Episode Forty-Five: The Interview-Jensine Larson

Social entrepreneur and international journalist Jensine Larson founded World Pulse-an online platform dedicated to connecting women and children across the globe-hear how, in this longer interview, in the middle of the Amazon, this miracle idea came to her.

Transcript

I just knew I had to go forward and create,

Like the vision was as strong as ever,

But it was going to take a different form,

But I really didn't know what that was,

And I didn't know how to do it again.

I had to relearn everything,

And I just remember those dark nights of the soul where I had no salary.

I had no team anymore.

I had lost the board.

I looked like I'd lost everything,

And I had to recreate again after a very grueling three years.

Hi,

My name is Jensina Larson.

In every single cell in my body,

I believe that the creative human potential of women and girls is the greatest untapped resource in the world,

And I describe myself as a social entrepreneur and a digital impact expert and a global women's silence breaker.

I was actually just remembering how we met so long ago,

But I met you through getting massage,

And what I find astounding is I remember laying on that table and hearing about your big plans for this healing area.

It was going to be like a house,

But it was going to have other buildings,

And it was going to be a place to heal.

In my mind at that time,

Laying on the table,

Right,

Because I'm half in and out of consciousness,

I'm thinking her ideas are huge,

But I don't think I had any concept of how huge your ideas would be to heal the whole world,

Which is essentially what I think you're doing.

Watching you and following you over the past two years,

I feel like it's getting bigger.

Am I wrong about that?

It's definitely growing.

I mean,

Building this global network of women change makers called World Pulse,

So it absolutely is growing,

But you're right.

I met you through massage therapy.

At the time,

I had told myself that I really want to make a difference in the world at large,

But I better put myself through massage school so I have a trade with my hands to help get me through.

When I started massage,

I discovered something inside of me that I didn't know was there,

Which was that I was a healer and that I could channel energy.

I loved working with people.

Meeting you,

I think,

As I started to do that work,

I started to have these visions build about first just a building or a home,

A healing center,

Especially for women and women survivors of trauma.

As the years went on,

That vision grew in new ways and became a global virtual space,

Which it is today.

You and I had a really intriguing conversation once when you were trying to get World Pulse off the ground.

I said to you,

How do you have this much energy to just keep pushing forward and keep going?

You said to me at the time,

Well,

If it's something that you truly believe in with your whole heart,

With such passion,

God or the universe or spirit gives you that energy.

It's like an infinite well of energy so that you can go forward and make your vision concrete in the world.

Do you still feel that way?

I'm so curious.

Definitely.

I feel that World Pulse actually was something that was given to me by spirit and I am a channel for it,

But it does move me.

It does drive me.

The actual vision when it happened to me is a story of a miracle that I can definitely share.

People who know social entrepreneurs know that we have an other worldly ability to just keep going and through every obstacle and have the optimism.

People are like,

That's too big.

We'll jump the wall.

The door is closed in our face.

We'll open the windows.

We'll make everything happen.

We'll sacrifice a lot.

I think for me,

It's as if there's been this burning light of possibility and this vision that is hard to communicate to other people,

But it is what gets me up in the morning.

I can see the future of the world with the human potential of women and girls unlocked.

It's an amazing future.

The renaissance of what is now suppressed and stuffed down and in deep shadows and suffering,

For example,

In Afghanistan or in the South Bronx today in women and girls' bodies,

But unlocking that is going to mean incredible music,

Incredible literature,

Incredible science,

Incredible solutions to challenges that are not budging today.

There's reason for that.

All the mind power and heart power,

Especially from the perspective of those that have been so,

So left out in our design process for solving problems.

To me,

It's not a,

Oh,

It's a heavy burden.

It's tough.

We have to have to keep rolling this boulder up a mountain.

It's like,

Okay,

I'm rolling this boulder up a mountain,

But at the top,

It's going to be so freaking mind-blowing,

Amazing.

It will be worth it for generations to come.

My second question is,

Did you grow up in a religious household?

Yes and no.

It's funny because my mother is a flower gardener and farmer,

But it wasn't a bed of roses,

I like to say,

Growing up.

Growing up was a paradox time where,

Yes,

We grew up in the country in this rural farmhouse with just acres of gardens and the beautiful blooms and all the vegetables and the animals and kind of a homestead environment.

I was homeschooled.

I had this incredible childhood of running through the fields with the fireflies,

Climbing the trees,

Talking to fairies,

And just being very in tune with nature.

It was just such an incredible feeling of abundance and freedom and just being in tune with the world.

