Scott M. Curran: Most people think power always looks the same, especially in the current landscape. It's loud, demanding, aggressive, and increasingly in your face. It's not subtle. But actually not always. 

Penny Abeywardena has spent her life mastering another kind of power—soft power. Something we can all use to help change the world if we become more familiar with it and better at using it in our lives and in our work.

Penny has served in global philanthropy in New York City government and in international diplomacy, and has seen every type of power used in both dire and inspiring circumstances, which is an apt metaphor for her life. Born in Sri Lanka, Penny grew up in Los Angeles, a child survivor of domestic violence, who learned at age 10 how to navigate the LAPD better than her mother could. That experience became the foundation for the life and career of impact that would follow, including her unique perspective on how we can all find hidden pockets of power that can be used in ways big and small to help change the world.  

Welcome to Better Good. The show where you learn how the best do good, and how you can too. I'm your host, Scott Curran. For 25 years, I've served as a corporate lawyer and in-house general counsel and an advisor to some of the most extraordinary social impact work spanning the private sector, philanthropy and social enterprises. On this podcast, I talk to the innovators re-imagining how the world does good, bringing you candid and inspiring conversations and practical advice, guidance, and tools you can use in your life and at work. If doing good is something you care about, you're in the right place—because the world's biggest problems won't wait, and neither should you. 

 My guest, Penny Abeywardena, served as the Commissioner for International Affairs for New York City, one of only 30 members of the Mayor's Cabinet, and effectively the Secretary of State for the largest, most diplomatically complex city in the world. A city that hosts 193 permanent UN missions, 116 consulates, and the largest diplomatic core on Earth. Over her eight years in that role, Penny both managed the diplomatic infrastructure of New York City and invented new ways to leverage it. When the Trump administration walked away from the global climate table, she created the voluntary local review, a framework for cities to report their own progress on the sustainable development goals. She built a coalition of 350 local governments around the world, and during COVID, when Washington told New York it was on its own, she harnessed eight years of diplomatic relationships to secure half a million pieces of PPE directly from the United Nations’ own stockpile. The UN had never done this before for a municipality, but since New York was their home turf too, smart, committed leaders found a way to tackle a tough time together. 

Now, Penny has taken everything she learned about influence, persuasion, and the subtle but meaningful exercise of power to launch a new chapter in her career. A consultancy along with a forthcoming book centered on a single idea: Soft power. Not the geopolitical concept, but something more personal and urgent. How do you move people, change cultures and advance agendas when you don't have the title, the budget, or the permission to demand it? In a moment when lots of people are choosing to check out, Penny is reminding us why and teaching us how we should all stay in so that we can each wield our own soft power. 

On a personal note, Penny has been a colleague, collaborator, and friend since our days working together at the Clinton Foundation, where I worked as general counsel and Penny served in several leadership roles, including a focus on the women and girls empowerment programming at the Clinton Global Initiative. And speaking of CGI, we recorded this episode at the 2025 Clinton Global Initiative in New York City. So the noise you hear in the background is just the sound of people working to change the world just like Penny does. This is better. Good. And here's my conversation with Penny Abeywardena 

Scott M. Curran: Penny Abeywardena. Welcome to Better Good.

Penny Abeywardena: Scott Curran. Thank you for having me. 

Scott M. Curran: I'm so excited. I think this is kinda one of the best things about having a podcast, which is that you get to schedule time with your friends who you spend too little time with. So I'm thrilled that we're able to spend this time together. 

Penny Abeywardena: Thank you. And I'm so excited about supporting and being part of this conversation that you're driving. 

Scott M. Curran: I would rather have nobody other than you, except I might like to do this again with your husband, another amazing person and leader, that one. Let's record and do as a bonus follow up another time. 

Penny Abeywardena: Oh, I, I love that. Since you approved our relationship, 

Scott M. Curran: We're gonna get into that. We're gonna talk about this. Okay. So Penny, as people are already gathering, is somebody with whom I go way back. And so we worked together for most of the decade that I was at the Clinton Foundation. We were at the Clinton Global Initiative. Your career in social impact and philanthropy and government service started before that, starting in the pub policy think tank space before you arrived. What did you do before you were at CGI?

Penny Abeywardena: I was at a public policy think tank, but honestly, my entire career has been sort of chasing, uh, impact and value. So like my first internships at Human Rights Watch in Los Angeles, and that sort of set me on the path around women's rights, human rights, and figuring out the best ways to use the power that I have to do some good.

Scott M. Curran: I wanna actually ask you a question I don't know the answer to. And I dunno if anybody's ever asked you this one. But I want you to think about in your life. Yep. The concept of doing good. When was the first time you realized in your young life that doing good was a thing that people did, that people recognized and or that you might be able to do? What was your earliest memory of that? 

