High Impact Philanthropy: Pamela Samuelson of The Center for the Advancement of Body Literacy On How To Leave A Lasting Legacy With A Successful & Effective Nonprofit Organization
An Interview with Karen Mangia
If we take the body as our ground and then consider what a just world might look like, we find that all change begins with feeling. For me, a just world is one where those of us who have been historically marginalized feel a solid, stable sense of authority over our bodies, not as a transaction or a performance, which is a common default, but as a lived, felt, desire-driven, pleasure-oriented subjective experience.
For someone who wants to set aside money to establish a Philanthropic Foundation or Fund, what does it take to make sure your resources are being impactful and truly effective? In this interview series, called “How To Create Philanthropy That Leaves a Lasting Legacy” we are visiting with founders and leaders of Philanthropic Foundations, Charitable Organizations, and Non-Profit Organizations, to talk about the steps they took to create sustainable success.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Pamela Samuelson.
Pamela Samuelson (she/they) is a body literacy and consent educator, a somatics practitioner and a manual therapist specializing in trauma-informed care. With years of experience in sex education across a range of school and community settings as well as hands-on therapeutic care for countless people, Pamela co-founded The Center for the Advancement of Body Literacy (CABL) with a desire to improve upon sexual and reproductive healthcare practices. She is also a writer and organizer focused on issues relating to reproductive rights, patient advocacy, and bodily autonomy. Samuelson is the co-founder of The School for Ethical Touch, a US/UK-based project offering education to healthcare providers who wish to incorporate trauma-informed and consent-based practices into their work with patients. In her private practice, she primarily supports people with internal reproductive anatomy as a trans- and queer-inclusive somatic provider, manual therapist, educator and advocate. Pamela is the creator of Take Back the Speculum, a crash course in body literacy which expands upon the self help groups that are central to the feminist healthcare movement. A Los Angeles native, she lives in Echo Park with her partner and their daughter.
Thank you for making time to visit with us about a ‘top of mind’ topic. Our readers would like to get to know you a bit better. Can you please tell us about one or two life experiences that most shaped who you are today?
I began volunteering as a sex educator with teenagers when I was in my twenties and had just moved back to Los Angeles, and I was assigned to work with 9th graders all over town. 9th grade is a wild point in the arc of development — in any given class, some of the students were people with fully adult bodies, whether they were ready for that or not, while others were nowhere near that point. And there’s such urgency at that age to define who we are in relationship to others — at all ages, really, but with such searing intensity at 14. The way a person presents and appears at 14 is such an important element of identity and how they find their place in the social dynamics of their peer group.
It was amazing to get to be with them. I had already worked as an educator with kids for some years by then, mostly as a teaching artist, but it was a very different thing to go into classrooms specifically to talk with people of that age about the high-charge territory of bodies and sex, which in my experience is something that very few adults are willing to talk about with kids in an open-hearted, factual way. Our culture is one in which bodies are readily objectified and sexualized in order to sell things, but a frank, kid-led conversation about the actual subjective realities of living bodies and what they do — things we quite literally all share — is unimaginable for many people.
At the beginning of every class, I passed out blank note paper and pencils for anonymous questions, and passed around a box to collect them to answer at the end. It was my favorite part of every class. The questions revealed the range of experiences and concerns in the room, the things they were thinking about as people occupying the whole spectrum of experience, from newly sexually active to not at all active but ruled by the thought of it: “Miss, where’s the G spot? What is a lesbian? Is it true that for a girl to lose her virginity, she has to bleed? Will I smell different after I lose my virginity? How do gay guys have sex? Can I get pregnant from kissing?” All really good questions. All requiring straightforward answers.
Those kids were smart, attentive, deeply curious, and richly deserving of accurate, inclusive information that normalized their experiences and preferences, and it was an honor to get to be that person for them. They taught me a lot about the qualities with which we need to meet our young people in these loaded conversations about sex. They deserve our best.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think are most instrumental to your success? We would love to hear a few stories or examples.
I have always admired people who are truly present with others, and have tried to cultivate that quality in myself. Ultimately, when I succeed as an educator or a leader, I feel it as the fulfillment of my desire to connect, to deeply listen and to find ways of relating to people whose backgrounds and experiences are very different from mine. Intertwined with that desire to connect is a love of language that has formed my deepest mind — I read like an addict, and have done so since I was a child, when books probably saved my life — and an urge to communicate in ways that aren’t just efficient but are as beautiful and nourishing as possible.
My access to my anger is a tremendously powerful motivator, both as a driver of action and as a point of entry to the sorrow that is masked by anger. Anger brings a sense of agency that clears the air whenever the dominant experience has been one of helplessness or overwhelm, and it’s agency born of love, the desire to protect and champion what we love. Anger underlies my personal exploration of holding boundaries and my work as a self-defense instructor, my engagement with activism and education, and my desire to parent my daughter in ways that support her robust sense of justice and her healthy fight response.
