Tammi Leader Fuller - Campowerment | S7 E02
If you are committed to ‘choosing your own adventure’ you’ll want to tune in immediately to TOB’s conversation with Tammi Leader Fuller, the effervescent co-creator of Campowerment. After three decades as an award-winning television producer (at The TODAY Show, NBC News, CBS News, America’s Most Wanted, and EXTRA TV), Tammi left television in 2013 to partner with her college professor mom and her brand strategist daughter on designing a sleep-away-camp-like experience for women of all ages. Thousands of women campers have now experienced this four-day transformative retreat, powered by play, where women (like her) can re-ignite their lives. She’s the party guest who can always come up with the next interactive game, the author of Dish and Tell – stories about how women struggle to juggle all that life throws their way – and a firm believer in the power of sisterhood. Tammi told us how amazed she was to be reinventing herself again at age 62. Join our conversation to hear about her journey and the joys she has on offer as her in-person Campowerment experiences are starting up again in November 2021. And check-out their online community with its many expert-led monthly offerings where women learn together and connect.
Check out Campowerment and learn more about how to re-discover who you want to be as you grow up!
Tammi’s book, Dish and Tell: Six Real Women Discuss How They Put Themselves at the Top of Their To-Do List (2006) is available on Amazon
+ TRANSCRIPT
Idelisse & Joanne: Welcome to Two Old Bitches. I'm Idelisse Malave and I'm Joanne Sandler. And we're Two Old Bitches. We're interviewing our women friends and women who could be our friends. Listen, as they share stories about how they reinvent themselves.
Tammi: I never in a bajillion years, thought that I would be able at 62, I would be reinventing myself again and again and again, and every year. And with each thing. It's more exciting for me. And I feel, I feel for the first time, like my wisdom that I have accrued over these years is finally getting to apply.
Joanne: It's such a joy to be here recording with you for Season Seven.
Idelisse: It's been so long since I saw you last. But it is exciting, isn't it?
Idelisse & Joanne: It is exciting. And this episode where we're talking to Tammi Leader... I love that name, Tammi Leader, given what she does, what a gift. Yes.
Joanne: You're right. Tammi Leader, who is the co-founder of Campowerment for women. And I love it for a lot of reasons. It was such a joy to talk to Tammi. She found us, which was wonderful. And you and I have spent nearly a lifetime creating venues where we bring women together.
Idelisse: And, you know, it's the facilitation, if you will, work that we do, but managing that energy drawing from that energy, all of that alchemy that happens in groups.
Idelisse & Joanne: And I think what's different is when we have done this in the past, it's been about bringing a group together for collective ends and goals. Right? It's about gender change. We were it's about women in the arts ...social justice.
Idelisse: What, and this, this time, I think what they do at Campowerment is they bring women together and yes, there are collective ends, but they're secondary what's primary are women's wants and needs and their own personal development.
Joanne: Right. And particularly poignant. And for me an opportunity to learn, to talk to Tammi about this at a time like COVID over the past 18 months when people it's been so hard to bring people together, it's been so hard to be in the same space together. So, you know, we use Zoom, et cetera, but wonderful, wonderful to learn from her and to hear about how they're doing it for fun.
Idelisse: And it's so much about play, which is what people are going to get to hear today.
Joanne: And so we start by asking Tammi, our classic question, who are you?
Tammi: My name is Tammi Leader and I am the founder of Campowerment we are a community of purpose driven women who come together to learn, connect, and grow around the power of playtime. So who am? I for 34 years, I was a television news producer. I spent almost 20 years at The Today Show and I worked on a lot of shows like America's Most Wanted and CBS 48 Hours and a lot of local news stuff.
I was an investigative news producer chasing bad guys, but I woke up one day and said, you know, the world women need guidance and women are not happy today. And in 2005, I wrote a book with five other women in Miami about how having it all, isn't having it all at all and how having enough should be enough.
And what happened is this groundswell of women started to come out and say, you're right. You know, I'm walking around with a mask on going, I'm good, all is well, and I'm imploding inside. So how do I get happy? And because my background is in television, I had connected with all of these brilliantly empowering and insightful experts in a bajillion fields.
And I used to prepare them to be on TV. I would teach them, sort of had a cull down what they were saying into an 8 second soundbite. I'm not doing very well with that right now, because I'm going on and on. But I would say to them, this is brilliant. And I'm going to, and I'm coming back for you one day, because one day I loved summer camp as a child.
