213 Catalyzing Large-Scale Movements and Waging Justice as an Unapologetic Optimist with Dr. Paul Zeitz, Co-Founder of Brave Movement & Executive Director of Build a Movement | Greater Washington DC DMV Changemaker

Mahan Tavakoli: 

Welcome to Partnering Leadership. I'm really excited to speak to you welcoming Paul Zeitz. Paul is a physician and an award-winning advocate for global justice and human rights with over 35 years of advocacy experience. He is also co-founder of The Brave Movement. He is the executive director of Build A Movement 2022, and co-leader of Breathe With Me Revolution where he co-covens the US National truth, racial healing and transformation movement. Paul has worked for the Obama and Trump administrations from 2014 through 2017. He has experience all around the globe, including fighting malaria in Africa. So I really enjoyed this conversation as Paul talked about his purpose drive for making a difference and how we can all be part of movements that make our communities and our world a better place. 

I'm sure you will enjoy the conversation too. I also love hearing from you. Keep your comments coming. mahan@mahantavakoli.com. There is also a microphone icon on partneringleadership.com. You can leave voice messages for me there. Don't forget to follow the podcast Tuesday conversations with Magnificent Change Makers from the Greater Washington, DC, DMV region, and Thursday Conversations with brilliant global thought leaders. Now here is my conversation with Dr. Paul Zeitz.

Paul Zeitz. Welcome to Partnering Leadership. I'm thrilled to have you in this conversation with me.

Paul Zeitz: Thank you so much, Mahan. I'm glad to be here.

Mahan Tavakoli: Would love to know about your own journey. First starting out with your upbringing, Paul, I ask all of my guests about their upbringing because I believe upbringing has an impact on us, and I know yours has had a significant impact on your life purpose.

What was your upbringing like and how has that impacted you?

Paul Zeitz: That's a complicated question. Thanks for asking. I was raised in a traditional conservative Jewish family. Education was a top priority and family time, family culture was always very important. Neither of my parents went to college. My father owned a steak sandwich and hoagie shop in Philadelphia, so I worked throughout my early childhood to my teens at the hoagie shop on the weekends and supported the family business.

I was the first one that went away to go to college. My sister went to college, but she lived at home. And my family upbringing was tumultuous. I would say. There was a lot of positive things. I had a lot of love. We traveled to Canada. We traveled to Israel. We were adventurous in some ways. And it turned out that there was a lot of dysfunction in a lot of trauma that also was happening at that same time.

Mahan Tavakoli: You are a big advocate for survivors of childhood violence. What was it in your upbringing that caused you to see this as something that you have championed for most of your life?

Paul Zeitz: Yeah, fast forward into my late forties. I was going through a stage in my life where I was confronting some of my unhealthy patterns, my anger and my addictions to food and overeating and work addictions, and I had gotten out of whack a little bit. 

I ended up going into a healing process at George Washington through their weight management center, and I was taking a class on emotional eating cause I knew that I was eating to calm my emotions and I learned about something called the fat dependency syndrome. I was much heavier. I was 70 pounds heavier than I am right now and I was unhappy and I was miserable. And the lecturer explained that some people build an armor of fat around them as a response to trauma.

And it's very common in rape victims like women who have been raped, they end up getting what's called fat dependency syndrome. And I looked at myself and I went, Oh my God, I don't know, there's something going on with me. So, I ended up doing a deep dive work and exploration and it turned out I was having flashbacks at that time, and I was able to piece together a puzzle.

Long story short, it turned out that I am a survivor of sexual violence at the hands of my father. I didn't have conscious memories of that for my whole adult life. I knew there was something messed up with me inside. I had a lot of self hatred. I had a lot of anger. I had a lot of things that were problematic to me that I was aware.

So then at that time, in my late forties I made a commitment to do whatever I could to protect other children, your children, our grandchildren, everyone's children and grandchildren because this is a scourge, it's affecting one out of five girls, one out of six boys at least, those are the statistics that are currently available. 

