We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Leigh Robbie Gaymon-Jones. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Leigh Robbie below.

Hi Leigh Robbie , thanks for joining us today. Going back to the beginning – how did you come up with the idea in the first place?

I launched The Nest as a home for creativity, possibility, and belonging. I wanted a place to experiment with building a work culture that nurtured its team as much as it uplifted its community. I wanted to feel good about coming to work, for my team to feel great about coming to work, and for the leaders I admired to feel excited to work with us! Really I launched The Nest seeking a feeling, or a vibe.

Second to the ‘how’ came the ‘what’. Reflecting on a long career of working for nonprofits, many years of doing freelance website design on the side, and a brief stint in philanthropy, branding emerged as a clear and exciting opportunity to utilize creative practices to amplify the important messages of community groups, nonprofits and businesses working diligently to creating lasting social change. I had plenty of firsthand experience with how an incredible business or organization could be doing really profound work, but struggle to connect it to their community or funding streams. This felt like a storytelling problem that could be alleviated through a strong verbal and visual brand identity that could bring the story of the work off the page. Having worked with climate justice activists, youth development organizations and racial justice organizers, I knew that these folks were experts in their fields. And I wanted to offer them expert communications tools that connect their messages to the people who needed to hear them.

After planning and producing my own wedding, I realized not only how much of my experience perfectly leant itself to event management, but what a thrilling way it was to immerse a community in an idea. I was excited to introduce event planning into the business as a beautiful and obvious extension of brand building. Through events, we would be able to pull an audience directly into the brand values and vision.

I had never run a creative agency or a business, or even worked as a professional designer for that matter. So I didn’t start The Nest knowing a lot about the field I was stepping into or about how to run this business. But I did know my audience. The thing that got my foot in the door, and that still drives our business strategy is that I, and my team, come from the communities we serve. I sought designers and producers who were steeped in the communities that I wanted to work with so that even while we were young and growing, we could say that we knew where our clients were coming from. We could relate in a deep and unnameable way, which carried more weight than I could have ever imagined.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

The Nest is a cultural strategy project that uses design, events and public programs as tools to amplify the social impact of our clients and community. We are a Black, Queer, Woman-owned business that is led by a team of BIPOC and Queer creatives, who are rooted in the communities we serve. Our California-rooted team maintains deep relationships across the country and draws inspiration from across the globe. The Nest is a social impact company investing in an ecosystem of changemakers who are building visionary solutions to meet contemporary problems in a range of fields including climate change, racial justice, culture keeping, immigration, gender justice and democracy.

Woven Studios is The Nest’s full service design and events agency, serving the communication and connection needs of artists, entrepreneurs, small businesses, nonprofits, and community projects. We leverage the skills and expertise of our diverse and dynamic artists, producers and strategists to develop compelling messaging, assets and immersive experiences to amplify our clients’ essential work. From impactful brand identities that ignite digital strategies to expertly crafted events, we ensure every touchpoint deeply moves and inspires our clients’ audiences.

We know that thinking about branding and marketing can be a daunting task for our clients who are already devoting an incredible amount of energy to powerful, strategic problem solving. We offer a deeply empathetic and culturally attuned approach to branding, specifically designed for values-driven groups and leaders, so they can see themselves and their audiences reflected in all that we create for them. Unlike agencies that prioritize trendy aesthetics or corporate messaging, we prioritize authenticity, community, and cultural impact. We offer a trusted partnership that goes beyond surface-level design, guiding clients through a process that honors their cultural context, respects their unique vision, and translates their message into impactful verbal and visual branding that resonates authentically with their community. We help clients reject the pressure of curated online personas and create a genuine brand presence that stands as a powerful counterpoint to the mainstream branding landscape.

While Woven Studios is where we bring to life the dreams of our clients, we engage our own creative ideas of connection and care through The Nest’s two public branches. Gatherings are our community programs where we play, learn, and explore together; and Flight Lab, our business incubator, is where socially-driven ideas, projects, and businesses are developed within a network of nurturing partnerships.

As the founder of The Nest, I have been connecting with communities through creativity and craft for over two decades. With a background in the arts, project management and community program development, I am a natural cheerleader for big, bold ideas and innovative dreamers. Woven Studios was born as an outlet for me to channel that enthusiasm and support for her peers. Today, I am proud that as a collective, The Nest has not only nurtured my peers, but supported the work of some of my heroes and connected me to inspiring projects that I truly believe are helping to shape a more vibrant and thriving future for us all.

