Kathy Grey is a California native and Lead Trainer at Power of Zero.  She is interviewed here by Tim Langford.

 

When asked what motivated her to join Power of Zero, Kathy Grey recalls her childhood. “I was bullied as a child … There’s a lump in my throat when I see this little girl, this 7th grader… frightened,” she confides. 

Kathy’s memories are encapsulated by a simple, yet powerful symbol. She doesn’t have to dig deep to recall the story of her little pink sweater, a memory that emerged as a symbol of her childhood.  Sometimes small acts have a lasting impact and emotional power over our lives.   Her dad had lost his job and her large family had to pack what was left of their belongings into a trailer and move to a small town in Kansas. “We had no furniture so we slept on pallets on the floor,” she remembers. The local church had supported her family by providing essentials and clothes, one of those was a hand-me-down pink sweater. “I was overjoyed when I tried it on,” Grey recounts.   

She vividly remembers the first day at her new junior high school.  She was wearing it when she walked through the door of her new school. 

“The girls in front of me all turned around, looking at the new girl, wearing the pink sweater and they started pointing and giggling and talking and I knew that pink sweater had belonged to one of those girls.”  Her voice breaks a little at the power of the memory. “There’s a lump in my throat where I see this little girl, this 7th Grader…frightened. It was a new school, I didn’t know anyone and then having that experience. I felt ashamed, I felt sad, I felt guilt for feeling ashamed because it wasn’t my parents’ fault…dad lost a job…And I had also experienced  a lot of hardship.”

That formative story would eventually come to define her mission in life: “It reminds me of what young people can go through…It’s propelled me to do the work I do with Power of Zero.” 

To this day she still has that pink sweater in her ‘Keeper Box’.

Before her career in education, she had worked as an arbitrator specialising in conflict resolution with a major U.S. airline. Often she was at the sharp end dealing with the unions. She was one of the few women in management in what was “a male-oriented world”. That experience would come to inform her work with Power of Zero, learning how to “Step into someone else’s shoes, be open-minded. To see both sides, those who harmed and those on the receiving end…”

Becoming a mom was a life-changing experience. Through her child it introduced her to schools and she began volunteering, as she realized this was the world she most valued. She could apply “skillsets from working with adults that are in conflict, people not seeing eye-to-eye.” She draws on a lifetime’s learnings when she opines that to understand bullying you need to have empathy with the perpetrator. Though she adds “You don’t have to agree with it …[but] when you have empathy for someone you get it, you understand their emotions, their feelings. You can understand why that is true for them.”  Eventually, she trained as an educator with Head Start. 

Kathy expresses a sentiment about children and young people that we can all surely relate to. “They are just so raw and open and anxious and curious. This beautiful, young malleable way about young people…If they are given an opportunity to connect in healthy ways with their peer group… there is lovely, beautiful potential.”

Years ago she recalls working in the yard of a kindergarten and the hurt she witnessed in children which “broke my heart”.  She was convinced there had to be methods and strategies for tackling bullying based on care, compassion, empathy and a sense of justice.  A few years later she came across the No Bully program that was being launched in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was one of those serendipitous moments. “This is something that is going to change people…” She pauses, then exclaims “It has changed lives!” 

She has been training schools for over fifteen years. The No Bully Program started with teacher workshops but schools wanted everyone in the school community to have the benefit of the program.  They now work with the school leadership team, faculty, parents and the students: setting up parent and guardian workshops, providing student assemblies as well as solution coach training for key educators. 

“To shift the culture of a school you need to involve all of the stakeholders. That’s what our full partnership provides to a school,” adds Kathy. The results are pretty remarkable. According to a peer-reviewed study, this approach had a 90% success rate in resolving incidents of bullying.

In the last two decades, with the explosion in social media, bullying has migrated to the online world, “Social media is a pandora’s box. Kids don’t understand how to safely use social media” And the parents? Kathy is blunt, they are simply “overwhelmed.”

Towards the end of our conversation, Kathy recalls a Native American morality tale about two wolves in conflict inside each one of us – ‘the wolf of kindness’ and the ‘wolf of wounded pride’. The question it poses is – which wolf wins this fight? It’s a question she has long reflected on: “You know there are times when we have to stand up and fight for survival and fight for what is right and I feel that the work I am doing is also part of that wolf. It’s not wounded pride and aggression but it’s standing up for what’s right.”

 

 

The No Bully program is delivered to schools across the world by Power of Zero, a non-profit organisation launched in 2020 to counter the rise in online childhood bullying and hate. It has achieved a 90% success rate.