And I say, I used to tell them one day, I'm going to do summer camps for grownups. And I am going to bring back all of the brilliant women that I have met in my career. And when you put someone on The Today Show and their career explodes and launches, they're very much grateful. And so I used to say to them, I'm coming back one day for you to pay it forward and share your wisdom with women who ordinarily might not have access to you.
And so that's what we did. I combined the idea of summer camp fun and games around impactful experience and experiential experience of play and groundedness and a feeling that we're all the same.
I started this with my mom, who was a college professor, who was in her late seventies at the time. And she and I had a foundation many years ago here in Miami when we worked together. When I lived here in South Florida. And it was for abused and neglected kids. And we really built it from the, it was a grassroots foundation and we used to say, wouldn't it be great to work together?
And I said, I'm a journalist and you're a college professor, how can we ever blend our skills? And then this idea came up after we had written this book, we started to...we launched the book on national TV and people started writing us and saying, I want to, I have friends, I have people in my life, but I want to be with women who I don't know, who don't know me.
It's like the stranger on an airplane theory. I want to be with people who are not going to judge me and who are going to accept me for sort of who I am and what I am and they're not going to tell when I share. And when you open up the space for people, to be honest and real, it's amazing, the magic that happens when they know they're safe.
Idelisse: And that book has a great name, doesn't it?
Tammi: Uh, the book was called The Miami Bombshells and it was about, and they called us bombshells. It was published by Harper Collins and they called us bombshells, not because we thought we were hot babes, cause we weren't, although we were inside. It was about dropping bombshells in areas that people didn't ordinarily talk about 15, 16, 17 years ago.
Now, women are much more willing to be vulnerable and to share. Although we found that women really are not so willing to talk about some of the mistakes they made and some of the things that have happened until somebody we know has the same experience. If, if you, if your partner was cheating on you, you're not going to go share that.
But when someone says my partner cheated on me, the first thing women do is jump in and say, let me tell you how I got through this. So we, as women want to help each other.
I love the idea of putting people together and, you know, and, and with bringing so many different experiences to life. And when we started Campowerment, which started in 2013, my mom and I started it together, uh, one of the first rules was you can't say what you do for a living for the first 24 hours.
And after that, no one cares. And it's really, we have women have come to, to learn that we are, who, what we do. It's four days and three nights, whole nights, and every, it's a choose your own adventure kind of experience. So you, we usually bring in about a dozen experts in all kinds of fields, running the gamut of areas of life. They're Ted Talkers, they're game changers, they're bestselling authors. There they're thought leaders and people who can help steer us in a direction.
But because I'm a producer, everything we do is so highly interactive and it's all sort of wrapped around the idea of play and fun. So you don't realize how deep you're digging. So we go deep and then we play and then we go deep and then we play. And so you can break down walls when you're being silly.
We split the camp in half. Each one has a different color. We play silly interactive games, some of them deep and poignant, you know, some of them pie eating contest or throw a, you know, you put a shower cap on your head with shaving cream and you toss Cheetos and whoever gets the finishes, the bag of Cheetos on the head runs and does a relay.
Oh that's my favorite! The egg toss, I loved egg tosses.
Tammi: We do, that's part of the fun, is to create the silly part of being young again. And a lot of people, there are a lot of women whose childhoods weren't so great. So it's not, oh, let's be a 12 year old and do that. It's we can rewrite our stories if our childhood wasn't so great.
Or if we did, we grew up thinking who we are, who we are, or who we were told we needed to be. This is a place where you can go. We, it's, we do nothing more than open a door to experiences to invite women to walk through.
Idelisse: So, I'm hearing two things. One is the power of play and the ability to reinvent and learn, right? When you're in that place of playing. Right? When you let go of some of the restraints when you're not playing, but I'm also hearing this sense of, because you show up there and they may come back. I don't know if they come back or not?
Tammi: Oh yeah, 60% of them come back...
Idelisse: There you go. Um, but it's still a group of people who are not in your everyday life and who, the mirror they hold up to you is a very different mirror, right? Then the people that have known you for 30 or 40 years, right? Who still think of you as that person, right? These people see you with a fresher eye, and that allows you to see yourself with a fresher eye. Am I getting some of this?
Tammi: A hundred percent and it also helps the, the other point is community. We build these communities, these micro-communities within the communities at our camps. There are about 150 people. So we build communities in cabins. We are very mindful about who we place in cabins. We don't put all the young moms together and all the retired executives in the finance industry. No. We shake it all up, the intergenerational...
