Belonging, Respect, and the Future of Humanity with Camille Dundas

In this episode of The Empowered & Embodied Show, hosts Kim Romain and Louise Neal sit down with Camille Dundas -- Editor-in-Chief of ByBlacks.com and Founder of The IDEA Practice -- to explore what it truly means to belong.

Together, we unpack how home extends far beyond geography into the heart of community, inclusion, and connection. Camille shares how belonging has guided her life and work, from newsrooms to boardrooms, and how authentic leadership and respect can transform our workplaces and ourselves.

This conversation invites you to rethink what it means to create spaces of trust and humanity amid a rapidly changing world.

Key Takeaways

• Home is not a place, it’s a feeling of belonging and connection.
• Belonging is a consistent thread in both personal growth and professional impact.
• True inclusion requires vulnerability, honesty, and intentional action.
• Respect is the foundation of belonging in communities and workplaces.
• Every person deserves to feel seen, heard, and valued.

Key Moments

00:00 – Opening Reflection

01:41 – Welcome and Introductions

02:36 – Defining “Home” and What It Means to Belong

07:00 – The Thread of Belonging in Work and Life

09:06 – Why Inclusion Is Under Attack

11:42 – Technology, AI, and the Loss of Human Connection

14:19 – Rebuilding Community and Collective Care

19:25 – Respect as the Foundation of Belonging

26:20 – Supporting Leaders in Building Inclusive Cultures

32:01 – Vulnerability and the Power of Empathy

38:02 – Listening Practices That Build Belonging

41:18 – Closing Thoughts and Goodbyes

Connect With Camille

Camille's Website: http://camilledundas.com

ByBlacks.com — Canada’s leading Black online magazine

The IDEA Practice — Camille’s DEI education and consulting firm

Connect with Camille Dundas on LinkedIn

Join a circle of changemakers committed to leading with purpose, presence and ease inside Kim's Rising Visionaries mentorship program.

Reclaim your career and confidence during midlife through Louise's Rise & Redefine program.

If you’re loving this show, come check out the Feminist Podcasters Collective, where creators like us are uplifting diverse voices and driving meaningful change. If you’re looking for new shows to fill your feed, head to https://feministpodcasterscollective.com

Transcript

Belonging, Respect, and the Future of Humanity (Ep 181)

Guest: Camille Dundas Release Date: October 14, 2025

(00:00) Kim Romain: When the systems we're in start to pull apart at the seams, what happens to our sense of belonging? Camille Dundas knows because she's helping reshape what inclusion actually looks like inside our workplaces and our lives. In this episode, she doesn't just share her theories. We talk about the truth of respect, courage, and the power of saying what no one else will. We're willing to bet this conversation will stir something up inside of you and maybe even change how you show up for work tomorrow.

(01:41) Kim Romain: Hello, hello, hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Empowered and Embodied show. I am one of your co-hosts, Kim Romain, joined as always by the lovely and incomparable...

(01:52) Louise: That's me! I'm trying to hold back a giggle today, but I'm so excited! I'm Louise Neal, and we have a wonderful guest today. We are joined by...

(02:04) Camille Dundas: Camille Dundas, that's me.

(02:07) Louise: That's you. Yeah.

(02:07) Kim Romain: Yay! Camille, we're so excited to have you with us, and we're going to share a little bit about you with the world, and then we'll dive into the juiciness of our conversation today.

(02:17) Camille Dundas: Sounds good.

(02:36) Kim Romain: Great, so Camille is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning online magazine, By Blacks.com, Canada's leading Black online magazine. She is also the founder of The Idea Practice, where she leads as a diversity, equity, and inclusion educator, dedicated to transforming workplaces through scenario-based learning. Camille spent a decade as a news producer in some of Canada's largest newsrooms, including the CTV and CBC. Before we hit record, we were talking about home. And there was something in there that I would just love to kind of pull forward in the beginning of this conversation, just to get us started here: what is home? Because when we look back, there's a tremendous amount of wisdom that we bring forward. But where does that get centered in this place called home?

