becauseyou have a unique perspective having worked in different issue areas. So,having done things with animals, with the environment, with humans, both kidsand adults, in the political realm. What am I missing here? [chuckle] All theother things. Oh, and in the arts. And in the arts.

13:34 BD: Oh, yeah, there’s that.

13:35 ST: Yes. So I’m curiousbecause I think of those particularly from a volunteering’s perspective, orfrom a trying to recruit other people to get involved perspective, as beingquite different in a lot of ways, I’m curious what you see as the similaritiesand the differences when you’re in these different sectors.

13:57 BD: Well, I think a commonthread might be just caring, just caring. So, through my work with Friends ofFlagstaff’s future, caring about special open areas that were really in dangerof being sold and developed and the care about the urban trail system and whatthat lends to this community. So, with growth management, just recognizing thatwithout some kind of planning and just left to itself, a place that you lovecan become unrecognizable if you are not working to keep it something that youlove and recognize. And then I went to the city and worked in economicdevelopment, I had always been a supporter of local businesses. And so to getto know… I mean, that was so exciting, to get to know what was inside some ofthe buildings in town. So, not retail stores but other businesses that aredoing other things that I had no idea that they were doing. And meeting thesepeople who started these companies from the ground up and who were employingpeople, and so caring about their future and caring that they were able to stayin business and hopefully grow.

15:24 BD: I think it doesn’tautomatically make sense but somehow I made it make sense. Then I go intoeducation and work with teenagers and run a school which was so completelydifferent than anything I had done before. It’s like non-profit management onsteroids. From there to the Flagstaff Family Food Center and the Flagstaff ArtsCouncil, Grand Canyon Trust. A common theme is that everything that I did wasin service to what I saw as a higher purpose, something that I really believedin. I don’t think, since I’ve been a teenager that I’ve had a job where it wasjust a job and I just went in and I did my job and I went home. I’ve oftenwished for a job like that, that I could just leave at the office door and thencome home and not think about it but…

16:24 ST: But you wouldn’t be.

16:26 BD: No, I’ve just never beendrawn.

16:27 ST: Even if, like, organizedthe thing on the side. [chuckle]

16:31 BD: I’ve never been drawn tostuff that I don’t feel passionate about.

16:36 ST: Yeah.

16:36 BD: Yeah, if I had a coffeeshop, I would have kittens in it. Which I’ve thought about often.

16:43 ST: [chuckle] There was awhole movement for a while when social enterprises was really picking up as atrend, where libraries were getting coffee shops that were a social enterpriseto help get people in job skills and do other things.

16:56 BD: I could see me doingsomething like that.

16:58 ST: Yeah. Well it’sinteresting, because here I am going back into the silos and telling you thatall of these are separate entities, and yet it’s not really how I think of it.I think of always from the community as a connected whole. I love this term andI’d love to study it more, of the idea of network weaving. How do weintentionally weave and strengthen the weave of the networks that create thefabric of the community?

17:26 BD: Oh, I love that.

17:27 ST: Yeah.

17:28 BD: Where did you first hearthat?

17:29 ST: I don’t know, but I followI think a LinkedIn page on network weaving and I’ve read a couple of booksabout it. It kind of is also related to the asset-based community developmentmovement. It also relates to this tech term of “the network effect,”which is like if you’re trying to start a social network online or even just asoftware business. Your value, and in their case they’re thinking the actualfor-profit value of the company increases the greater the network is and themore connected nodes within the network. So like a new… That’s why it’s sohard now to have a new social media platform actually gain any strength, isbecause we have certain ones that have become entrenched and we may not likethem all that well but they have the volume and the connectedness that makesthe network valuable. But I think that’s fascinating from the communitybuilding side too. If you were thinking of the same thing of trying to createthe network effect of, how do we intentionally connect all these differentnon-profits and community entities in a way that strengthens the overall wholeand increases the overall value?

18:52 BD: I love that. You’reblowing my mind. [chuckle]

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19:01 ST: Just a quick break toremind you that the show notes for today’s episode are available atdogoodbegoodshow.com, including a full transcript of the episode and links toanything that we’ve mentioned today. You can also join the conversation aboutthe show in our Facebook page, facebook.com/dogoodbegoodshow. If you havequestions or suggestions for me about how to improve the show or possibleguests, you can contact me directly at [email protected], that’[email protected]. As we rejoin the conversation, we transition totalking about how Becky’s varied career inspired her to run for politicaloffice.

19:48 ST: Is that part of why youdecided to run for office, because of your experience in these various places?And then how does that impact what you’re hoping to do and what kind of changeyou’re hoping to effect as a elected official?

20:04 BD: It definitely did. I juststarted thinking about all the different things that I’ve been involved in andall the ways that I think that the city needs more attention paid to it. Andthen also currently I’m working for Outlaw Dirty Money. And so being backinvolved in politics and how I love it, I thought, “Maybe I shouldrun.” Because I never thought that I would run, because I was always theperson who was pushing the elected person to get something done and I justnever thought that I wanted to be that person on the other side. But now I knowthat I have all of these skills from all these different areas and I see the communityfrom a 360 vantage point and can take all of those perspectives intoconsideration when making policy.

21:08 ST: So, pivoting slightly,partly ’cause I was just listening to a podcast about creative place making,and since you worked with the arts and you have your involvement with theater,I’m curious how you see the space for arts and cultural organizations beingpart of things like economic development and responding to climate change.

21:33 BD: It’s like you read mywebsite.

21:37 ST: I actually didn’t.