I think the rates are actually much higher, and it's a universal challenge around the world. So, that is one of the things that I spend a lot of time on right now is ending project sexual grounds. Based on my own experience. Now, as a child, I didn't know about it.

As a young adult, I didn't know about it. I didn't remember all that was happening.

Mahan Tavakoli: It takes some reflection for all of us to understand some of these parts of our lives that have impacted us, and in some cases, as The greater the trauma, the more likely it is to wanna push it away, and it has an impact on our lives, on lives of loved ones. 

So you went through this journey, but one of the things I find inspiring is that you also have built a movement. You are a fan of movements to address the issue. You've taken the pain and the hurt that you had in your life to turn it into a positive movement, to have a positive impact on other people's lives. 

What enabled you to take the pain and their hurt and the suffering and turn it into what can be truly a positive?

Paul Zeitz: That's a deep question. In my professional world during these decades, I'm a physician by training, and then I went into a career in public health and preventive medicine. And as I was working in Africa, for example, on dire health circumstances related to child survival and child death, as well as the HIV-Aids pandemic, I was working as a technocrat within the US government and within agencies that were doing great work doing policy and programs to directly benefit people. 

And it was during that time when I was living in Africa, I realized that working within this system was one option that I had taken for a couple decades, but I realized that sometimes when you step out the bureaucracies, you can position yourself as an advocate on the outside and you can actually advocate for bold and transformational change. 

And I had done that for many years working on global aids, for example, where I had been working inside of USAID and inside of the government of Zambia. Inside of the UN System, unaids, I work for them. It was valuable work. But then as an advocate on the outside, I was able to really build a movement and work as part of a movement and mobilize a large number of stakeholders to call for a transformational response to the AIDS crisis, for example. And it was successful. We were able to get President Bush to launch the emergency plan for AIDS relief.

We also were able to convince the international community to launch a global fund to fight aids, TB and malaria. So billions of dollars started being spent and literally over 45 million lives have been saved over the last couple of decades in that effort, but I was a part of doing advocacy on.

And so, as I have gone forward on my journey, taking the lessons learned from the AIDS movement and the advocacy work that happened in that zone and applying that to this issue, this challenge, the challenge of ending childhood sexual. That is some of the work that I'm doing now, and we have been able to launch something called the Brave Movement. 

And we are brave. We are adult survivors of childhood sexual violence that are stepping up and speaking up and acting out and letting everyone know that we actually have the solutions. We can do prevention, we can do healing, we can implement justice programs to hold perpetrators and institutions accountable, and we can solve this problem

And that is what the brave movement is advancing both here in the United States and around the world.

Mahan Tavakoli: You have launched this series of these movements. You have chosen to act, why?

Paul Zeitz: I think it's more how, right? This is a personal journey that I'm on, and I'm on a spiritual journey. Like I'm always exploring what is my soul's purpose? And as part of that inquiry, I like to ask the question of how can I serve today?

What can I do today to serve others? Sometimes it can say I have to take care of myself, or I have to do something with my wife or my kids. And it could be very domestically oriented, or it could be something local with my local community. My mind, the way I think about things is to really look at what is working and ask the question about how can you take successful small scale either technologies or programmatic models that are working for a small number of people, how can you bring that to global scale? 

Like when I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, I was taught by the Dean of the school at the time was this guy by the name of D.A. Henderson, who has since passed away. But he was the guy that helped lead the global smallpox eradication program. We had a smallpox vaccine and he was part of a movement of people that thought we should get it to everywhere in the world that needed it so that we could eradicate smallpox. And that was the first ever infectious disease that's been eradicated.

So, when I was in my early days learning about public health. It was like, think big, think global. So that's where my work trajectory got launched. During that time I started working on polio eradication and the next thing I worked on was ending global AIDS, 

I don't think that everyone has to work on a macro global level. I do think it's about finding where your passion is and how you wanna serve, and in whatever way your listeners may wanna serve. It could be within yourself, it could be within your family. It could be within your church or your religious organization.