(02:53) Camille Dundas: Yeah. I mean, it's easy to answer if you've lived in the same place your whole life. But I suppose for someone like myself, who's lived in so many different places from such an early age, home was wherever I felt like I belonged. And I think belonging is an even more obscure concept, because it certainly means and feels something different to each of us. I've always felt like I could belong anywhere because I've always, for whatever reason, approached life with the philosophy that each of us are connected in some way. And I tried to impress that upon my kids to let them understand that wherever you were born is not necessarily home. Wherever you were born was simply by chance. And so while we care for each other in our family, it doesn't mean that somebody who's outside of our family is necessarily more important than who's inside your family. And I know that's a little radical, but it was something that was passed on to me from my own father when, as a kid, we would complain that he was working too much, and he worked in poverty reduction. And so he was often out in communities talking to people about what they needed, what they didn't have, and how he could help solve their problems. And a flawed man as he was, I remember one night him saying to us, "You all have everything that you need. I need to help other people who don't have what they need." And just watching how he lived his life, it became clear to me that he saw the world with a sense of, you know, we have been conditioned to believe that blood ties are stronger than any other kind of ties. And yes, family is important, but I think that that type of conditioning holds us back from being able to see all other people as equal humans to us. It allows us to be lulled into the idea of this hierarchy of importance, this hierarchy of who gets to belong and who gets to belong where and why. But if you think about the fact that wherever we ended up is really just by chance, we could have been born in Gaza. We could have been born in Ethiopia. We could have been born anywhere in the world, and our lives would have been completely different. And so why is it that because we were born here, do we feel that we deserve something different or something better than somebody who wasn't?

(05:47) Louise: It goes to this place of like inside, right? Like as we shed all of those things that are visible or external, deeply connecting inside with another human. And for me, with the planet, like with the earth, to me that feels so... like I belong in a place where my feet are in the dirt and I can feel it. And that feeling—I belong when I'm with people who make me feel that way too. And it is so grounding. But yeah, you're right, for me, it has nothing to do with all of these outside things. It's like, are we connected, like deeply connected, through... it feels like it just comes from here, right? Yeah.

(06:46) Kim Romain: So when you're doing the work that you're doing in the world, in all the different ways that you're doing it, this place of belonging, how much of that has driven kind of where you are today and with the work that you've been doing?

(07:00) Camille Dundas: Yeah, it's such an interesting thread, I think, when I look back at how many different types of careers I've had. But that quest or that advocacy for belonging or inclusion, for equality and equity, has certainly been a thread, I think, since I was a child, if I really had to map it back. Because as I've grown and become more aware and become more—I think I've always been intuitive, I probably am what many people call an empath—as I became more aware of that power, I could now sense and understand why at every human's core level, even though we're so different and come from so many different walks of life, at our core, all each of us really wants is to be seen, is to be heard, and to be understood, and to be loved. And those concepts, for a very long time, have been so divorced from the workplace. And I think that part of the work of anyone who works in inclusion is to get leaders especially to understand why these softer skills or softer considerations are actually really core considerations, because people aren't machines. And so we have to understand what it is that keeps them going. And if the place where you spend more of your time than at your own home, if that's a place where you don't feel seen, don't feel heard, and feel included, feel it's a place where you belong, you absolutely will not, or will be a lot less likely to perform at your best or to reach your own sense of purpose. And, you know, I tell my kids all the time, "Do not chase money. Chase your purpose. Understand what your purpose is in life." And if people are directionless and not purposeful, that will show up in their work and that will show up in any company's results.

(09:06) Kim Romain: So I live in Canada now. I've been here for four years, but I am from the States. Don't hold that against me. Why is this under attack? From your perspective, why is this under attack?

(09:12) Camille Dundas: I think that the individuals who have been largely responsible as the architects of our societal norms had been feeling this shift for quite some time, had been feeling the success of the shift that was happening, that has been happening over the last couple of decades. And I think that really worries them because it directly shakes their hold on all of us that they have grown very comfortable with. And so, as we all know, power is really never ceded, right? And so when people want to hold on to power, because that's what matters to them as opposed to uplifting all, they'll do anything to hold on to that power. And if we really trace this through history, you'll see how it's been the same playbook, but different enemies, different villains that have been created, right? And the work of inclusion and diversity and equity is simply the villain du jour. But if you were to trace this, it is literally the exact playbook that has been used decade after decade when any type of institutional structure is threatened.

