May 1, 2025 • 13 mins
What if joy and activism could start with a simple swap? In this episode of Culture Raises US, Grace Harry introduces 'Swap Me' -a community-driveninitiative designed to foster meaningful relationships, reduce mindless consumption, and ignite personal and collective change. Grace shares her journey of shedding materialism, reflecting on how true fulfillment comes from community support and mindful exchange rather than accumulating possessions.The conversation explores the many faces of activism, from everyday choices to systemic change, and highlights the power of small actions in building a more connected, supportive world. Discover how shifting from consumerism to community engagement can spark a revolution of joy and lasting impact.
Key Takeaways
- Swap Me' fosters community and curbs excessive consumption.
- Personal growth often begins with letting go of materialism.
- Community support is vital in a world that often prioritizes individualism.
- Activism can be both bold and quiet-every action counts.
- Relationships and connections matter more than possessions.
- Consumerism can be addictive; shedding it leads to deeper fulfillment.
- The pandemic underscored the need for strong support systems.
- Inner change is as crucial as outer activism for real progress.
- Small, mindful actions can transform lives and communities
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Grace, Harry Todave's guest is a friend of the show,
and it is at the center of what she calls
a revolution of joy. And you know, some weeks ago
she sent me a text of something that she was
working on called swap Me, and I read through it
and I was like, Yo, I love this idea and
I need to do something like this myself because it
(00:26):
was rooted in this notion of purging and I've been
in the season of shedding in general. Not only did
it hit the button of shedding, but it went even
deeper into how this could show up in a very
very impactful and timely way given what we're kind of
dealing with in today's society. But Grace, I want you
to share first the concept of swap Me and the
(00:47):
why behind it.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Well, first of all, I love talking to you. It's
so fun.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
No, it's always so good.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
It's certain people in your life, are you you know
have an alphabet A to Z if most people you're
at B and see or explaining you and I get
in it like Z V. You know, this has been
a very interesting period for me. I shed a life
in twenty seventeen, and when I shed that life, I
had realized that I'd never actually built my own life.
(01:16):
I had built a life of successing, and I was
playing the game based on how I was taught the game.
And when I looked around my life, I had so
much stuff, people, things, validation, objects, consumerism like. I had
so much stuff that I was leaning into for the
value of myself doing this outer work and not going
(01:38):
into inner work. And as soon as I started to
lean into myself, what do I like, how do I feel?
What is my mission? What do I'm proud of in
this life? I realized I get all spiritual people before
who'd done any version of this journey. Getting lighter, getting lighter,
more nimble, more free, more flexible, gave me such a
different feeling in my reality. Amy look at my consumption
(02:02):
as what it is, another version of addiction. So that's
really how this started. It started in this very simple way.
And then I was blessed enough to spend some time
with the Obamas, and our president was talking about how
he uses his brain in a certain way so that
he doesn't focus so much on his clothes and his
(02:23):
other things, and he really creates a space for what
matters to be front and center and that took that
small idea that I'd started cooking for myself on the
road to Yo, what does matter?
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Like?
Speaker 2 (02:34):
What do I need? And as soon as I pulled
that back, I started thinking about my imprint on the
world in terms of what I was providing in what
I was offering, and I realized, I want my offering
to be love and blessings that I've had in insanely
magical fifty years. And now instead of accumulating more stuff,
I want to accumulate relationships. I want to use the gifts,
(02:56):
the skills, the knowledge I have to support other people
at whatever level they are in their life. And it
just got very exciting to me. And then the pandemic
spawned some more ideas. When you saw those a lot
of people in their neighborhoods were taking different procedures. I'm
having a hard time talking to me, and they would
do things like we all saw that there was one
(03:17):
community they were putting different colored paper in the window
for people who needed assistance. I think it was green
for please visit or red for I need help. I'm
not really sure what it was, but that was such
a beautiful thing and it brought me back to a
concept of community, of neighborhood and not just what the
young people call community now or container, but what is
community really? Community is a neighborhood watch. It's making sure
(03:41):
that everyone's good. It's almost like that old drug deal
or mentality of if this is my community, I want
to make sure that everyone in this community is straight.