It could be within a school. You could be working with a PTA. There's no right or wrong here. So it's every ripple of action, at whatever level you're deploying your energy, your commitment to serve others. That is the ripple, and that's the movement building that I think is important right now.

Mahan Tavakoli: I love that perspective, Paul, in that even for habit building BJ Fogg talks about this. When we talk about things and we have these huge aspirations, we end up never actually. Taking a step toward it. So whether it is in getting fit or having an impact on the world around us, when we think about these big things, or in some instances, people like you who have made a significant difference, we say That's too much. I can't really do that. 

As opposed to what can I start with myself? What can I start with my small bubble or community and not comparing ourselves to people that have made global transformations possible.

Paul Zeitz: Exactly right. The barriers that stop me are the things that I try to overcome. I think that those barriers can apply to everyone at any level. Endeavor. Like part of it is I get complacent. I get complicit. I act confused, like I don't know what to do. So then I get paralyzed and I can be stuck in those kinds of mind states of complacency or complicity with the status quo. 

I can feel very hopeless and despairing. And so, what I have learned to do is to practice making a commitment. And when I can say, I, Paul Zeitz, am committed to doing whatever I can to end childhood sexual violence, or I, Paul Zeitz, I'm committed doing whatever I can to address the climate emergency. Then I've created a zone of possibility.

And in that zone I can be more courageous. I can be brave. I can be more risk taking, cause I'm committed to it. It's like when you make a commitment, you're throwing yourself off the edge of a cliff and you're flying into, I don't know what that commitment means, and I don't know exactly what I'm gonna do or how that's gonna unfold.

I don't know how that's gonna operate. But I have found it to be a way of generating myself, like I have to generate myself every day. I'm unlike everyone else. Like I read the newspaper, I see what's going on in the world, and it is depressing and scary. And I default into hopelessness and despair. I have laid in my bed and pulled the covers up and just gone I can't take it anymore.

And then the other way of going is the only thing I can control is myself. So I can create practices to generate myself to be a certain way, and I want to be committed and courageous. Then from that place I can be waging justice.

I can be speaking truth to power. I can be bold and I can serve justice for all. My family, we have a mantra that we learned from a guru, Swami Shree Sasha Heranda, who said love all and serve all, so we've tried to bring that into our family and go, how can I generate myself as someone that loves all and serves all and have that view of reality?

Mahan Tavakoli: What a beautiful way to view life. Love all and serve all. Taking that fear and uncertainty and channeling it into the zone of possibility of the impact each and every one of us can have. 

So, what was it in you that caused you to channel some of this into battling global HIV aids?

Paul Zeitz: Yeah, thank you for that question. When I was training as a physician in my medical training that was in the early nineties, I remember very distinctly seeing the first early cases of HIV infection even before we understood what was going on with the virus and I was like, scary cuz it was like young people that were being affected. 

And then, as I went through my training and I decided to focus on public health and preventive medicine, I started working on vaccine preventable diseases cause I had got immersed in that priority during my graduate school and my residency at Johns Hopkins.

I started working on health issues and child survival issues and prevention of diarrhea, prevention of pneumonia for children, the leading killers of children under five vaccine preventable diseases. I spent years and years working on how do we bring cost effective, scalable solutions to scale around the world.

So, sub-Saharan Africa, at that point, they were the furthest behind. So, I became really curious about what's stopping us from saving lives for children under five in Africa? I started traveling and working in Africa then I ended up moving to Zambia in the late nineties and I was there working on child health and child survival then my team and I, we did the first projections of what was gonna happen with hiv aids in Zambia, and we found that one outta five young people were infected in Zambia which was a huge proportion of the population. 

