I sat down with Faith Clarke —organizational health consultant, strategist, and soul-led systems thinker—for a deep and nourishing conversation on what it means to build work cultures where people actually belong.
This episode is a grounded, heart-forward invitation to slow down, feel your body, and rethink what thriving actually means in community and business.
Immigrant, Mother, Culture Builder: A Conversation with Faith Clarke
Today I’m so excited to share a beautiful and layered conversation with Faith Clarke.
We go into:
how her immigrant journey shaped her
what parenting neurodistinct kids taught her about systems and scaffolding
invisible labor and why so many of us are exhausted
and how we can build restorative work cultures, even inside broken systems
Let me introduce Faith properly, and then we’ll get into it.
Meet Faith Clarke
Faith Clarke is an organizational culture and teamwork specialist committed to helping business leaders cultivate values-infused, inclusive cultures where people truly feel like they belong—so they can deliver on their business and social impact promises.
She is especially passionate about inclusion for BIPOC and neurodistinct individuals, grounded in her experience as a Caribbean immigrant and as a mother of neurodistinct humans.
Faith’s background spans:
computer engineering
doctoral research in teamwork
and deep experience with organizations that care about social impact
She brings all of that into a high-touch, systematic approach to building strong teams. Her clients improve operations, increase productivity, and grow revenue—but in ways that honor humans, not just numbers.
Faith is:
a published researcher
author of the Amazon bestseller Parenting Like a Ninja
host/curator of the Feminist Founder Community and Podcast
and former host of the Peak Performing Teen podcast
She’s contributed to numerous publications and online shows in the U.S. and the U.K., and delivers workshops and lectures across academic and professional settings.
Mic drop, right?
But of course, bios are one angle. I wanted to know: how does she hear herself in all that?
On Hearing Your Own Bio (and Why It Feels Like “Too Much”)
When I asked Faith how it felt to hear her own bio, she admitted:
“Whenever I hear my bio, I have to deal with my own reticence around being spoken about with these big words.”
She shared a story:
She once led a workshop for women leaders. As they read her bio aloud, she felt uncomfortable and asked the room, “Why do you think this feels uncomfortable for me?”
A woman replied:
“Maybe because your bio sounds like that of a man.”
That comment opened up a conversation about:
our own internalized biases
power and privilege around gender
and how even women can see authority and accomplishment as “male”
Faith’s current practice is to receive her own bio—to let it in, even when her instinct is to push it away. Because so many of us, especially women, women of color, immigrants, and neurodistinct folks, are carrying generational instincts that tell us to shrink, deflect, or downplay.
As she put it:
“We breathed it in the air. It’s in the blood.”
Faith’s Core: Loving People and Asking Better Questions
When I asked, “What does someone need to understand about your journey to understand your work?” Faith started with something simple and profound:
“I’m a person who loves people. I’m deeply curious about people.”
As a child, she was “accused” of asking too many questions. Today, she sees questions as powerful tools:
Good questions live beyond the answers.
Holding a question can guide you over time.
Many harmful solutions come from asking the wrong questions.
So a lot of her work now is about standing in spaces—teams, organizations, families—and wondering:
“What’s the right question to ask here?”
Parenting Neurodistinct Kids: A Portal and a Teacher
Faith is a Caribbean immigrant, a mother, and a parent of neurodistinct kids.
She prefers “neurodistinct” rather than how we often misuse “neurodiverse”:
“Neurodiversity, like biodiversity, is just the normal state of the world.”
The issue isn’t diversity. The issue is that our systems are built for a narrow default and everyone else is seen as “other.”
Raising neurodistinct children gave her:
a front-row seat to how unlevel the world really is
constant reminders that many supports aren’t automatic—you have to fight for them
and new questions about what true inclusion and access actually look like
She calls her kids “pinpoints on the developmental cloud”—spots that revealed where they didn’t belong by default, and where systems weren’t built with them in mind. That shaped how she thinks about teamwork, culture, and designing for inclusion.
