Interview of Jeremy Courtney, October 12, 2020

Jeremy Courtney, transcript, October 12, 2020

Marlies Otteman: Hello, it is 6:30 AM in Nashville on October 12 and I am Marlies Otteman and I am about to speak with Jeremy Courtney who is the CEO and founder of Preemptive Love Coalition and he is calling in from Iraq

So I am a sophomore Global Leadership Studies major at Belmont in Nashville and, so for part of our final project we were asked to interview a leader of any sort who just really inspires us and we look up to a lot so I, that's why I asked to interview you. I really admire your work and the message that you spread with Preemptive Love. Um, so, if you could just give me like a brief background and what led you to your current position, that would be great.

Jeremy Courtney: Yea, and tell me what you're trying to do with this ultimately. Is this going to be, like, do you turn in a paper do you do a presentation - over zoom nowadays?

Otteman: Yea so we have a past, present, and future part of the assignment so the past is writing an essay, this is just an interview and then I write out the transcript for it, and we do another thing for the future portion. So no essay for this portion, but yea.

Courtney: Cool! Well I'll give you the brief version and then you can dig in wherever you think is best. So, Jessica, my wife, and I moved overseas shortly after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001. Then a couple years after that we finished up grad school - we were in grad school at the time - and ended up moving overseas in response to those terror attacks. And you know it took us some years to figure out exactly what it was we were going to do and how we were going to do it. We went through some various false starts, I would say. You know we tried some different things - it didn't work out. So we ultimately moved into Iraq in two thousand - I started coming here in 2006 which was really like the height of the war - probably the scariest, most dangerous time in the country, arguably, and we moved in to see what we could do to be a part of a humanitarian response. We had never done humanitarian work before, but we had a small organization here that invited us in and offered to put us to work. So we moved in, started working for their organization, and it just wasn't a good fit. I think we are more naturally entrepreneurial. We have big ideas, we like to try big things, and this group just wasn't thinking like that. And so we found ourselves not fitting well from the beginning and within maybe three months we left that group and started Preemptive Love so we have been leading and serving and growing Preemptive Love for, I guess this is fourteen years now, and - thirteen, fourteen years - and you know in many ways our vision is still the same as what it was when we started. We're working to end war, and we're trying to stop the spread of violence. The way we do that - there's three main things that we do. It's relief - showing up fast for people when they need us most in conflict zones because it helps stop the outbreak of violence, and then at the same time we try to show up with income-generating solutions - that's our jobs program, and trying to make sure we're getting people back to work, helping to rebuild their community and stabilizing their economies because when people have what they need, that prevents them, a little bit, from getting recruited into violence because it's often gangs and militias and military that offer income, economic options, and that furthers violence, but it also puts food on the table and so we try to make sure we give people a way to put food on their table so that they can resist the call to get involved in the violent activities that sometimes exist around them, and we do all of that, I said there were three things really it's all subsumed in a third thing which is what we call our community work which is really for the way we do all that we do. You may call it peace-making, we call it community, but it's the particular way we show up. It's the way, it's kind of our signature mode of listening and designing programs and putting teams together. All of our work is basically a repudiation of the big-aid, traditional, linear way of working that predominates a lot of the industry around us, a lot of the aid industry and humanitarian industry around us and we're trying to make sure that we, that we do it different, that we bring, we really bring that community aspect. We really bring that humanity that gets lost in bigger organizations. We bring speed and agility and entrepreneurialism to it that often you don't see in the prevailing, large organizations.

Otteman: Yea, I love that. We've been talking in our class how some, some types of aid and non-profit aren't always as effective as they hope to be. And so I really appreciate your approach. When I was glancing over your website I saw that your main three statements were: "stop the spread of war, reduce the risk of war, and change ideas that lead to war." And I really love this because it's not just like a bandaid solution. So was there anything that inspired you or made you have this approach?