And if you look forward to that, thousands and hundreds of thousands of people were gonna die and that was gonna affect the fabric of the country. We were starting to experience that directly. I was living there at that time and we were directly affected. We didn't have HIV infection, but people who we knew, like my work colleagues would get sick and then a minute later they would be dead 

My secretary, when I was living in Zambia, she read my poetry and liked it. We were close, and we spent a lot of time together then all of a sudden she got sick and my wife and I actually went to her hospital bed and tried to figure out what we could do to provide any kind of support to help her live. She had a little boy the same age as my son, my little kid. 

So, it turned out that we were able to help her get some antifungal medications, but the life saving AIDS medicine that were available in the United States, Europe and Japan at that time were not affordable, we couldn't afford it. So, that was when I had a wake up call, we have these solutions, these drugs that are saving lives all over the global north, why aren't we making them available here? 

And it was that inequity and it was that kind of dissonance between what was possible and what was actually happening. Then I sparked into an advocate. It became unacceptable for me to stay in the system of the bureaucracy or the technocratic solution, the dialogues that I was part of. It was going nowhere fast. The cemeteries were filling up while I was sitting here talking about the problem. 

And so I leaped out of the institutional role that I was programmed to go forward in and became an advocate. Left Africa, came back to Washington, and was able to connect with other advocates and learn advocacy and then realize that, if we raise enough political pressure and we bring the voices of those who are affected from Africa into Washington, then we can actually get resources and expertise and American leadership to help solve this, what seemed at that time, to be an intractable challenge.

Mahan Tavakoli: And You were able to get incredible support and funding from President George W. Bush, something that most people would not have thought possible. 

Paul Zeitz: Exactly. I came back from Africa. I was impassioned with this commitment, to save lives. And that, we had to do something radically different. So I was coming back saying, we need billions for ending aids in Africa.

And literally, peers and people who I had worked with for the decade before, literally laughed at me out of the room. They're like, There's no way we're gonna get billions for that issue when we have all these other things. And I remember that very vividly, and they even joke with me now that they admit that's how they acted because we proved them wrong.

Not me, but our movement, by building a movement. By developing a cross partisan movement where we worked with Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Where we worked with physicians and students and faith-based organizations, civic groups, thought leaders, celebrities, and a whole constellation of actors and stakeholders, we all aligned on, we needed billions of dollars to implement prevention, treatment, and care.

When we figured that out, that formula of alignment and created an agenda that everyone could agree to, then we won.

Mahan Tavakoli: You saw the possibility, Paul, when people thought you were crazy to see that. We can see things that it is the way it is, can't do much about it or. We can make a difference and change the way it is. So, you saw the fact that you could make a change and it is dreamers like you and people that others see as crazy who are able to actually move the needle for significant things to be done. 

When we see significant things, we a lot of times just quote and think about entrepreneurs that have done great things, but there are also great societal things to be done, and that's where your focus has been. 

Now, in doing that, you also had a chance to interact with a lot of incredible people. Would love to know about your opportunity to interact with and learn from Desmond Tutu, being that he was a spiritual mentor to so many people in the world.

What was that experience like?

Paul Zeitz: I was deeply honored and his photo is over my shoulder right here. I feel honored and humbled that I was able to connect with him during his life. He passed earlier this year. And you're right, many people. Living today are being touched by him or were touched by his wisdom and his grace.

And I certainly still feel connected to him in that way. After I had returned from Zambia, I was back in Washington and I had been working on an organization called the Global AIDS Alliance, which was a movement building, catalytic organization.

Through the network I was able to connect with his youngest daughter, Reverend in Po Tutu, who was living in Virginia at the time. And she joined the Global AIDS Alliance as our fiduciary board chair and she served in that role for many years and guided our organizational work and she was able to invite her father to serve as our honorary board chair.

And this was in 2006, 2007, all the way through. I worked with Arch. Tutu until he retired the fourth time, he kept retiring. And he is Paul, I'm really retired this time. It was interesting cuz he and I connected, like he was one of the first people to have an iPhone.

I think the iPhone came out in 2007 and I had a Blackberry, but he had an iPhone. I remember. His messages said I, and he would be involved with us by participating in media calls. If we had a media call with journalists and we were briefing journalists, Arch would come on and he would provide his wisdom and his perspectives to the assembled media.

