Nate Howard is a professional speaker, poet, educator, and social entrepreneur. In May 2013, Nate made the front page of the LA Times for sparking a movement against racial profiling after 79 LAPD officers shut down his event at USC. Realizing someone was attempting to tell his story, he founded Movement BE, a non-profit organization that helps young people discover their stories. With the motto of “tell your story before they do,” Movement BE has directly impacted thousands of students across the country and even the world. Nate was selected on the inaugural NBCBLK28 list as one of the top 28 black leaders in the nation under 28 years old. He was later featured on the Today Show as one of the "Best and Brightest: Game Changers Making History."

Most recently, Nate was honored in his hometown of San Diego as the " Young Entrepreneur of the Year." Nate’s belief is that we should focus our activism on education, empowering youth to create change so that the movement is proactive and sustainable. Seeing poetry as a means of self-expression, he challenges school systems to see its use as vital for the development of youth, giving them the courage to find their story to challenge the status quo. Nate has recorded his poetry on songs with artists Ty Dolla Sign, Kendrick Lamar, and Dr. Cornel West. Nate is a graduate of the University of Southern California. His biggest inspirations are Martin Luther King Jr. and Maya Angelou.

Connect with Nate:

Movement BE: www.movementbe.com

Website: www.natehowardspeaks.com

Twitter/Instagram: @natehowardbe

Amazon Book Link: Tell Your Story Before They Do: A guide to winning the battle of you versus you

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Think of an art. Think of something like a mosaic or very poetic. You will see all of these different colors like a painting. It is beautiful. It has all of these different pieces to it. The problem is we look at that piece of art and say, “What category does this fit in?” They look at me and you, and they are like, “I know how I can identify them. They are both Black men.” That is simple and it becomes obvious. It is so much deeper than that.

To say that because we are Black, we are the same is idiotic. It is like blackness and Black men are so monolith, and Taryell and Nate are the same people. There is something unique about each of us. When you look at society and politics, even the politics of racial identity and the pandering of things, it is starting to go on more and more. That is what I want to challenge us. I would go deeper into that but it simplifies things to make it easier for media consumption for us to say, “I get that. That is a Black man. This is a stereotype and I understand the stereotypes of Black men. I’m going to leave it at that.”

Let’s take it back for a second because the journey to where you are at now has been a journey, to say the least. I always like to ask this question because I like to give people context that sometimes you got to start. It doesn’t matter where you start as long as you start. Everybody’s starting position is different. The end goal should be whatever that vision you have for yourself to somehow get there and take what you have learned along the way to get there. The first question is, what was your first job?

We were staying out of college. That is where I met you. My first job lasted for two months.

What lesson did you learn in that first job?

I’m an entrepreneur. That is the lesson.

I learned a lot from you too in your first job. I learned that I need to become an entrepreneur to be the best version of myself. I’m still on the journey to win in the battle of me versus me. I don’t want to get too much in the book because I want people to go out and read it. Give me one little nugget. What is something that you learned is the biggest hurdle for people to jump over in the battle of them versus them?

My favorite is when I wrote the book with my dad. Shout out to my dad. It is part of me listening to his advice but also taking my own. Growing up, he always said, “Don’t eat steak on a hamburger budget,” which makes sense. That is financial literacy. As I was talking about sustainability and finances, I said, “Why would I have a hamburger budget if I want steak?” There is a different look at it. That is a big nugget I want people to understand. It takes as much work to make $1 million as it is to make $100,000. It depends on what you are putting your focus on.

What I challenge people in this you versus you battle is being comfortable with success and with finances. It is your ability to be the best version of yourself. I say this in the book, “Be the best version of yourself.” That doesn’t mean 50%. To be the best version of yourself, you have to first see it. I like steak. That is okay. If I decided I wanted to have a steak dinner, I better put my mindset of what it means to have a steak dinner. At the end of the day, I understand people who say, “I want a hamburger budget.” That is fine for you. I have grown up and my dad will tell you, “I have lived a great life.” It is what he was able to provide for me.

I love that advice. Let’s say somebody is reading this, and they are like, “I have been limiting myself. I want this steak. I can’t do it in a corporate world so I’m going to do what Nate did.” What were the steps that you took to get into entrepreneurship and build your career in business?

Google. You have shared a lot of resources with me. I was looking at what you shared about starting a YouTube channel. I see all these YouTubers here. This is not rocket science. Decide on something that you are passionate about. You are not going to do it unless you are passionate about it. I do this because I love it. I’m like, “I get paid to do this and tell people to tell their stories and to share my poetry. It is fun. I don’t work a day in my life.” Do something you love.

We have the whole worldwide internet out here. People act like you have to be famous or you have to have millions of subscribers. Think about your budget. If you need a couple of thousands a month, you probably only need maybe a couple of hundreds or maybe people that believe in you. They can support you. It is all relative. 