And that was also for protection, but it was also
that I do a lot of things in this neighborhood
that are complicated, and I want to make sure that
I pay the people back. So all those things brought
me to swap me. Then the biggest part of it
(04:02):
was that I have trained myself to never need anything
from anyone, and as I was starting to learn to
be softer in myself and to learn myself more, I
realized that that was an handicap that I'd built, this
avoidance of actually having to be vulnerable and having to
ask for help. So for my fifty fifth birthday, when
people were calling me because the past fifteen years, I
(04:23):
always host a three day workshop for my birthday of
retreat with healers and experiences. And then finally I was like,
what do I want. I want to not spend another time.
I want to swap for things that I need. And
I also want to make sure people start to understand
it's not just about money. Also, we have services. There
used to be a time where I would come to
your house next door, aster and I would say, do
(04:44):
you have a cup of sugar? Can you help me
with this thing? And we really lost that as we've
become this world that doesn't live near our family, that
doesn't necessarily live near our closest friends, that doesn't even
think of vacation as the people around us. I was thinking, Oh,
want to bring all those to one place and build
an actual community where we support each other, where we
(05:05):
lean into each other for the things we need, and
we ask if there's something that I can offer even
support versus the current community. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Now it's this this this power, it's like this power
of freedom, right and and you know, this shift from
no longer participating in the culture of you know, mindless
consumption where corporations kind of tell us what we need
and what we should desire to now believing in this
(05:37):
power of exchange right, buying, pre owned, gifting, bartering, recycling,
and upcycling is a game changer for a number of
reasons and and this actually led to the next big
idea of thought that you were speaking of that's based
on our modern day revolution, right, that's needed. And then yeh, look, look,
(05:58):
I know the excitement and the notion that we can't
have the same approach as those before us had because
times have change and there's different ways of pushing the
envelope of necessary change. Talk about the power of not
doing through the lens of overconsumption and how that can
help fuel an element of the modern day revolution that's needed.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yes, thank you well. First of all, we live in
a world that we don't like a lot of things
about it, but yet we don't under We don't even
realize that this mountain next to us that smells like
sulfur is a garbage mountain. And there's a company called
the Slow Factory that started going to fashion houses and
bringing Adidas and Chanel and places to see what was
really going on with fast fashion, and that was eye
(06:43):
opening to me. I didn't even realize that we're polluting
our waters. And there's so many negative things that are
happening from that. But at the very base of it
is people right now are scared, and they're feeling hopeless
and hapless, and yet if we do the old play
of marching right, everyone knows who we're coming from with that.
But if we understand that our money is activism, that
(07:03):
we can actually unfund the movement that we're afraid is
happening around us, that if we're not interested. You know,
a couple of years ago, I had this conversation. I
think we talked about this. J C. Penny was most
of their factory labor was prison labor. And I remember
having a conversation with a few people of real note
who have big followings, who could really lead to anny
(07:26):
this and saying, well, all of us just didn't mess
with JC Penny for a week and we demanded that
they don't have prison labor. Well, there you go. And
we're noticing right now that we're living more in a
coupdeta leaning towards a dictatorship than we are in whatever
version of democracy that we came in. And some would
say the country is failing, and I would say, actually,
(07:47):
the company is working exactly as it was designed, so
into the scenario, not in the current vision of what
works for this country. Well, then how do we start
to support ourselves going backwards? How do we build from here,
do that by doing what we had to do by
necessity in the beginning. We support within, we buy within,
we trade within. We don't put our dollars to anything
(08:10):
that is representing a lifestyle that we don't want to
be a part of. So that's the big thing to me.
You know, we saw it in little blips around some
of these boycotts that have happened recently, but we've yet
to really grasp that we actually have that exact power
that if we all just decided that we're not interested
in a world where we're being put in containment camps
(08:31):
or whatever the fears are, will defund the people that
are making that happen. And so a big part of
swap Mee was asking for help myself inner systemic change,
where I was taking this opportunity to speak into my
community and say I have needs, which is another thing
that consumerism really covers up. And we talked about this before.
What happened when we were first emancipated as slaves. The
(08:53):
only ones who were not questioned were the ones that
looked like they were homeowners. That was the beginning of
commercialism genius, you know, cleaning our sneakers and making sure
we look like we have value. Let's learn that on
its head and really look at what value is our value?
If we are being and I'm talking about the world
of people who care right at this moment, it's I'm
(09:13):
not even breaking it down in terms of race. If
we have a caring about the world, we care about
the people around us, and we really have the power
to make the changes that we want to see going
forward and hold the world in kind of a choke
hold until we have what we need and that have
what we feel our children deserve to have going forward.
