Compassion in Action
Video

Compassion in Action

Ellen Krug and Jerome Evans
Bottomless Coffee, 2024
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Editorial Rating

9

getAbstract Rating

  • Applicable
  • Eloquent
  • Inspiring

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In this Bottomless Coffee video interview with host Jerome Evans, attorney and inclusion advocate Ellen Krug explains the value of shared human experiences. Instead of lumping people into defined categories – black and white, old and young – she urges getting to know them as individuals with whom you have a lot in common – work, kids, pets, hope for the future. Krug, a transgender woman, explains that her deep voice startles people at first, until they get to know her by stepping into the gray area – beyond black and white categorization – of mutual concerns. That’s inclusion, she says, and it rests on recognizing that everyone matters.

Summary

Inclusivity recognizes that everyone matters.

In 1966, the late US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. gave a fiercely anti-Apartheid speech at Cape Town University in South Africa. In the speech, called “Ripples of Hope,” Bobby Kennedy argued that individual ripples of courage and bravery can create a river of hope and change. In that spirit, attorney, inclusion expert, and radio host Ellen Krug named her popular newsletter The Ripple.

Krug embraces inclusion as someone who has fought for it. Although she has faced many challenges as a transgender woman, she advocates for and believes in fundamental human goodness. As a frequent public speaker and author, she hopes to be an agent of the hope Kennedy promised. Krug explains that inclusion isn’t just about feeling as if you belong somewhere, because you can belong somewhere and still be discriminated against. It doesn’t rest on race, gender, age, sexual orientation, or religion. Inclusion comes from feeling like you matter to other people and connect with them on a fundamentally human level.

“Gray area thinking” matters; not everything is black or white.

People tend to categorize...

About the Speakers

Ellen Krug is an attorney, a frequent lecturer on inclusion, and the host of LE 2.0, a radio interview show launched in 2017 and available on Minnesota’s AM 9:50 website. She is the author of Getting to Ellen: A Memoir about Love, Honesty, and Gender Change; Being Ellen: A Second Chance at Life; and the Ripple newsletter. Her Lavender magazine column, Skirting the Issues, received a Gold Medal Award for Excellence from the Minnesota Magazine and Publishing Association. Writer and activist Jerome Evans hosts Bottomless Coffee and The Antiracist Agenda.

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