All the Colors Year in Review: The 5 Actions that Marked 2020

This year has been very surprising. This pandemic went everywhere – even to indigenous tribes deep in the Amazon jungle who were able to survive European conquests 500 years ago. Our lives have been altered in ways we can’t even see yet.

I want to share the five most important events of the year for All the Colors. If there’s ever been a year you to do things differently, it’s this one. I am incredibly proud that All the Colors began a new cycle for me this year.

1) Submitting an Outside Business Agreement (OBA)

When the pandemic started my coach asked me a question I thought was ridiculous: Why aren’t you expanding access to financial planning now?

As a financial planner I work with affluent individuals and occasionally do pro bono work through my employer. We do not offer services to people without investments to manage or who cannot afford our multi-thousand dollar annual fee. Plus I was already busy, who’d want to hear from me anyway, and on and on went the reasons I could not do it.

Thankfully my coach saw past all of it. He asked me to:

1. list out why I couldn’t do what I wanted to,
2. think of possible solutions, and
3. share both lists with him

When I submitted the OBA request to my compliance officer to open All the Colors I felt nauseous. Why go through all this work? What did I have to prove? Couldn’t I just do more pro bono work? But I knew I couldn’t. I had to be there for people who were where I had been a decade earlier: utterly overwhelmed around money and completely unaware of where I was in my own money cycle.

I had to be there for people who were where I had been a decade earlier: utterly overwhelmed around money.

As you can probably guess, my firm agreed. I can provide financial education through blogs and workshops. No individual advice or financial products is offered as part of this service, and the only potential fees to be collected are for the reimbursement of materials and expenses related to the delivery of educational content.

Once the OBA was approved I was ecstatic and dreaming about all the writing and workshops I’d create. My blend of mindfulness and money management is scarce. When you add in that I’m a trilingual first-generation immigrant with a CFP^® who has years of recovery work: I’m a full on unicorn. I can serve a portion of the public through All the Colors that is not served today.

2) Calling the Minneapolis Police Department

Shortly after George Floyd was murdered I made a series of phone calls that changed me. I used the tool built by activist Shaun King to leave voicemails for the Minneapolis police department and all the offices that could bring justice to the murder of Mr. Floyd.

During the first message I hesitated and felt scared to make a stand. But by the third message I was FURIOUS. How could they kill him that way? How could this violent officer be in charge of my safety?

That same day I went to my first protest. I began to get more educated on police brutality and the history of racism in the US. I felt the deepest grief. I knew my cycle of indifference, of tacitly agreeing to the status quo was over.

How can I help? What can I do? That’s all that was on my mind. I needed to be part of the solution. To paraphrase the Sufi poet Rumi, “I would not go back to sleep.” All the Colors is how I can bring about change.

I began to get more educated on police brutality and the history of racism in the US. I felt the deepest grief. I knew my cycle of indifference, of tacitly agreeing to the status quo was over.

3) Diving into My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem

Before that phone call my commitment to social justice was theoretical at best. But now that I had a platform through All the Colors I could talk about social justice, the racial wealth gap, and positively affect my community.

Working with people’s deep held beliefs around money is delicate and the last thing I want to do is cause harm. To integrate anti-racism into my work I had to be trained.

I began exploring my own relationship to white body privilege and wrote a piece on colorism for my Quaker community. I got in touch with my own pain to be able to hold space for clients working through theirs. As my coach reminds me, you can only take people where you’ve already gone before.

In this training I am uncovering how deeply I am angered by the racial wealth gap. How it’s created a culture of hostility. How past traumas have been ignored.

We need to be gentle with ourselves as we do money differently. There was a time that my Mexican grandfather was not allowed in restaurants. It’s not just about skin color, but about hierarchy and oppression. I remember that whenever I feel out of place in a white space. The feeling in my body is real. I get to be with it, move through it, and work on change.

Thanks to Mehrsa Baradaran for sharing the history through The Color of Money and to Resmaa Menakem and Karine Bell for showing the way forward through somatic abolitionism. It’s never just about the money. There is so much at work. Together we make healing possible.

4) Creating Money Resilience Workshops

The Money Resilience workshops help others see how resilient they already are, how interconnected we are, and that we don’t have to go through money work (or any work) alone.

So much gratitude to all my friends who joined the first three beta workshops and gave me amazing feedback! The plan is to give this workshop at domestic violence centers, recovery centers, and anywhere were people need to be reminded of how resilient they already are.

The beauty of group work is that as the facilitator I am modeling to others what steps are possible. I do not tell others what steps to take, instead each participant shares what has worked for them. Rather than me being seated as the expert, I empower others to see their own options.

Yes, I have training, knowledge, skills around money, but only you know what the next right step is. My job is to help you chart the seas when it comes to your money as you navigate it.

5) Opening my website

In today’s day and age, if you don’t have a website you’re just dreaming. So I made a website: www.AlltheColors.net. At times it was painful, and it always feels vulnerable. My writing style is so open that sometimes I feel I’m sharing my “dear diary” pages! But hey, if I’m going to invite people to create peace with money, I need to demonstrate how I’ve created peace with it myself.

What’s Next?

Money skills require knowing cycles. Knowing where we’re headed and what we’ve gone through. What feels easy one day, may feel hard the next. What works today, may not work tomorrow, but work again next week.

Building this flexibility into my relationship with money helped me feel capable. I can adapt as money changes. Although this list may seem chronological, really it’s continued self-inquiry. What’s next? I ask the still small voice within me. Sometimes it says rest, other times it reminds me to let my anger flow, other times I can’t hear it. That’s fine. I’m here for all of it, for all the colors in my life.

Although this list may seem chronological, really it’s continued self-inquiry. What’s next? I ask the still small voice within me.

My hope is that this pandemic helps us see how interconnected we are. That it ends a cycle of exploitation and competition that’s hurting our planet and ourselves. That we can honor those who have passed by building a better world. Today I do my part through my work and my community. Thank you for being a part of it.