Belonging Is a Two-Way Street: Claudia Menendez on Being Understood, and Helping Others Feel It Too
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We usually talk about belonging as something we hope to feel. In this episode of Connected Conversations, Claudia Menendez offers a more demanding idea: belonging is also something you build for the people who come after you.
The applause that came a beat late
Claudia Menendez begins not with a definition but with a scene. At a bilingual city meeting, a speaker finished a heartfelt point, and the English-speaking half of the room applauded right away. The other half applauded a beat later, once the interpretation caught up. That small lag, that pause, is the whole story. It is the difference between information reaching people and people actually being included in the moment. For Claudia, closing that gap is the work.
Empathy you can only earn by living it
Claudia did not arrive at this through theory. She reaches back to northern Uganda, where she was the visible outsider, the mzungu, noticed everywhere she went. She describes what that does to a person, the days you would rather not leave the house, the humility of getting by on smiles and gestures when the words are not yours. It is the episode's clearest bridge from her life to the listener's, because most of us have felt some version of it, the room where we do not quite fit and cannot quite explain ourselves.
That memory returns in a Fort Collins classroom, where she taught Guatemalan students in the Mam language and realized she had actually been to the village one of them was from. "I know where you're from," she could say, and mean it precisely. Being seen, made concrete. Not a slogan, a fact about a specific place and a specific child.
Translated is not the same as heard
The most useful idea for any leader in the conversation is a distinction Claudia draws cleanly. There is a difference between translating information and making someone feel heard. You can hand a community a perfectly accurate document and still leave them on the outside of the decision. Real inclusion runs both directions: the community speaks in its own language and is answered in it.
How do you know where that line is? Her answer is refreshingly unglamorous. The only way to know is to be in community with people, which means leaving your office. You cannot design belonging from behind a desk. You have to be in the room, often the uncomfortable one, listening before you build.
The label, and the work
There is an honest, harder stretch to the conversation too. Claudia is candid that the work has faced real pressure, to the point that her office nearly had to change its name to keep going. She describes a very emotional couple of months, and a decision that clarified everything for her: if changing the label was what it took to protect the communities the work serves, then the label was worth changing. The work mattered more than the name on the door.
You do not need to share anyone's politics to feel the human weight of that. It is what it looks like to care more about the people you serve than about being right in the abstract. She kept going.
Belonging, defined
About halfway through, Claudia offers the line the whole episode organizes around. Belonging, she says, is something we want to feel and receive, but it also means you have to contribute toward it. It is a two-way street.
That reframe is quietly radical. It moves belonging out of the category of things done to us or for us, and into the category of things we make together. You are not only owed a seat. You also help set the table for the next person. For leaders, that is the whole point: a culture of belonging is not a policy you announce, it is a practice everyone contributes to.
When the community builds it themselves
The most striking proof of that idea is one Claudia did not create. During COVID, when official channels were failing to reach people, a community built its own. By her account, a WhatsApp network grew to more than 800 participants across counties, for the community and by the community, and it outperformed anything the institutions were putting out. Given the tools and the trust, people build their own infrastructure for reaching each other. The job of a good institution is often less to lead that than to notice it, support it, and get out of its way.
For the leaders listening
Claudia's episode is not a lesson in any one program. It is a working theory of how people come to feel understood, and what it costs the person doing that work. Start with the scene, not the slogan. Earn empathy by having been the outsider. Know the difference between handing someone information and actually including them. Leave your office. And remember that belonging is not only something you are waiting to receive. It is something you can build, right now, for the person who walks in after you.
Listen to Episode 58 of Connected Conversations, hosted by Elena Petrova, Founder and CEO of Ad Astra, Inc. and AdAstra Connect.
Connected Conversations is produced by Ad Astra, Inc.
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