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You are a business owner who wants to prioritize people and planet over profits (without sacrificing success). That can feel lonely—but you are not alone! Join host Becky Mollenkamp for in-depth conversations with experts and other founders about how to build a more equitable world through entrepreneurship. It’s time to change the business landscape for good!
Becky Mollenkamp: Hello, Zia. Thank you for being here.
Zia Dione: Glad to be here.
Becky Mollenkamp: I'm going to start with the same question as always, which is, tell me about your relationship with feminism.
Zia Dione: Feminism is a weird word for me because I kind of grew up in the Alice Walker school of thought about womanism, which is more of an inclusive way of looking at feminism. What feminism has been historically in this country typically excludes people who look like me. I would like us to get to a point where we don't have to segregate ourselves based on our genders, where all of our voices make a difference, all of our voices matter. I'm all for us standing up as women and being more active, taking on leadership since we make up half the population. I think we should definitely step up and take more leadership spaces. I feel like what's happened to the planet has a lot to do with this imbalance of leadership. Do I define myself as a feminist? Probably not. Am I a womanist? A little bit. I think I'm a humanist. And I hope we can get our shit together.
Becky Mollenkamp: I identify as an intersectional feminist, but ultimately what we're saying is the same thing. If 'humanist' is what hits the nail on the head, then I'm for that. But that's why I like to share, because it is so different for everyone. I think it's so important, especially for the white listeners, which I think makes up a good portion of this listenership, to hear from women of color, or as I've been trying to say, women of the global majority, to hear about these differences and understand that. Often, a lot of white feminists think that 'feminist' just naturally means everyone. Intersectional feminism aims to do that, but many who identify as feminists aren't aligned with us. The JK Rowlings of the world and others. So it's really good to have that conversation. Now, you mentioned before we started recording that you changed your name not long ago.
Zia Dione: I did.
Becky Mollenkamp: I want to know about that. I love hearing from women who’ve changed their name.
Zia Dione: I'm writing about it in my memoir. I'm currently finishing my last semester of my MFA in creative nonfiction. To get the full story, you’ll have to read the book. But I think it was in 2020, I started feeling disconnected from the name I was given. It actually started with my last name. With everything happening in the world, we had time, and I was thinking about ancestry. My birth name is Rachel Marie Walls. If you Google Rachel Walls, no Black women show up—except it used to be me, but we’ve taken care of that. 'Walls' is a British last name. How did my family get a British last name? I didn’t want that anymore. I started thinking there should be a way for descendants of enslaved people to change their names for free if they wanted to. But last year, I live in Hawaii and I was on Maui for a while. Before the fires, I moved to Oahu. In January or February of 2023, I was driving to the airport. I got there early, and I'm not the type to get to the airport early. I think my flight was supposed to leave at 7:45 that morning, and at seven o'clock, I was freaking out because I thought I was too early. I went to get coffee. Let me back up a little. I'm totally spirit-led, a free spirit. I see this unsheltered man standing past the coffee truck. Something in my spirit said, 'Go buy him breakfast.' So I did a U-turn, went back, and started talking to him. He tells me his name is Shoestring. He was gorgeous—Native Hawaiian, beautiful soul. He asked me my name, and I said Rachel. He looked down at the ground, shaking his head, and then looked back up at me, saying, 'Yeah, that’s nice, but what’s your real name?' I was like, 'Sir, I just came to buy you breakfast, why are you calling me out like this?' After that, I kept thinking about it. My MFA advisor gave me one of the best pieces of advice. He said not to choose a name that represents what I am but to choose a name that represents what I could be. If you choose a name that represents what you are, you stay stagnant. So I was going to choose the name Adri, which a four-year-old boy gave me years ago, but it didn’t sit right. Then I heard 'Zia.' It’s a symbol from a native tribe in New Mexico, but it also means 'light' and 'resonance' in so many languages. Dion comes from Dionysus, the mother of Aphrodite and Dionysus. Love and pleasure—who doesn’t want that? And there’s a balance between Zia meaning light and the moon representing dark. That’s who I am. That’s who I want to be.
