Hello Kind, Curious, and Talented Human,
The best question I was asked this year came from the youngest people in the room.
I heard it first in April, from a student at Emory University's John Lewis Good Trouble Summit. I heard it again all through June, in the seven corporate rooms where I spoke during Pride month. Different cities, different industries, nearly the same words every time:
“How do I find a company and a job that matches my values and feels safe?”
I have been taking audience questions for thirty-five years. Most of them stay in the room. This one followed me home. It got in the car with me, sat with me on the porch, and waited. It deserved a longer answer than a stage and a countdown clock allow.
This is that answer.
WHAT THEY ARE REALLY ASKING
Start by hearing what the question actually asks. It is not a job-search question. Nobody raises a hand in front of three hundred colleagues to ask about resume formatting. It is a belonging question. Can my values and my paycheck live in the same building? Will I be safe there while they do? Will I have to take myself apart at the door every morning and reassemble the acceptable pieces?
When I was their age, we did not ask that question out loud. We asked it privately, in code, by watching how a room treated the people at its edges. The fact that they now ask it from the floor, on the record, in front of their own leadership, is not naivety. It is progress wearing the disguise of a career question.
It also lands harder in 2026 than it would have ten years ago. They know it. I know it. The cost of bringing your whole life to work has gone up, and some institutions that once advertised safety have gone quiet. These young people are not asking because they are fragile. They are asking because they are paying attention.
FIND. LEAVE. BUILD.
It took me thirty-five years to earn three answers. I offer them in the order I learned them.
Find.
I did not learn to find safe rooms at Disney or Gap. I learned it in a high school English classroom in Toledo, Ohio, from a teacher named Mrs. Elaine Kunz.
Mrs. Kunz opened rooms with reading assignments. For a kid who did not yet have words for everything he was, she handed over other people's words and let them do the work. The words that worked hardest were J.D. Salinger's. She assigned The Catcher in the Rye, a book that school boards had spent decades trying to keep out of classrooms like hers, and in its pages I met Holden Caulfield, a kid asking in 1951 the same question those young people asked me this spring: is there anywhere safe to be all of what I am?
The image that never left me comes near the end. Holden tells his little sister the only job he really wants: standing at the edge of a cliff beside a field of rye where children are playing, ready to act if one of them strays too close. “I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff.” Mrs. Kunz knew exactly what she was handing me. Her classroom was the first room I ever stood in that felt built for all of me, and she built it with books, attention, and the quiet conviction that catching kids was her job too.
That is the first answer. No room is perfect. No company will ever match your values wall to wall, and the ones that claim to are selling something. You are not looking for a perfect room. You are looking for your people inside an imperfect one: the teacher, the manager, the colleague two desks over who makes a pocket of safety where the floor plan never planned one. I found those people in stockrooms and studio hallways for three decades. They are findable, and you can interview for them. When you visit a company, watch how the room treats the people at its edges. That tells you more than any values page on a website.
Leave.
Sometimes the honest answer is that a room cannot match your values, no matter how hard your people inside it try. Last week I published an essay about leaving a room I loved after years of service, and I will not relitigate it here. I will only say this: leaving is not the opposite of loyalty. Staying silent is. When the gap between what a room claims and what it does becomes a gap you are asked to personally absorb, leaving is a values decision. It counts as an answer to your question.
Build.
The third answer took me the longest. When the room you need does not exist, you stop searching and start framing walls.
In 2019 I co-founded the Queer Philanthropy Circle at Indiana University because the room I needed, where LGBTQ+ alumni and allies could pool their generosity and direct it, did not exist yet. So a group of us built it. Nobody issued permission. Nobody ever does. That is the part they do not tell you about rooms: every single one was built by people who got tired of looking for it.
YEAR 251
Why am I hopeful enough to write any of this down?
Last Saturday this country turned two hundred fifty. I wrote on the Fourth about my father's boat on the Maumee River and what an eleven-year-old believed while watching fireworks rise over Toledo. The short version: the promise was never a gift. It gets kept, on purpose, by ordinary people who decide it is theirs to keep.
Year 251 starts now, and the keeping will not happen at the scale everyone is staring at. It never has. It happens in rooms. A team where someone decides candor is safe. A classroom where a teacher hands a kid the right book. A company where a leader lowers the cost of showing up whole. A community where belonging stays true on purpose, even while it is contested everywhere else. National despair is abstract. Rooms are not. You will walk into several of them this week, and in every one, somebody sets the temperature. It might as well be you.
I am doing my part the only way I know how. I am building a room. I have been building it quietly for months, with people I trust and a blueprint I believe in. On July 13, I will open the door. More then.
HANDING IT BACK
To the young people who asked: you were really asking whether belonging at work is still possible in this country, in this year. It is. It is just not automatic, and it never was.
Find your people inside imperfect rooms. Leave when the gap becomes yours to absorb. Build what is missing.
There is a fourth answer, and I did not earn it until my sixties: be the room. Be the Mrs. Kunz. Somewhere right now, a person two desks away from you is watching how you treat the people at the edges and deciding whether they are safe. You are someone's answer to this question, whether you meant to be or not.
Keep asking it out loud. The asking is how rooms get better.
In Community and Conversation,
Jim
