What if the goal was never to fix a broken system — but to find the doorway out of it?

Deepa Iyer is a writer, strategist, and lawyer who has spent decades working in and alongside Asian American, South Asian, Muslim, and Arab communities. She works at the Building Movement Project and created the Social Change Ecosystem Framework — the widely used map that helps people locate their role in collective change.

Deepa came to the U.S. from Kerala, India, at 12, and the skills she built to survive that displacement — reading a room, sensing its energy, finding the through-lines — became the way she works. She calls herself a weaver. Years later, in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice after September 11th, she sat inside a contradiction she's never shaken: a government that promised to protect the same communities it was surveilling and detaining. "Systems set up with clear values," she tells Renay, "don't always practice them" when it matters most.

This is not a conversation about how broken things are. It's about where the doorways are. Deepa names the grief of watching the architecture of civil rights come apart — and refuses to stop there. "The goal is not to reform systems that were already broken," she says. "The goal is to identify these portals for a different type of society."

She and Renay cover the cognitive dissonance of doing justice work inside government; why she left for the movement sector; the "pressure cooker" inside today's nonprofits and the burnout landing hardest on women of color leaders; hope as something you practice rather than feel; and what she returns to when she's most disoriented.

Through the Noise is about the inner capacities that let leaders sustain themselves and the work. This one is about staying in relationship — to community, to grief, and to what's still possible.