Becky Mollenkamp: I love that. That's who I want to be. I know we spent a lot of time on your name, but the liberation and empowerment of naming yourself—it must have felt empowering. And thinking about business owners naming their businesses, not just what they are but what they want to be. It’s powerful. You also wrote something for Feminist Founders about language and the power of words. I’ll link to that in the show notes, and there were some nice comments from people who appreciated what you said.
Zia Dione: I'll go back and look. I saw it when it first came out, but I haven’t looked again. Thank you.
Becky Mollenkamp: You mentioned you're nearly finished with your MFA. Maybe by the time this comes out, you’ll be done. I'd love to hear about your journey. I’m guessing you didn’t go straight to your MFA after undergrad, so what made you decide to go back to school?
Zia Dione: I follow my spirit. I guess this is where people learn I’m weird, but I hear this voice, and I've followed it since 2010. I actually have a law degree, so I’m way past 18—got a couple of 18s in me! In 2010, I started hearing this voice. I got lost in Mexico, and that voice got me found. I ended up on the wrong bus, my Spanish was trash, and I ended up in a town called Quiroga in Michoacán. I needed to be in a town I couldn’t even pronounce back then. I got off the bus, and I heard this voice say, 'Cross the street.' It was loud, like everyone should’ve heard it. So I crossed the street and kept walking until I reached a taxi stand. The driver spoke English, and he took me where I needed to go. A couple months later, that same voice told me to quit my job. I was just a staff attorney at a big firm in DC, nothing major. So I sold all my stuff in July 2011 and started traveling. I liked writing, but I wasn’t serious. In 2012, I ended up in Barcelona. I’m a big food person, and I had a bad meal at a restaurant called Picnic. It was supposed to be Southern soul food—fried green tomatoes, chili, cornbread—and it was so bad I wrote my first poem. I performed spoken word, did open mics, taught writing to kids in Savannah and Taos. Then during the pandemic, I really started writing. I wrote a whole novel during the pandemic. It’s trash, but maybe one day now that I have skills, I’ll fix it. It's called All Fuck Boys Must Die.
Becky Mollenkamp: I mean, I want to read it just based on the title, so I hope you can fix it.
Zia Dione: Yeah, I think I can. One of these days when I have some time after this program ends, I think I will. But I wrote that, and then looking at what was happening in the world, I decided maybe I should go back to school. I got into a program for restorative justice because I thought that's what I wanted to do. Honestly, it was just a bunch of white people feeling guilty and asking, "How do we go into Black neighborhoods and help them?" And I'm like, you know how to do that? Start in your own home. Everything that's happening to us is because of what's happening where you are. Until you can face that, stay out of our communities.
I was the "angry Black woman" in my class. I was about to order a sash that said 'Angry Black Woman.' Like, do I need to wear it? All the statistics they were listing—like drug use—I’m like, have you seen drug use in rich white neighborhoods? Because I have. They just don’t get caught because the police aren’t looking for them. But have you seen the drug use in those neighborhoods? Come on.
Becky Mollenkamp: Cause guess what? Oxycontin is a drug.
Zia Dione: Ain’t it though? Just because it has your name on the bottle doesn’t mean it’s not a drug. Alcohol is a drug. Let’s get real. So I’m having these conversations, and nobody wants to have them with me. I dropped out like five weeks into a two-year program. I just wish I had dropped out a week sooner so I could’ve gotten a slight tuition refund. But you know, I tried. I still wanted to do something.
Then I got this idea for a cooperative, like a self-publishing cooperative, because the publishing industry excludes people like us. This idea came to me, and I started getting the ball rolling. Then it was like, "Go to school." It led me to a specific school. I still don’t fully understand why I’m there yet, but I kinda know why. I’m really outspoken, and I speak on things that others tend to sweep under the rug. So I’m still wearing the sash. But it’s not to disparage—it's to shine a light.
Let’s get back to the name—to shine a light on where we’re missing the mark. We recruit people from diverse backgrounds and then don’t do what’s needed to make those relationships work. Don’t just invite us in and let us be abused. Protect us if you want us in these spaces. That’s what’s happening around me, but also... my writing has gotten better. Now I can look at that book and cringe as I go through it, but I can rewrite it and make it what it needs to be.