On the other hand,

My parents also were struggling financially.

They were struggling to feed us.

We were on food stamps.

It was hard being isolated and raising three children.

My parents fought a lot.

I realize today that I grew up with this sense of scarcity around money and finances and also this desire to sometimes just go off by myself and shut the door to be away from conflict.

So it's a paradox.

I think all of our childhood times are paradox times.

But for me,

It was both of those things at once.

Then when I finally got put into the school system around fifth grade,

I was paralyzingly shy.

I just didn't know how to socialize or talk to other people because I'd been held out of school.

I read these books and I was very literate,

Extremely literate,

But not in other areas,

Not in math,

And not in social.

So I carried this paralyzing shyness and this deep sense of my voice burning inside of me for many,

Many,

Many years.

I still carry that today.

But in terms of religion,

We never had any formal religion put on us.

There was a deep sense when I was a kid that you could commune with the plants and you could commune with trees and almost have conversations.

Did you ever feel that way?

Absolutely.

Watching my mother talk to the plants and the animals.

My middle name is actually Marigold.

My mother just loves plants so much.

My story of my birth for a long time was my mother sharing that she was in the garden and this Marigold bud opened up and a little baby girl came out of it.

That's how I was born.

I've always had this relationship with flowers around love.

I still feel that way.

I walk down the streets of Portland,

Which are just very full of flora and fauna.

I talk to the flowers and like,

Oh,

Hello there.

Look at you're coming out to play.

I do believe that I was instilled in me from a young age that I was just part of this orchestra of life with the natural environment.

Well,

One of the biggest life changing miracle moments for me was when I was 19 years old and the vision of World Pulse was given to me.

I actually had become a journalist.

I had gone to the Amazon jungle at 19 and decided that I wanted to be out in the world and listen to women's voices.

I felt very isolated in rural Wisconsin.

I met incredible women who were telling me to take their stories to the world because their children were dying of various cancers because of the oil contamination in their traditional lands.

The more I listened to them,

The more I realized I wanted to be a writer.

I wanted to be a journalist.

From there,

I went to the Burma-Thai border,

Which is also known as Myanmar today.

I was working with women refugees who were fleeing ethnic cleansing.

They had endured mass rape,

Family members being killed in front of them,

The worst that you could ever imagine.

I had been interviewing them and they were saying the same things to me,

Please carry our stories.

It was clear that they had so much hope in their eyes that the world could hear them through me,

Potentially.

I mean,

There was no doubt that if these women were ruling the land,

All the problems would be solved in terms of military dictatorship.

There was no doubt,

But it was incredibly painful to hear.

One night,

I came back from interviews and I just couldn't sleep.

I was lying on a bamboo mat.

It was a very hot,

Sticky night and I was tossing and turning.

I was under the stars and I was just feeling so hopeless.

I could publish these stories,

But who's going to listen?

Who's really going to care about these women in Burma?

People don't even know where this is.

And as I was feeling that very deeply,

The stars spoke to me.

You know how people talk about a lightning bolt striking?

Well,

For me,

It was like this pulsing of the stars.

And the blue light,

As I looked at it,

Each star grew bigger and pulsed in the shape of a globe.

And I knew that what I was looking at was the unlocking of individual women's voices.

And as one unlocked,

It triggered another and it grew this building pulse around the planet.

And it grew bigger until it was just covered in this beautiful healing light.

And I said to myself,

I've just been shown the way forward.

And it's not just voice,

But it's connected voice.

And I need to,

I can no longer just be a messenger for these extraordinary leaders and voices,

But the world actually needs a platform,

A communication source so that they can be their own messengers.

They can speak for themselves and connect to each other to a bigger force and not feel so alone.

It just struck me.

It was like a lightning bolt.

And I knew that whatever happened in the world,

It had to exist.

But I also was like,

That's not me.

I mean,

Somebody else has got to do it because it's a great idea.

It needs to happen.

Yeah.

But I also,

I went back to the United States and I held it inside because I thought I'm so young.

I have no experience in media,

In communications.

Technology was very nascent at the time.

And somebody else who has the degree and the expertise will take it forward.

And I get to be the assistant to type in stories or do outreach.

I'll be very,

Very happy.

Well,

Years went by and I just,

It was agonizing because I was like,

Hello,

We need,

You know,

We need on blast.

We need the megaphone of these women and girls voices.

Nobody's been 21% of global media features women and girls or gender diverse individuals.

And,

And back then it was a few degrees less,

But it's still relatively the same.

