Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Anna Burrell. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Anna, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear a story from back when you were an intern or apprentice. What’s a memorable story you can share with us?
Many moons ago, before the days of being a proud co-founder of Twiggs & Co. and a candidate for Denver’s 2023 mayoral election, I was a college student who couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs.
Growing into a 6’1″ human is not for the faint of heart. Or, as it turns out, a basketball player on a very intense team. Hours upon hours of high impact activities with knees that were still taking shape left two ligaments with skewed insertion points – causing my kneecaps to “track” wrong and dislocate. Long story a little bit longer – the surgery I was told I needed for both knees comes with a cool year-long recovery to get back to basic movements. Per knee.
As a young, vibrant, and active individual… this was not ideal. So I dealt with it and by college, anything with running was out of the picture, walking was questionable, and existence was mildly painful on the best of days.
Still bright-eyed and bushy tailed, I somehow made my way to the campus boathouse and found rowing, or as I like to refer to it, the most work I’ve ever done sitting down. The lack of physical impact on my legs made it feasible for me to do and the teamwork was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. It was incredible. I was hooked.
Jumping in with both feet, I soon became a coach for a local high-school team at a public-facing boathouse with all kinds of interesting people floating around. One day as I was limping my way up from the docks, one of the ‘houses resident 70-something year old athletes gets a look on his face and asks what’s wrong.
I told him the abridged version of the story to which he replies, “Come meet my friend, Al. He can fix you up.”
Well… after having spent the last two days stuck on a rest, ice, compress, and elevate (RICE, IYKYK) regimen… sure, I’ll try it.
Al Meilus, a former robotics engineer from GE, was a big guy who found himself with compressed muscles in his neck so bad that it was pulling his inner ear out of alignment. When the inner ear gets out of alignment, vertigo happens and he had it to the point he couldn’t rise past some 25-odd degrees. He couldn’t find anyone who was strong enough to release the muscles so like any robotics engineer from GE would do, he built a machine that could, and does, release muscles.
The guy from the boathouse and I get to Al’s office and Al has me move down the hallway and back, hawkeyes watching closely, before putting me under this strange looking arch with a hydraulic arm attached to it. 4 hours later, I’m released. Sitting up on the side of the bed, feeling like not much has happened, I look at him. He looks back and then tells me to get up and walk.
3 steps in and I have no idea what to do with myself because for the first time since I was 14, I walk without pain.
My jaw dropped. I jumped. Actually jumped. And landed. And didn’t want to cry out in pain.
Having just switched my field of study from business to what is effectively pre-med for the rehab therapies, I asked if there were any openings in his clinic. There were and for the next year, I was at his shoulder, learning the in’s and out’s of how to see past the symptoms, look at the body as an intelligent machine, and see where the imbalances causing the issues lived and how to shift things back into alignment.
He trained my ability to not be distracted by the easy stuff (while still being open to the possibility that the easy answer is sometimes actually the answer) and to get to the roots of what’s going on.
Over my time there, I watched and participated as people who came in wheelchairs left walking. People who were debilitated by migraines got their lives back, and frozen shoulders came back to life. Throughout those and many more processes, Al was there, showing me how to look at the entire system of the human body; all of these muscles and bones – pulleys and levers – working to keep us going and how when things move out of place – the body is hardwired to shift things back and this can cause a lot of pain, tension, and all kinds of other issues. “Don’t be distracted,” he would say “by the lines that clothes create. Follow the lines created by the bones. Follow the lines of the muscles. Find the source. What happened? What started it all?”
Systems thinking, asking why and then asking why again, shifting gently into alignments that allow space for movement and room to function and heal… Al brought these concepts to life for me day after day, week after week. His words still echo clearly in my mind today.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
When I’m being really philosophical about it… I’ll say that I’m still in the world of healing.
The flavor is very different. Right now it’s with businesses; the relationship of an organization with itself and with it’s stakeholders (from a people, places, and things perspective.)
But, first you asked about my background. Well, it’s diverse and varied – family business in agriculture, horse trainer, governess, COO of a frankincense essential oil distillery.
18 countries and 32 of the United States by the time I was 18 (walking onion fields in many of those places) is a solid way to pack in a lot of experience in a short amount of time.
The physical therapy school I was going for didn’t happen but a lot of other stuff did and now I’m running for mayor in a city filled with game changers, system shifters, and a whole bunch of people who give me a massive amount of hope for the future.
Which is what my company, Twiggs & Co. does. It functionally gives me(and a bunch of other people) hope for the future.