Becky Mollenkamp: It’s interesting because you ended up in an MFA program instead of an MBA. Many people, when they have a business idea, would naturally think, "I should get an MBA if I’m going back to school, so I can learn how to run a business."
Zia Dione: Yeah.
Becky Mollenkamp: But instead, you followed your intuition or whatever you want to call that voice. It told you to get an MFA, which might seem illogical, but it wasn’t the voice of logic. It was this voice of internal knowing. And I’m a huge fan of internal knowing. So there must be some reason, right? Obviously, you're not done getting the business, "Here’s how you make a million dollars running your business," but that’s not what you’re there for.
Zia Dione: Exactly.
Becky Mollenkamp: My guess is that your intuition didn’t lead you to an MBA because you’d be getting all the shitty advice about how to run a business in a capitalist system that just perpetuates problems. So in the MFA, you’re working on Trunk of My Car or your book, or both?
Zia Dione: I’m working on my book. Trunk of My Car has nothing to do with the MFA program except that this is me learning how to write a book. It’s not for me—it’s so I can help other people write books. People who don’t go to MFA programs and don’t want to put themselves through this. That’s why I needed this.
Becky Mollenkamp: So you’re just writing your book?
Zia Dione: Yes, but also to write my story because my story is an interesting one.
Becky Mollenkamp: Well, yeah, obviously, I can tell. I already want to read the book.
Zia Dione: But I wouldn’t do the MBA thing. I have a law degree with a business concentration. My undergrad was in business. I’ve run businesses, and let me tell you, everything I learned did not work in those spaces. Even before I got on this path of shunning what I learned in DC, I was already doing things differently. I used to manage billing departments for healthcare providers in the DC area and did some office management stuff. You know how job descriptions are? I was in my early 20s managing a plastic surgery dermatology spot, and our two main people were so unhappy. I figured out why—they didn’t like parts of their jobs. So I took all their duties and let them pick what they wanted. Anything left, I did. Do you know what that did to productivity and happiness? Why don’t we do that more in business? People are complex. I don’t believe work should be a place you dread. People deserve to be happy doing what they do. Let’s make this an even and fair exchange.
In my early 20s, I was already fighting, standing up, walking out, and cursing folks out. I was already there, seeing that something in business wasn’t right. Because it’s not people-centered—it’s all about profit. How can we squeeze more? I saw it years ago. So why would I go pay money to learn how to do it a little better? No, I would’ve dropped out on day one.
Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah. I’ve had several former lawyers on this show. Law, especially for women and even more so for people of the global majority, seems to churn and spit people out. Lawyers seem to be really taken advantage of in the race to partnership, which is supposed to make everything better, but the hours and shit people put up with is unbelievable. So many leave, especially non-white men. So I’m not surprised.
Zia Dione: Yeah. We don’t need that shit. My situation with law was different. I didn’t go to a big school, but I’m a damn good lawyer. I didn’t get considered for a lot of jobs because I didn’t go to the right school. I’m a first-generation college graduate and law graduate. I’m my grandmother’s 21st grandchild, and I was the first to go to college and get degrees. Now some of my cousins have gone back and gotten theirs too, but that’s where I come from. I didn’t know any better navigating this stuff. I had a kid when I was 16, so I dropped out of school after eighth grade. I had a lot working against me, and I didn’t believe in myself.
My first job out of law school, I was so embarrassed, but now it’s hilarious. I signed an NDA, but I don’t care. I got fired from my first job as a lawyer. I had never been fired before, but I accidentally called my boss a bitch.
Becky Mollenkamp: Oops!
Zia Dione: I mean, she was. She told me I should have handled a personnel matter differently. I was kind about it, but she was yelling at me. I stopped her and said, "Yeah, I guess I would’ve done that if I were a bitch like you." It was an accident. So they fired me, and after that, people didn’t want to work with me. I took another job in healthcare law, and it was so racist. They put me in the basement with a ragtag desk made of random pieces of furniture. Meanwhile, they brought in another attorney who got brand new stuff. I sat in the hood, and she sat in her fancy new office. One day, I just clocked out, cleaned out my desk, and went home.