Lastly, I believe that my ability to feel and trust my own body is what makes leadership possible for me. I’ve been so blessed with teachers and mentors and elders who showed me how to develop trust in the profound knowing of my body, and it’s from that sense of rootedness that I can offer anything useful to anyone. I can take others there and stay responsive to whatever is happening solely because I intimately know and trust that ground in myself.
What’s the most interesting discovery you’ve made since you started leading your organization?
When attempting to do an unprecedented and optimistic thing inside of the insidiousness and apparent inevitability of capitalism, there’s a tug of war between the compulsion to make oneself or one’s work visible to others by turning it into a product, something designed for easy consumption, and the very real commitment to the demands of the thing itself, which is the ongoing, gritty reality of letting the real and the ideal smash into each other every single day. We want people to see us and understand what we’re doing, and we want it to be accessible to everyone, and we also know that what we’re doing isn’t necessarily going to be legible or desirable to everybody, and that trying to water it down so that it fits into more popular or common frames of reference has the potential to lose the plot altogether. So we look for the sweet spots and stay with the spirit of the work, and we keep it moving.
In that, I’ve really begun to learn how vital it is to be working with a team of people I trust. My collaborators are some of the most clever, good-hearted people I’ve ever met, and it’s an absolute joy to be doing this with them.
Can you please tell our readers more about how you or your organization intends to make a significant social impact?
CABL’s mission is to create and share really beautiful, comprehensive body literacy and sex education content that champions every person’s agency, normalizes all kinds of bodies and experiences, and creates a rooted sense of community and solidarity as embodied people with many of the same questions, issues and preferences. So much of what we grapple with culturally is a deeply encoded sense of shame about bodies and sex, and shame thrives in isolation and silence, so framing our work as something communal and convivial is integral to its success.
We are at the very beginning of our launch — our full website will be up, fingers crossed, within the next month or so — and we are rolling out a fall series of workshops for teens, as well as a crash course in body literacy for adults called Take Back the Speculum and an ongoing project in partnership with some incredible local midwives called Pap Smears for Queers, which provides trauma-informed, trans-competent gynecological care and education for the queer community in Los Angeles. It’s a great, effective model for reproductive and sexual healthcare, one we hope very much to share with other educators and clinicians.
What makes you feel passionate about this cause more than any other?
I see the world through the lens of somatics, which is such a buzzword right now! I define somatics as a focus on the body as the wonderfully intelligent medium through which all of life occurs, and as the proposal that the quality of how we experience our own bodies — the way we feel and know ourselves through our senses — is fundamental to the quality of every aspect of our lives. To me, the body is the treasure house of the mind, inextricable from consciousness.
If we take the body as our ground and then consider what a just world might look like, we find that all change begins with feeling. For me, a just world is one where those of us who have been historically marginalized feel a solid, stable sense of authority over our bodies, not as a transaction or a performance, which is a common default, but as a lived, felt, desire-driven, pleasure-oriented subjective experience.
If we look at who is allowed to want things and to say so, we find that nowhere is the sense of agency more contested and more urgent than where the sexual and reproductive body is concerned. It’s ground zero when we ask the question of who is in control — the sexual body is the place of greatest taboo because it’s the place of greatest power.
We can see attempts to limit autonomy in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, most obviously right now in the current political attempts to block access to abortion and gender-affirming care as well as in this country’s attitudes toward people of color, in the popular stance on consensual sex work, on how we care for our most vulnerable people. Our bodies are being used as political footballs by authoritarian lawmakers, and we’re seeing a shocking wave of violence right now. The current climate is particularly cruel, but when I talk with elders about it, they assure me that none of that is anything new.
What is new are the tools and technology we have at our fingertips that enable us to work together, to share resources and to support each other. What we’re doing is creating avenues of access to the information and resources and support that we all require to flex our agency, and to take the actions that we choose. To quote the architects of the reproductive justice movement, there is no choice without access.
Without naming names, could you share a story about an individual who benefitted from your initiatives?
I’ve been teaching Take Back the Speculum in its current form since 2017. It’s a continuation of work that my elders have been doing for five decades and consider to be the centerpiece of their efforts — these are the people who built the feminist healthcare movement, beginning in the years before Roe. In essence, they created a mirror-world which persists in some form to this day, one in which women and queers have created their own healthcare system where care is predicated on self-sovereignty, education, and solidarity. Most people don’t even know that the feminist clinics ever existed, or have any sense of what is being provided there.