(10:43) Louise: It breaks my heart to hear that something we need so deeply, that connects us so deeply, is being ripped away from us and becoming inaccessible to many. Belonging—that we look for, that I think we search for throughout our lives. At least I have. Kim, you and I have talked about belonging before too, right? How do we know we belong, and how do we manifest that in ourselves? And then how do we bring it for others so that they can feel that too? And it feels like this quest that we're on, that's humanity. It needs this belonging so deeply, and yet now we're being starved of it. Right? It's being ripped away from us and being threatened. Foundationally, what do we do about it?

(11:42) Camille Dundas: The interesting thing about humans is that we're built to connect. So what I actually enjoy seeing right now is the widespread pushback to the normalization of AI. While I can concede that AI has some fantastic uses in removing and reducing barriers when done correctly, whenever I see a new company posting about how they're so excited that now you can have your avatars or whatever in your meetings and responding just like humans, I'm like, "How do you wake up excited about replacing human beings?" And then I'm comforted when I go into the comments and 90% of other people feel the same way. I would feel like I was living in some kind of twilight, and I often do when I see these posts, but then I'm like, "Okay, it's not just me." Everyone is feeling like this is not a good thing for humanity. So to answer your question, the pushback needs to be there, and we have to be very loud about it. We have to be intentional about it, but we have to be consistent with not normalizing the replacement of human connection. I hope, rather, that we would have learned from the social media experiment lesson. When I think back to how I so easily adopted cell phone use and social media use without thinking twice about how it was impacting society or my own human behavior, I'm really shocked by that. That I, as an intelligent human being, didn't think twice about that. And so I wonder if us having gone through that, do we have the presence of mind to say, "Hey, remember when we were addicted to that BBM light on our phones and that ding? And remember when that completely changed how we hung out with our friends? Remember when everyone was making videos about how people are at dinner tables and everyone was on their phone, and that was like a joke, and now it's just normal?" Hey, you know what? We don't want something like that to happen to us again. So I really hope that, one, what we do about it is that we keep pushing back, and that two, we really learn from the very recent lessons. As humanity, we've been going through some very rapid learning curves, and I just hope as a collective, we really have the presence of mind to learn from that and try not to repeat those things.

(14:19) Kim Romain: Yeah, where you started with that play, with what you shared, talking about connection, human connection, and community. And the thing that gives me hope is the speed with which people are now figuring out how to reconnect in a communal way and redefining what community means for them, particularly how we've been treating community as you just shared, right? Over the last 15, 20 years, we have really been—we've shifted to this place of "This is my community. My community is purely online. It's purely in my phone. It's purely text-based." And that people are looking at regenerative processes to help support communities through a wellness lens versus through a technology lens. That's what I'm starting to see poking up places. And so I'm excited about what might happen there because, to your point, right, if we're all being replaced by our avatars and our bots, what is the future of humanity? I mean, those are the conversations I do have with my, thank goodness, philosophically inclined 15-year-old, because at our ages, yes, we still have a lot to give and a lot to do and a lot to change and a lot to impact, and they're looking, they're watching us and saying, "What's going to be left for us?"