Courtney: Yea, I'm glad to hear that that connects with you and resonates with you. I don't think it is - I think it's a little bit of a higher amount of paying attention, to understand it than simply saying, you know we're providing clean water to people, for example -

Otteman: Right.

Courtney: But then again, war is complex, so it requires complex, multilateral responses, and, to be clear, that complexity extends far beyond us. You know, I think if we're really going to play a part in ending war it's going to also take government leaders and military leaders and civil society and I think the business community. I mean it's - we're all implicated in it so we don't believe that we alone have the keys to change everything, but we think we have a really meaningful role to play.

As for what inspired that approach; a handful of things. One: living it. This hasn't been something that we've undertaken from afar. This hasn't been something that is just conceptual or even, you might call it like intrepid for us. It's not a trip that we take once a year, or it's not a trip that we as leaders take every quarter to - quote unquote - 'go into the field'. We live it, we live here, and our ideas and our programming - it's developed from the ground up on the front lines, and so our blueprint and our modalities are things that have really arisen from within the soil of conflict, and in that way they are native to or indigenous to the people and the communities that we aim to help. So we talk about local solutions to local problems, and that's just meant to remind us of our place in things. There's a real risk of importing foreign solutions thinking that they're going to take root, and, as often as not, that's just not how it works. So the "on-the-grounds-iness" of it is an important part of how we arrived at some of those conclusions and that model. The other part of it, or part of what we saw - have seen on the ground then is the deficiencies of the programming system. When ISIS had overran a third of Iraq and a third of Syria next door, and the military campaign to push ISIS out of these cities that they occupied was underway, every city that ISIS occupied had civilians living there as well. So, notorious names like Aleppo, Raqqah, Fallujah, Mosul - these cities had both ISIS operatives and soldiers there, and civilians who were starving. Civilians who were living under the rubble of carpet bombing campaigns. Civilians who might get sniped in the street when the military entered. And we were very concerned about the civilian casualties, we were very concerned about how civilians would be treated. The prevailing narrative has been; if you live under ISIS occupation rather than displacing yourself and becoming a refugee, then you must therefore be an ISIS supporter. Who would live under ISIS unless you supported the agenda and aims of ISIS? Look at all the billions of people who are living in these tents; they fled for their lives, they fled home, therefore anyone still living at home must be a terrorist. And this made us very concerned for the millions of people who still lived at home, that they would be targeted as combatants when, by every account, they should be treated as civilians, even captives. And we abetted with the military and worked closely with the military, with the Prime minister's office, with various bodies here to be on the front lines of these conflicts to make sure that we were the first to show up. So, while snipers were sniping and bombs were falling, we were repeatedly first on the scene, the first international aid organization in the world to get into these places and deliver them what they needed. And one of the things that we saw, and one of the conclusions that we came to was that we saw, there were a couple of instances where we were not first and where we were not fast and no one else was either, and people were just displaced. The war had now come into their city. They were actively fighting with ISIS and these people were now finally running for their lives maybe years later, and they would just get stuck out in the desert and there would be no food, there would be no shelter, no medicine, no care, and we saw these people on the news screaming at everyone. It was like 'ISIS killed us and then you guys come in and kill us and no one is here to help us.' You could see their blood boiling over. You could see the anger and the resentment, and this tended to happen along sectarian lines. And so we saw a chance where the United States could have been viewed as a hero. The Shia government could have been viewed as a hero. The Kurds, vis a vis the Arabs, could have been viewed a hero. But, these opportunities were missed altogether because no one showed up with food, no one showed up with shelter, no one cared for the humanitarian needs of these people. They were just zeroed in on the military agenda. And we, we started to correlate this with a view of violence that says violence spreads through society like a disease, like a virus, meaning there's an epidemiological model that correlates both to the spread of a disease or virus and the spread of violence. And as we've all now become more familiar in the era of COVID, we know part of what we have to do is kind of get to patient-zero and try to isolate patient-zero before it, before there's an outbreak. That's why we talk about social distancing and things like that. And so our relief program in many ways is about getting to people fast to get them what them what they need fast before there's an outbreak of violence, before the suffering and the trauma that might be emerging in their hearts and in their lives and their experience spills over onto the society, and we think that delivering humanitarian aid in the hardest places at the hardest times is one of the most important things that can be done to stop the outbreak of violence. And so, those three statements you read, they kind of correlate with the epidemiological model, stopping the outbreak of violence. Our jobs program is about protecting vulnerable people from catching the virus, so to speak, from being recruited into violence, in this case. And then the third thing that the World Health Organization talks about in their epidemiological model is changing behaviors that lead to the spread, and for us we correlate that to changing the ideas that lead to the spread of violence.