He would also write op-eds. So, we would help generate an op-ed. And he was very willing to challenge political leaders, based on what was right. He wrote op-eds, holding President Bush accountable but even more interesting when President Obama came in, he would provide a tough nail critique of President Obama and publish it in the USA Today or Washington Post. 

And in his role as honor chair of the Global AIDS Alliance. I remember one example where he did this in USA Today, and he critiqued the President. We heard through, the grapevine, that it upset President Obama at the time. He felt upset about the fact that he was being critiqued by someone who he thought was a mentor of his. 

But Arch was the kind of guy that would speak the truth. Even though he loved Obama and respected him, he also was willing to hold him accountable and I think that was really special. He would respond to my text messages faster than my wife.

I always make that it's like he was on his iPhone. He was a deep inspiration to so many of us and he really walked the talk. He lived his vision in a really profound way.

Mahan Tavakoli: When you do that, you hold everyone around you accountable, most especially the people you love the most and you expect the most from. So that's a great lesson for all of us to learn. 

Now, you have been starting movements to transform and one of the movements that you are venning is the truth racial healing and transformation movement.

What is that about Paul?

Paul Zeitz: Thanks Mahan for asking about that. It's a really important opportunity for Healing America. When I was working in the State Department under Obama, I actually went into the State Department for a few years and friends of mine on the outside, there's this thing that goes on in Washington in particular, where you do inside, outside advocacy.

Sometimes you're on the inside, sometimes you're on the outside, but you have this kind of dexterity to be able to position yourself in either arena, like in the government or advocating towards the government. When I was in the State Department, a bunch of friends of mine were wanting to get President Obama to launch a Truth and Reconciliation Commission like what Desmond Tutu chaired in Sub-Saharan Africa in the post apartheid era. 

And that truth and Reconciliation Commission was like a model because it was able to have people speak the truth. There was some healing that happened and in many expert analysis, it may have contributed to preventing a civil war in South Africa that might have happened in the post-apartheid era. And Arch led that. He was the head of the TRC. It turns out there's 40 countries that have done truth and reconciliation commissions. And so folks in the US felt like we've never really done that for our racial hierarchy and the racial healing that needs to happen here. 

So, after George Floyd was murdered on May 27th 2020 Representative Barbara Lee introduced the bill in Congress calling for a truth commission basically. And I had worked with her office on the AIDS crisis. I was in contact with them and they were like, We need a movement. We need a coalition to get behind this legislation that we introduced. 

And Representative Lee wants to see a truth and healing commission. And she’s looking at several things. One is to hold the federal government accountable for its role in perpetrating systemic racism. That's number one. And racism is basically the idea that there's a hierarchy of human value based on skin color. And we know that our constitution and our government policies and laws and our whole society and our whole culture, even until today, is based on this lie of there being a hierarchy of human value based on skin color.

So this commission that she's proposing, we started building a movement on that. Of course, the George Floyd murder and all that's happened since then, we think that it is creating the enabling environment for something like this to happen. Then, candidate Biden was talking about healing the soul of America and getting at the root cause of the flaw in our society.And this issue of racism and the hierarchy of human value based on skin color is something that we have to dismantle. And that is what the Truth Commission is envisioned to do. 

Since that time, a year and half later, President Biden is not taking action on it yet, unfortunately. However, there is a lot of cities and states that are developing truth and restorative justice programs and activities. For example, the state of Maryland where I am right now, we have Governor Larry Hogan and the State Legislature and the State Assembly here in Maryland, launched and approved the anti-Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission that's operating at the state level. 

So, they're studying the history of racial lynching here in Maryland, and they're convening hearings they're developing policies and programs and there are ripples of it happening. For example, Salisbury, Maryland has launched a truth commission at the local level, to try to do this at the local level. 

