#34: Jenny — Systemic Change, Regenerative Societies, Personal Growth
A bold experiment in provocation and connection.
Welcome to Mia’s Queue, a free newsletter for “humans in the loop” who care about conscious culture in a tech-driven world. I love exploring how taste and curation facilitate self-discovery and create deeper connections with others. When I’m not exploring what that means in my own life, I chat with an undercover tastemaker infusing creativity and wonder into the world. Learn what lights them up as they tell their inspiration story and share quality things to read, watch, hear, and do. Meet Agent 034: Jenny Stefanotti, the founder and steward of Denizen.
Jenny and I worked together at Google “back in the day,” and I’ve avidly followed her moves ever since. Beyond her many fancy degrees, sharp intellect, impressive network, and excellent taste in music is a tenacious desire to make the world a better place. That may sound like a cliché, but I assure you it is not. Jenny really is getting into the weeds of what change requires at a systemic level. Her platform, Denizen, is a content and community hub, with a podcast and salons, that distills the critical topics of our time to help, you know, save humanity and the planet.
In addition to her fierce drive to tackle some truly tough stuff, I admire Jenny’s thesis that change begins within. At a time when the trend was to “lean in” (thanks, Sheryl S!), Jenny pushed back, opting to live her principles and prioritize caring for her family. The back-to-back deaths of her parents inspired another reckoning. She’s open about whatever’s happening in her life and it all informs her work.
That is leadership — and bravery — to the highest degree.
How would you describe what Denizen is?
Well, first there is the podcast. It’s a broad conversation about systemic change. There are six pillars: economics, politics, culture, consciousness, technology, and justice. The interrelated nature of those pieces of the puzzle encapsulates the foundation of society, the incentives that lead to our behaviors, how we govern, etc.
It's asking at the highest level:
What does a society look like that is fundamentally just, caring, and regenerative?
We pick one topic at a time — for example, universal basic income — and think about how that might fit into a more just world. The second question is: how do we get from here to there? That's the content piece.
The conversation became a magnet for so many people during the pandemic; I was hosting them on Clubhouse and we unexpectedly grew to an audience of over 85,000. From there the community component naturally emerged. Now we do in-person and virtual events and an annual retreat. We have Signal groups where the community engages regularly, including ones for Denizens in various geographies. I've recently started to do monthly salons here in the Bay Area too. I'm always experimenting with ways we can learn together.
So while the conversation is exploring the systemic change that we all know needs to happen, the theory of change is that we're all complicit with this very broken system by virtue of the implicit biases we have, the choices we make, where we work, the things we buy, where we send our kids to school, etc.
I hold a holistic thesis around each of us as agents of systems change. Denizen’s tagline is “change from within.” It’s insufficient to have a social enterprise with a product that does good in the world if, for example, the culture within that company reflects the dominance of certain groups.
The conversation is a provocation on a comprehensive level and the community offers a space for us to do that work together.
I curate a common intellectual foundation and thought leadership, but I’m also curating opportunities to do the work together in partnership with organizations that do adjacent work, like the Buckminster Fuller Institute and organizations at the forefront of psychedelics. I'm giving my community opportunities to uplevel themselves, whether that be an intellectual understanding of what regenerative economics or finance might look like through the Capital Institute's work, or doing the deep relational work through something like nonviolent communication.
A critical part of my story is that I ratcheted back work significantly during the years when my kids were young, which was not what the world asked someone [with multiple degrees] to do.
When I emerged to go back to work, I wrote this blog post, “I didn't lean in, I pushed back.” The Sheryl Sandberg notion of push, push push with work until the very last minute, and then take the time off, and then go back to work, but, you know, really fight for that dinner at home, and then go back to work…to me that was capitalism capturing feminism. I wanted to be a model for a different paradigm where we value care.
Do you have any rituals and practices around feeding your inspiration?
I just follow an elusive force. The stack of books on my nightstand is a mile high. There is something mysterious about what happens to be lighting you up at the moment.