With two strikes on me, I didn’t have many options, so I started doing doc review. People look down on it, but they need it. It’s like looking down on fast food workers while standing on the other side of the counter. Make it make sense. I was really good at it. Partners and associates I worked with couldn’t believe I was just a doc reviewer. On a big case, I was given tasks most people weren’t. Typically, we’re not allowed to give substantive advice, only procedural. But on that case, they’d tell people, "Go to Rachel, she knows." After two years, though, my soul felt dirty. I made good money and thought I had a good quality of life, but I was miserable. So I quit.
Zia Dione: I quit, sold all my stuff, and started traveling by myself. My daughter had turned 18. I had nothing to do.
Becky Mollenkamp: I’ve been there. Well, I’ve been at the part where your soul feels dirty, not so much the traveling and doing all the things, but I think that's amazing. The first question that comes up for me and probably other people is, how did you make ends meet? Because we live in capitalism, you have to have money to survive and travel and all of that. How were you making ends meet between that time when you quit your job and now?
Zia Dione: Well, I had some savings. This was in 2011. The savings is long gone, so I lived off that for the first year and a half. Then, whenever I needed money, the universe just provided. I’ve done legal research. I do mostly remote stuff. I worked for a commercial leasing company and drafted commercial leases. I had a baking business when I lived in Puerto Rico. I’ve done what I had to do. I’ve been a nanny. I don’t think I’m above anything. I know I’m intelligent, I know I have a lot to offer, but I’m not above anything. I’ve done work trade, where I lived on someone’s property. The nanny situation was work trade—I took care of their kids two days a week, and they gave me an apartment on their property and let me use their van sometimes. So that was what was up.
When you’re open to how the universe wants to bless you, it will show you. It will give you what you need. So things always happened. During the pandemic, DocReview became a remote thing, so I was able to pick up some work. I’m not too active anymore because of the time difference—people hate that they can’t schedule meetings with me at three in the morning. I’m not getting on camera at that time for anyone. But I can’t see myself living anywhere else.
Becky Mollenkamp: I’ve had a similar experience of the universe delivering when you don’t know how. But also, as a white woman, I have to acknowledge there’s a lot of privilege in my ability to say that. I love that you’re showing, you know, leaving school in eighth grade, having a baby at 16, and all that’s come since then. And so much of it, it sounds like, is because of your spirituality or belief, which is lovely. You said in 2010 you started leaning into listening to that voice. Is there something you can share about what happened around that time that made you start?
Zia Dione: That was the Mexico thing. Before that, I know it was there. Looking back, I see I was protected from certain things, certain doors closed in my face for a reason. It was already looking out for me, but it needed me to look out for it. That’s what the Mexico thing was. The way I ended up in Mexico—I was working on a case involving chemicals. I told you how I am about food, so I had to learn about these chemicals. I found out one of them, BHT, is a derivative of jet fuel. It’s banned for human consumption in most countries, but not in the US.
Becky Mollenkamp: Sounds about right.
Zia Dione: Right? So I had a box of Frosted Flakes in my desk drawer at work. I opened it up, and there it was—BHT for freshness, the last ingredient. I started thinking about what I was putting into my body. I watched two documentaries—Flow: For the Love of Water and Life and Debt—talking about the IMF in Jamaica and what they've done to oppressed and exploited countries. I realized I was part of the problem. The work I was doing was contributing to what was happening to people around the world, and I didn’t want to be that anymore.
I decided I was going to live off-grid. I had never been camping before, but I was going to live off-grid. I started looking at possibilities and found this thing called the Greater World Earthship Community in Taos, New Mexico. These houses are built into the ground, self-sufficient, and made from trash like bottles. It’s amazing. I ended up living there in 2017, but in 2010, I thought, let me see if I can live off-grid. I found a community in Mexico and applied. I figured if they didn’t accept me, then it wasn’t meant to be. But they accepted me.
Becky Mollenkamp: So you did it. And it went well enough for you to say, "Yeah, I can do this."
Zia Dione: Yes. It changed me.
Becky Mollenkamp: I want to make sure we get to Trunk of My Car because we’re talking a lot about your story, but I think it informs so much of what Trunk of My Car is or what you want it to be. So tell people about the self-publishing project. It’s self-publishing, but self makes it sound very isolated, right? It’s about cooperatively self-publishing.