And I just thought finally at 28 years old,

I held it in for a long time.

Like I could no longer,

It was a greater risk to hold it inside.

It was gonna,

It was going to eat me up.

I remember when it was a print magazine,

Which putting something out like that is no joke.

Right.

That was another miracle time,

But also from a very dark days,

I had to figure out everything.

I built a volunteer team.

It started with a print magazine because these were early days,

Like even before Facebook was popular.

So I thought,

Okay,

It's a print magazine.

Spent a couple of years,

Learned everything about print,

Independent publishing,

Learned the business model,

Learned how to build a website,

Learned how to work with women writers and source unknown writers around the world,

How to publish,

How to every aspect of building an independent publication.

And it went across over 200,

300 newsstands across North America was winning independent awards.

The sales were doing really well and I had to stop it all in the middle of this process.

I had to stop it and go into something even more unknown.

When I started to hear about the social media wave that was coming and the web 2.

0 at the time it was called people advisors were telling me,

Do you realize?

And I suddenly saw,

I was clear to me that that was actually the real vision.

It was not just a print publication,

But it was the interactive connectivity.

And that could span much farther across the globe than a print publication.

I could see the limits right in front of me,

Staring me in the face and the cost of it.

And we just didn't have page space for all the emails that were coming in from the heart of the Congo and from the Amazon and from Russia to be published.

So I literally had to let go of staff.

I had to tell magazine subscribers that were going in a different direction and offer refunds to tell funders that we were not doing this.

The board changed because the board lost confidence.

They had signed on for print magazine.

Nobody knew what was this web 2.

0 thing.

And I just knew I had to go forward and create,

Like the vision was as strong as ever,

But it was going to take a different form,

But I really didn't know what that was.

And I didn't know how to do it again.

I had to relearn everything.

And I just remember those dark nights of the soul where I had no salary.

I had no team anymore.

I had lost the board.

I was like,

I'd lost everything.

And I had to recreate again after very grueling three years.

That was not easy,

But there were other miracle moments along the way that showed me that was the right direction.

Absolutely.

The lab has facilitated voice for women around the world from movement building.

And I've seen that firsthand that in places of the world where women and girls,

About half of the population of women and girls have access to the internet today.

And that includes rural areas.

That includes conflict zones.

That includes places where there wouldn't normally be like a big nonprofit organization or government listening to these women.

They're able now to have a voice reach the world.

I mean,

We're seeing this with what's going on now in Burma.

We're seeing this through Afghanistan.

We're seeing this in Syria.

We're seeing this everywhere.

And so it has absolutely facilitated women and girls who before had no outlets.

The difference with World Pulse was that we figured out early on,

Or we were just diligent about making sure the online community and the online space was very protected and very safe from attacks and trolling.

And that it was a positive environment where a woman who,

You know,

Coming online from South Africa,

Who's been taught that she's no better than a dog or a donkey,

And didn't deserve to get a secondary education,

That she mattered and that she had something to say.

We went the opposite path of the Zuckerberg freeway.

We went the country road of instead of go for massive growth and be a unicorn,

Let's go for deep,

Deep connection and deeply feeling heard.

And instead of lots of eyeballs and advertising to enter commercialized data,

Let's go for measurements around impact instead,

Like what are the real outcomes happening in women and girls lives?

What are they through this confidence and feeling like they've got a global sisterhood cheering them on and around them?

What then do they go on to do?

And so we've been able to measure our community impacting over 17.

6 million lives with new laws,

New businesses,

New movements,

Even just finding new jobs,

Just changing social norms,

Whether that be child marriage,

Acid burning,

Female genital mutilation,

Or police brutality,

Maternal mortality,

Even here in the United States.

It's actually the biggest human rights abuse in the planet is violence against women and girls today.

It's the biggest thing holding back humanity.

So having a safe online space is actually pretty radical and pretty revolutionary,

Especially when trolling and attacking and cyber violence is just mimicking the real world in the online space.

It's a war zone.

There's a war zone out there for women and girls.

So.

I have a couple of favorites.

One of those is a young woman leader in Uganda,

In rural Uganda.

And we had known her on the community.

She had been a powerful storyteller telling about how she grew up with 10 other brothers and sisters and had to fight for food.

But somehow a visitor to her community saw her potential and enrolled her in school and paid for her education out of her other brothers and sisters.

And so she was fortunate to get a basic education and get access to the internet through that.

So she's telling the stories of all the challenges.