So there's so much activism in this concept of swap
(09:34):
me from the minutia of a neighborhood, not that neighborhood
app that just scares you and tells you people are
walking around, but really in service to supporting neighborhood watches
and you know, food drives and someone who's who has
a new baby, or someone who lost their job. We
used to bring the meals and we used to take
turns watching people's kids or you know, there's so much
(09:56):
we can do around that. And so activism doesn't have
to be loud, it doesn't have to be a march
or a protest, it could be looking at the parts
of our life that we feel are not working, from
the minutia of even streamlining our closet and not spending
our very last dime on some fashion item, instead having
groups together where we talk about money and we invest
together and we create things together, and then also being
(10:20):
strong and powerful as a united community that says this
green piece of paper is going to support what I want.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Listen, the thing that was punching through when you were
talking about that is this notion of get the vanity
out of your victory and be very intentional and not
worry about how or what it looks like. Right. And
this is a very literal and figurative statement with what
you're talking about, but it also puts me in a
place of you know, so often we go and we
(10:50):
want to try to calm the storm, right, but rather,
can you calm yourself through the storm because the storm
will pass? And what are the things you do or
can do to calm yourself? And I think when you're
talking about this mentality of this modern day revolution or activism,
that feels like it falls right in those notions, right,
(11:11):
what are the things that we can do take a
step back very calmly but very easily do galvanize around
ourselves in the repurposing of things within our own communities
and starving that of the things that we've made who
and what they are. And we see where that's gone,
and now we need to stifle that growth.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
One thousand percent. And I love what you just said
about what we can do, and I love to really
talk about that. There's outer systemic change things we do
together as a community, but that inner systemic change is
so essential. It's essential because if we're getting overwhelmed with fear,
if we're upset, if we can't even see some of
these things in front of us, it's really taking the
(11:56):
time to change the story, change the looping fear into
the story of what we want to experience. And that's
very far fetched for people. But if we were in
a loop of fear and then we said to ourselves,
what can I do? As well stop ourselves and say
what power do I have? What can I do? What
small action can I take today to change not just
(12:19):
the way I feel, but how my family, how this
world is being impacted. I love the way you phrase that.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah, and so you know we're going to have more
of these convos, you know, on a regular basis, because
I think this is so necessary for a number of reasons,
and I think your point of view on these things
is so needed and warranted, and I just want to
thank you for sharing how what some might say is
a simple idea of shedding and repurposing can now also
(12:48):
evolve into something that can be revolutionary from an activism
standpoint of really making the change as necessary. And so
as always, I thank you. I look forward to having
more of these because we are You're going to hear
more from Grace on a regular basis with these amazing
ideas and spirits. So I thank you, thank you, thank you.
Grace, Harry Todave's guest is a friend of the show,
and it is at the center of what she calls
a revolution of joy. And you know, some weeks ago
she sent me a text of something that she was
working on called swap Me, and I read through it
and I was like, Yo, I love this idea and
I need to do something like this myself because it
(00:26):
was rooted in this notion of purging and I've been
in the season of shedding in general. Not only did
it hit the button of shedding, but it went even
deeper into how this could show up in a very
very impactful and timely way given what we're kind of
dealing with in today's society. But Grace, I want you
to share first the concept of swap Me and the
(00:47):
why behind it.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Well, first of all, I love talking to you. It's
so fun.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
No, it's always so good.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
It's certain people in your life, are you you know
have an alphabet A to Z if most people you're
at B and see or explaining you and I get
in it like Z V. You know, this has been
a very interesting period for me. I shed a life
in twenty seventeen, and when I shed that life, I
had realized that I'd never actually built my own life.
(01:16):
I had built a life of successing, and I was
playing the game based on how I was taught the game.
And when I looked around my life, I had so
much stuff, people, things, validation, objects, consumerism like. I had
so much stuff that I was leaning into for the
value of myself doing this outer work and not going
(01:38):
into inner work. And as soon as I started to
lean into myself, what do I like, how do I feel?
What is my mission? What do I'm proud of in
this life? I realized I get all spiritual people before
who'd done any version of this journey. Getting lighter, getting lighter,
more nimble, more free, more flexible, gave me such a
different feeling in my reality. Amy look at my consumption
(02:02):
as what it is, another version of addiction. So that's
really how this started. It started in this very simple way.