As I do it, TBTS consists of an inclusive, accurate do-over anatomy lesson and then guidance through a gynecological self-exam, first demonstrating on myself and then supporting anybody who wants to do it. It’s often people’s first time ever seeing themselves in this way and having their bodies and feelings normalized in a communal setting, and it’s frequently an experience of profound repair, power and joy. In every class, people come to terms with the ways they’ve been conditioned to passivity as both patients and as partners, and in many cases profoundly harmed. Within the layers of the material, participants come to a sense of presence in their bodies and undo a lot of the shame and secrecy we all hold about our bodies by simply being together and witnessing each other. Self-exam is a very simple thing to do, but barely anyone is ever taught how to do it in a provider’s office or given the option to even see themselves with a mirror, and there are SO MANY people for whom that is a life-changing experience.
We held groups regularly in person, and then of course everything went online with the onset of the pandemic — I would never have been able to predict that TBTS could possibly translate into an online format, but it really has, and incredible groups have formed with people in some very far-flung corners of the earth. A woman attended using a VPN from an undisclosed location in the Middle East. Another person attended from her car in the parking lot of a national park in Canada because it was the only place she could have privacy. People have brought their friends and family. Hundreds have come, over the years. It has been amazing to be a part of.
We attribute a sort of omnipotent authority to medical providers and allow things to happen to us in medical appointments that are truly not okay for us, while the truth is that providers are simply human beings with their own complicated biases, and moreover that they, in their role, are working for us, not the other ways around. We have the right and are always capable of taking charge of a medical appointment, but this isn’t the way that either providers or patients approach that exchange in the current paradigm of care.
Because I see people who are terrified or outright refuse to go into clinical settings for a pap because of having felt brutalized in the past, teaching someone how to do a self-exam can be an incredible way to restore people’s power in clinical settings. No one else ever has to insert anything into their body, because they can do it themselves, and knowing that gives people back their sovereignty, their power, their control over their own body and health.
It can be a huge step forward for postpartum women who had a difficult birth, survivors of sexual or obstetric abuse, or anyone who feels disconnected from their body. The feedback that consistently comes back is of people who completely turn around how they approach their own healthcare and are changed by it. Others come to learn as providers and are able to incorporate this material into their practice. Others go on to form their own groups and show others how to do it, which is the entire point — if we’re serious about changing the culture, there can be no gatekeeping. At the time of this writing, I’m aware of roughly 15 people who are offering some version of this where they live.
We all want to help and to live a life of purpose. What are two actions anyone could take to help address the root cause of the problem you’re trying to solve?
There is an ethic of mutual aid and community care at the heart of what we’re up to, in which we begin to consider that our real wealth lies in our web of relationships and our capacity to resource each other. One of my most beloved teachers talks about the world that becomes possible when we embrace mutual indebtedness — a sense of ongoing debt to each other that we hope we never pay back entirely, because it’s part of what weaves us and ours into a continuous living relationship. It’s a very different mindset from the one we generally live in as a modern culture, in which we outsource so much of what we need to people we don’t know, meet our needs through transactions, and focus on amassing individual wealth, all of which is very isolating. Cultivating communities who genuinely prioritize care and attention for each other is a big piece of the puzzle we’re trying to solve, and beginning to try these ideas on, to experiment with other forms of exchange and mutual support, is key. We don’t have a template for it, but we’re very interested in what it might look like.
Another action that would be powerfully helpful is for anyone who takes care of kids — parents, caregivers of all kinds, teachers — to really take personal stock of what we received in our own education and in our families of origin around bodies and sex. Did you get what you needed from the adults around you? What did you need that you didn’t get — and what did you get? Were you recognized and respected in that transmission? We have to confront these questions in ourselves so that we can be intentional and clear about what quality of information and listening we provide for the kids in our lives. How we are with them as they grow and develop makes a huge difference in their quality of experience, as the way we were received by the adults close to us made a huge difference to us.
How has the pandemic changed your definition of success?
The world cracked open in the first months of the pandemic for me. In the abrupt halt to business as usual, I felt the world begin to renew itself, which was an absolute revelation. And the sudden blooming of relationships within the internet, over vast distances, was and is extraordinarily cool to me.
In my pandemic definition of success, both of those things are structurally necessary. Our activity must remain that flexible and that attuned to the living world. And our relationships and work and art and presence now take place in a communal space that includes every physical corner of the planet, and I now have a very high bar for the capaciousness and range that affords us, and the communication and relationship that becomes possible over vast distances.
We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world who you would like to talk to, to share the idea behind your non-profit? He, she, or they might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Cindy Gallop. We absolutely love her. We love what a baller she is, what an obviously wonderful time she’s having, and how clearly she’s throwing her weight behind projects of liberation. She’s the coolest and I would love to take her out to a sumptuous breakfast. Please let her know 🙂
You’re doing important work. How can our readers follow your progress online?
You can find us at www.bodyliteracycenter.org with more to come when the site goes live in about a month’s time. We’re also on Instagram at @bodyliteracycenter, and will be keeping that updated as we go.
Thank you for a meaningful conversation. We wish you continued success with your mission.
About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
High Impact Philanthropy: Pamela Samuelson of The Center for the Advancement of Body Literacy On… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.