So that's the kind of thing that we'd like to see happen across the country where you really dig in, get the truth of what actually happened. You make that available in a public record, and then you work together across the racial divides and come up with solutions for how do we wanna live together and embrace our common humanity.

Mahan Tavakoli: It is important for us to have these conversations and this is something that is important for all of us to address.

Paul Zeitz: It's never been addressed. We have never had a national process of truth, racial healing, and transformation. We have never excavated the truth and understood as a society, how it is playing out even today. 

It's systemically embedded in every aspect of our society and our culture. And as a privileged white person, I have to figure out, why am I on this? I'm on this to be in solidarity, this is part of our common humanity. It's people like me that have to transform. White people have to transform.

And I actually have an African son, we adopted a son in Zambia. I have bi-racial grandchildren. So I feel like it's part of my commitment to them to see if we can create a world where they grow up and their future opportunities are not affected by their skin color. And that is the way it should be.

They should be liberated. They should be free from stigma and racism.

Mahan Tavakoli: That's a beautiful perspective you have and the impact that I have. No doubt you will continue making Paul. Now Paul you are an author having written books of your own, but as listeners reflect on the impact they want to have are there leadership practices or resources you typically find yourself recommending?

Paul Zeitz: So, one resource I would recommend is something called the Social Transformation Project. It is headed up by this guy named Robert Gas and he has a repository of tools and supportive efforts that are available. 

Another leader that I have worked with is Leslie Crutchfield, who's at Georgetown University, and she has written a book about studying social movements best practices and what works and what doesn't work.

I'm an advocate for building movements because I feel like that's how you can bring forward bold and transformational change. 

Mahan Tavakoli: Those are great resources. And Leslie Crutchfield and Georgetown have a great program that is focused on social change. Bill Nove started that he was a co-founder of Porter, No Valley, 

then CEO of A E R P. And he is at Georgetown. I had a conversation with him also, and I'm a big Georgetown McDonough guy myself so I appreciate those recommendations.

Paul, how would the audience find out more about you and connect with you?

Paul Zeitz: Thank you Mahan. You can find out more about me at my website, Dr. Paul Zeitz, drpaulzeitz.org. And also I'm working on the Brave Movement, so you can go to brave movement.org and learn more about that movement as well.

Mahan Tavakoli: Paul wanna end with the fact that you have something called SIPO. You've been diagnosed with SIPO, 

Paul Zeitz: yeah. So thank you. I probably should have started with this earlier, after I wrote my memoir, Waging Justice. I was doing a book tour, and people were asking me questions like, how did you respond to these circumstances in the way that you did?

And as a physician, I have an opportunity and maybe a responsibility to share what I have identified for myself as a syndrome. What I figured out for myself is that I'm affected by something called SIPO. Self-imposed persistent optimism, SIPO, Self-imposed persistent optimism. That is what we talked about earlier when we were discussing, generating myself every day.

I read the news, I get depressed, but then I take a stand. I'm committed, then I become courageous, and then I can be waging justice. So SIPO is highly contagious. Courage and bravery is contagious. So I want to forewarn you and your listeners about that, there's no vaccine, there's no known cure.

Once you are exposed to SIPO, you might be affected by it for the rest of your lives. So CPO is something to be, forewarned about

Mahan Tavakoli: The great news part of it, Paul, is SIPO transmits over zoom also. So now I have CPO and I appreciate that. One of the great points is I do have conversations with leadership book authors and authors that talk about great entrepreneurs and organizations that have been very successful. 

The part of your story that I love is the fact that it is not exclusive just to those entrepreneurs. We need that SIPO, and with that SIPO, we are all able to make a difference and change. You say I'm an unapologetic optimist. I have spent my life tackling some of the greatest challenges facing humanity and overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds. 

Paul Zeitz, thank you for investing. And infecting all of us with SIPO, so we can also work together to overcome insurmountable odds and make a positive difference in our communities and the world .

Thank you so much, Paul Zeitz.

Paul Zeitz: Thank you so much, Mahan. Great to be with you.