Idelisse: What is the age range?
Tammi: 21 to 80, if you can believe it. Yeah. And our average is about 45 to 65. So it's women who are, really, most of them are women who have really achieved something, whether it is, you know, in their career or mentally or within their families, and are looking now to say, I want it, there's gotta be more to life than what I'm doing and what I'm experiencing.
And when COVID hit, um, we pivoted to digital only because we had dozens and dozens and dozens of women writing us saying I'm alone, I don't...this could last two weeks. I don't know how long this, this quarantine things...
Idelisse: How many camps did you do a year? Was it just one?
Tammi: We had over, we've had over 50 events over the seven years. So we did quite a few each year, all over the country. In the beginning, we rented out children's summer camps in the off season. They were empty shells and we would come in and really decorate them and make them fun and funky and adult like. But they were...it's still camp. It was still the idea of being in nature and nature, we don't get out and play in nature enough, but being outside and just, you know, being together like that in experiences is that we call it a choose your own adventure because every hour and a half there are four or five choices of what you get to do. And, you know, you can go to a class about how to have hard conversations about sex with a sex therapist, or you could go to how to not become your parents if you're, you know, so if you're not a parent, you're not going to go to that one.
Or if you're, we can, we do tightening your downstairs with a pelvic floor dysfunction, physical therapists, you know? So like those are three of maybe the five choice.
Joanne: So Tammi, I have to ask you in these kind of fraught political times, how do you deal with politics?
Tammi: We don't. I'll tell ya. The weekend of November, 2016, we chose that weekend in 2014 in Malibu two years ahead because we have to book these camps out a couple of years ahead. Retreats are very, are big business now. We don't own our own place.
We move around. So two years before we made the decision that we were going to do with the weekend after the election, because we were going to celebrate the first woman president. Then that Tuesday came and we had an event on Thursday and we had to declare, this is a no politics zone. We are not going to discuss politics because politics has nothing to do with, we're talking about reinventing ourselves and it's not that we don't want to make the world a better place, but we had a lot of pushback in the beginning. We need a place to vent we're pissed. And so we make it very clear that politics is completely off limits. And, you know, with all that's happened in the last year and a half, we've had to hold back.
We had something called inner circle. And we originally started that because it was when people would leave the camp after three intense days, they would say I've learned so much. How am I going to take this into the real world when nobody else has been experiencing what I have. So we started something called the inner circle.
We put people together who had been to camp, cause we thought you would had to, it had, have had that Campowerment experience in order to really relate to each other online. They didn't know each other anyway, we chose groups based on when's your availability. Oh, your Wednesday, noon to two, we can, you know, we'll put you together.
So everybody had had that camp experience. So they understood the idea that when there's a circle, what this are, our circles are like Vegas. What happens in the circle stays in the circle. You're not allowed to go back to your cabin and talk about what just happened here. There's a, you know, a sanctity.
So many of the people who are part of our community are desperate for community right now, we need to connect with like-minded people that are different than we are, whose paths would never ordinarily cross ours in our normal life. And that I think is what's really been a beautiful...
Idelisse: I really want to ask you about this. So you mentioned, you know, you were in television for 35 years and you've been doing this for seven years, so I'm going to guess you're in your early sixties?
Tammi: Yep, 62.
Idelisse: 62, right? Um, the name of this podcast is Two Old Bitches. Right?
Tammi: Well I'm one of you, we're now Three Old Bitches.
Idelisse: That's what I wanted to ask you. You know, one of the ways I could, some people hear that name and they're like, you know, they're oh, me too, right? Other people don't. So, um, would you rather be called an old lady or an old bitch?
Tammi: You want to know the truth?
Idelisse: Yes.
Tammi: I'm not going to say it, that word that my mother used to say was reserved for special people starts with a C? You could call me that.
Idelisse: Oh I know that word.
Tammi: You know that word? I don't care what they call me as long as they know that at 62 life is just beginning. I have a whole new chapter that's opening up for me and I never in a bajillion years thought that I would be able, that at 62, I would be reinventing myself again and again and again, and every year. And with each thing I, it's more exciting for me. And I feel, I feel for the first time, like my wisdom that I have accrued over these years is finally getting to apply and I call this, so I teach a class called re-invention and it's using a lot of what I learned in television.