Parenting, for her, has been more than a role. It’s a portal:
“To be a portal is to also allow yourself to be changed by that magic, that power.”
She wanted to offer her kids what she didn’t have, and in doing that work—for them—she kept hearing the whisper:
“You know it’s for you too.”
The Mother Archetype and Becoming “More Than Mother”
We talked about the archetype of Mother—how huge it is, especially for women of color and immigrants. Faith shared:
She always felt motherhood was a calling.
Even as a teen, she was intentional about when and how she wanted to mother.
She wanted to offer something different than what she received growing up.
But motherhood has both a bright and shadow side.
As her kids grew, she started asking:
“Beyond Mother, who am I? What’s the bigger archetype?”
She began landing in Woman as the larger identity, with “mother” as one expression inside of that.
Because as mothers, especially in cultures where mothering is idealized and demanded:
we can lose our other identities
we can forget we are also: friend, partner, entrepreneur, leader, creative, human
So she’s been deconstructing the ways society fuses “woman” and “mother” into one thing—and reclaiming a fuller, more integrated self.
Integration, Not Juggling: Turning Down and Up the Dials
I shared with Faith how I’d felt like I was living a double life:
one identity as a communications/writer professional
another slowly building this podcast and my own work
She reframed it, not as juggling, but as integration:
“Integrated is that place where everything has integrity—integer, whole.”
When we’re not integrated, we fray and fragment.
That fraying is a signal: something needs attention.
Her question in those moments is:
“What’s going on here?”
Then, instead of “juggling,” she imagines an audio equalizer:
Maybe business needs more volume right now.
Maybe parenting needs more presence right now.
Maybe her own rest and care need to be dialed up.
Integration isn’t doing everything at once.
It’s knowing what to dial up and dial down, based on what your body and life are saying.
Starting a Business to Reclaim Needs: Autonomy, Competence, Connection
When Faith started her first business, it wasn’t just about entrepreneurship or income.
It was about reclaiming needs that were no longer being met.
She had left traditional workplace roles to be more fully present with her autistic son. That meant:
less recognition of her competence
fewer colleague relationships and stimulating conversations
less autonomy, because autism and care needs structured her days
Around that time, she was in a doctoral program and came across Self-Determination Theory, which speaks to three core human needs:
Relatedness – having meaningful relationships
Autonomy – feeling agency over your life and choices
Competence – feeling capable and having that competence recognized
She realized her business could be:
a place to reconnect with her competence
a space to build relationships that nourished her
a container for reclaiming some autonomy
“Deciding to start my business was a decision to reclaim the needs that I had that were no longer being served.”
So again, it wasn’t just about “being a founder.”
It was about practicing being an integrated human.
Women of Color, Systems Not Built for Us, and the Need for More Care
We zoomed out to talk about women of color, first-gen experiences, and systems that aren’t built for us.
Faith was clear:
The road is not level.
The game board is rigged.
More labor is required of us to take the same step others take.
There is more risk when we move.
That means:
“More care is needed, not less.”
But we’re taught the opposite:
push through
prove yourself
work twice as hard
don’t ask for too much
Faith encouraged:
Care as the first priority
When your body is screaming “take care of me,” it’s not the moment for deep questioning.
Resourcing yourself physically and emotionally comes first.
Build relationships that reflect your humanity back to you
People who remind you: It’s the system, not you.
People who understand your context (race, gender, chronic illness, neurodivergence, immigration, etc.)
Relationships that help you rest, not just hustle.
She also highlighted the power of multigenerational connections:
“I always had friends 10–15 years older than me. That gave me a bird’s-eye view forward.”
Those relationships gave her perspective, models, and wisdom she could draw from as she built her own path.
When Family Isn’t the Scaffolding
We talked about something tender: when your immediate family or culture can’t—or won’t—provide the scaffolding you need.
Faith offered two big ideas:
Stop moralizing difference.