Otteman: Yea, wow, that's amazing.

Courtney: So, that was long-winded, but, it's a bit of a complex model.

Otteman: Yea, I mean, it is a very complex issue so there's a lot that goes into it. So thank you for that. I guess my next question would just be, how has your work, in Iraq and all over the world, how has that changed your global perspective?

Courtney: I mean, significantly I, I probably thought of myself as globally-minded, or something like that, when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened, I wouldn't have necessarily considered myself clueless about the world. But looking back now of course, from today's vantage point, I certainly was clueless. I had not only never left the United States, I had really in many ways never left my particular political and geographic bubble. I had travelled from Texas to New York one time, but I spent that summer in New York still immersed and kind of cocooned inside the same conservative, Christian, republican shell. I was surrounded by the same kind of people while in New York. And so I didn't even allow myself to kind of have a diversified New York experience. I only knew how to have the New York experience as filtered through my lenses and my defense mechanisms. And so in many ways my experience, and I think my wife would say this too, the first three, five years, I mean they were largely about seeing some of those defenses fall away, seeing some of those assumptions fall away, those things I was so sure about, those things that I would have, said I would have died for. To see them be challenged, questioned, eroded, not holed up under scrutiny, the very things, you know from my conservative, Christian upbringing, those were all the things I was warned about. I was warned about back-sliding. I was warned about being aligned with people who, who held more liberal, more diverse views than me, and how eventually I would succumb, we would all succumb to a kind of lawlessness or godlessness or whatever. And in fact in some ways that is what happened. I don't feel lesser for it - I feel better for it, I feel enriched for it. But, there were some years of having to come to grips with the identity change that came with the change in the particulars. It wasn't just that I was becoming more open to Muslims. It's that my becoming more open to Muslims said something about me, and implicated something about my faith, and implicated something about my background and my family, and changed something fundamentally inside me and it would change who I was and how I was when I went back home and interacted with people at Christmas. So, all these things about war and politics and foreign policy and who we vote for and what we believe about God, sex, country, marriage, you know, it's not just about changing our views, our world views as you said. It ultimately has a profound implication because it changes us. And when we engage with the world, or people who are outside of our norm or the norm of our family of origin, it changes us and it makes it confusing for everyone involved to know then how to reintegrate with each other because it's like, "you're not the kid I raised." And it's like, "yea well you're still the parent I raised, you're still the parent that raised me, but I don't know how to relate to you the same way anymore either because I'm not that kid anymore." And so, yea I think the distinction I'm trying to draw attention to here is yes, my world view got more global and yes, I ultimately then became more progressive, liberal, open, whatever you want to call it, but it's not just that I changed who I voted for or how I color in the dots or check the boxes on a ballot, it's that all that stuff says something in a much much deeper level in our own being and that's where it's painful - it's at the level of identity and being.

Otteman: Yea, for sure. So I guess going off of that, what were some of the cultural barriers you faced, or maybe the political tensions, other struggles - what were your being challenges throughout the years?

Courtney: I mean I could name some particulars, I kind of just ticked off a lot of them in that previous comment, -

Otteman: Yea.

