TheBridge profile: Jim Araby
Name: Jim Araby
Current city: Briones, CA
Current job: Director of Strategic Campaigns, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 5
Past job: Executive Director, UFCW Western States Council
Q. Favorite spot for a coffee meeting? Awaken Cafe, Oakland, CA
Q. Describe how a skill you learned in a previous job helped you in your current job. The job skill I learned in my previous job is how to build collaborative partnerships built through a shared policy outcome. I learned how to build campaigns and organize people around central ideas and use my listening skills and communication abilities to build broad based coalitions.
Q. Job advice in three words? Keep at it
Q. Why are you part of TheBridge community? I am part of the Bridge community because I think it is important to keep open lines of communication between different groups.
Q. How are you (or your company, org, nonprofit) currently bridging the gap between innovation and regulation? We are dialoguing with companies in the tech space and trying to have conversations based on the vision of having equitable access to the success that tech platforms provide the potential for. Additionally we are using our political relationships to further the discussion with groups that may not have those same relationships.
Q. What can innovators learn from policymakers? Innovators can learn that we shouldn’t just try to “move fast and break things” but that we should try to “move fast and fix things.” Policymakers are in the world of fixing problems and innovators should understand how those problems can be fixed and share it in the fixing.
Q. What can policymakers learn from innovators? Policymakers can learn from innovators that just because things may seem insurmountable they most likely are not. Also, just because things have always been done that way, doesn’t mean that they should always be done that way.
Q. Favorite book/podcast/long-form article you recommend? Favorite book at the moment is “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway
Q. Looking back, what advice would you give yourself in the beginning of your career? The best piece of advice I would give my young self is mistakes are where learning happens and patience helps you see problems that you may not realize are there.
Q. How do you unwind after work? I unwind after work by going to the gym and getting a good workout in or practicing some Yoga.
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