Penny Abeywardena: So I think my earliest memory is, I'm gonna switch the. That question a little bit around, it's not about when I realized other people are doing good, it's when I realized I needed people to do good for me. 

Scott M. Curran: Say more.

Penny Abeywardena: So I was, I'm a survivor of domestic violence. My father is, um, uh, you know, very mentally ill. So it's not, you know, that's his mental health. I didn't appreciate until my late teen years. But as a child I was abused. Um, and I got very good about protecting myself. I knew how to interact with the, with the LAPD. I was 10 years old. My mom wasn't as savvy as I was. I was able to interact with them and it was that moment where I'm just like, I need help. And, you know, the LAPD was my source for that, but it was also just a different time. We were undocumented during that time. And, you know, this is when the police still felt safe no matter what your documentation status was. But yeah, so I'm turning that around. But it was at a very young age where I knew people should be doing things to help others. And I was somebody that want needed that and wanted that. 

Scott M. Curran: Beyond being savvy with the police, did you see them as people who did good for you in that situation?

Penny Abeywardena: Absolutely, and they did do good. For me, they would come with the, what's called the PEP team. When you call and you say, you know, somebody's having, you know, an incident, um, they start to ask what it is and then they realize that it's probably mental health related. So back in the day it used to be called, um, the PEP team, which is like the psychiatric something, um, team that would come with the, with the LAPD. So instead of my father getting arrested, he would be then taken to a hospital to get the support he needed. 

Scott M. Curran: That's an interesting answer. When did you then realize that doing good was going to be part of, if not the core of what you would do in your life and work? 

Penny Abeywardena: I, um, went, went to undergrad at the University of Southern California and I saw the woman, I think her name was Dorothy Thomas at the time, speak about—she was running human rights watches, women's Rights Division—speak about women's rights globally. And I think that same year I was 19, I went to Sri Lanka for the first time since coming to the us. I came here when I was four and we hadn't had the money or the resources to get back. So we went when I was 19 and Sri Lanka was in the middle of its civil war with the Tamil Tigers. And I am just, just like maybe unnecessary context, but I am lighter than most Sri Lankans, so I don't look like I'm a native and so I kept getting profiled and I thought that was so fascinating watching this hyper militarized community. Many of the women were actually the military. Actually,  I've never seen more women in camouflage in my life. And it was just this open, this like eye-opening experience of seeing women being militarized, getting profiled, and having body checks damn near every three blocks. I was telling my mom, “Why are we leaving the house? I'm just getting like, felt up like all day long.” 

But yeah, so that's when I realized, you know what? I wanna actually figure out a career around supporting women's rights. But I have to say, seeing the strength of my mom as a survivor of domestic violence, that women's rights fight was always in me. It was going to Sri Lanka that I realized I wanted to be more than just what's locally happening. I wanted to have a global bridge. And so that's ended up really defining the way that I spend my time now. I'm hyper conscious of what is important in our communities, but I also know that the most important thing about what we do here and around us is how we're part of the global conversation. And global strategy to move things forward.

Scott M. Curran: This is why I love talking with you, whether we are recording it or not. So help people who don't know you as well as I do know what your path was to and through, to the point where you are now, where you are the founder and CEO of Soft Power Strategies. And I want to talk about the career arc first, and then explain what soft power strategies. Is as an entity and a going concern, but also what soft power means. And we'll spend quite a bit of time on that. But first, connect the dots between those early experiences and that awareness and where you are today at Soft Power Strategies. 

Penny Abeywardena: So my, um, I'm going really back, but my first internship was at the w the Women's Rights Division at Human Rights Watch—that talk really translated into, into action pretty quickly. But what I realized then at a very young age, in my early twenties, were what my limits are. And I think that is also what has really influenced like the larger sort of track that I've taken, but human rights watcher, human rights lawyers who spend time on the ground and do some of the hardest on the ground research documentation of travesties in conflicts throughout the world. And what I realized is that I have real PTSD from being a survivor of domestic violence, that that was not gonna be me. I can't spend two years living amongst the Dalit community in Southern India and supporting them in that way. And that, you know, was a struggle because it, it felt like, and sometimes, you know, how are we defined as advocates? An activist who's more of an advocate that cares than the other, right? And there is this, you know, hierarchy within social justice that if you're doing the work literally on the ground, you are stronger or you're more committed than somebody that's doing it behind the scenes, and that is something I fundamentally push back against because I think we all have our reasons in terms of how we show up. The most important thing is that we show up and we're effective at it. 

And that's when I spent most of my, like twenties, was really developing, you know, I ended up working and getting a full-time job at Human Rights Watch in their development division, and we were kind of like dismissed. We're like the gala over here and like talking to the rich people and it's like, no, actually I need to know what you're doing, as well as you do to be able to translate it into regular language to sell it to people, right? Right? Human rights is a very hard thing to like sell as a concept because it's not a starving child. It's not a woman being abused , and I'm not trying to disparage that. I'm just saying that it's a very complicated thing to try to sell, right? And I understood that building this muscle of knowing the work as well as I do, but being able to translate it to audiences that may or may not care is going to be my sweet spot. 