Zia Dione: Yeah, it’s self-publishing inside of community. It’s a cooperative. Cooperatives have been around since before the United States. Ours is a multi-stakeholder cooperative, meaning it’s owned by everyone who wants to own it. There’s no requirement to own to be a part of the community, but if you want to, you can. We have circles instead of membership classes. I didn’t like the hierarchy that 'classes' denote. Language is important. So we have circles of readers, creators, and workers. We haven’t launched yet, and it’s been a lonely journey. I’ve been at it for two years now, but we’re almost there. By the time this comes out, we’ll be operating.
We’ve been pushing back because we want to get it right. It would be easy to throw it together, but that’s not what this new world that’s being birthed needs. I believe in divine timing, so I feel like the setbacks have been the universe saying, "Not yet, but keep going." And so we keep going.
Back in 2017, I was in Vegas about to see Stevie Wonder. I was sitting outside a bar, and Michael Baisden, who had a nationally syndicated radio show and wrote Men Cry in the Dark and The Maintenance Man, was there. We started talking, and I was looking pretty fly that day. I told him I write a little, and he said when he started, he sold his books from the trunk of his car.
Becky Mollenkamp: I wondered where the name came from.
Zia Dione: And so like in 2022, I'm on Maui, washing dishes, and I remembered that conversation. It was like this strong presence in me; that conversation did something in my body. I was like, I gotta do something with this. So I ran to my laptop and Googled "trunk of my car." I wanted to see if authors were still doing this, and they are. I thought, okay, let me buy the domain and see. I bought the domain, the .com, the .org. I didn’t know why—I kinda just left it alone at the time.
I was helping some midwives here get organized. They wanted to know the best way to serve their community, and I suggested a co-op because Hawaii had just passed a consumer cooperative law that offers more protections. The thing I love about the Hawaii statute is that the preamble to the act says that things of nature can be members of the cooperative. So, like, we can have members that are trees, we can have members that are the air. We want to make sure these living beings that are affected by what we do have a say in what we do. So, we’re going to assign people to vote for their interests because they are the first members of our cooperative, right?
Becky Mollenkamp: I love that. And I think especially when we think about publishing, trees should really have a say.
Zia Dione: Yeah, right? Thank you for that one, because that’s new. But so, yeah, I was helping them, and then it just hit me one day: Trunk of My Car needs to be a cooperative. I self-published a book back in 2012. Please don’t look for it. Lord, it’s so bad. But I needed to get it out. I was in Morocco. I went to Morocco for Ramadan in 2012 to learn discipline. In those 30 days, I unraveled my dreadlocks—my second set of dreadlocks—wrote an entire 235-page book, and was creating recipes in my mind. It was the most creative space I’d ever been in, but I did it alone.
Not only did I do it alone without knowing what I was doing, I put it on Amazon. They would change the price whenever they wanted to. They’ve changed this now, but at the time, people could read Kindle e-books and return them, which would cost authors money. It was like people were treating Kindle books like library books. And, lo and behold, e-books are the only digital item that can be returned. Movies can’t be returned, songs can’t be returned, but books can. What’s up with that? So I started thinking about all of this, talking to a few other people, and kept pushing forward with the idea. I applied for grants. I almost gave up a couple of times because I wasn’t being supported in this—so many people don’t understand cooperatives, but they’re not new.
When you think about the history of this country, I always recommend the book Collective Courage by Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard to anyone who works with me. I wanted to talk to you about doing something called 'Collective Courage Conversations,' where maybe monthly we get together and talk about the book and how it applies. The book covers the history of Black cooperatives in the United States and mutual aid, which started post-enslavement. Because how else were we supposed to make it? What else were we going to do? We had to work together because we were all we had, coming out of a system where we had nothing. But now, we live in such an individualistic society. We don’t care about each other.
Becky Mollenkamp: And it’s not sustainable.
Zia Dione: Exactly. When I was traveling, I saw something different. The first place I went after leaving DC was Costa Rica. They call themselves Ticos, and they share. If your neighbor doesn’t have food and all you have is a cup of rice, you give them half of your rice. But here, you don’t even know your neighbor.