I’m in the education industry. I work with schools, with you, and people are always going to have kids. They are going to grow up and need support. People in my industry, and I say, “Be good with kids. Be good with young people.” If you have little cousins or brothers, learn how to start teaching them and supporting them. Visit your local YMCA or reach out to any youth. What’s interesting is there is a need. How many people are waking up in the morning saying, “I want to go help as many youths as possible.” Maybe there are a few people who do that. If they are, there are still more youth that needs to be helped. There will never be enough.

It always surprises me that people think money can’t be made in this industry and prosperity can’t be made in the space of education. You may be looking at it as one way because they told you, “You have to go to school and become a teacher, and teachers don’t make money.” If that is the path you want to go, great, do that.

For educational entrepreneurs, the sky is the limit. For those who go the traditional route as teachers, what other job do you have 2 to 3 months off? If I know I’m working 9 to 10 months of the year, I better have a summer business. I may have something else on the side that is building on that. For everybody who wants to get into education and work with youth, there are so many opportunities.

Both me and you are a living testament to that because after I broke away from the company that we both worked at, I started getting contracts left and right to come and do workshops for our youth around career development. You do the socio-emotional literacy. You have added some financial literacy in that and a lot of different things that helped you. What I like about the way your thing is set up with Movement BE is that the same youth that has been part of your programs, you have been able to hire, go out, and help youth in other schools. That is a beautiful thing. Was that always the plan in your head?

That has always been the plan. I went to USC. The reality is a lot of students who have come from certain backgrounds can go to college, they graduate. If they don’t have a job after graduation, they can go work for their parents because their parents have this big business. It is like, “You didn’t get a job. Come work for me.” I’m hoping that Movement BE can be the same for a lot of youth. We got a lot of youth that we work within the foster care system. They may not have a parent that they can do that with.

If you went to Movement BE and we have an opportunity, you are going to be the first to get that opportunity because you went through this program. That is how everybody else does it. Does this work? I don’t know what else to say about that. It is the reality of it. The people who have gone through the program understand it better. I can go higher and try to get everybody else, “We have a chapter.” Of course, that is part of what I have to do. I’m required to do that.

At the end of the day, I’m going to give preference to the youth who have been to the program. I’m hoping that they pay it forward and keep it building. That is how we do this work. We are working in juvenile halls and those youth who get out were like, “I was part of Movement BE. I now have the opportunity to work with Movement BE.” It also gives incentives for people to say, “Let me take the training. Let me get involved in the program and hopefully build from there.”

What do you think the future has for the entrepreneur space, especially for people of color in this space? What does it look like when you see it or when you vision it?

There is going to be a bridge at this point. What we realized from 2020 is there were two things that happened, we are seeing George Floyd and then we had this whole pandemic. It was like a race. Technology became huge. At that point, you had Zoom sessions of racial injustice from everywhere. What is going to be interesting is looking at how schools begin to adapt to this hybrid model that now exists.

Schools are going to open back up but it is not going to be the same. The kids are going to have the option, and part of that option is going to have to deal with. As a student, do I feel like I belong? How funny is it that students probably felt more of belonging at their school at home than the actual campus? In the same sense, we are going to have other issues of students who had tough home lives and were at home during this pandemic when they needed to be at school to escape from their homelives.

There is a mix of things that are probably going to happen in the education system. People in this space will have to realize how to play both ends. How do you educate in person and how do you educate online? In regards to Black people and people of color, who are educating those youth to do that? What will happen is the opportunist will say, “I know technology. I know how to create a platform for Black students or students of color. Let me lead this initiative because I have the funding for it.”

They create more of a problem and create probably online racism, more issues of campaigns, hashtags that are temporary, don’t have the sustainability of the money going to the community itself, and a mix of other things. Go to MovementBe.com and sign up. If you want to be part of this movement, I got work for you. We could do some education entrepreneurs together and we can make it happen. 

I could go on this tangent but my challenge to schools at this point of why kids are dropping out or getting disconnected is because it is the same rubric that you are trying to compare everybody to. If you are trying to teach a fish how to climb a tree, it is better in water. There is a different animal who can climb a tree better.

If you are trying to take all of these students and make them all the same, that is idiotic. We are not giving them the room to create a better world. We are making everybody factory workers in the same type of system and then wonder why everybody thinks the same. They could go to a meeting and everybody was like, “I agree.” “Do you guys all agree with this?” “Yes, sir.” It is okay to be a rebel. Be a rebel a little bit.

Think for yourself a little bit. You are pretty close. I’m not an ENFJ. I’m an ENFP. I don’t know if you took that randomly or if you guessed. Was that random?

That is random but that was pretty close.

What are you? Are you ENFJ?

I’m one of those. I have to take it again. You know that and now you have a full understanding of your characteristics. It tells you the careers for those types of people. Teachers, counselors, and school helped me with these careers based on my personality.