We often make our parents or elders “wrong” and ourselves “right,” or vice versa. That keeps us stuck.She shared deciding, with her 85-year-old grandmother:
“If there’s anyone who can change, it’s me, not her.”
That didn’t mean agreeing with everything—but it did mean stepping out of constant judgment.
Look for your people everywhere, not just in one place.
Your “village” may not be your biological family or coworkers.
It might be online communities, spiritual spaces, friends of friends, mentors 10–20 years older, younger folks you mentor, etc.
And building that village takes discernment and initiative:
noticing when someone lights something up in you
being willing to say, “Hey, want to grab coffee or chat more?”
letting yourself be the listener so you can see who is safe, aligned, or supportive
“We don’t find our people all sitting in one spot. They don’t all look the same.”
Invisible Labor, Leadership, and Burnout
Toward the end of our conversation, Faith shared what’s currently alive for her: invisible labor.
Especially for:
women
women of color
competent, “type A” people
We get praised for being “calm,” “capable,” and “reliable”—and punished for it too.
Because:
people assume we don’t need support
systems load more work onto us
we end up holding the emotional, cultural, and relational scaffolding for everyone
She pointed out:
Many of us get promoted into leadership while still carrying all the invisible labor.
That’s why so many women leaders, especially women of color, are burnt out and fragmented.
Her invitation:
Notice the invisible labor you’re doing.
Grieve the fact that you don’t fully belong in these systems—and that the system isn’t designed to care for you.
Release some of that labor, even if things temporarily fall apart.
Because if we belonged, systems would be structured to care for us.
They aren’t. So we have to build micro-worlds—teams, relationships, communities—that do.
Tiny Pockets of Change: Why Culture Work Starts Small
In her consulting, Faith focuses on restorative work cultures—workplaces that don’t extract more than they give.
But she’s not only working with C-suites and big declarations.
She loves working with:
one team leader
and a team of 4–6 people
Because policies matter, yes, but:
“A policy will not heal us.
A law will not heal us.
What changes us is the practice of behavior between two people, three people, four people.”
Her questions for anyone listening who feels stuck at work:
Where do you have any autonomy or influence?
How can you care for one relationship differently?
How can you be the kind of leader—formal or informal—who facilitates belonging, starting with yourself?
Stories, Media, and What She’s Reading/Watching
I always love asking guests what media has shaped them.
Faith shared:
She’s obsessed with stories about humans, especially ones that let you see culture and patterns from the outside.
She loves the Outlander book series (not just the TV show) for its rich human dynamics and history.
Recently, the Wild Robot series (and the new animated film) moved her deeply.
She pointed to The Wild Robot as a metaphor:
A “robot” arrives alien to the planet, then becomes native to it.
It asks: Alien to whom? Native to whom?
“You might feel alien in spaces that don’t fit you. But you are native somewhere else.”
From a business lens, she mentioned The Buddha and the Badass by Vishen Lakhiani as a book that offers some interesting examples of more human-oriented work cultures (even if not perfect or complete).
Where to Find and Work with Faith
If you’d like to connect with Faith, explore her work, or bring her into your organization, you can find her at:
🌐 faithclark.com
She works with:
leaders and teams on culture design, team effectiveness, and conflict prevention/navigation
individuals on self-integration, self-belonging, and living as a whole, aligned person
Because:
“If you don’t do that work for yourself, you’re not going to do it for your team—any team, including the one at home.”
Closing
This conversation with Faith felt like sitting in a living room with a wise auntie, big sister, coach, and culture strategist all in one.
We went everywhere:
immigrant stories
parenting portals
belonging and non-belonging
invisible labor and burnout
business as a way to reclaim your own needs
If this resonated with you, please:
share it with a friend, coworker, or loved one who might need these words
reach out to Faith if you feel called
and, as always, take what serves, leave what doesn’t, and listen to your own body’s wisdom in the process
Thank you so much for being here, for listening, and for continuing to question and reimagine work and life alongside me.
Until next time,
be well. 💜
Learn about Faith Clarke:https://www.faithclarke.com/
