Queering the Grid

Angie explains how her lived experience allows her to be an effective bridge-builder in enacting change at a systems-level and where her program design methodology succeeds where others fail. Plus how she employed her neurodivergence to not just survive but thrive in corporate America and develop skills she now mentors others to tap into.

We live in a reality where queer people are forced to upend themselves and move to Illinois at immense personal and financial cost so as to save their lives. In Carbondale there has been enough newcomers that the city rebuilt the train station around it having a workforce hub attached where those arriving with nothing but a suitcase can get connected to resources before even stepping outside. In Chicago meanwhile, urban queers sneer at smaller places in ways that are, in a way, homophobic, while also being pushed out to places like Peoria, where the natives resist in ways that are in fact homophobic.

Angie and I discuss why Illinois is the best place to be a queer in 2026 and why Carbondale is an unassuming, under-invested sort of place that is also an unexpected hotspot of Illinois queerdom thanks in no small part to Clare Killman, a progressive and beloved City Councilperson who has enacted policy aimed at specifically cementing Carbondale as a sort of place where queers fleeing other states can find refuge. I also preview the energy policy research trip I took myself on last winter to Valencia Spain, where I saw energy policy implemented at the municipal level in a way that was shocking to see.

Angie Ostaszewski is a preternatural translator and not because she speaks three languages. In this episode she discusses how her success is rooted in the fact that she is able to communicate her ideas to everyone from high-up people making decisions to the very people who would be impacted by the decisions those others make, all of rooted in her uncommon mindset for getting someone to care about her ideas. Plus, she offers career advice for anyone curious to follow in Angie's footsteps.

Angie Ostaszewski implemented bold and bright ideas while employed at Ameren, the utility covering much of the lower two-thirds of Illinois, which earned her a Rising Star Award from the Midwest Energy Efficiency Alliance. Since, she's went on to do even greater things nationwide as the Director of Strategy and Innovation at SEEL (Solutions for Energy Efficiency Logistics). All this might already sound heady and in-the-weeds, but trust me, it is important you listen: I am sure by now you have heard that the grid is not doing well, which is why I traveled to Peoria to hear what Angie had to say.

bell hooks' Belonging: A Culture of Place is a "deep cut" of hers that I read as an urban planning manifesto. She wrote it much later in life as she moved back to take care of her elderly parents in Berea, Kentucky. It is a profound and powerful text and the question of how we each "belong" to place is one I wish more people thought about. Granted I am a huge nerd and think about it way too often, but there's really something there as it relates to the subject at hand: grid resilience. In this episode I turn a niche peeve of mine into a case study in ethical leadership and systemic design. I argue that technical expertise is insufficient without empathic literacy to understand the human impact of our work, and I use a personal anecdote from my transportation outreach consulting days to make my point. I critique a concept called "planning fatigue" as a call for any consultant, designer, or policymaker: without a genuine commitment to praxis and shared ownership, even the best-intentioned interventions will fail, damaging trust and perpetuating inequity. In this episode I positions myself not just as a planner, but as a translator and practitioner striving to mend the disconnect between policy and lived experience: skills that have helped me move across industries and identities.For obvious reasons, none of us are ever taught the skills of love as praxis, which is why her work has spoken to countless millions across decades. Unfortunately she is easy to quote and today, her words are something most only see in aesthetic Instagram carousels, stripped of any power and meaning, reduced to fluff facilitating all of ours' compulsive doomscrolling, consuming media and electricity at rates that are now alarming, not only because sleep is now considered an enemy of profits, but because charging an ever-growing array of screens is not good for any of us either and if there is ever one person who could find just the words with which to describe the feelings this all produces in each of us it would be the one and only Ms. hooks.

What does "grid resilience" have to do with me growing up in semi-rural 1980s Russia without running water? With being an urban planner, energy efficiency consultant, and hobbyist TikTok content creator riding a packed Brown line L car during rush hour? With getting near-cancelled for daring to have an opinion in 2025, for the bold claim that systemic collapse is, in fact, not a good idea, a position inspired by my own lived experience that I am not interested in receiving feedback about, thank you very much, because I am now divorced and 39, and just not interested in wasting time arguing when we all have much, much bigger things to worry about, like the state of the country's power grid, and ways that we each can build community in real and not performative ways.But I digress. Tune in and try to keep up as my story weaves in and out of time, place,

Welcome to How to Queer the Grid , a podcast about resilience, belonging, and redesigning the systems we live in, from the edges in.Learn about how I, an artist, urban planner, and energy efficiency consultant got to America as a child from rural Russia, with no running water, no English, and no rulebook for how to belong. In this episode I give you a window into my early years navigating profound alienation and connection in a new country including humiliating isolation in a middle school classroom and life-changing friendships offered by people across decades.This is the origin story of a perspective forged outside society’s central "grid." This story is about what happens when you don’t fit the blueprint, and how that very position becomes a lens for seeing how systems really work (and fail). Here, “queering the grid” is not an abstract theory. It is a lived practice of learning, adapting, and building resilient connections from the ground up.And, if you haven't heard, the Grid, as in the power grid is in danger and, I know how to rebuild, not from the center, but from the margins.