[laughter]

21:41 BD: Whether people know me ordon’t know me, let me say this, I’m a huge supporter of arts and culture of alltypes, for all ages, in all its forms. Also, having been in economicdevelopment and always having that mindset of, “How can we creatively doeconomic development? Not like it’s done in other places, maybe taking goodideas from other places, but how can we do it creatively here?” And Ireally think we’re missing an opportunity to use arts and culture as aneconomic tool, because it’s already demonstrated itself to be an economicdriver, we just don’t recognize it as that. We tend to see arts and culture askind of a frivolous afterthought, or like the icing on the cake. And I thinkthat Flagstaff is positioned to make it a focal point for economic developmentefforts.

22:45 ST: Yeah. On the podcast I waslistening to where they interviewed one of the people who works at ArtPlace,which is a program I’ve followed for a while, but they were talking about acity that had created an Artist-in-Residence position within the citygovernment. And the Artists-in-Residence was brought in to all different typesof meetings and project planning they were doing, to basically just see ifthere was a way they could lend their artistic perspective to it. And one ofthe ones that they ended up doing was that they were struggling of gettingenough community input on things like planning and zoning, and just general,“Where should we put a street?”, that kind of stuff. And theyalways… You typically do all the same things, you send out an electronicsurvey, you maybe have a public meeting that the same five people attend.

[chuckle]

23:40 ST: And they’re tired of itand they’re like, “We’re not actually hearing from the people who will beaffected by this.” So she came up with this idea that they converted anold truck into a popsicle truck and took it out to the neighborhoods that weregonna be affected. And they had literal popsicles, they weren’t bait andswitching people.

[chuckle]

24:01 ST: So people got popsicles,but while they had the popsicle they said, “Would you mind answering justthese three questions about a project that’s coming to your neighborhood?”And so it was a chance for them to have this positive interaction with peoplein the community.

24:15 BD: And connect with people,possibly for the longer term, that they hadn’t been connecting with.

24:21 ST: And if it’s a popsicle youcould literally print the website or something on the popsicle stick. So ifthey wanted to… [chuckle]

24:28 BD: That is awesome.

24:28 ST: Keep involved they wouldknow where to go.

24:31 BD: Oh, I love that.

24:31 ST: I know, right? That got meall energized again just thinking about, “There’s so many creativepossibilities that we’re not even thinking about.” Is there anything inparticular from either your work with the Arts Council or your volunteering intheater where you directly got an idea or took a method that works in thatspace and brought it into a completely different space?

24:57 BD: I was invited to direct acouple of mini performances at a criminal justice conference. So these werejudges and police officers and probation officers, it was just a mix of people.And a writer met with individuals in our community who had had some interactionwith the criminal justice system, and she wrote short plays based on theirexperiences. So then what I did was I found actors to come in and play thoseparts. And the people in the audience didn’t know that they were actors, untilwe eventually told them. But they just got up and talked about a reason whymaybe they offended a second time or something that they learned after beingincarcerated, or just something about their life that led them to have thatinteraction with criminal justice. I know that at least for the people that Iheard from at that conference, it was really impactful.

26:09 ST: That’s awesome. I kind ofwanna steal that idea for another event I’m doing in May.

26:14 BD: Go ahead. I didn’t come upwith it.

26:16 ST: Well, I was actuallyalready thinking something similar. I’ve been thinking about like, “How doI not only give people an experience but also reflect back to them what’shappening in their own organization or with the people they work with, thatthey might not be seeing?” Or the power dynamics create a situation, whichit sounds like that was happening in the criminal justice scenario. They neverwould have necessarily gotten to hear those words in that way if you had askedpeople to come in and tell it directly, whereas because you had this layer offilter in between and you were able to then have actors come in, there isn’tthat actual power dynamic happening.

27:00 BD: Yes.

27:00 ST: Yeah. And there weren’trisks to the people.

27:02 BD: Right. No one ever knew.

27:03 ST: And that would happen in alarge organization too, where they say they wanna know how the frontlineemployees feel about this new direction they’re going in as an organization,but it’s so hard for them to get an actual accurate hearing of that becauseit’s like that old organizational science thing where people are affected…People who are being observed are affected by the fact they’re being observed,so you can’t get the actual information. Does that make sense?

27:35 BD: Yes. Absolutely.

27:36 ST: Okay.

27:37 BD: And you know what, you’rekind of describing and I did a workshop, I took a workshop, at Theatrikostaught by Moan Hen’s mom, who is world-renowned in Playback Theatre. Andessentially what that is, well, what this workshop is, I’m no expert in this,but what we would do is describe events in our lives to another person or to agroup, and it didn’t have to be an emotional experience. It could be, “Iwent to the store and this is what happened.” And then we would do exercisesto play that back to the person. And it got emotional because… Well, just thestories that people were telling, even if on the face they didn’t seem thatemotional, I think seeing it played back to them, seeing someone else play outyour story was very impactful.

28:39 ST: The podcast is called“Do Good, Be Good”, what does it mean to you to be good?

28:44 BD: Just to be kind, and tohave good motives. To live your life in a way where you’re not trying to getone over on someone, you’re just living your life out to help other people andto enjoy your life so that you can demonstrate to other people some joy inlife.

29:10 ST: I hope you enjoyed myconversation with Becky. Thank you for listening to “Do Good, BeGood”. For show notes on all of our episodes visit dogoodbegoodshow.com.Thank you, Becky, for coming to my home studio to record and share your story.Today’s episode was edited, produced, and everything else by me, SharonTewksbury-Bloom. Don’t forget you can always subscribe for free to this show inany podcast app of choice, be that Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, any ofthem that you like. You can just click the button to subscribe and you’ll geteach episode as soon as it is released. Music in this episode is Bathed in FineDust by Andy G. Cohen, released under Creative Commons AttributionInternational License, and discovered in the Free Music Archive. Until nextweek, this is Sharon Tewksbury-Bloom signing off.

[music]

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