So did that, and it was interesting because. I also, um, realized I was spending too much time doing the global work, and I didn't really know what was happening in my own community. So I started working for the funding exchange, which was  a foundation. It's, it was a organization of a series of community foundations. I went from there to a public policy think tank, and then I felt like I had my social justice chops as well as my global human rights. And then there was a job posting on idealist.org for a Commitments Education manager at the Clinton Global Initiative and I applied online. And I like to say that I am one of the first people that CGI hired that didn't come from like the Clinton world of like a campaign or an internship program or the White House. And I honestly think that was a really good, healthy thing for me to be able to come in, bring my women's rights crew with me and help build out that program that ended up being, I think, one of the most successful programs within CGI agree.

Scott M. Curran: We share that in common that neither of us came from the Clinton world as it's commonly referred to. But, which is also a great way of staying in the Clinton world once you're there because if you're not trying to stay in it, you, you, it tends to be more comfortable to be able to stay in it.

Penny Abeywardena: Well, you know, it's so interesting too because it's like. You have this incredibly powerful name and platform, but you also don't have any of the baggage of, of being in that world. Right. It was just like, oh my God.

Scott M. Curran: Or having transitioned from the White House or the political side. Exactly. And the philanthropy. If you're just, I always tell people I’, just, for the philanthropy. That's exactly right. I just came for the philanthropy. 

Penny Abeywardena: I was like, I wanna run with girls and women especially because I knew Hillary at the time, secretary Clinton couldn't. Um, you know, you as you know, during that period it was sort of church and state. The Obama administration said she had to really check out when she was Secretary of State, so when she was Secretary of State, which was when I had joined. 2009. Yeah. Um, so it was just a huge opportunity that I could not have been more happy to get. And then I was, um, I created the girls and women's program. And then, um, I got a phone call from the mayor's office appointments, and I was, I had a sweet job. I was like director of gender integration at the Clinton Global Initiative, and I thought they were gonna pitch me like the Women's Commission in New York. Mayor Blassio, his first year. Um, and, uh, he invited me. To come and join him to be commissioner for international affairs. And I, honest to God, like, like open tabbed, what is a commissioner? Because I'd only ever thought about it in the sense of like, Batman and like that was like, what is this? Um, and then it had the most boring website in the world. There was like a hundred page PDF on like parking. And I was like, I don't really know if I wanna do this. But how much are you guys paying? And I paid like 150,000 more than I was being paid at CG, and I was like, commissioner sounds great. When can I come in and talk? 

Scott M. Curran: We I normally think that philanthropy and government service are usually on par with each other. That's great. I didn't realize it came with a, a nice pay upgrade. That's awesome. 

Penny Abeywardena: Well, I mean, well the thing about being commissioner, you're is you are running an agency and you're part of the mayor's cabinet. There's only like 30 of us, right? Yeah. But my peers are like NYPD, sanitation, all of that. So that's Government doesn't pay well. Explain. Commissioner Dead Paid. 

Scott M. Curran: Well explain the work for the Commissioner of the Foreign of Foreign Affairs International for the city of New York. Because it's not like a job at any other city or No, it's a commissioner job even in New York because you are effectively the Secretary of State for one of the biggest and most consequential cities in the world. Which also hosts the United Nations. 

Penny Abeywardena: Exactly. New York has hosted the largest diplomatic corps. There are 193 permanent missions, 116 consulates, which are a different arm of foreign ministries around the world. There's a hundred economic commissions. And then of course we have UNHQ, UNICEF is based here, UNDP. So we are the host to the largest diplomatic corps. The US mission to the UN is host country, and New York City is host city. So I used to sit on the board of the UN Development Corporation, which helps manage all of the UN's real estate in the tri-state areas. So there's a deep diplomatic footprint here in New York. 

Scott M. Curran: how does that interview go of all And did you have a prescreen? 