Becky Mollenkamp: You go out of your way to not know your neighbor. We live in neighborhoods where you drive home, pull into the garage, shut the door, and that’s it—no communication, let alone concern.
Zia Dione: No care, no community. Exactly. Every country I went to, I saw how people take care of each other. In Morocco, the caretaker for the property I rented invited me to their house for Iftar, which is the dinner to break the fast at the end of the day. He, his wife, and his daughter sat me there and watched me eat. They hadn’t eaten all day either, but they sat and watched me eat and then packed up most of the food to send home with me.
Then I came out here to Hawaii in 2014. I didn’t want to move here at first because it’s so expensive, but I’ve been taken care of out here. In 2015, I needed a car because the family I was nannying for moved back to the Bay Area, and I decided to stay here longer. A friend of a woman I had just met—she’s one of my best friends now—her husband had a used car lot. I had no job, no credit, nothing. He financed a car for me out of his pocket, didn’t charge me any interest, let me work some of it off. He didn’t know me from Adam and did that for me. Where else does that happen?
Becky Mollenkamp: America is so hyper-individualized. It’s just not the spirit here. And you brought up Amazon, which to me feels like part of that because it's a company where one person has more wealth than 90% of the people on Earth. And then you have all these people working hard, often dying for various reasons, like from heat while delivering or because of a shoddy building that they’re working in when a tornado knocks it down. That actually happened very close to where I live in St. Louis. Not to mention the system they have that exploits or extracts money from the people selling on that platform. As you mentioned, the markups—Amazon takes so much money and gives you this tiny portion. There are so many ways it screws over the people selling on their marketplace. So, what’s different about your vision? Let’s say I have a book I want to self-publish because, let’s be honest, self-publishing is becoming more common now because traditional publishing only wants to work with people who have giant platforms. You have to have millions of followers and do all your own marketing work, right? That’s why they want to work with people with giant followings—they no longer want to put any money into marketing.
Zia Dione: Yeah, it’s a $1.25 billion industry.
Becky Mollenkamp: Exactly. They expect you to do all the marketing, and then they take their profits off the book. They hardly pay advances anymore, and when they do, they’re not big. So everything about that industry sucks now. It’s not what it used to be. It’s very hard to try and get a book deal. You have to pay a lot of money just to get your book published—through editing, getting an agent, and all the things. A lot of people feel like, "I can’t do all of that," or even if they could, "they’re not going to look at me." So they have to self-publish or want to self-publish. And when people talk about self-publishing, the first thing they mention is Amazon, right? KDP. There aren’t many other options. KDP makes it easy, and I’ve done it—they make it easy, but they also screw you over in the process. There’s no personal connection. I’ve never talked to a person at Amazon, and I have a KDP book—a workbook on there that you can buy.
Zia Dione: Yeah, because there aren’t many options. Me too. Oy!
Becky Mollenkamp: So what’s different? If I took that same workbook or book and said, "I know it’s not live yet," but when your vision for this comes to life, what would be different? What’s the experience like? What do you want that experience to look like?
Zia Dione: Number one, we want it to be easy. I’ve been resistant to building in the same capitalist ideals I’ve seen with other cooperatives. It’s like new packaging in some ways. So we’ve been very intentional about what we’re putting into this.
Number one, we’re not doing a huge buy-in. Most cooperatives have these big buy-ins that become unaffordable for most people. We’re doing monthly dues, so you can own as you want. The longer you own, the greater your profit sharing is. We’ve come up with a system to reduce our operational costs as much as possible so that more of what we make together goes back to the people who are actually doing the work. There’s ownership here—one person, one vote. You can’t buy more votes. You can belong to multiple circles, but you don’t get extra votes for that.
There’s no one person at the top. There’s no pyramid. These are all circles that come together like a Venn diagram. I even have a diagram of how these things come together.
Zia Dione: If you’re an owner, you retain 90% of the sales from your book. That’s huge, right? On Amazon, they take 65% if you’re not exclusive. If you don’t sign away your rights to sell your book elsewhere, you only get 35%. If you do make it exclusive to Amazon, I think you get 70%.