We play a critical support role in the progressive social movement ecosystem as culture change strategists resourcing them with materials to facilitate a just transition toward a thriving & liberated future. Woven Studios produces, practices, and promotes collective power and belonging.

Woven Studios at The Nest is eager to showcase the impact of our clients’ work by weaving together the stories, visuals and experience that bring their visions to life, and spark their communities to take action.

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 have a background as an artist and in non-profits, and I launched a for-profit company fueled largely by personal drive and enthusiasm. My training as an artist helped me imagine possibilities for The Nest and my work in non-profits built my people management and leadership skills, but I spent a lot of time struggling to figure out how to make the finances of the business make sense. Prior to starting The Nest, I spent virtually my entire career in non-profits, with freelance gigs on the side. And even then I worked on the program side of things, not in development. So when I began building my business I brought vague notions of needing startup capital (which I didn’t have), seeking out investors (which I didn’t want) and finding business grants (which I never found).

It wasn’t until going into our third year that I realized my whole approach to how to get off the ground was rooted in a non-profit perspective — I was looking for some funding source that was outside of our actual services that would give me financial freedom to experiment, fail and iterate as I built the business, all the while covering my core expenses. Don’t get me wrong, that would have been dreamy! But the reality is that embedded in my fantasies of a magical money pot was a non-profit framework which was seeking some sort of charity instead of appreciating the value of the service that I was offering to my community. A huge part of why I developed The Nest as an LLC instead of a 501c3 was to put me in direct relationship with the people I was serving. I was excited for their feedback, engagement or potential lack their of to dictate the direction of the company, instead of a 3rd party funder. But it took me a while to see that my search for funding was pulling me away from my initial motivations in launching the company.

Once I could see how the approach wasn’t serving my goals, I could reorganize my financial planning and lean more heavily into our marketing strategies. Now our financial goals are tied directly to our the income from Woven Studios, our creative agency. This year our finances are so on track that we’re even planning to reengage our public programs, which were put on pause while we redesign our financial structure!

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Our company values are connection, care, craft and collaboration. And supporting and collaborating with a team are a big part of what excites me in my role, so I reflect quite a lot on how to integrate those values across our work broadly and my team management specifically. Transparency, empathy, reciprocity and honest, frequent and direct feedback are at the center of my approach to managing a team.

I doubt that anyone things lying is a topnotch strategy for building relationships, which is essentially what managing a team is. But it can be hard to know if we “should” be transparent as managers or bosses, especially when we spend a lot of time trying to tell the world how stable, successful and put together our businesses are. But I have found that being as transparent with my team as possible has built a lot of trust and investment in me as a leader and in The Nest overall. I’ve had to lean into the vulnerability of transparency when I admitted I wasn’t sure how to aspects of my job that I felt I should know how to do, when I made big mistakes with clients, when I denied people’s requests for raises (either because I didn’t feel we had the funds for it or because I didn’t feel their work warranted the raise), and when I was sad to let people go even though I knew it was the best for the business at the time. And each time it was hard, but it allowed me to be a real person with my team members, and usually allowed me to maintain or event strengthen the relationship long term.

I also believe deeply in direct communication and honest, frequent feedback. I hate guessing about where I stand with people, so I don’t want to leave my team in the dark. I give lots of praise because I’m genuinely so delighted to have a team who is helping me bring this business to life! I also know that many people come to the workspace with a lot of tenderness and timidness about not measuring up, so I like to find the places to celebrate their work! It also means that when I bring critical feedback, which I’m not shy about doing, they can hold that feedback in the greater context of their work overall.

And to all of these hard conversations, critiques and pivots, I really try to root my reflections and questions in empathy. As a business owner it can be easy to take a team member’s behavior personally. But it’s usually not. So I remind myself that as invested in this work as they may be, I can’t expect anyone to prioritize my business the way I do. And from there I try to imagine where they’re coming from, or better yet, I ask them directly. And even when I share how I feel about a situation or how I may have been negatively impacted by someone’s actions, I hope to convey that my goal is to address tensions so we can work towards alignment. I never want anyone on my team to feel shamed, scrutinized or unfairly critiqued. I started The Nest to lift people up, and that can’t only apply to our clients. If we’re not holding that value in-house, the value of our work externally is diminished.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thenestcreatives.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenestcreatives/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-nest-creatives/
• Other: vimeo:
  www.vimeo/thenestcreatives

Image Credits

Qurissy

Farah Sosa

Shannon O’Neill Creighton