Penny Abeywardena: There's a, here's a strategy. There were like, there were like five pre-screens. Maya Wiley was one of my priest greens, who's like this queen in social justice and I'd worked with her previously before. Um. You know, one of a strategy for your listeners. When you're nervous, I like to think about who I'm interacting with and their physical presence. Bill de Blassio is like six, so I was imagining being in like a small, like city hall, like the mayor's office being like overwhelmed with his physical presence, and instead he changed it to Gracie Mansion. It was a beautiful day. We sat outside. Chirlane joined us for that conversation and we talked for two hours. So Mayor de Blasio was really unique in that he was a, um, rather provincial, right? He was public advocate, came, kind of came outta nowhere and won this election, um, and became the, arguably the most important municipal leader in the world. And something that I thought was very cool was, if you look at all of his appointments, he got best-in-class of folks that were doing that kind of work. He didn't have a bench that he owed anything to, and it was a really interesting sort of like development or bringing people up into this kind of bench. And so he has, he went to SIPA too at Columbia and the School of International Public Affairs, and he was just deeply interested in the fact that we're host to his large diplomatic core, there's an agency for it, but nobody's really done anything with it other than the operational, the diplomatic parking programs, security, that kind of operational. And what we got into is New York is this large, if not larger than 141 countries. We believe Mayor de Blasio and I, that government should work for, for its people. So if policies are working here, those could be translated elsewhere, right? I mean, that's something that Chelsea Clinton said years ago that I, it's like replication is like the biggest flattery. It's not about just what's new, what's new, what's new. But it's like, what's a great idea and let's go replicate it and that was like at the heart of my strategy as I became commissioner.

He appointed me and. It was like, “oh God, I just inherited people that had been here for a very long time.” All to say there was a, you know, first six months is really like listening, asking people to, you know, give their ideas, et cetera. Um, but you know what? Fast forward, I was there for two, uh, terms, full eight years. Um, and I distinctly organize them into three phases. 

The first phase was sort of just rebuilding and figuring out how do we better connect? Because at the end of the day, you do work on bridging. The whole thing here is about how do you make people feel invested in what you're doing. New York City had not ever really invested any money in connecting the diplomatic core to New Yorkers and New Yorkers hate the diplomatic corps because of like traffic. I mean, it was just such a miss that it felt like here's a big opportunity for us to do things. 

Scott M. Curran: When you were just starting out, what did you have in mind that, If you were able to connect the diplomatic core better to the residents and the city of New York, what would that have in your mind, have, have looked like? 

Penny Abeywardena: First of all, we were paid by taxpayers, right? So I wanted New Yorkers to care that we have this. And the way to make them care about it is that they're getting a benefit out of it. 

So a couple of the first things I did, we did an economic impact analysis of hosting the un. We've never done that. It's, it's as if we host three Super Bowls every year. All the diplomats aren't just coming from foreign countries. The, they're staffed and resourced by New Yorkers. They hire about 16,000 New Yorkers. So we made sort of that economic argument. But then we created this program called New York City Junior Ambassadors. We were focused on the 13-year-old age group, because if you can activate them, there's a lot of, um, studies. If you can activate kids at that age, it like really sticks. And we wanted to focus on the least underserved communities. You know, there's like un um, I forgot what it's called, un high school or things like that. But usually those are well-resourced schools that to get to participate in the UN. We were like East New York, Staten Island, let's go. 

And the best story ever was I went to Staten Island to talk to seventh and eighth graders, and the principal pulled me out, pulled me to the side, and he's like, “You know what? 75% of my kids don't leave the island of Staten Island. So the UN could be on another planet for all it matters.” And so it was just such a very like. Poignant moment to understand that, you know how you get somebody that works at the bodega to care about the sustainable development goals, it's 'cause their kids doing something about it. I unabashedly stole the commitments model from CGI. So the kids, so the schools that participate in the New York City Junior Ambassadors, the kids had to do, we just called it commitments, um, around the SDGs and like SDG 14, I'm pretty sure it's life underwater sounds boring as fuck to people that aren't doing like water shit. And these kids who chose it, they wanted to clean up the South Bronx River because the South Bronx River is one of the dirtiest waterways in New York. Now tell me that's what they're going home and talking to their parents about. And that's just a different shift. So we launched those kinds of programs and that was first phase. 

Second phase, um, you know, was a surprise. Donald Trump came into power, said climate change doesn't exist and you can't talk to US-UN about sustainable development goals. And it was one of those moments where opportunity kind of rises because things feel so effed. Um, I like that I'm censoring myself now when I didn't.

Scott M. Curran: You don't have to censor yourself.

Penny Abeywardena: It was, you know, I felt particularly fucked back in 2016. Um, but it was a really interesting opportunity. One of the things I had learned and my team had learned is that very few of our international counterparts, but also Americans, don't appreciate how much power there is in local governments. One of the largest militias in the world. Is it NYPD? Who controls that? The mayor of New York, not the attorney General, not the president. And so there is so much power, like they control what happens at the borders. But once people are in our cities, mayors are the ones, mayors and the city agencies are the ones that ensure we are doing everything from making sure kids can get access to school, get the medical care they need, have them be safe. What are dignified interactions with the police department looking like? And so that gave us the idea. 