I'm coming back into it after taking some time off because I needed to stabilize some things on my home front; I needed to uplevel how I showed up in my marriage. I put Denizen in a hole for a quarter and devoured 10 books on marriage and love. Of course, that's going to then come back into the inquiry because it's super relevant.
Another key piece of the work is around getting out of our heads, getting out of our intellect, getting out of the should, getting into our bodies, and really trusting our soul to tell us where it wants to go.
What practices do you have around keeping notes and retaining what you read?
My current process is pretty old school. I read real books, and I underline and dogear them. I'm effectively reading things twice so that helps me really absorb the content.
I'm a very visual person, so seeing where the content is on the page helps me refer back to it easily. Next to my desk are all the books I read for Denizen since the beginning. Many times while I'm doing a podcast recording I’ll want to bring in a quote from something I’ve read and I’m able to grab the book and find it quickly and integrate it into the conversation.
I don’t do it often but the process also allows me to read the whole book [again] in a few hours just by scanning my underlines.
You're one of the most well-read people I know. What are some of the books that you recommend that everyone check out because you think they're so valuable?
The first two are books that I would send to everyone joining the Denizen community:
📙 “Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows
She was an amazing systems thinker. She was the lead scientist in a study called “The Limits to Growth,” which was the first voice to say “exponential growth on a finite planet is a recipe for disaster.” This book is very short and fairly easy to read. I have a podcast episode on Donella with Marta Ceroni, who runs The Academy of Systems Change:
❤️ “All About Love” by Bell Hooks
A really interesting provocation about love: what it is, what we learned in childhood, how we learn it in community, the importance of honesty, and what it means to live by a love ethic.
🍩 “Doughnut Economics” by Kate Raworth
I don’t find the doughnuts concept particularly insightful and I think the book is too high level on the solutions side, but what’s amazing is how she delineates, very succinctly, what's wrong with neoclassical economics. How did we get here? What are the vectors that we need to think about evolving economics to account for how the world works and where we want it to go?
🌍 “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible” by Charles Eisenstein
It's a quicker read. Charles's focal point is around consciousness and culture, essentially the story of who we are; this story of independence and separation, which is the dominant paradigm that everything is built on top of — versus interdependence and connection. That's where things need to shift.
One of the things that influenced me in this book was his example of a leader who stopped when his stepmom got cancer. We need to embody the world we want to move towards, and that is not a world where we don't show up for our family. That's why I stopped everything for six months when both my parents died. I was doing the work at a more meta level, like how I was living my life.
📝 Adrienne Maree Brown
She wrote a really amazing blog post called “We will not cancel us” that talks about cancel culture — what’s wrong with it but also when canceling is an effective tool, why you might use it, and how it's overused. She distinguishes between punitive justice, which is the dominant form of justice that we know; restorative justice, which restores relations, and transformational justice that does the very deep work of transformation. As leaders of these movements, she says we need to embody this change, not deal with our trauma or take the opportunity to oppress the groups that were formerly oppressing us, which is a lot of what happens in cancel culture.
“Emergent Strategy” is another book of hers that is a classic.
What about music? Let me say I love your taste and music!
Weval has always been number one!
Dauwd “Theory of Colours” is my favorite album to play on vinyl.
Melanie de Blasio is a little more jazzy.
Cool! Is there anything else you want to recommend?
The last thing I feel remiss without mentioning is this amazing relationship coach Jillian Turecki.
Her thesis is about improving relationships by improving your relationship with yourself. I've been learning a lot from her. Fill up your feeds with people like Jillian who help you evolve and do the work.
You can check out Jenny’s work over at Denizen.
Mia’s Queue is a newsletter about and for “humans in the loop.” Each edition is full of culture-forward recommendations hand-picked by authentic people who savor the hunt for the Good Stuff, always strive to be their best, and know that sharing is caring. Thanks for being here!