(15:44) Camille Dundas: Yes. You know, this reminds me of a story that I just published yesterday on By Blacks that was so inspiring to me of a young woman, originally Nigerian, who was living in Rwanda and immigrated to Canada. And she started a TikTok channel to just post, share about her journey and all the things that she didn't expect to happen while she was here. And so she wrote a first-person piece for us about how in the space of maybe, I think, three months—she said, no, less than that, about six weeks, I think—while she was job searching and getting nothing back, she started what she calls a social wellness program. And she was someone who loved the gym, right? And she was trying to go to the gym here and realized that everyone had their headphones in, no one looks at you, which was the opposite of what she experienced in Rwanda. And she wanted to rebuild that. But there was—I just pulled up the article because I want to read you a part of what she said that really stuck with me. She said, "There's a specific kind of grief that comes with immigration. No one prepares you for it. The grief of leaving behind who you were. The grief of being hyper-qualified back home and invisible here. The grief of missing weddings, birthdays, funerals. The grief of watching yourself shrink to fit into a system that only values your labor, not your dreams. Ottawa Fitness is my refusal to shrink because I want other immigrants to know it is possible." And at the end, she said that it's sort of a reclaiming of her own agency and what immigrants are allowed to do. Everyone told her there's no way that you'll be able to immigrate here and start a business. But she literally just started outside, and she grew from a group of four people to now 16 people. She got a grant from the municipal government, and she's building what she wanted to have. And when I read that, I was like, that's belonging. She didn't feel a sense of belonging, and she created it and therefore created belonging for other people too.

(17:56) Louise: Yeah, goosebumps. Like really, right? When we can't find what we need, how can we create it? Yeah. In a park. Yeah, yeah. It's this—I know we started talking about home, and what home is, and kind of this reclamation of home, and really deeply understanding what that is. And I'm fascinated by how, how even in this stage of my life, right, this later stage, this midlife, that I'm, that I'm—I don't want to say I'm still searching, but I'm deeply curious about belonging and how to, how to really create communities where people do feel like they belong, where they can set down all of those—I don't know if they're worries, fears, anxiety, whatever that is that's keeping them from feeling like they belong—creating a community where, like, you walk in the door, and all of that is left behind. Right? It's all left in the hallway. Like a great Canadian winter, right? Like we leave our parka and our boots and all of that. And to create a community where people can feel like they belong, but it feels really, it feels really scary and it feels really vulnerable. As much as we desire to belong, how do we take off all of those clothes and really step into that place? Yeah.

(19:25) Camille Dundas: I think that what came to mind immediately, the word that popped in my mind was respect. I think what worries me rather, is that as Canadians, we've had such a strong reputation of inclusion. And sometimes I sit and think, "How did we get here?" And is it that it's just like a few spoiling the whole bunch, or is it really this widespread? And I grapple with that, to be honest. And what I'm left with is that two things can be true at the same time. Canada can absolutely be a deeply racist country, but Canada can also be a deeply warm and inviting place where people feel a sense of home. We see so many stories of people who come from away, of people who aren't from here and find a place here, who have never seen snow, who have never... so many great stories come to mind of people that I've seen who've been embraced here. But again, multiple things can be true at the same time. I think back to my own parents and the racism that they encountered when we were trying to make a life here. But then also, some of our best family memories are here, too. Normalizing, I think, respect is really key to that. Because me being able to feel like I belong anywhere, for me, the first thing is, is someone going to respect my boundaries? Is someone going to respect my culture? Even if we don't agree, is someone going to respect my right to disagree? So these, I think, are the core things if we had to focus on in terms of doing our best to ensure a sense of belonging everywhere. But yeah, there are so many Canadians who have opened their homes, their businesses, their hearts to people who do not look or speak or live any way like them. And I'm so proud of that.

(21:40) Louise: Yeah, I love this idea of like, both things can be true, right? And really understanding that. I went to—a couple of weeks ago, I was out at Folk Fest. It is someplace that I long to be and I do feel like I belong there, right? Out in a field with great music, with people who can shed some of those things that keep them small. They walk through those gates in all their glory and it's beautiful to see. And it's beautiful to be able to be in community like that and to embrace all of the differences. And yet this year, I also noticed that there were these, I don't know what to say, it felt like some of the outside world had like stuck to some people, right? And as much as this community was full of belonging and welcoming, there were some instances where it felt like, "I don't belong," but more is like, "But you don't belong here." And I saw that. And I saw people say like, "You don't belong here, and so you should leave." And it broke my heart because of all the places in my world that is full of belonging and acceptance and understanding and curiosity—because if I don't understand something, let's ask, let's have a conversation, let's understand what that's about. But I saw that stick, and that's the first time in 19 years that I've been going. That's the first time I saw this stickiness where people were saying, "You don't belong here and you should leave," because you're that different. It broke my heart a little bit.