Courtney: But I think, I mean I was raised in a very conservative - and when I say very conservative, I mean very conservative - cloistered, overtly racist, white, evangelical, southern background, and actively racist, actively homophobic, actively anti-refugee, -migrant, -Muslim, -poor, and so at any point where I've changed along those vectors, or along those, how I relate to and see those various communities, I think it's been difficult. Because on many, on some of those things more than others, they are hills to die on in the community where I come from. How you see and relate to LGBTQ people is, was for many many years, a hill to die on. I think it's maybe a little less of a driving political thing today than maybe it was ten years ago before the Defensive Marriage Act, but things like that - abortion, Islam, and then kind of the attendant issues about immigration and what does it mean to be an American, what does it mean to be patriotic, what is the fundamental makeup of America? Is it at its core whiteness or is it at its core diversity and pluralistic and multicultural? Those kinds of questions are, have all been very difficult points of change for me because I no longer fit in back home. You know, I've basically created a new community, or have come to belong to a new community, and the person I am today does not belong to not be expressive, to not be true, and comfortable at home with the place that I come from, because they don't, they don't welcome this beast of difference. And to be clear, I don't really welcome and, I can't fully embrace and welcome their positions anymore either, and so these have all been real points of difficulty over the years.

Otteman: Yea, for sure. So, I guess changing gears a little bit, could you give me some background about what has shaped you as a leader, or what do you think your leadership characteristics are, your strengths or your approach?

Courtney: Yea. So there's a couple different ways that, there's two distinct ways that I think about leadership development. One is more of the leadership pipeline that you would find coming up through the ranks of a larger organization, including perhaps one like Preemptive Love. You could start on the front lines of an issue. You could be a phone bank person talking to our donors. You could be a front line delivery person of aid. You could work in the mailroom at some company in New York City. Whatever it is, you know, like a kind of frontline entry-level job. And from there you progress to manager or to director or to vice president, to CEO, whatever. That's one way of gaining responsibility, experience, scope, complexity, moving from being an individual contributor to being, to your time on the horizons being pushed out more to thinking about the week or the month or the quarter or the year or the decade ahead. That's not the approach I took, that's not how I came to leadership. At twenty-four, or whatever it was when I left grad school, I launched out into the world. We were young and married and I in many ways started something from day one where I was, I was in some ways the boss of a small team, and you know, we were friends so I couldn't be bossy, but I did have like the lion's share of responsibility and there was a sense that the buck stopped with me for our little thing that we were doing of six people. And we rode that for a while, and then we started something else similar. And then Preemptive Love is the one that really took off, and Preemptive Love started with four people, five people, and I was responsible for doing the website - for building the website - I was responsible for making videos, for photography, for setting the financial agenda, for the product we were doing, for the services, for, you know I was responsible for a lot and they were responsible for a lot, but ultimately the buck stopped with me. And the entire journey of Preemptive Love has largely just been about that scope of work becoming bigger and bigger and more and more complicated. I didn't have someone to hold my hand. I didn't have someone to rebuke me. I didn't have someone to put me in time out. I didn't have someone to say "your job is on the line if you don't upgrade in this way or that way." In fact, in some cases where people disagreed with me and we couldn't find resolution, they had to leave, I didn't have to leave. And it meant that I made a lot of mistakes. It means that my direction of accountability has been a little bit different than other people's directional accountability is going through their twenties and their thirties. I was accountable to the people we were serving. I was accountable to my team, my staff. I was accountable to donors. I was accountable to the board, but the board was, you know obviously the board is never really right there at hand everyday to see what you're doing. That's true with any organization. So, the sense of responsibility and leadership and how I felt the burden of that and what I did about it was different than being a frontlines worker or a manager who's accountable to the person over them who's going to inspect their work day by day and who has the ability to fire them day by day. In some ways, they each have their strengths and they each have their weaknesses. There's not a right way or a wrong way or a better way, but my leadership journey has largely been marked by a sense of profound responsibility to the people we're serving. That goes back to the on-the-groundsy-ness of our work that I was mentioning earlier. And for years there was this kind of frenetic sense of growth and energy that's like, we are doing hugely important work. If we don't show up on this next frontline or this next battle, no one else will. And I think it was easy to even get like some blurred lines about how people saw me and how I saw myself. Sometimes I would forget that people saw me as their leader, and I would think that I could get away with this notion that we were all just a bunch of teammates kind of going out to do the thing together. So, some of those really high growth years of the organization around the experience of war and ISIS were complex years for me as a leader because I had to, they were growing up years in many ways where I had to really reckon with the burden of leadership and recognize that I couldn't just be a pal anymore, I couldn't just be a friend, that people had expectations of me that I hadn't fully realized yet. I guess that's not precisely what you asked so I'll take one more stab at it. I mean, I'm trying to kind of work my way through it. So what's my style? I guess, my style has kind of changed I think is why I took you through that journey a little bit. My style is, these days - how about that? These days,