So this is gonna be a little bit nerdy, but the Sustainable Development goals invites all countries to submit a voluntary national review every year during the high level political forum. And it's an important process of recording what you are doing to achieve the SDGs. So we decided to create what's called the Voluntary Local Review, and that was cities assessing how we're doing the SDGs. And before we launched it officially, I went to the P five, um, the P five or the permanent five on the Security Council. Like it or not, they are the most influential countries in the world, 

Scott M. Curran: Usually comprised of. UK. 

Penny Abeywardena: not usually are. So it doesn't change UK. That's why they're called the permanent five. Permanent. P five. UK, France, China, Russia, US. And so obviously I couldn't talk to the US, but I was like total buddies with the Russian ambassador, like they all, and they loved the idea of the voluntary local review. And my agenda with them was, this is not us trying to usurp the sovereignty of member states. This is us saying cities are actually reflecting what is happening on the SDGs in a way that even the v and r is not the voluntary National Review, not able to capture. We launched it with, uh, Freetown, Sierra Leone and Helsinki because I wanted to show that in small cities, it doesn't matter. What you, what sort of resources you have. We're all doing things around climate change or gender, et cetera. So anyway, so we launched that and we were really able to, and if you talk to, talk to the secretary, general, general at that time and say, you know, how are you dealing with the US not believing in climate? He's like, but, “Yu know what? Look at what cities like New York are doing. Look at what the private sector is doing.” And it just was such a powerful, so that was that second phase of really driving what it means to be. A local government and the power of us. By the time I left office, we had 350 local governments around the world that are part of the voluntary local review. And you know, it still exists and is out there and it's like an awesome bit of legacy. 

And then the final phase was COVID. So, you know, the UN is sovereign land and there, you know, was a lot going on. We had 5,000 people dying a day. Um, and the president of the United States told New York we are on our own. And we had, um, healthcare workers in the South Bronx in garbage bags. And it was just one of these moments, I'm healthy, thank God, so my family and I stayed, but you heard ambulances all day long. It was just a, it is just I, I still have PTSD from it, but I wanted to know how can international affairs—we've just spent six years building relationships with these foreign governments. You know what? It's time for them to show up. So not only were we interacting with the UN and all these foreign governments. The way I wanted to lean was full transparency. So you know what I know as we know it and we don't really know much, but I did town halls on phones saying like, “If you're sick, don't go to the hospital. Only go if you're dying” That is how overwhelmed our healthcare system was. Um, and so we were just giving information as we had it, but I also looked back at them and said, “We need PPE, we need medical supplies.” And on March 28th, I'm getting shivers thinking about it, the UN gave us a historical donation from their own stockpile on campus. Historical, because they never give to a municipality directly. They usually go through a member state, but at that point, the Secretary General said, “We are all New Yorkers right now,” and gave us half a million PPE. And I think that is really when I was like, oh right, hat's right. It was like that soft power and this is, this is that period I really started to think about Joseph Nye's soft power in the way that he talks about it in terms of institutions and ecosystems. 

Scott M. Curran: I was gonna interject and I didn't want to, but I was, when I, when I heard you talk about. Bringing kids into greater awareness of things that matter to them locally and tying it to the global SDG. Were you seeing soft power then? Were you putting that together then, or was it that until COVID that you saw? 

Penny Abeywardena: No, it was really during CO. So here, so they're giving that us, giving that to us, and then at the same time, city hall's figuring out like vaccines and, you know, testing and all of that. We were the only diplomatic city that treated diplomats. As local citizens and one of the most powerful things.

Scott M. Curran: Instead of saying they were on their own. 

Penny Abeywardena: Yeah, that, that you're not part of New York City. Right. And one of the most powerful things, listen, the Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez could have gotten inoculated for his, for his vaccine much earlier because he's essentially a head of state. He waited until we were able to give vaccines out to 70 and over. He and I went to a high school in the Bronx, and he got his Pfizer shot along with, teachers and like construction workers and it was such an important, again, these like give and gets—he was showing how safe the local system healthcare system delivery was, that he's partaking in it. And so it was just like, as horrible as that time was, the takeaway from that was if you have built the right relationships and have the right reputation, when something as extreme as a global pandemic happens, it's like the bureaucracy of two of the most bureaucratic institutions, New York City government and the UN, just kind of went to the side and it was like, “This is what we're gonna do, this is how we're gonna help each other.” And then I'm on the city mayor's chat on the side, and then everybody's exchanging ideas, you know, in Barcelona, how are you guys helping the aging population? Oh, that's a great idea. I should send that to our Department of Aging. But it was like, it was just this incredible exercise in strategy and communication without around all of this hard power that would've otherwise prevented it if it hadn't been for this global emergency. So that's when I really started to think about soft power and how I wanted to do it. 

Scott M. Curran: So then how did you make the transition from that position? To soft power strategies. And I think I know the answer, but share it with listeners.

