We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Carlos Kareem Windham. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Carlos Kareem below.

Hi Carlos Kareem, thanks for joining us today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

I have never been happier about the direction of my “professional path”, whatever that means. I’ve been blessed to parlay word-Tetris into a lucrative career as a facilitator, Executive Coach, and trainer for several public facing agencies across the region. Collaborating with Theresa Logan and Subduction Consulting, I’ve had the opportunity to help agencies elevate their internal strengths and wisdom, toward working for the most impacted folks in their respective communities.

Under the banner of the EL Porvenir Services, the LLC I formed in 2019, I’m able to produce three shows a month, along with my production-partner, Mx. Dahlia Belle. We are currently producing F*cks of Life – a Brunch Mic at Capitol Bar, The Aftermath, comedy and music for the Aftermath at Havalina PDX, and The Rapture stand-up showcase at Siren Theatre. Between standup, facilitating and the occasional emceeing gig with Portland band, Wallace, Whether through comedy, consultation or rap, I make words that inspire folks to build communities that center the most impacted.

Carlos Kareem, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

El Porvenir Services, LLC is on a mission to bring clients into the future, and to center the voices of the most impacted in the reclamation of their power in the intersection of race, class, and gender. We work for the creation of just ecosystems where people maintain long-term relationships across difference, in the creation of outcomes that provide equitable opportunities for the most excluded. El Porvenir Services, LLC provides training, coaching, and forensic equity analysis for individuals, public agencies, municipalities and non-profits across the nation.

El Porvenir Services’ Equity and Racial Justice / Human Rights services are built on a scaffold of deeply researched, investigated, and reality tested frameworks created by Founder and Principal, Carlos Kareem Windham over more than 30 years of community praxis to talk honestly about race, find strength through vulnerability, understand the philosophical principles of racial equity, and to move toward standing and working in deference to Black femme power. This network of frameworks is built on hundreds of years of scholarship, organizing & activism, popular culture, & the lived experiences of the most impacted.

Training alone does not create different outcomes and is too often used as a strategy to “check the box” of commitment to racial equity without the necessary concomitant shifts in daily policy and practice. In our approach to training & facilitation, we help clients make the invisible visible, speak the unspoken, and understand how race, class, and gender codes are structurally and behaviorally woven into & reinforced in organizational policies, practices, and norms. Then we help participants identify the rhizomatic choice-points that can bring your vision and outcomes into stronger alignment.

Multi-hyphenant, Carlos Kareem Windham, is an artist/organizer who has spent the better part of the last two decades performing for audiences and speaking with students, teachers and organizers on stages and in classrooms across the globe. Carlos’ works are vulnerable, defiant expressions of the relationships between race, class and gender in the U.S. and abroad. Whether through the medium of storytelling, lyrics, workshop, or stand-up, Carlos takes every opportunity to speak truth to power.

Jean Grae and Wanda Sykes think they are pretty funny. NPR’s Jesse Thorn says Carlos pronounces their name like a character form the 1980’s television program Taxi. Michael Rappaport thinks Carlos is an asshole, and international rap superstar, Talib Kweli, called them a “goofy fuck” who should mind their own goddamn business.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

It takes a great deal of study, investment of hours, and sacrifice of immediate gratification to forge a path to personal freedom. It also, by my estimation, requires a clear embrace of the community and people in our immediate lives. Too many folks seem to think that shitting on the efforts of the community, or their elders, is a path to salvation. However, judgment without a solution at offer is just bullshitting over drinks and dinner. We have to embrace each other, because the goal of society isn’t to care for its workforce, and certainly not for its creative class. Rather, the goal of a hyper-consumerist capitalist society is to add weather to the coffers of the aristocracy. That’s why we have to depend on our communities and collectives. There is no one on our team but us.

This, I think, is why we are witnessing the historical SAG-AFTRA strikes. By and large, people won’t understand the impact of the labor shortage for a while, but once they do, it’s going to be felt for a while. And, we see clearly how the industrialists are treating the creative folks in their labor market. A studio executive at Disney literally admitted to reporters from Deadline that “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses,” another insider calling it “a cruel but necessary evil.” These are the oligarchs who run studio systems, and they are willing to let their artists lose their homes and starve, rather than pay them a fair living wage, amidst steadily rising inflation and stagnant wages and pay structures.

If society wants to support artists and creatives, it must burn the system to the ground and allow femmes and Radical Leftists to reimagine and facilitate a global redistribution of resources. Everything comes with a price.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to learn that I could never be mentally or spiritually balanced at a regular job. I tried. I tried to work for several municipalities from Colorado, to Oakland, and finally in Portland. Each time, it grew more clear that I didn’t have what it takes to bare down and work for an employer for a career. I felt so awkward in chinos and a polo shirt, and was told by my then partner that my work ensembles made me look like a well dressed cop.

I also had to unlearn the idea that I needed titular recognition to contribute meaningfully to the direction of society. All that is required for any of us to impact the world around us is to interact with it. If we do so from a place of resiliency, a surplus model that centers sufficiency, and rooted in long term, ongoing, relationships and love – we care about creating a path for healing ourselves and reclaiming our souls from the bloodied jowls of a white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy.

Contact Info:

• Website: under construction
• Instagram: @elcaballonegito
• Facebook: Carlos Kareem Windham
• Linkedin: Carlos Kareem Windham
• Twitter: what’s a Twitter?
• Youtube: Carlos Kareem Windham

Image Credits
Gregory Wallace, Lindays Lens Photos