Emily Anadu of The Lay Out on Cultivating Black Joy

Emily Anadu didn’t mean for The Lay Out to become a thing. It was 2020 and Fort Greene Park, once a place of solace for the Brooklyn resident and accomplished consultant, had started to feel like less and less of a safe space.

“When we went into lockdown, I spent hours every day just lapping the park. I was averaging 20,000 steps a day,” Anadu tells PS at an interview during ENVSN Fest with Adidas, in partnership with The Lay Out. At some point, she started feeling othered on her visits. “It’s not like people were yelling racial epithets or anything like that,” Anadu says. But it was this “feeling” of standing out just by merely existing.

Then, came the murder of George Floyd. Protests erupted around the country, including one that started at the Barclays Center and into Fort Greene Park, passing right by Anadu’s house. “It was a very, very weird night. It was a night of a lot of pain,” she recalls, thinking back to the police van exploding just blocks away from her home. When Anadu woke the next morning with dust pan in hand expecting to help sweep the block, she found that life at the park had resumed.

“When I got out there, it was like [the protest] had never happened. The farmers market was back popping, the organic Mutsu apples were trading like stocks,” Anadu tells PS. While she wasn’t expecting everyone to be sobbing in pain in the middle of the park, the reset felt too soon, too fast. “It’s been a week since we all saw a snuff video, and people were just lounging in the park like nothing happened. Last night there were people out here getting arrested — they were throwing Molotov cocktails into police vans because of what was happening in this country,” Anadu recalls thinking.

“For me, The Lay Out was just this idea of, ‘I just want to take up space.’ I don’t want to have a specific purpose. I just want to be together taking up space.”

Over that next week, all she could think about was seeing Black people back on the park again. “For me, The Lay Out was just this idea of, ‘I just want to take up space.’ I don’t want to have a specific purpose. I just want to be together taking up space,” Anadu says. She spoke the idea out loud on a Thursday, hopping on a call with a few friends that night. Friday, less 16 hours later, she made the Instagram account for The Lay Out and had an invite made for the first event. On Sunday, June 7, 500 people showed up to the first Lay Out in Fort Greene Park. On June 12, they came back to the park for a Juneteenth celebration and 1500 people showed up. This past Juneteenth event, Fort Greene Park was filled with over 10,000 people, Anadu says.

Four years into its existence The Lay Out serves as a community platform with year-round events, all centered around cultivating community and support for one another — from the BuyBLK.ByBLK marketplace for Black vendors to The Knock Out, a hip-hop infused boxing class held in Brooklyn and inspired by Anadu’s own practice. “My mind tends to race and I suffer from anxiety. Boxing is . . . such a hard workout, and in doing combos your mind kind of has to be blank and that, for me, is very soothing,” Anadu tells PS. It’s during these workouts that she actually comes up with many of her ideas for The Lay Out, keeping her phone next to the bag for whenever she needs to text herself a concept for the next “out”.

“Now The Lay Out means much more than just this idea of taking up space and peace in a time of absolute hurt and crazy. But it truly is about Black joy,” Anadu says. In fact, it’s oozing with it — I can verify, having attended several Lay Outs myself. It’s the kind of community that Anadu has always yearned for.

Having been born in Texas, raised in Nigeria, then returning to the US in her tweens, Anadu has always had to “re-find and remake community.” So as The Lay Out grew, she started to envision a type of community where you don’t have to know everyone, but you still feel known.

Protecting this space has been an integral part of Anadu’s job, but as the multi-hyphenate founder of The Lay Out she also wears the hats of the sales and marketing team, social media coordinator, and partnerships lead. Her Harvard Business degree and long career in marketing and consulting have prepared her for just that, though. When seeking out partners, from Adidas, to Amazon Music, to HBO, the message is always clear: “You are here to enable Black joy. You are not here to brand or take credit for it,” Anadu says. She’s also adamant about the fact that The Lay Out is not a non-profit. It’s not a distinction made to knock non-profits, but rather to clarify to investors and brands that it should not be pigeonholed into corporate America’s cause marketing budget. She refuses to let the community be undervalued.

“Like for my Juneteenth event — yes, these people happen to be Black, but it’s still 10,000 people who at the end of the day, are the people that set culture, that set trends, that are watched,” Anadu says. “Watch what we do today — it will be what all of you are trying to do, or what the world is trying to do tomorrow, next week, month.”

“At the end of the day, I don’t want the community to be undervalued. I don’t want the sheer fact of our skin being Black to mean that [we] somehow need smaller, less support, or different support,” she says.

As she continues to protect this safe space for Black joy and community, Anadu also envisions a world where The Lay Out expands to other gentrified areas of the country and other parts of the world — from Detroit to Paris, she says.

Until then, to more and more outs, Anadu says. “We’re gonna be out, out, out. Outside always.”

Alexis Jones is the senior health and fitness editor at PS. Her passions and areas of expertise include women’s health and fitness, mental health, racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, and chronic conditions. Prior to joining PS, she was the senior editor at Health magazine. Her other bylines can be found at Women’s Health, Prevention, Marie Claire, and more.