Otteman: Yes, that works.

Courtney: My style is recognizing that my job is to get the smartest people in the room, and not to be the smartest person in the room. And that's a bit of a change from where we have been over recent years. Over recent years there was a way in which the whole team looked to me, and of course to Jessica, to be the experts, because we grew this organization, we started this organization. The team in the US would default to us on stuff because we were the ones on the ground or we were the ones who were going to bear the brunt of it, on some level. And, over the last few years, as we've grown our work and diversified our work and we're in more places now, we've definitely started moving toward a leadership model and a structure where I'm not the smartest person in the room, I'm not the definitive answer for what's going on in the room; I'm often the least informed person of what's going on, and my role is to make sure that I'm hiring and nurturing a team of experts who can, who bring their expertise to me, inform me, present various scenarios and ask for some guidance or some support. And I have not become that leader to the degree that I want to or need to yet, but I think that I'm becoming more of that collaborative leader who builds up a team of experts. I am fundamentally a challenger, if you are into Myers-Briggs, or the enneagram for example I would be an enneagram eight, so I,

Otteman: Okay.

Courtney: I'm a challenger. I'm going to push for things. I'm not going to settle for status quo. And that means I'm, I can be disruptive and can kind of cast a burden on those who are part of my executive team to go out and execute on visionary ideas that I have. So, becoming a mature eight and a mature eight leader has required knowing when to reign it in and when not to torpedo initiatives that we were already working on with some new, grand, entrepreneurial idea. So, I threw a lot of stuff at you. Take what you want.

Otteman: No, I really appreciate that approach, and I like how you referenced the enneagram. I can definitely relate to that, and

Courtney: Yea, I was thinking you're in Nashville, you'll get that too.

Otteman: Oh yea for sure. I guess you, well you kind of touched on this but if you could just maybe expand more on ways that you have been able to build relationships and trust within your organization and with the people who support your organization.

