“It’s really hard, because design is a profession that often, black or brown people don't see themselves reflected in. The numbers aren't great right now, but my organization has started a program where we teach design to high school students. There are a lot of people who simply don't have careers in design because it was never introduced to them. They don't have access to it. A lot of people think of design as a luxury and not something that we need every day, so this class started in 2020 to reach out to those high school students. We're in five different cities now exposing design to folks at a younger age so they can understand there is a place for them in the design world. One of the things that we talked about is that you can make a good living as a designer. So not only do we talk to these students about design, but we also talk to their parents about it. There's no such thing as a starving designer. I'm sure there are some, but we talked about the viability that design is a great career for anybody and that you can make a good living, and a good, satisfying life in design.”

“Design is a career that is over 90% female, yet leadership tends to be more male. And it's interesting that it’s a woman populated profession, but not necessarily woman LED. Although, in the 20 plus years that I've been doing this, I have seen changes and now I'm seeing more women in leadership. I was just recently at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and there we’re starting to see more equal numbers of women and men enrolled in design courses. When people think of design, they think about it in terms. It's often like when you say nursing, the first gender that a person will think of is women. Traditionally that happened with design. When you'd say architecture, people primarily would think about men, similar to design with women. Many professions have these dividing lines along gender, but we're working really hard to change that.” 

“I want to write a book but I haven't quite figured out the specifics. But I want to write the book about the influence that place has on us for the rest of our lives. I'm tentatively thinking about calling it ‘first place’. What is the first place that you remember? People often say, it's the first home that they lived in or something about that home. Someone once told me a story that she always had an affinity for a certain shape of a house and she never knew why. She ended up realizing it echoed a house that she grew up in up until the time that she was maybe 3 or 4, which she didn't remember until she saw photos. So really, what are the impacts of places we first encounter at a certain age? What impact does that place have on us for the rest of our lives? It could even be the first classroom that you remember that leaves an impact on you. So I’m figuring out what that looks like and what that feels like. But I firmly believe that the first place that we remember stays with us and has an impact on us for the rest of our lives.”