And of course,

The HIV and AIDS as well.

She lost almost all of her brothers,

Her seven brothers to HIV,

AIDS.

Well,

One day I got a ping on my phone,

Which said,

Please help,

Need help immediately.

And these come from time to time on World Pulse.

And she wrote that her last brother,

Surviving brother had just died of AIDS.

And because the family no longer had a male heir,

The village elders were going to come to her home and take away their land and their house the next day and put her mother,

Her sisters and all the other orphans that they had taken in,

Because of course they'd taken in all these orphans,

Were going to be displaced.

And it was just devastating.

So suddenly I checked back shortly and there's all these comments and posts coming in from around the world,

From women on the network saying,

Look,

We're here for you.

You don't have to back down.

Do you realize that in Uganda,

You actually have legal rights to the land as women and we'll come there and we'll take care of you and try this and try this.

And there was all this just flurry of energy and support.

So I wake up the next morning,

Because it's morning,

Our time in the Pacific Northwest.

And she writes back that,

Thank you so much.

The village elders came,

My mother and I stood very proudly at the threshold of the door.

And we said to them,

We are not letting go of our land.

We know that we have legal rights to our land.

And if you try and take it away from us,

Women are going to come from airplanes all over the world,

And they're going to land here in our backyard and they're going to stand up for us.

So to make a long story short,

She was able to remain on her land.

She was able to become a force from educating other women in the community of their rights.

Then with that hope that she had,

She said,

I'm going to pay this forward.

And she decided that she wanted to start a program to get rural girls like her who are getting married off at age 11 and get them into school.

So she started a program of matchmaking rural girls to mentors around the world for small educational stipend,

A couple hundred dollars a year,

Plus some online mentoring.

And she started this through World Pulse.

Well,

It grew and grew and grew and grew to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of girls and so many mentors and so many Zoom happy birthday to my mentor.

And the mentors started flying truly to Uganda and also really bringing that part of the prophecy,

What she said true.

But then she started growing.

She started building school buildings.

She started building gardens and sustainable organic gardens.

She does beekeeping.

And now those girls,

Many of those girls are getting into college,

They're getting into medical school and they fundamentally change the legacy and the lineage of their families and their communities through that education.

And this woman,

Her name is Beatrice and you can find her on World Pulse,

Beatrice Acheang-Nas.

She's a force and she continues to build.

And I swear to you,

If just the vision of this one woman,

I'm talking one woman and there are tens of thousands of women on World Pulse,

But just her vision,

If she was the ruler of the world,

We'd all be in a better place.

We'd all be in a better place if her vision came to life.

Sometimes I feel like I step into World Pulse and I just,

With my eyes and wonder,

Reading the trust that has been placed in us to tell the hardest stories,

The scariest stories.

It's a cathedral.

It feels like a cathedral,

A sacred cathedral that is,

A blend of all these different languages and cultures,

But there's healing happening in this space through this exchange of stories.

And people say,

What,

You know,

Stories,

What good does that do?

But I'm so proud to feel very confident and to literally measure at this time that women feeling heard,

Feeling seen,

Feeling supported,

They go out and they kick butt.

They do freaking amazing things in the world and they will really speed up change.

If we can listen to legions and legions of women and girls and surface their stories as fast as possible and connect them,

It's the surest pathway to global security and resilient economy that I could possibly imagine.

Thank you for listening to episode 45 of Bite Sized Blessings,

Where I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing a very good friend,

Jancina Larson,

Founder of World Pulse,

Social entrepreneur,

International journalist,

And global women's rights expert.

I have so much gratitude to her for clearing space in her day to have this important and miraculous discussion.

And whether you choose to listen to our Bite Sized offerings for that five to 10 minutes of freedom in your day or the longer interviews,

We're grateful you're here.

I need to thank the creators of the music used in this episode,

Chilled Music,

Alexander Nakarada,

Lilo Sound,

And Music L Files.

For complete attribution,

Please see the Bite Sized Blessings website at bite-sized-blessings.

Com.

On the website,

You'll find links to books,

Music,

And change makers like Jancina and World Pulse.

Hopefully they all brighten and lighten your day.

Thank you for listening and here's my one request.

Be like Jancina.

No matter what age you are,

See the challenge in front of you,

Engage it,

Build it,

And then take it out to the world.

You you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you I'm so glad you cornered the market on it.

So to speak.

Because it's so perfect.

Knowing you all these years and where your calling has been and I mean this is so perfect to really be a channel for people to hold the space of miracles in their lives.