Interview with Creative Netwerk Board Member, Debbie Liu
 
What is your role at work, and your role as a board member with Creative Netwerk?

I work at Meta. I manage a team of program managers in the cybersecurity space and we look at long term programs. We focus on scale and sustainability. We look at things like reliability and quality in large and long term spaces. We find that a lot of people are always very interested in starting things or creating things - but there's a lot of consideration on how to support those things long term - and make sure they grow in a healthy manner. For Creative Netwerk, I am the board secretary. My goal is to make sure that our board meetings are well organized, have clear agendas, that we have action items that are followed up on, and that we make sure to have good documentation around any decisions being made. So you can see a lot of similar themes to the program management that we do at work in the board secretary role.

Do you have any of your own experiences with dance?

Growing up, I danced. I did kind of your typical jazz and lyrical competition teams in middle school and high school. I also did the prerequisite technical training in ballet and other forms. I also did a limited foray into traditional Chinese dance. I then took a 13 year break from dance and tried playing a bunch of other sports, and then after tearing my ACL, came back to dancing as sort of my original passion and started learning hip hop choreography. Then from there, I started learning things like Chicago Footwork, which is how I met Kelli and a lot of the other Creative Netwerk team members. I also dance in Oakland, where I live, on a couple of teams at a local dance studio called ‘In The Groove’.

How did you meet the Creative Netwerk team members?

Kelli started teaching at the studio where I go, In the Groove, when she moved out to the Bay Area. And honestly, I was just feeling like I really needed some cardio one day, and decided to take her class. And Kelli is so good at including people in the community, that she just started reaching out and inviting me to things, and the next thing I knew I was doing a week-long intensive with her on Chicago Footwork. So through her I met King Charles. And then I travel a lot for work. And one of the things I got to do while traveling was get exposed to Creation Global, which has a lot of international crew mates. So I actually met up with some of Kelli and Charles’ crew mates around the world and got to experience some of the local street dance cultures there by going to their sessions. So that's been really cool and interesting. It really does make dance feel like a connected global community. I can meet these complete strangers where we have nothing in common except dance, and then end up hanging out for an entire day. So that's been really really interesting and rewarding experience.

How has motherhood changed the way you view dance, or CN’s mission, or both?

Tactically, it's forced me to be a lot more disciplined about how I make decisions. Dance takes up a lot of time. Motherhood takes up a lot of time. My job takes up a lot of time. And I just have to be really disciplined and honest with myself about prioritizing and making trade-offs and just making choices. Something about dance is, it's full of a lot of people who are younger or who are single or who don't have children. I have found that by and large, everyone's been really supportive, and just amazed that I can still dance while still having a young child. So I felt very, very supported by all of my respective communities that engage with all of the teams I work and dance with. My child is very young and not dancing yet. But I do see things like Creative Netwerk as an investment in areas where there need to be outlets and the after school programs. You do need areas where kids can pursue their interests, and that there's a wide variety and diversity of options available. When I grew up, it was ballet, jazz, or tap. And there wasn't a lot of history and there wasn't a lot of acknowledgement of where those dance forms came from or their origins. One of the really beautiful things about Creative Netwerk is that it acknowledges those things and teaches the history and the respect along with the dance form itself. So you're entering spaces respectfully, you're entering them with full knowledge, and like that's exactly the type of experience that I want for my child. I'm also glad to see that there's a lot more investment in regional and local dance forms that are authentic to the communities that they serve with Creative Netwerk and with our local partners. I hope that when my child is old enough to start dancing, he has something similar available to him in our area. There's a lot of really amazing forms of dance that are local and originated in the Bay Area. So hopefully he will feel like he can enter those spaces as well.

You juggle a lot - high level FT work, lots of travel, board leadership with CN - what keeps you grounded? 

Dance keeps me grounded. But, dance and my career are the things I’ve spent the most time cultivating. A lot of people that I've talked to talk about getting lost in motherhood. I think being a whole person has helped me a lot more to be also a better mother, because I can be engaged and I can have a healthy interaction emotionally with my child without projecting as much. Being a whole person who cultivates these other parts of my life has helped me be better as a mom, because I don't feel like I'm lost entirely in any one facet of my life. But it does also mean that I have to own the parameters of my own identity a lot more. 

What has your experience been like on the board of Creative Netwerk?

The experience of being a board member with Creative Netwerk has been really great. I've learned from people on the board who are a lot more experienced at board leadership than I am. I've learned a lot about how to enter different cities and regions authentically and make sure that we're serving them the way they should be served, the way they want to be served, and not imposing a vision that we have upon them, if that's not what they want. The guidance that Charles and Kelli provides to the organization and being true to the culture, to the region, to the spaces we're in is so valuable. I think we have a lot of integrity as a board and I really really admire that. I really love learning from how everyone’s different experiences or interests in either the nonprofit space, the community space, or dance. So it's been really awesome to have that learning. I also feel like I contribute because like my natural skill set is like I'm extremely organized and very efficient. So I feel like I bring something to the table as well. That exchange and that level of equal respect amongst the board as well as the Creative Netwerk staff makes us feel like a very healthy and sustainable space with a lot of growth potential.

What do you hope the CN team will learn from you?

I think it would be the most effective path to your goal. Within that, how to build really aligned goals, and make sure everybody's on the same page about what they are. Then evaluating things like how do you make trade offs? How do you build a model where you know what return you're gonna get on your investment, but what you're also going to give up by doing that? I think one of the biggest things that I've seen that's a failure point for organizations, whether for profit or nonprofit, is trying to do too much of everything and not succeeding enough at any one thing. What you often really need to do is ask, “What are the things that we care the most about?” and then prioritize those and execute them really well and then move on and grow more. That also gives you the most credibility in the spaces that you want to be present in. So I hope I help Creative Netwerk make good long term choices, the right trade offs, and execute to actually land the goals that we want to.

What do you see for the future of Creative Netwerk?

The first thing I see is Creative Netwerk in more cities. I would love to see a version of Creative Netwerk where I'm based out of in the Bay. I also see CN programming giving kids the tools to dance, to keep them safe, and give them space in the learning and the skills. Whether that's to parlay into an actual dance career, or to use what they learned in dancing to translate to teamwork. To build academic or professional skills.