Becky Mollenkamp: That’s a major difference from KDP. I’m not even sure I get 50%.
Zia Dione: Right! So we offer 90% if you’re an owner, and if you’re not an owner, you still get 75%. We also want to make things affordable. On Amazon, they give you an ISBN, but if you don’t want to sell on Amazon and need your own ISBN, they cost $125 each. Did you know that in other countries, you don’t have to pay for ISBNs?
Becky Mollenkamp: Interesting. I didn’t know that.
Zia Dione: Yeah, in Canada, they don’t pay for ISBNs. But here in the US, Balkor gets rich off it. Thanks to a generous donation, we have a block of ISBNs. We don’t sell them, but if you post your book with us, you can get an ISBN. We charge an administrative fee for registering your book’s information, but for our members, it’s $5. For non-members, I think it’s either $15 or $25, which is a huge difference from $125.
Also, we’re creating a community with writers, readers, and creators—people who do book art design, editors, small presses—all on one platform to boost each other. I think how we connected on Threads was me talking about offers and needs. We’re building an offers-and-needs market where an author can say, "I need help with this," and someone else can say, "I can help." You can barter because bartering isn’t taxable. The more we can withdraw from the exploitative system and build something better, the more we’re doing what we set out to do.
In addition to having people who can help you create the book, we’re also owned by readers. Readers’ membership dues are lower—$10 a month for authors, $5 for readers. Readers automatically get 15% off all books.
Zia Dione: We’ve just been rethinking the whole system. This is like breaking down that cup of rice and sharing it. If you’re an author, we have built-in readers. A lot of authors struggle to find alpha and beta readers, and arc readers. In this community, we have that built in. Collectively, we can market.
I suck at marketing. I’m not active on social media. I begrudgingly get on sometimes, and that’s how you found me. But if I don’t have to do it alone, if someone else in the collective sees my effort and claps me up, they can share their cup of rice too. We all give what we can. I can help with copyright protection or contracts, sharing what I’ve learned. It’s about us coming together, asking, "What do you have? What can we do together?"
Becky Mollenkamp: And I know it’s not built to replicate systems. So it’s not about competing with Amazon as in trying to make all the money that Amazon is making. But is it a sustainable business model? Because obviously it doesn’t have to make tons of money, but it does need to sustain itself to continue functioning. Does it feel sustainable to you?
Zia Dione: I believe so. Last year, I won a fellowship with the Workers Lab Innovation Fund, which gave me time to really think about how to make sure it’s sustainable. I also worked with a SCORE mentor—it's free—and I got connected with a woman here in Hawaii who’s a former American Airlines executive. She didn’t know anything about cooperatives, so I taught her, and she helped me figure out how to make it work with a business plan to keep it sustainable.
Like I said, we’re keeping our costs as low as possible. Right now, it’s just two of us working—tech and operations. Neither of us are interested in getting rich. I’d like to live comfortably, but we don’t get paid until the business is sustainable. She gets paid before I do, and all of that is set in stone. Membership dues go toward keeping us operational, and the 10% of the remaining royalty gets put into a pot. At the end of the year, that’s our profit, and we hope to redistribute that.
Becky Mollenkamp: My checks from Amazon are laughable. I only get paid out every $10, so it takes a while.
Zia Dione: Exactly, girl. I’ve had my own 12-cent checks.
Becky Mollenkamp: Sometimes it feels like this either-or: either you buy into capitalism and go all-in with the individualistic Jeff Bezos world, or you have to go nonprofit or sacrifice everything. There’s also the option of going off-grid and living on a commune, which is a great alternative for some, but we need businesses that challenge the norms, survive, thrive, and are sustainable over time. Businesses that show there’s another way.
Zia Dione: Exactly. The thing is, we’re not trying to get big overnight. I think organic growth is better. I’m certified in permaculture design. In 2011, I went to Patagonia and got certified. I lived on an Estancia that was 100,000 acres, totally inaccessible to the outside world. You had to take a three-hour horseback ride through the Andes Mountains to get there. I’ve applied those principles to how we’re doing things because, in nature, you don’t plant a seed and expect it to pop up overnight. The seed breaks open, sprouts, and it may take a season or two before you see fruit.