Courtney: Yea. I think, I mean the principles at the bottom of it all are probably the same, but the way it plays out is probably a little different. So on the ground in the places that most people associate us with - Venezuela, Mexico, Syria, Iraq - we build trust by going slow, in some ways, by being patient, by continuing to show up day after day after day. But the thing that we say above all is that listening is our first response, or listening is our first program, we often say, meaning we don't get to come in with an agenda that tells people "here is how we are here to serve you." But instead, we come in humbly. We know what we do best and we know what we might have to offer, but we present more of a blank slate and say "write on this what it is you care about, what it is you need, what do you think the problems are going on here, how would you like to see that addressed." And then we take from that to understand, do we have anything to offer that intersects with what this community thinks is really going on. And if we don't have anything to offer, if that's not our wheelhouse, or we're not set up for that, or it's outside of our mandate, then what do we do? Do we fund someone else, do we find skills and get better at something that we're not good at, or do we just pass on the opportunity and say "your needs are real, and that's outside of the scope we do, so we're going to have to, you know we don't want to waste money doing something that someone else could do better." So, I think that whole dynamic, the whole relationship of listening and then following through builds profound trust in and among communities that have often been let down and lied to by others. On the donor side of the equation, again I think the rock-bottom principle is the same; listening goes a long way, trying to understand why is the donor doing this, what is the donor looking for, what is the donor hoping to accomplish, what is at the root of the donor's desire to give? And frankly it's not always generosity. It's not always altruism. Sometimes it's legacy. Sometimes it's fear. Sometimes it's, I mean I actually think fear is a huge motivation for giving in a lot of our work. I saw this a lot during the ISIS years, where people were so afraid that ISIS was going to show up on their doorstep and blow up their kid's school that they gave money to us, I think low-key so that we would keep ISIS away, so that we would keep these guys fed and isolated in places like Iraq and Syria, and maybe if they had some food they wouldn't get on a plane and come blow up America. So, understanding why people give and then trying to meet them on their terms without shaming people, if their motivations maybe don't line up with what I think is ideal or most appropriate, then meeting them where they are without shaming them back into like an underground position is an important part of why I think people trust us. Transparency is why people trust us. I issue failure reports when we screw up things. I don't seek to hide that. We publish failure reports, and I think that's earned us a lot of trust. I think the fact that we live here and people have seen me in and among the smoke and the rubble and the bombs and the bullets - I think that's different. There are few if any organizations our size that you can find that are doing what we're doing the way we're doing it, and I think the kind of no-polish, straight-to-camera-selfie-video stuff has done a lot to make people feel like they can understand and trust how we're going to take care of their money and get it to the people who need it most.

Otteman: Yea I think that definitely does make you very unique as an organization, and I was actually going to touch on the transparency too. At least from my perspective as a follower or a supporter of the organization I think you guys do that really well, so I'm glad you touched on that. I don't want to take up too much more of your time, so I just have one last question for you. With, you know, all of the tension and chaos that's going on today, what would be your advice or your message to young, aspiring leaders?

Courtney: That's good. In your desire to press for change, resist the urge to completely vanquish the other side. The things that are not working, the things that have not worked, the things that have even contributed to your own pain and suffering, resist the urge to destroy and exile completely from society the people who made it so. And instead work in your own heart to do the much harder thing, which is to press for change, to build the new way, to build the better systems, and to find ways to yes, hold real criminals and real corruption and real oppressors and abusers to account, but also to include and forgive and reconcile with those who are required if we would actually have a truly better society. We cannot actually have the society that we claim to want if we destroy the other side to get there, because all that does is set off another cycle, another generation, of violence that will absolutely come home to roost down the road. And so, fight for change, push for change, advocate for change, maybe some stuff needs to be torn down, but focus on the building of the new and resist what is a very loud and very aggressive urge right now to just delete the other side entirely from the equation, because it will not work. And I'm not saying that hypothetically. I'm saying that as someone who has lived through cycles of civil war and violence. It will not work. You cannot cancel people and delete people and exile people completely from society. They will always come out and come back, and sometimes the comeback is worse than the original.

Otteman: Yea. That's a very powerful message for today for sure. So thank you for sharing that and just thank you so much for making the time to speak with me. I'm so grateful for all that you've shared and just for making time for a young, college student who doesn't have much to offer so thank you so much.

Courtney: I appreciate that. Thanks for reaching out. Thanks for being a part of what we're doing in the world. Couldn't do this without you, and I'm honored we got to spend time together today.

Otteman: Yea!

Courtney: And cheers to you for taking a swing and reaching out. I really appreciate that. That was inspiring to me, and so I was very happy to get on the phone. I think a lot of people want to do something like that, but they just never get up the gumption so, good on you.

Otteman: Thank you, yea! Well, have a great rest of your day

Courtney: Alright thanks, you too.

Otteman: Yea, bye!

Courtney: Cheers.