Penny Abeywardena: Well, so a couple things I was up for, um, a very, very big to run a big UN agency, was a finalist and I didn't get it for political reasons, but as for where I was in my career, just in my personal life process, I realized that I didn't need something, another job to get there. I'm there. I could run an $8 billion UN organization. All the right people believed in me. I knew I could do it, and so I didn't need to start. So I didn't. It was very privileged. I didn't take jobs that were coming my way, and I decided to give myself a break and see what happens when I think and bring the creativity I've brought to institutions like CGI and to New York City. What would happen if I just like get to do it without any of the constraints of government or philanthropy or whatever? And the soft power really emerged because I spent a lot of my downtime talking to young people, women. People of color and you know, we had just started to reopen, this is in 2022, and I had been part of the shutdown and the reopen. And one thing that was really freaking me out was the younger generation is really choosing to check out proactively. I don't blame them. Their last 10 years have been a fucking nightmare. And if I had my formative years in that, I would be really overwhelmed in that too. But one thing that I got very worried about was in terms of leadership.

When I reflect back on how my leadership toolkit got built, it's through, um, all the indignities that I had to deal with. Just the dumb shit people think they can say to you, because I look young, because I'm a woman of color, because I choose to dress a certain way. And I thought that sucks because it's this interpersonal connectivity and like judgment. You build a muscle and that muscle helps you gain power because then you know how to navigate your environments. You get to navigate the people that have, and the institutions that have that power. But you've gotta be there. 

So the first article I wrote was about the importance of returning to the office. And I'm like, “Dude, embrace the hybrid. But there is so much power in being around people, whether you're an expert, extrovert, introvert.” And so I wrote an article and started shipping and shopping it around. And um, this fabulous editor at Forbes actually said, “We don't do one offs. But have you thought about soft power as a potential like leadership column?” She's a total badass and she's like, “Do what Malcolm Gladwell did. Like start this for, start a Forbes column and then see if it'll turn into a book and we'll grow.” And I was like, “That is brilliant, but let me, I'll be back. I'll be back to you. I'm not sure if I could do this thing.” So then I went down the academic research of the behavioral science of changing norms and game theory, and there's such brilliant strategies, but it is so fucking boring to read. Like I am not an academic and it's like painful. So I was like, okay, how can I bring like an Anthony Bourdain style of writing to this and present it and I like the concept of soft power because people think they know what that means and that allows you to be flexible and readapt it. And so I decided to focus on soft power in terms of individual strategies, how to have influence and persuasion when you come from having no perceived power. 

And that just became, so I started writing. I ended up publishing about 25 pieces in Forbes, turned into a book project, and last year launched the consultancy, which is now going in a lot of really great directions. And unfortunately I have to say with our new reality, I'm seeing more and more people disconnecting. And I think the only way to give people hope is if you can identify power for them, how they have power. And so that's really what I'm trying to do because we have in institutions now five generations. Leaders over 50 don't know how to talk to the generations coming up. And young people need to be spoken and communicated and given strategies, I think in a different fashion. And I just wanna equip both sides for whatever they wanna do. You know? And this is what, it's not political. This is about how you feel about yourself. If you feel like you can go into the office and you are now have the strategies to like change the culture of the team you're on or know how to support that really good idea that Scott had that nobody really wants to listen to, what your role in that could be, that makes people look forward to their lives.

 So that's, that's what I, that's the journey I've decided. I don't know if we still say this, but I'm gonna die on this hill of, of soft power, um, with AI and everything that's happening. It's our humanity. 

Scott M. Curran: How does somebody know when they need you to help them with soft power? 

Penny Abeywardena: I think that is gonna be a journey for people, but I do think if they're honest about just kind of feeling burnt out. It’s a strategic way of thinking that I think people need to opt in, but it's not this I'm asking you to look deep inside you. It's being honest about, I am feeling very burnt out. I feel hopeless and I wanna disconnect and I know I shouldn't. And I think that's the way that individuals can identify it. But I will say I'm proactively working with corporations and nonprofits. I was gonna say.

Scott M. Curran: So who are your, who are your archetypal clients right now?

Penny Abeywardena: it's corporations and nonprofits. Because I do think we're in a transition. 

Scott M. Curran: What's an example of somebody who's struggling with something like Call Penny. 

Penny Abeywardena: If you talk to any chief people officer mm-hmm. They're like HR head. HR. They're all about risk mitigation too, right? The thing that they notice, people are unhappy, morale is low. And again, that's that direct line between people feel good and hopeful when they feel like they have power. And that's that through line of. You know, also being in the SP spaces one, one, um, I spoke to Vital Voices is a brilliant women's nonprofit, to the corporate, to their leadership team. And they're going back to the office from two days to three days. And a lot of the staff aren't happy. And I think what they needed was we need to have, we need to communicate to people. This is not about organizational strength. This is not about team building. That happens too. We need to talk about what you get from being back in the office. And that shift is really the way you can start to reframe value rather than this being like a checkbox of like, Ugh, I just gotta go because I say that I gotta go. No, we are telling you to go back because we know this is why this will be powerful for you. And so it's been those kinds of conversations that I've been having with both the nonprofit and the corporate side.