We’re taking our time, breathing, walking, and listening. The person handling tech and I are both very connected to spirit and source, and we trust that. So, when we get these instincts, we follow them. Working with her has been a blessing. Hey, Joanna!
Becky Mollenkamp: I love the model you’re giving. It’s funny you mention the seed because it reminds me of how capitalism even messes with nature. With GMOs, they’re trying to make food grow faster, instead of just working within the natural systems. That includes our bodies' natural systems too. What you’re talking about is slower, intentional growth, and that’s hard in a world that pushes hustle and grind. But you’re honoring what feels right for you, your body, and your process, which is beautiful.
Zia Dione: Exactly. Hustling is what burns you out.
Becky Mollenkamp: Right.
Zia Dione: You go to other countries, and it’s different. In Argentina, they shut down from four to six every day. They eat dinner at 10 o'clock at night, then they’re out dancing in the street, drinking wine until two in the morning, while toddlers are out learning how to live.
Becky Mollenkamp: Meanwhile, our kids are going to school and getting indoctrinated into being good workers for the system.
Zia Dione: And pledging allegiance... Words are spells. Let’s be real about what we’re doing.
Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah. Well, not to add to your sense of urgency, but do you have a new target date? For people listening who are interested, like, "I want to be a part of this, I want to get into one of those circles that makes sense to me, I want to support this vision," do you have an idea when things might be live?
Zia Dione: Yeah. So, one of the things we’ve run into this year, especially, is that I haven’t been super active on social media, and I do need help with marketing. But after October 7, we realized we needed to implement BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) into how we’re building this thing, and that’s been the hardest part—finding plugins run by companies that don’t support the apartheid state. In tech, that’s hard.
We made a compromise this week that we’re not super happy about, but there’s a way out in the near future. It involves servers because most server companies like Intel are backed by certain interests. So, we decided this week to go with a company whose servers are currently on Intel, but when AMD servers become available, we’ll switch. We’ll just take the site offline temporarily to do that. Since we made that decision, I’d say we’re about a week or two away from sending that email saying, "The marketplace is open."
Becky Mollenkamp: That’s exciting! By the time this airs, you guys will definitely be live. So, for people who are interested in joining one of those circles—whether they’re a reader, creator, or worker—what are the next steps?
Zia Dione: You would just go to trunkofmycar.org and follow the steps from there. We’ve made it really simple. Our legal contracts are written in plain English. My background helped with that—I wanted to make sure it wasn’t full of legalese. No one wants to read a 3,000-page document where you unknowingly give away your firstborn child. So, we’ve kept it straightforward, and the signup process is really simple.
Becky Mollenkamp: Great! So, if you're interested, you can go there and learn more. Ordinarily, I ask for a resource at the end of these interviews, and you’ve already given a couple of great ones. You mentioned a few books earlier, but is there one in particular about cooperatives that everyone should read?
Zia Dione: Collective Courage by Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard is a great one. I highly recommend it.
Becky Mollenkamp: I’ll link to that in the show notes. And although Trunk of My Car isn’t a nonprofit, is there an organization doing good work in the world that you’d like to highlight?
Zia Dione: There are so many. I’d say look to multi-stakeholder cooperatives. REI is a cooperative, but it’s a consumer cooperative, meaning it’s only owned by the people who buy, not the workers or producers. Recently, their workers tried to unionize, and the consumers wanted to block that—how cooperative is that? So, I’d encourage people to support multi-stakeholder cooperatives, find a cooperative grocery store or healing space in your neighborhood, and get involved. If you want to build a cooperative but don’t know how, reach out to us. We’re giving this information for free because we believe in this model.
Becky Mollenkamp: We’ll find those links and add them to the show notes as well. Thank you for sharing those resources. I’ll have to check them out myself. And thank you, Zia, for your time today. We’ll also be doing some bonus content, so head over to the Feminist Founders newsletter to check that out. We might talk about Hawaii—we’re not sure yet! So, make sure to subscribe.
Zia Dione: Thank you, Becky. It’s been awesome sharing this. It’s time.
Becky Mollenkamp: Thank you, Zia. I appreciate it.