And then I was blessed enough to spend some time
with the Obamas, and our president was talking about how
he uses his brain in a certain way so that
he doesn't focus so much on his clothes and his
(02:23):
other things, and he really creates a space for what
matters to be front and center and that took that
small idea that I'd started cooking for myself on the
road to Yo, what does matter?
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Like?
Speaker 2 (02:34):
What do I need? And as soon as I pulled
that back, I started thinking about my imprint on the
world in terms of what I was providing in what
I was offering, and I realized, I want my offering
to be love and blessings that I've had in insanely
magical fifty years. And now instead of accumulating more stuff,
I want to accumulate relationships. I want to use the gifts,
(02:56):
the skills, the knowledge I have to support other people
at whatever level they are in their life. And it
just got very exciting to me. And then the pandemic
spawned some more ideas. When you saw those a lot
of people in their neighborhoods were taking different procedures. I'm
having a hard time talking to me, and they would
do things like we all saw that there was one
(03:17):
community they were putting different colored paper in the window
for people who needed assistance. I think it was green
for please visit or red for I need help. I'm
not really sure what it was, but that was such
a beautiful thing and it brought me back to a
concept of community, of neighborhood and not just what the
young people call community now or container, but what is
community really? Community is a neighborhood watch. It's making sure
(03:41):
that everyone's good. It's almost like that old drug deal
or mentality of if this is my community, I want
to make sure that everyone in this community is straight.
And that was also for protection, but it was also
that I do a lot of things in this neighborhood
that are complicated, and I want to make sure that
I pay the people back. So all those things brought
me to swap me. Then the biggest part of it
(04:02):
was that I have trained myself to never need anything
from anyone, and as I was starting to learn to
be softer in myself and to learn myself more, I
realized that that was an handicap that I'd built, this
avoidance of actually having to be vulnerable and having to
ask for help. So for my fifty fifth birthday, when
people were calling me because the past fifteen years, I
(04:23):
always host a three day workshop for my birthday of
retreat with healers and experiences. And then finally I was like,
what do I want. I want to not spend another time.
I want to swap for things that I need. And
I also want to make sure people start to understand
it's not just about money. Also, we have services. There
used to be a time where I would come to
your house next door, aster and I would say, do
(04:44):
you have a cup of sugar? Can you help me
with this thing? And we really lost that as we've
become this world that doesn't live near our family, that
doesn't necessarily live near our closest friends, that doesn't even
think of vacation as the people around us. I was thinking, Oh,
want to bring all those to one place and build
an actual community where we support each other, where we
(05:05):
lean into each other for the things we need, and
we ask if there's something that I can offer even
support versus the current community. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (05:15):
Now it's this this this power, it's like this power
of freedom, right and and you know, this shift from
no longer participating in the culture of you know, mindless
consumption where corporations kind of tell us what we need
and what we should desire to now believing in this
(05:37):
power of exchange right, buying, pre owned, gifting, bartering, recycling,
and upcycling is a game changer for a number of
reasons and and this actually led to the next big
idea of thought that you were speaking of that's based
on our modern day revolution, right, that's needed. And then yeh, look, look,
(05:58):
I know the excitement and the notion that we can't
have the same approach as those before us had because
times have change and there's different ways of pushing the
envelope of necessary change. Talk about the power of not
doing through the lens of overconsumption and how that can
help fuel an element of the modern day revolution that's needed.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
Yes, thank you well. First of all, we live in
a world that we don't like a lot of things
about it, but yet we don't under We don't even
realize that this mountain next to us that smells like
sulfur is a garbage mountain. And there's a company called
the Slow Factory that started going to fashion houses and
bringing Adidas and Chanel and places to see what was
really going on with fast fashion, and that was eye
(06:43):
opening to me. I didn't even realize that we're polluting
our waters. And there's so many negative things that are
happening from that. But at the very base of it
is people right now are scared, and they're feeling hopeless
and hapless, and yet if we do the old play
of marching right, everyone knows who we're coming from with that.