The big picture is that we do what are called “Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility Programs” where we connect business goals to intentional stakeholder engagement in a way that increases employee engagement, intentionally engages stakeholders from a triple bottom line perspective (social, environmental, and financial), and facilitates the evolution to a better business. Or as our friends over at the B:Corp movement would say, “business as a force for good.”
Coming soon we have a workshop that leads people in organizations through the process of forming strategic community investment plans. My business partner, Vicki Carey-Davis and I are particularly excited based on the feedback we’ve been getting and the tie in of our workshop to the B:Corp assessment as well as Asset Based Community Development. This workshop guides the conversation in a way that has participants coming from a place of abundance, seeing the hope, assets, and possibilities all around instead of being stuck in that place of scarcity where the only thing visible is what’s missing.
Re-empowering people to notice their abundance is an incredibly powerful tool.
Any advice for managing a team?
LISTEN TO YOUR PEOPLE.
Shouting for the people in the back.
The people who best know what’s going on with your team, your business, in your city, are your people.
Do they not know what’s going on? Then they are not engaged and that is a huge red flag that things are going wrong.
HUGE.
If you find yourself there, that’s alright. Noticing where you are means that you’ve looked up and seen where you are well enough to know something’s gotta change.
And even if you don’t feel like you can, even if the heat from the fire on the roof is curling the hairs on your arms, it is vital that the thing that shifts is the sense of urgency that comes from living in a culture where internalized capitalism and white supremacy culture reign supreme.
(not-so-side-note: did reading about internalized cap. & white supremacy culture trigger you? want to know what the first-step of a solution to that trigger is? … slow down. take a breath. Ask why it triggered you, and then keep asking why until you find (what may be an uncomfortable truth) about why you were triggered)
Anyway, that’s the thing about how the systems that we are in work, and this is where the advice from Al comes in handy in a different context, a lot of it is under the surface. It can take digging through a lot of symptoms to get to the cause because these systems of oppression are often very sneaky.
That’s why your people are vital.
And that is also why it is vital to fight the sometimes insurmountable urge to drop everything and put all the fires out now.
We have to slow down and listen to our people.
What are they complaining about? What is going on in their day-to-day? What have they asked for from you directly?
Admittedly, sometimes it is not feasible to deliver what they have asked for and when this is the case. Without making excuses, bring them into the fold and compensate them for their time. Remember that you are on the same team.
So for success, LISTEN TO YOUR PEOPLE. They are experts at what they do – day in and day out. Treat them as you would a high-powered consultant, take care of them.
TL;DR: Listen to your people, respond to what they’re saying. Engage in conversation. Bring them into the fold. Fight the system, slow down and take a breath.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Twiggs & Co. has a reputation built on showing up and doing the work. For us, this is some of what that has looked like so far:
Early 2020 we doubled down in the hospitality industry and when that disappeared overnight, we saw our people lose income, purpose, and connection. Also overnight.
The first thing we did was to create a resource guide for the multitude of resources that Denver, Colorado, and the organizations across the US moved to provide. We then distributed it to our friends in the service industries, bar and restaurant owners, and others who suddenly found themselves out of a job.
The second thing we did was to shift to a different angle in our food systems – food rescue, food pantries/banks, and food production. We figured that in order to have conversations, to figure out solutions, to collaborate, people need to eat so we (always in teams) sorted, served, and distributed literal tons of food. Seeing as 1/3 of total produced food in the United States is regularly thrown away, moving up the food chain was a natural progression in our stakeholder-sustainability journey.
From the beginning we have had an eye on how policy influences the operation of people and businesses. In working in this part of the food system, we came face to face with some of the systems of oppression that are at play in how standard operating procedures and policies are written. We followed bread crumbs and found Good Business Colorado, the Alliance Center, and other groups that work to guide our government officials in creating more effective policies.
While participating in volunteer events, task forces, working groups, and on councils, we’ve met hundreds of people who are working for change. We have met policy makers of all ilks, business owners and operators who want to see the world become a better place, and organizational leaders from every position.
Our reputation has grown because we’ve put intention into where and how we show up for our stakeholders. Because we listen to our people and because we respond when they tell us what’s up. We have grown our reputation by looking at the symptoms, tracing them to the source, and are continuously working to facilitate the space and room to be able to exist, heal, and ultimately thrive.
Contact Info:
- Website: Twiggsco.com and Annafordenver.com
- Instagram: @anna_m_burrell, @annafordenver, @twiggs.and.co
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-burrell89/
- Twitter: @annafordenver
Image Credits
Twiggs & Co.