Idelisse: So when Tammi shares and highlights, and I love this, the importance of identifying and sharing for women, those things that we're good at.
Joanne: Yeah, it's that thing, you know, we are hard on ourselves. Many, many people, many of my friends our friends,right? Are the biggest judgers of their own inadequacies. Often surprising you, you see one of our friends who has accomplished so much who's so interesting and fascinating and courageous. And when you hear their own narrative about themselves...
Idelisse: ...it's all about, you know, what all of their deficiencies and whatever and inadequacies. Uh, so I think it's interesting here to lift up, you know, what is it about Tammi? What did she bring to creating, and not by herself, but she sounds like the leading force Campowerment what kind of person does that?
Tammi: I'm the one who, when we're sitting around, okay, rate your life on a scale of one to 10. What is it? I was asking my friends at 20 years ago. So I like to game-ify things because I think it's just much more fun than sitting around talking about what did you do last week? So it's fun and games, it's storytelling, which I think can help market and package it.
I worked with my mom and now I work with my 33 year old daughter, who was my CEO. I work for her now. Um, my mom unfortunately has since passed away. And so she was our, our wise village elder who had such an incredible, she came to every camp and everybody loved her. She taught people how to journal. And when she passed away, almost 50 people flew into Miami for her funeral, from camps. I mean, Campowerment people who didn't know our family.
I totally believe in magic. And I believe that if you can tap into a side and you know, again, this is, we were not, when I got interviewed for Oprah magazine, it was like, we are not a spiritual place. We don't drink green juices here, but what we have since learned is that, no, we don't drink green juices there, but we have helped people understand and recognize the power that there may be more to life than what they see right now.
And so I believe that magic can happen when you open yourself up to opportunities and possibilities that are completely foreign to you. And so we are pros at crafting experiences and possibilities that most people would not come across (inaudible).
Idelisse: This past year of many of us, being locked down one way or another and more isolation than we've ever...most of us have ever known, um, this disruption of life, as we know it. Right. And the slow return of more familiar things, you know, as you said, old people are going out on Friday night instead of, you know, doing a Zoom, right? They're actually...what's pulling, what's calling you forward? You know, when you look to this new, normal, this, you know, this new future or a different future, um, what, what most in there intrigues you or calls you forward?
Tammi: That's a great question. Actually I think the idea of...it's been a heavy year. It's been, you know, leading up to this year has been super heavy.
I just read today that this week is the 50th anniversary of Marvin Gaye's, uh, What's Going On that song and where are we compared to where we were? We're no better than we were at. We're probably worse than we were 50 years ago. Uh, and so the idea is the world is really a scary place and I think people are emerging from this whole thing, looking at their life from 30,000 feet and going, where do I fit in here? And what have I been doing? What can I do next that can really leave my legacy? My mother was so much about legacy. And so I'm all about creating a legacy, not just for myself, but for helping other people create their own legacies.
What do you want to be remembered for? We are only here for this short time on earth. And what is it that you want to do to make an impact that you want people to remember you? The people who love you and, and what is it that you can do that is kind and loving and giving that you can leave for others.
Every one of us has a gift. Every one of us who's listening right now has something that they are hoarding, that they are not sharing with the world because they don't realize that the world needs it. And so I believe that in my, for my future, I believe that I want to share with women, especially the idea that the whole world is waiting for you. What the fuck are you waiting for?
Idelisse: Tammi, her energy is just so contagious.
Joanne: It's such a positive experience to spend an hour talking to her and just imagining what it would be like to be in a Campowerment.
Idelisse: And to play, the chance to play with her and the other women would be just amazing. So we encourage you to check out Campowerment.
It might work for you. Um, we're certainly curious about. And also, we want to encourage you to follow us,Two Old Bitches podcast on whatever platform, iTunes, Spotify, wherever you listen, click that follow button for Two Old Bitches.
Joanne: Right, because we know that will work for you and also contact us, click our contact button, let us know what you're thinking, what you were experiencing, the kinds of shows you'd like to hear, the kinds of risks you're taking in your life. And as always, we want to end by thanking. Two incredible young bitches.
Idelisse: Very big team. We're now a team of four.
Joanne: So thank you to Katherine Heller coming to you from Brooklyn, who does so much of the work to make Two Old Bitches sound the way it does.
Idelisse & Joanne: And thanks to Loubna Bouajaj and thanks to you Idelisse! And thanks to you, Joanne!
It is a really great, small, great team. See you next time.