But if we understand that our money is activism, that
(07:03):
we can actually unfund the movement that we're afraid is
happening around us, that if we're not interested. You know,
a couple of years ago, I had this conversation. I
think we talked about this. J C. Penny was most
of their factory labor was prison labor. And I remember
having a conversation with a few people of real note
who have big followings, who could really lead to anny
(07:26):
this and saying, well, all of us just didn't mess
with JC Penny for a week and we demanded that
they don't have prison labor. Well, there you go. And
we're noticing right now that we're living more in a
coupdeta leaning towards a dictatorship than we are in whatever
version of democracy that we came in. And some would
say the country is failing, and I would say, actually,
(07:47):
the company is working exactly as it was designed, so
into the scenario, not in the current vision of what
works for this country. Well, then how do we start
to support ourselves going backwards? How do we build from here,
do that by doing what we had to do by
necessity in the beginning. We support within, we buy within,
we trade within. We don't put our dollars to anything
(08:10):
that is representing a lifestyle that we don't want to
be a part of. So that's the big thing to me.
You know, we saw it in little blips around some
of these boycotts that have happened recently, but we've yet
to really grasp that we actually have that exact power
that if we all just decided that we're not interested
in a world where we're being put in containment camps
(08:31):
or whatever the fears are, will defund the people that
are making that happen. And so a big part of
swap Mee was asking for help myself inner systemic change,
where I was taking this opportunity to speak into my
community and say I have needs, which is another thing
that consumerism really covers up. And we talked about this before.
What happened when we were first emancipated as slaves. The
(08:53):
only ones who were not questioned were the ones that
looked like they were homeowners. That was the beginning of
commercialism genius, you know, cleaning our sneakers and making sure
we look like we have value. Let's learn that on
its head and really look at what value is our value?
If we are being and I'm talking about the world
of people who care right at this moment, it's I'm
(09:13):
not even breaking it down in terms of race. If
we have a caring about the world, we care about
the people around us, and we really have the power
to make the changes that we want to see going
forward and hold the world in kind of a choke
hold until we have what we need and that have
what we feel our children deserve to have going forward.
So there's so much activism in this concept of swap
(09:34):
me from the minutia of a neighborhood, not that neighborhood
app that just scares you and tells you people are
walking around, but really in service to supporting neighborhood watches
and you know, food drives and someone who's who has
a new baby, or someone who lost their job. We
used to bring the meals and we used to take
turns watching people's kids or you know, there's so much
(09:56):
we can do around that. And so activism doesn't have
to be loud, it doesn't have to be a march
or a protest, it could be looking at the parts
of our life that we feel are not working, from
the minutia of even streamlining our closet and not spending
our very last dime on some fashion item, instead having
groups together where we talk about money and we invest
together and we create things together, and then also being
(10:20):
strong and powerful as a united community that says this
green piece of paper is going to support what I want.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Listen, the thing that was punching through when you were
talking about that is this notion of get the vanity
out of your victory and be very intentional and not
worry about how or what it looks like. Right. And
this is a very literal and figurative statement with what
you're talking about, but it also puts me in a
place of you know, so often we go and we
(10:50):
want to try to calm the storm, right, but rather,
can you calm yourself through the storm because the storm
will pass? And what are the things you do or
can do to calm yourself? And I think when you're
talking about this mentality of this modern day revolution or activism,
that feels like it falls right in those notions, right,
(11:11):
what are the things that we can do take a
step back very calmly but very easily do galvanize around
ourselves in the repurposing of things within our own communities
and starving that of the things that we've made who
and what they are. And we see where that's gone,
and now we need to stifle that growth.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
One thousand percent. And I love what you just said
about what we can do, and I love to really
talk about that. There's outer systemic change things we do
together as a community, but that inner systemic change is
so essential. It's essential because if we're getting overwhelmed with fear,
if we're upset, if we can't even see some of
these things in front of us, it's really taking the
(11:56):
time to change the story, change the looping fear into
the story of what we want to experience. And that's
very far fetched for people. But if we were in
a loop of fear and then we said to ourselves,
what can I do? As well stop ourselves and say
what power do I have? What can I do? What
small action can I take today to change not just
(12:19):
the way I feel, but how my family, how this
world is being impacted. I love the way you phrase that.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah, and so you know we're going to have more
of these convos, you know, on a regular basis, because
I think this is so necessary for a number of reasons,
and I think your point of view on these things
is so needed and warranted, and I just want to
thank you for sharing how what some might say is
a simple idea of shedding and repurposing can now also
(12:48):
evolve into something that can be revolutionary from an activism
standpoint of really making the change as necessary. And so
as always, I thank you. I look forward to having
more of these because we are You're going to hear
more from Grace on a regular basis with these amazing
ideas and spirits. So I thank you, thank you, thank you.
Host
Astor Chamber
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