All posts by Terry Howard

ADR Advisor Terry Howard is an award-winning writer and storyteller. He is a contributing writer with the Chattanooga News Chronicle, The American Diversity Report, The Douglas County Sentinel, Blackmarket.com, co-founder of the “26 Tiny Paint Brushes” writers guild, recipient of the 2019 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award, and third place winner of the 2022 Georgia Press Award.

The Simple Cafe in Kabul

In a recent article in The New York Times, Hadis Lessani, a high school student living in Kabul, Afghanistan said this about finding a place free from harassment because of her makeup, Western clothing and chatting publicly with young men: “This cafe is the only place where I can relax and feel free.”

You see, trendy cafes like The Simple Cafe have sprung up across Kabul in the past few years as sanctuaries for women in an Islamic culture that still dictates how they should dress and interact with men. These restrictions endured years after tradition banned girls’ education, confined women to their homes and forced them to wear burqas in public.

Continue reading A World Apart: Coffee Shops in Afghanistan and Georgia – by Terry Howard →

Authors A-H, Inclusion

Valuing the Remnants! – by Terry Howard

January 12, 2019 Terry Howard

The first thing that caught my eye when I entered that carpet store was the separation between the multi-colored, expensive looking carpets lined up vertically on the right wall and, by contrast, the mundane remnants stacked in horizontal piles on the left. Oddly, those images got me thinking about the evidence of societal human separation. It also reminded me of something Oprah Winfrey wrote recently.

Let’s start with Oprah.

Now with the exception of a billion dollars – like she got it, I don’t – Ms. Winfrey and I have something in common; we both know, as millions do, that the undeniable truth is that our nation has reached a dangerous fraying around the edges, an implosion of our fundamental values and, in the words of Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts, we’re dropping verbal litter into the public square. And it seems that there’s no end in sight.

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Authors A-H

Verbal paralysis at death’s bedside – by Terry Howard

December 29, 2018 Terry Howard

Truth is, when faced with touchy issues, even the well-spoken can find themselves tongue-tied with verbal paralysis and no idea what to say, let alone do. I received this email a while back.

“Terry, in two weeks I will visit a lifelong friend who has spreading colon cancer. Two years ago, I visited another lifelong friend who was suffering from lung cancer. It was on New Year’s Day. I searched for the right words, but they did not come. I was embarrassed when I caught myself avoiding eye contact. He had to sense my discomfort. Instinctively I knew that this would probably be last time I’d see him alive. Two months later he died. Long story short, I struggled for the right words then and I will struggle for the right words and the right behaviors in two weeks. What do I say and what do I do?”

My hunch is that I’m not the only one who can identify with this conundrum. And because I didn’t have all the answers, I shared it with my global network and asked for their advice. Here’s what they suggested:

Continue reading Verbal paralysis at death’s bedside – by Terry Howard →

Authors A-H, LGBTQ, Teams & Leaders

When Bias Comes Knocking – by Terry Howard

December 12, 2018 Terry Howard

During my highly visible role as diversity and inclusion director at two Fortune 500 companies, I wrote internal articles, often when bias was a factor, read by people across the globe. I also had to make difficult decisions, sometimes with potentially significant financial consequences, for the organization. Following is a major decision I made and the national fallout in one company. That’s followed by a few responses I received in response to internal articles I wrote. Note that topics of sexual orientation or Islam/Muslims seemed to generate these messages to me:

Continue reading When Bias Comes Knocking – by Terry Howard →

The Simple Cafe in Kabul

So what gives?

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