Massive Systemic Change

29/07/2026

A politician who opposes your cause is politics.

A government seeking the authority to decide whether your organization exists is something else entirely.

The Trump administration is pursuing the power to revoke tax-exempt status from organizations it labels ideological enemies. Justin Foster names the threshold being crossed, and what it asks of nonprofit leaders who have spent their careers preparing for funding threats instead of existential ones.

Ninety seconds from Justin Foster, worth hearing before your next board conversation about staying off the radar.

Full article and free subscription → https://substack.com//note/c-285588269

28/07/2026

"The majority of women in this world believe that the basic operating system of humanity is men and women loving each other." — Jane Evans

That belief is the whole argument. Fear of revenge assumes women want the patriarchy's methods under new management. Jane says women want something older than that. Egalitarian. Built on care for everybody in the pod.

Which is why she teaches a subversive approach: go around it, laugh at it, love it to death. Confrontation speaks the patriarchy's native language.

New episode of The Massive Change Show with Jane Evans, founder of The Seventh Tribe. https://open.substack.com/pub/makingitmassive/p/jane-evans-on-loving-the-patriarchy

El abrazo de amor de El universo, la tierra (México), Yo, Diego y el señor Xólotl - Frida Kahlo, 1949.

27/07/2026

In this episode, Jane Evans opens by brilliantly framing three things: the patriarchy is only 1.3% of human history, what was created by humans can be ended by humans, and the women to end it are here right now.

For 40,000 years before Hammurabi carved his laws into stone in 1792 BCE and made women the property of men, civilization ran on women’s inventions: brewing that made water drinkable, then agriculture, then the trade and cities that followed.
The women to end it are the matriarchs. Not a mother or a grandmother, but the most senior women present in a power structure. For the first time in history, women occupy positions of power their ancestors never could.

The 7th Tribe is the place she built for matriarchs to gather and organize. She made it off-platform because the algorithms bury midlife women, and she has proof. In early 2025, the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to drop hundreds of words tied to women, race, and DEI. Jane built a post out of those banned words, then coordinated an experiment: several people posted the same content at the same moment. She reached 8% of her audience. A man in the group reached 143% of his.

Her method for taking the patriarchy apart is heretical. You love it to death, because confrontation is itself a patriarchal move. She points to a 2000 UCLA study that found a third response to threat beyond fight or flight: tend and befriend. Loving the patriarchy to death is tend and befriend applied to power. You don’t meet the threat head-on, because force is the patriarchy’s home turf. You disarm it instead, get close, befriend it, and change it from the inside.

Key Takeaways

▪ Only two species go through menopause: humans and whales.

▪ A woman over 50 with a partner and two children has direct loving influence over 120% of the population.

▪ Skip the head-on fight with powerful men and ask them about their legacy.

▪ One nonviolent protest any woman can run: stop saying Israel and call it the Holy Land, because the Holy Land belongs to everyone.

▪ Midlife women feel when something is wrong before they can explain why, and Jane treats that intuition as a reason to act.

🎥 Full episode at https://open.spotify.com/episode/5u4xen73yyQ0gQPBuCUdpZ?si=-kGUzHfXR

Justin Foster Virginia Lacayo

23/06/2026

The research is settled: the more kinds of people on a team, the better the work.

Cat Howland on why diverse teams produce stronger results, and how the sharpest companies build equity behind it, from yearly pay reviews to benchmarking across levels.

This is one clip from a much bigger conversation. Hear the full episode with Dr. Virginia Lacayo and Justin Foster at https://open.substack.com/pub/makingitmassive/p/cat-howland-on-embedding-humanity

19/06/2026

Culture lives at the top. Leaders own it, model it, and answer for it. Handing it to HR and walking away builds the human doings kind by default.

The human beings kind asks more of leadership and gives more back: people who stay, who grow, who do their best work.

Cat Howland joins Dr. Virginia Lacayo and Justin Foster on this week's Massive Change Show.

🎙Catch the full conversation here : https://open.substack.com/pub/makingitmassive/p/cat-howland-on-embedding-humanity

- Alice Neel, Pat Whalen, 1935.

18/06/2026

Justin Foster and Virginia Lacayo sit down with Cat Howland, a communications strategist who has spent fifteen years changing companies from the inside, where leaders make the calls, and someone has to write the words. Her distinction is simple enough for a sticky note and subversive enough to rattle an earnings call: some workplaces are built for human doings, and some are built for human beings. The first wants you to behave like a robot who never has a doctor’s appointment or a family to tend. The second sees the person, lets them thrive, and the business is stronger as a result.

Cat is a quieter sort of system shaker. Her clients are CEOs, HR leaders, and comms teams. She's there to help them communicate but she's also there to make sure the employee voice is in the room before the words get written. That shift -upstream, before decisions are locked, is where real change happens. She points to Sam’s Club, where fairer pay and predictable scheduling pushed sales up forty percent and cut turnover by a quarter. Care comes first; results follow.

Justin floats a dairy farmer metaphor: be kind to the cows, and they give more milk. People, he adds, deserve more than a herd, and Cat operates a level above the analogy. One orthodoxy sits under the whole conversation: Milton Friedman’s gospel of shareholder value, the quiet enemy of anyone who wants to treat employees like humans.