(23:33) Kim Romain: It's so interesting because, right, so I've immigrated to this country, this beautiful country, and call it home. I'm proud to call it home. I've lived in a province that wasn't as warm and welcoming. And some of that is because I came from the States, possibly, although most people don't guess that we're from the States. But where we're moving to—we're getting ready to move next week—every call I've made, every service I've set up, every person I've met in where we're moving to, it is exactly what you're talking about. There is a welcoming. There's a, "My gosh, I have somebody for you to meet. My gosh, you need to come over here. You need to go there. These people need to know you. I need to introduce you to..." And it feels like a homecoming. It feels like something that I expected. So I grew up in Massachusetts, lived in Arizona for a while, and then moved to Chicago. And I have a large extended family in Chicago, and that's what I expected moving to Chicago because large extended family, I was like, "Sure, they're going to introduce me around." That did not happen. And so having this opportunity to now step into a space where people are excited—like they may or may not even know me, and they're excited to introduce me to people—that is that belonging that we're talking about. It's like, I can breathe a little easier. So Louise, you're talking about your heart center, right, at the center of your chest today. And it is. You can breathe easier when you feel like, "I belong here. I'm included here. That door is open, and there is a seat for me at the table." It's a very different feeling than... I've enjoyed where I've lived, I've met some amazing people, I've enjoyed the culture, all of that, and it is very different now to be able to breathe and feel it in my body that I can settle.

(25:27) Louise: Yeah. And then when we're there, when we're in that space, that's whole, right? When our cup is full, we can now give. Right? And so when we're in that space, now we get to send those ripples out. We get to be shining that light outside. And workplaces—then we get to be our best selves, right? I know, Camille, you do a lot of conversation around workplace and belonging and inclusion in the workplace. And I see just in our conversation, right? When I can feel like that community, when I can feel that belonging, Kim, that you just said, when you were moving to a new community, I can feel that when I walk into the doors of work, then I get to be my best self. Then I get to do all the things that I'm there to do in a way that aligns with who I am.

(26:20) Kim Romain: So as we're talking about this, what do we—the three of us on the screen, but others as well listening—do to support the leaders? Whether we're talking about corporate or small business or community or activist leaders, whatever kind of leader we are, how do we support the leaders to create these kinds of environments?

(26:40) Camille Dundas: Yeah, the first one is the most difficult one. The best way I think to support leaders is with honesty. And it's difficult because very often we don't feel safe enough to be honest with our leaders. I suppose that's why I get hired a lot as an external consultant, because it's much easier to bring someone in. So I suppose that's why consultancy may never die. But that is how I lead my practice. And so much so, wherever the person is who hires me, I tell them not to tell me who is the CEO. And I don't search their name. I don't Google it. If I'm going to do a group session with the C-suite, because I don't want to speak to them any differently than I speak to everyone around the table. And obviously, very quickly, it becomes clear who the CEO is once the meeting starts. But I've certainly gotten some raised eyebrows and some feedback afterwards because I'm very irreverent and everyone there is very protective of how the CEO is communicated with. And to have any sense of transformational change, that has to be dissipated right off the bat. And so I'm very irreverent and honest with them, respectfully, about what needs to change here. The second way we can support leaders is through our own engagement. Because it is so easy for us to get disillusioned and just skeptical of any change in our workplaces that often we just don't engage, or we just click like, reshare, "That's great, great initiative," and then we don't show up or we don't actually say what we think. And in doing so, let the ideas flow through us and then offer them, right? So honesty and engagement to me are the biggest ways to support leaders who are genuine about creating and maintaining a sense of belonging at work.

(28:42) Louise: And I think, too, is to share your ideas and your thoughts, right? Like, sometimes leaders and folks really do want to and they just don't know how. And so not to hold back when you have an idea or a thought or a vision of what work could be like, or what you need at work to belong, is to share that and to be able to just like, from the article you read, Camille, find that place and then just be able to see what generates from that. Because if you feel like you don't belong, you're not the only one. And so how can we do that? Like, from grassroots, be able to share those ideas with leaders in the right spaces. And hopefully, you're in one of those spaces where those ideas are welcomed and can bloom and blossom.