I like using a little bit of the personality and the skillset because there might be some things that fit my personality that does not fit in my skillset or things that I may not want to do that don’t mirror both of them. If I could get something that mirrors my personality, the things, and the skillsets that I have, that would be a perfect marriage.

I agree with you on a lot of things. You know the government and the No Child Left Behind, which put us towards this model of college for everybody. Less on kids behind because what it did is we started dialing back from the apprenticeships and all those other things that were in schools to give you different career, pathway, and trajectories.

We are paying for it now because of things like the welding industry and so forth. I have been called in to help those programs because those apprenticeships got out of the schools and there is a need for them now. These are great-paying jobs. These people make $80,000 to $100,000 a year after doing an apprenticeship. They are getting paid to learn, pension plans, and travel the world on the company’s budget. I’m like, “A lot of people would probably want to go this route if they knew it was available to them.” It is the same thing as you talked about with the tech.

I love that you are bringing that into focus for us. When you look at the future of what you have been able to do and some of the things that you are talking about that could be done in a school system, what is the best way for schools to start partnering with programs like Movement BE to get them in their school system? We can at least start training in that way because a lot of the people think, “It is so hard to do. I don’t know how to connect with the Movement BE. How do I do it and get Movement BE programming to my school system?”

That has been an interesting approach. Part of it is we may have to go to a policy. That is the strategic route. It is almost saying, “This is a curriculum on racism. Would you like to have it?” A school is saying, “No. We are fine and we are not racist at all.” It was like, “You need this curriculum.” All the teachers who are trying to say, “Taryell, you need to become a teacher because they need training.” They don’t know how to deal with a young Black man.

I’m making an assumption but typically, those people who are saying that you need to become a teacher, it is because they don’t have the skillsets that you have to reach the students. That is the reality. “I have a young Black man in my class. I’m not Taryell. I don’t know how to educate him. I’m a White woman trying to connect with this young Black man.” Young Black men just see other Black men. It is the truth of it and representation matters. It is the importance of fatherhood and positive role models.



What I’m saying is there aren’t enough Black male educators. At the end of the day, I do a lot of staff development and professional development. I’m going to go into those schools and look at those teachers and say, “This is what needs to be done. This is the reality. You are working with a young Black man and we had another case.” There are too many hashtags to name at this point. “You are going to go in with curriculum trying to teach these kids what you think or assume that they should be learning about this. That is not how it is going to work. This is not optional.”

That was interesting. I took one class in high school and it was my Economics teacher. He was the only teacher who introduced us to it, but I forgot about it until I had maybe a little cash to play around with anymore.

These kids are full-blown learning how to play the stock market and what was the entry point that they could put. It was a little $25 and now they are living in Belltown. They come out of college and they have a couple of thousand. They were learning that, and I was like, “I didn’t have this in high school.” We will work together again and I can’t wait for that day to come. Is this new Movement BE? Do I need to get the upgrade?

No. This is what I found on Facebook. Do you know those ads that pop up?

Yeah.

They work. I was like, “I like that hoodie.” You see those Facebook and Instagram ads, scroll, and then you are like, “I like that.” I don’t know who this is. I have just seen it on Facebook and I bought it. I’m also hearing stuff, so I got you.

Nate, are there any last words do you want to leave the people with anything?

Get the book on Amazon, Tell Your Story Before They Do, and read it. I’m hoping people get inspired by this book. It is one of those things where it is a reminder for myself and all of us the power of your mind. Don’t think about the outside. Shape who you are from the inside. It is almost like you are writing your book. Think of your greatest version, write it, and then begin to believe it. People have to accept it because it is your book. I still got the approved copy. I still got to get the original copy. Taryell, thank you.

I’m definitely going to read it, Tell Your Story Before They Do: A Guide to Winning the Battle of You Versus You. Nate Howard, it has been a pleasure. Have you grabbed the book? If you are in the education space, connect with Nate to the Movement BE platform and see what he has got going on. Let’s work together. Let’s start the build and shape the future.

I do music. I have been on staff with Ty Dolla $ign and Kendrick. I love music, but literacy matters. I’m challenging the hip-hop community and the Black community. There is a reason why they hid books away from us. Wake up and read. I want to get on that movement. If you want to get on that movement, which I know you are, Taryell, let’s get more people to read. It is okay to read.

Take a book, read a book, and start with this one.

I did have a friend reach out to me like, “I don’t read but I got your book.” I was like, “You got to read it.” He is like, “Audiobook will come out soon. I’m waiting.” You can listen, too, but literacy is in play.

There is something that you pick up differently from hearing audio versus the visual of reading it. Some certain points stick better than others, and then you could take that and transcribe that to create your own vision. Nate Howard, thanks for being here with us. I appreciate you as always. I can’t wait to reconnect again.