Scott M. Curran: I love it. I, you know, it's funny, I, I'm curious for your take on storytelling as a soft power strategy, because every single thing you have talked about has involved telling a story or is made impactful by the story. It tells from your first experience that you shared being a victim of domestic violence and knowing how to engage with other people. And the story that conveys to the story of your own career trajectory to how do we make something like SDGs relevant to the bodega owner by having their kids care about the things it's—which is a total think globally, act locally move. Yeah. And it wasn't even Earth Day. But that these kids care about clean waterways near them because who doesn't care about clean waterways near them? And then to do something with it, some of the most ardent environmentalists I know are deep red state hunter and Fisher people. A clean waterway in which to fish. Yeah. Or that serves the animals they seek to hunt or the farmland they seek to farm. And care about air temperature for purposes of growing crops and not having fires destroy them. So I find that once you make that local connection and help them understand and see where it is, all of a sudden they become far more engaged and involved as small-a activists, even though they would never describe themselves that way.

Penny Abeywardena: Well, and I think that's full circle for the storytelling, for the book that I'm writing. Because it is full of strategies and activations. But you have to package it in a way that people wanna not only read, but consume and process it. And that's all storytelling. I have an entire chapter on vulnerability.

You know, like I had a miscarriage when I first got pregnant and then this ended up in influencing a bunch of things. But when I first got pregnant, I called HR and I was like, Hey, so can you tell me about the time off? And they were like, uh, when are you do? And I was like, Tuesday. And she's like, “Okay, work on work until that Sunday and then roll over your hours. And I was like, “I'm sorry, what?” And I just left the, you know, this is like leaving the Clinton Foundation and our like. Suite, you know, parental leave. Right. And we, we had lovely benefits there and I was like, we what? And also I'm commissioner and yeah, I had to log in hours, but I was like, “You're telling me to roll over?” I'm, I was very confused. It turned out as progressive as we were as an administration, there was no parental leave. Right? Parental leave is not a federal thing. It happens within companies and at the local level. I ended up talking to, um, a few folks at City Hall, and you know what's really funny? They're all progressive, but everybody's older. So their kids, they're not thinking about getting pregnant and all of this, you know? And I was like, fuck, FMLA, that just meant the American, like FMLA couldn't fire me. We need to really think. And then there was a whole bunch of badass women at City Hall that made sure this got done. Parental leave ended up being one of de Blasio's really big wins here for foster care adoption. You know, the whole thing was fantastic. 

So I ended up having, um, a miscarriage with that one, and I had to go get a DNC, which is like a hospital situation. And I had to tell my team that I'm not gonna be in the office for two days. And then I thought, wait, but if I was like having like a knee surgery, I would totally be telling y'all that I'm having knee surgery. Why am I keeping this a secret? I work with women. I'm of childbearing age, and so I shared it at the, um, at our staff meeting because I was comfortable with it. I cannot tell you every single woman that worked with me came and thanked me for it. And part of   miscarriage is nobody's fault. It's just like life happens. Yeah. I love what my doctor said. He said, “It just means your body's getting ready,” and I got pregnant two months later and it was great, but it was one of those things, the fact the way he communicated to me was just my body's getting ready really shifted the way that I was thinking about. the way I felt.

But it's like vulnerability can be used in such a powerful way. To move agendas, right? To empower people, to enable people. And so that is a way that I do storytelling and that's the kind of global stories I'm also sharing in my book is because it's not just personal, it's these brilliant campaigns and these other larger, movements that are built, built on storytelling and soft power. 

Scott M. Curran You’ve spent a lot of time on women and girls Empowerment. Primarily in, in the philanthropic space. And in elevation And awareness of the cause and the importance, um, as the son of a strong. As a grandson of a strong grandmother, a the son of a strong mother, the husband of a strong woman, and the father of a, what I, who I hope will be and have good reason to believe will be a strong, uh, young, young lady. Now, um, explain why the empowerment of women and girls matters and explain soft power in the context of women and girls initiatives. How do we equip that population with a greater awareness so that the work of empowering women and girls is better and more effective earlier?

Penny Abeywardena: Well, so the thing with girls and women's empowerment is that there's not one silver bullet. So the storytelling really comes from not just access to education. It's quality education, healthcare. Menstruation, all of that. I haven't thought about a particular gender lens to stop power. My lens is more hope that we all need to have, um, to be able to move the agendas that we want to do. But I'm seeing soft power as one of the ways to enter conversations. Let's say in a community that isn't maybe strong on climate, young people are gonna care about domestic violence, right? And these are ways in which they can activate on issues that don't have to be related to girls and women, but they become entry points in how they choose to engage on issues that matter to their community. 