(29:33) Kim Romain: Yeah, I work with people in the social impact space, and so there's a lot of those leaders themselves feel like they have to uphold something that they're not comfortable upholding. And yet they don't know that there's another option. And so I think very often when we're called in to do the work that we're doing with our leaders, it is that we have that opportunity to say, "Just because you believe you need to hold this way of being, right, this way of leading, doesn't mean that that's the only option." And so I think, right, that irreverence, that's that irreverence. It's saying, "This isn't how you have to hold it." And that can be really scary for those leaders.

(30:14) Camille Dundas: Yes. It is. I guarantee you it is. And that is a great example of where the personal meets the workplace. Because I also guarantee you that the way that person views leadership is 99.9% informed by their childhood experience. And so we cannot negate all of the ideas, the biases, all the things that we have collected on our journey to become that leader—how they influence our decision-making, our philosophy, how we manage people, how we see people. And so, you know, my special sauce is getting leaders to see, to make that connection and to not dismiss these things. And so when they have that aha moment, it really is magic.

(31:20) Kim Romain: Yeah, it is. It's so funny because I've worked with a number of leaders myself where they're holding it, they're holding it, they're holding it. And then all of a sudden it's like this walnut cracks open, right, and starlight. It is the opening that we don't know that we need. And I really think it's a need.

(32:01) Camille Dundas: You know, I was doing a session with a group of CEOs, of Canadian CEOs. It was a small group, maybe 10, all men, all white. We were doing a session about understanding inclusion, belonging, et cetera. And there was one gentleman who—I'll take credit for this—because of the way that I opened the session, I lead with such vulnerability. I think it helps them to feel in a psychologically safe place that they don't usually feel as a CEO because of the reasons that you listed, Kim. And he shared with the group that coming from the Atlantic provinces, he was so keenly aware of his accent. And he says that when he comes to Toronto to have meetings, he feels like the dumbest guy in the room. And that was a shock for me. That highlighted my own biases to myself internally. I had to—it was such an interesting moment for me because I had to continue facilitating, but also process the fact that my bias was being deconstructed in real time. Because I thought to myself, "I would never think that a white male CEO would have any insecurity, would be able to show up in any room and not think about his accent of all things." My other bias was, "Well, a Canadian is a Canadian. No one really cares. You still have more privilege." But it was so interesting to see how he shared about how that impacted him as a leader. And so it was a learning for everyone at the table, including myself. But it was so fantastic that he felt safe enough to just share that. Because I think that it opened just a little extra layer of empathy in the other CEOs around the table that hopefully they would take with them into their practice.

(33:39) Kim Romain: Yeah, we never know. Until someone shares, we never know. And then when we don't share, right, there's really a disservice to those we're with to be able to understand our experience. And so that beauty comes in from having the vulnerability to share what we can share.

(34:03) Camille Dundas: Yeah. And I'll also say, though, that as you as a leader decide to lead with more vulnerability, at the same time, it's really important to educate yourself on how your experience could be how you are processing your own experience through your own different levels of privilege, and being careful not to try to match or equalize your experiences to your peers or your direct reports or whoever you work with for the sake of trying to relate to them, because that can go wrong really quickly. I'll give you an example. I was consulting with the company in the capacity of helping them to host a listening session. And this was post-George Floyd's murder, so it was a sensitive time. She was addressing Black employees at this meeting. I also had a once-upon-a-time career in PR. And in a PR hat, this is why you vet everything a leader says, right? We didn't do that this time. We just said, "Hey, lead with empathy, vulnerability." And she began the meeting by talking about how she understands what it is like to be the only or to be in the minority because she lived for a number of years in Japan. And talked about how, as a white woman living in Japan, that she was in the minority. And while that experience is of course valid to her, the way that it was framed was deeply offensive to most of the Black people on that call, especially at that particular moment in time. To try to equalize your experience living abroad, a privilege most people actually don't get to have, rubbed most people the wrong way. And so my point here is that it's very important to first deconstruct your own experiences, right? And understand why you can't equalize or match everything that you have experienced for the sake of trying to be empathetic or believing that that makes you and that person's experience the same.