In the Second Show, Virginia presses further. Moral clarity opens the door, and skill walks through it; the myth that collective, participatory change costs more time and money runs backward. Compassion, both agree, is systemic. Treat one person as a human being and the effect ripples outward, to their family and to the rest of us.

1. The human doings test: one workplace treats people as output and expects them to pretend the rest of their lives away; the other sees the whole person and builds for the long haul.

2. Care is a profit strategy. At Sam’s Club, fairer pay and predictable scheduling moved sales up forty percent and cut turnover by a quarter. Free coffee and catered lunches sit in a different category.

3. The idiosyncrasy credit: we watch a cruel leader succeed and assume the cruelty is the cause. Adam Grant’s research points the other way: such leaders succeed in spite of how they treat people, and would do better without the cruelty.

4. Leaders own the culture. Wellness apps and Taco Tuesdays sit on top of a system without touching the patterns that produce the culture. Leaders model it from the top, or the job falls to an HR team too small to fix it alone.

5. Change comes one meeting at a time. A middle manager without the CEO’s authority still owns choices about which project or policy gets a more human design. Influence the decision in front of you, and the wins compound.

6. Moral clarity needs skill. Good intentions open the door; leading a whole system through change is a learnable craft, and the belief that participatory change costs more time and money runs backward.

🎧 Listen to the full episode here : https://open.substack.com/pub/makingitmassive/p/cat-howland-on-embedding-humanity

Season 4, Episode 6

30/05/2026

We are wired for comfort. For belonging. For keeping things smooth and feathers unruffled.

Emily Cassel Copeland knows that pull. She also knows what it costs when you follow it.

This is what choosing the other direction looks like from the inside. Season 4, Episode 5 of the Massive Change Show. Full conversation at https://open.substack.com/pub/makingitmassive/p/emily-cassel-copeland-on-why-the?r=2jt9kl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Emily Cassel Virginia Lacayo Justin Foster

28/05/2026

"You're welcome."

That is how Emily Cassel Copeland responded to being called the greatest threat by the Trump administration.

Season 4, Episode 5 of the Massive Change Show goes from that opening to a full argument about redesigning power, building the ethic of care into social structures, and what it costs a business owner to stay quiet versus what it costs everyone else when they do.

Full conversation at https://open.substack.com/pub/makingitmassive/p/emily-cassel-copeland-on-why-the?r=2jt9kl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Emily Cassel Justin Foster Virginia Lacayo

27/05/2026

The word matriarchy makes people uncomfortable.

Usually because they picture patriarchy flipped. Same ladder, different people at the top. Same rules, different winners.

Emily Cassel Copeland says that is the wrong picture entirely. A matriarchal social structure does not invert the logic of dominance. It replaces it. The ethic of care as the organizing principle. The whole design, different.

That conversation is waiting for you. Season 4, Episode 5 of the Massive Change Show. https://open.substack.com/pub/makingitmassive/p/emily-cassel-copeland-on-why-the?r=2jt9kl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Emily Cassel Justin Foster Virginia Lacayo

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26/05/2026

Every so often, an algorithm does something useful. Justin Foster found Emily Copeland on Instagram, watched several of her Reels, and recognized something familiar: a woman with a fiery, articulate, and gloriously unbothered way of saying what most people are still too polite to say out loud.

This episode is what happens when that voice meets Virginia Lacayo 's intersectional leadership lens, and the conversation goes exactly where it needs to.

Emily lays out her big idea: power is a design, not a destiny. Patriarchy and extraction were chosen by someone, somewhere, to preserve a certain status quo, which means they can be unchosen. She offers an alternative she calls the infinite upward spiral: a matriarchal architecture grounded in the ethic of care, where regeneration replaces dominance, and community replaces control.

Key Takeaways

• Power is a design choice. Patriarchy and extraction were chosen by someone, at some point, to preserve something. Emily argues matriarchy is a separate social design entirely; one centered on the ethic of care, with community and regeneration where dominance used to sit. The present moment is an inflection point where redesign is possible for the first time in generations.

• Public education stripped out civic engagement. Emily had to seek out months of fellowship training to learn how government functions at the precinct level. A democracy needs informed, participating citizens, and most Americans were never taught how to participate.

• Youth apathy is a leadership failure. Virginia rejects the lazy critique of millennials and Gen Z. Young people were never taught to self-organize or step into systemic leadership. What comes off as apathy is the absence of role models worth following.

• Community keeps a public voice steady. Emily handles trolls and lost relationships with surprising calm because she has built an inner circle of people who reflect who she is becoming. Virginia adds the second function of community: keeping you accountable to your mission when you start to forget who you are.

•There is a leadership vacuum on the left. Justin points out the absence of a Kelce-Brothers-sized voice that brings civic engagement and leadership together for younger women. Celebrity endorsements from Taylor Swift or Beyoncé move few ordinary voters. Direct engagement moves people.

•Systemic change is the real goal. Virginia’s closing point: when momentum lives in the system instead of in a single leader, the change survives the next election cycle. The fight is against the system that produced MAGA and produced the institutional Democrats who let Roe v. Wade fall.

🎥 Full episode at https://open.spotify.com/episode/2wOiV4WitHn4boyYM3VHOX?si=QaNdwjCkTJGLQqSLWyzA8w