Listen, girls and women, 50% if not more of the population, there is a lot of work that still needs to be done, but brilliant activists are doing it. But there are a lot of us who are not—within the activist movement—that are placed strategically in influential hard power institutions and spaces. And we are also driving that agenda. And I think that is a really important, like that circles back to realizing that I can't be somebody that works in a rural community on the ground. But what I've done is build power, inserted myself into different spaces and conversations and hard power institutions, and made sure the girls and women's lens was core to that, right?

My agency, by the time I left, looked very different from what it looked before because as a woman of color, there are different priorities that I am going to prioritize, and because I'm the boss, I get to hire accordingly. Right? The best in class as I see it. 

Scott M. Curran: What are two things or more that somebody listening can do to start exercising the soft power muscle in their life or in their work? What's the frame for it and what's the action item for it? 

Penny Abeywardena: You know, I mean, I've given a couple of examples, but I do think one, one thing that I've really liked that I've gone down the road from is, um. Make your problem different, maybe blow up your problem, because something that always happens when we feel conflict is we get really stuck on the specificity of that, of that issue, that conflict. And sometimes when you step back and try to reframe it or think about it differently, you start identifying different allies that you hadn't actually thought, oh, this could, this person can be brought in, or this idea could be brought in. So I think the reframe of problems to make it bigger, to make it different, be creative with it, is actually really valuable in terms of what the outcomes can be. In terms of who you can bring on board and how you can sort of navigate out of that. 

Scott M. Curran: So that's getting the bodega owner to care about the SDGs by engaging their kids.

Penny Abeywardena: Exactly. In a local cause rather than just getting stuck on like, how do we make New Yorkers care about, um, the SDGs and putting ads out, on all the bus stands, it was like, okay, well New Yorkers have children. And then working, working, uh, that way. Exactly. 

Scott M. Curran: A couple of fun facts for biographical purposes is that you and I met at the Clinton Foundation. We did when you were working at CGI and I was in the council's office. Um, and you met your husband at work. And the reason we joke about the disclosure thing is that it's in every good handbook or code of conduct, usually an employee handbook that says, which nobody ever reads well, but which good HR and legal teams train on. And usually in an entertaining fashion that you love. because I may or may not have been part of the team that would do the training at the Clinton Foundation, so somebody knew that when you are in a relationship with a peer, uh, or especially in a reporting relationship, which you are not, I, so you got, you were not. So you, you're, the story is though that you met a wonderful guy named Daniel Schafer at work, who was our Chief Technology Officer.

Penny Abeywardena: Well, no, but at the time I thought he was like a rebound hookup. 

Scott M. Curran: Hmm. Interesting. 

Penny Abeywardena: So then I was wondering, should we tell anybody? 

Scott M. Curran: And then, then it, then it merged into, I didn't know that part of the, I thought it was just, you know, see at the coffee maker every day. I, oh. And then he was so much younger than me.

 Oh, the thing about Daniel too was that what, 30, 40 years? 

Penny Abeywardena: He six to seven, so he was 25 and I was 31. 

Scott M. Curran: Fair enough. So, um, I just wanted the listener to have some context. We're not, we're not talking about a Anna Nicole Smith situation here. 

Penny. You are a one of my favorite people of all time in my career. You are an incredibly smart, incredibly amazing, incredibly inspirational, exciting, engaging, enthusiastic, dynamic presence. 

Penny Abeywardena: Can I get a clip of just this, this, thank you. 

Scott M. Curran: This will, this will run on TikTok. I'll join TikTok just to run this. Um, should I interrupted you? Keep going. You are a total baller in this world.

Penny Abeywardena: Thank you. 

Scott M. Curran: But you're also a really great human being. Thank you. And there's a lot of people who want to convince you of how smart they are, how talented they are, and how accomplished they are. And then there's other people who just exude it by the way they show up. So I want to thank you not only for joining me but for the example of your soft power. And the soft power, actually a hard power of your amazing example. Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for being a wonderful example of Better Good in this world. 

Penny Abeywardena: I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. 

Scott M. Curran: Thank you for tuning in to the Better Good podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please remember to rate, review, subscribe and share. You can watch the show on YouTube or Spotify. And for those who prefer to listen, we're on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts. If you wanna learn more about how you can do more good, better in your life and work, you can also find me on Instagram threads, LinkedIn, or subscribe to my Substack. You can find links to all of these at www.scottmcurran.com 

Better Good is a Beyond Creative production. My executive producers are Kieron Banerjee and Aaron Shulman. Production is by Echo Studios in partnership with Palm Tree Island. Remember, the world's biggest problems won't wait, and neither should you.