(36:29) Kim Romain: I think that's where that hollowness comes from, where people say, "This is right, we're just checking the box, we're doing the thing." And it feels very hollow, is because it becomes a game of equalization. It's, "If I tell you my pain, and then you tell me your pain, now we're equal."

(36:50) Camille Dundas: Yes, and I tell people that not to be too hard on yourself about this, but to be aware of it because this is a byproduct of how our neurons work. There is something called a mirror neuron where our brain is telling us that if you're smiling, I should also be smiling. If you're sad, I should also be sad. And it's part of human behavior. And so as a leader, it is so critical for you to be aware of these processes of how our brains work and to be mindful of how we communicate because we can decrease belonging while we are trying to increase it with good intention.

(37:45) Louise: Yeah, absolutely. And it's the listening circles, right, like getting deeply curious about what people are feeling, what they're saying. It comes from creating a space where people feel like they can share those things, that it's not going to be dismissed or like equalized, right, where it's like, "I have a deep pain, I have something important that I need to say." And how can I say that in a space that can just hold it and not try to change it or shift it to be something else? Yeah.

(38:22) Camille Dundas: Yeah, a really great practice, a good practical tip that I've tried to embed in my own practice is when someone shares with you, summarize what they've said and say to them, "I hear you saying that you feel X, Y, Z," and kind of summarize what they said. Not only does it help you to make sure you're on the same page, but just that small sentence of saying to someone, "I hear you saying this," makes them feel way more seen than if you just responded right away, and worse yet, responded with your own story.

(38:52) Louise: To be heard and to be seen, right? Then we belong when those two things happen.

(38:58) Kim Romain: And it takes me back to the word that you used early on in our conversation: respect. If we are able to show someone we're listening by saying, "I heard," being very clear, "I heard what you said, this is what I heard," that is showing respect. I'd love to continue digging into this further. What are the main things that we want to make sure our listeners are carrying with them today? Because there's been so many good little nuggets of wisdom that have been dropped here. What are some of those main ones?

(39:27) Camille Dundas: I would say: Resist where necessary. Rest where necessary. Reinvent where necessary. But commit to something and continue whatever that something is. We may not be perfect, we may not get it right, but we will always be here. And as long as we can be here, we can be impacting something or someone.

(40:04) Louise: That deep knowledge that if we're trying and doing and observing and respecting, you're right, we might not get it right. But don't let that stop you, right? Don't let that be the barrier that keeps you from creating a space where people belong or for belonging yourself. And in that act, I think that's how we build that community, that bigger family, right, that you talked about, Camille. It's not blood that ties us. It's this deeper thing that ties us. And when we're stepping out and we're speaking up and we're saying what needs to be said, that's how we create those bonds. Yeah.

(40:32) Kim Romain: So what I'm hearing is action. And even in the action of rest—so you mentioned rest, right—that is still an action. And it's action with intention. All of this is with intention. And yeah, I think that's really what I want to underline and highlight for folks, is this is all about taking intentional action so that we all have that feeling of belonging that I was talking about experiencing in my current world right now. That's what I want for everybody. I want everybody to feel that in all the situations that you get to walk into. So Camille, thank you so much for being here and having this beautiful conversation with us today. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

(41:16) Camille Dundas: An absolute pleasure to be here.

(41:18) Louise: Where can folks connect with you, talk with you, build community with you? What does that look like?

(41:25) Camille Dundas: I'm a big LinkedIn gal, so find me on LinkedIn, easily accessible there. If you want to email me directly, it's just hello@camildundas.com. You can find my website camildundas.com or theideapractice.com. Of course, if you're interested in learning more about the amazing stories that we tell about Black Canadians across the country, BYBLACKS.com.

(41:49) Louise: Thank you so much, Camille. Thank you, Kim, and thank you, listener, for joining us today for this beautiful, beautiful conversation on belonging. Thank you. Take care, everyone.

(42:01) Kim Romain: Bye for now.