 I'm a Palestinian energy and I'm so grateful for your attention and your time in being here and spending a little bit on a subject that is central to my life, you know, but I'm really driven by the folks who are in the community doing the work that makes my job easy, which is, maybe, to ask about what the work of accountability is like, and I felt that there was a really simple formula for success, and it's actually a guide to this formula. It's pretty simple. God gave us one mouth to speak from and two ears to listen from and two is greater than one, so you should be doing one a little more than the other. And it's important for us to get to listen and be led by the community. So I want to touch a little bit on that, but first things first, I want to thank you for the introduction, for the future of the week, certainly for the elected official, we understand the powerful work of your group and the impact of the generations here in San Antonio. And not just that, but the fact that we all want to continually grow and get better at this and so I'm going to touch a little bit on the ways that I, none of your campaigns have been in the elected office and it suggests that we walk through what we're looking at in this state. But before I begin, I was thinking about this, I said, as a student of history, growing up in San Antonio, I loved history and I loved going into some of my history classes, some of my history books, because I took the opportunity to read about powerful moments in our transition. And I will agree with Anthony about moments of time and it's strange that moments of time of tumultuousness, of difficult struggle, the leaders that were born from those moments, whether you're talking about the heiress presuming over a one, over a two, the heiress presuming, the women's movements and the rights movement. And I would think to myself, it's too bad, I need to live through those moments. And there's a saying, the Chinese curse, that may be lived in interesting times. And ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not, we are living in an interesting time right now. You don't have to be envious of the history. So what that means is that there is a lot of places for people to stand up and fight for the important things that are happening here and I want you to try to read for its inclusiveness or its concept of access to not only folks who are already plugged in, but folks who are getting plugged in. And I think it's an interesting time for me as well too because we're living in a time in which I happen to be part of the group that in many ways is the most maligned, the most victimized, and villainized. And of course I'm talking about the politician. You know, not many people know this, I heard this in the funny saying, I might be one of us, but the origin of the word politics is the origin of the word money and tips, which are blood-sucking feathers. Something told me that this is certainly a time when that seems to be true. And I think to myself, you know, why is it that anybody would ever consider voting with that much of a sense of feeling in some way anger or disappointment or frustration? And I think I'll tell you that there's something really important about what is necessary when we come to vote. So the idea of what we sometimes vote for, whether you lead a nonprofit or if you lead an effort like a lead to get people to vote, what you're looking for is you're looking to accomplish a quick goal. And growing up, I think that this idea of wanting and wanting something is incredibly important because before I was born in a part of town, you were sort of, you spread a seed of certain feelings about who you are and what you've accomplished. And sometimes you grow up to be in the South Side of San Antonio, sometimes you felt like you looked very nervous. And so what I was looking for, what I think many of you have been doing is you're trying to find a better-public system. You're trying to find justice. Justice is a word that you define in a lot of different ways for the folks who work in specific areas of effort. So let me tell you this, the opposite of justice, one might assume it is injustice, but truly the opposite of justice is indifference. Indifference is not carrying one way or another what happens if I vote. Indifference is not carrying one way or another whether somebody wins or loses. Indifference is not carrying one way or another whether the community progresses because it is not about the community that happens without me. And I think that's what we are battling against, that indifference, that apathy that we feel. So the question is who can be blamed for this indifference? And I'm going to give you a very simple answer to be blamed for that indifference. And I'm speaking to you right now. I am who you should blame and other folks who are in my position for policy makers who are elected who you should blame. When we start asking ourselves why we haven't had such a vote before we turn up? I'm going to let you know a little secret. And it's a secret that some folks already know and prove. It's a secret that Ms. Mary Alice Sanchez has become accountable to those, Mayor Riley knows, Mayor of the Ivalry. When you decided to run for office, and I decided to run for office when I was 24, it was 2011. In fact, I'll tell you a quick story. Now, 24, as a good candidate, you know exactly whose door you're knocking on. You have the rage, you have the name, the address, the phone number. And I remember going up to Ms. Rodriguez as well. The very first door that I was going to knock on was in my campaign, in 2011. I go up. I go, oh, Ms. Rodriguez, I'm so sorry about that. I just want to introduce myself. My name is Ray Saldana. I run for city council. I was born and raised here on the South Side of San Antonio. Went to South Side High School. Graduated from South Side. Went off to San Francisco. Got my undergraduate, graduate degree. And now I'm coming back and I want to represent you. I'm city council. What's a name? She's graduate. And she says, you say you're ready for the city council or you're ready for the student council? I've seen it. You said it all about you running for the city council. Here's the story line that I'm trying to tell. When I got advice on how to run a campaign, it was campaign manager consultants. And so tomorrow you decide you want to run for mayor, you want to run for city council, you want to run for state senate. You're going to get advice. You're going to talk to a campaign consultant. That campaign consultant will tell you a phrase or a poem. So the question sounds like this. Okay. Marina, if you're running for office, Marina, this is what you're going to do. Let's find out how many voters exist in your district that you wanted to run for. And you're going to do it. Don't worry about anybody who has never voted in the past. I only want you to focus on those votes who are consistent voters, right? Who are going to label them. These are our strongest, propensity voters. These are our level one participants. And so I say that's what you're going to find out. What about the other votes? No, no, no. Do not upset any time, money, or anything that's of no use. Maybe I'm going to be one of those voters. And so this is what would happen. And this is what has happened for decades in cities and interiors. I have enough on this for a brief reason to vote. And then I don't vote for a neighbor. Or for a neighbor's neighbor. In fact, I skip about 20 votes before I get to the end of the block and find another one of these level one voters. And so when people are asked about, why is it that we have such a low voter attitude? We get pretty simple. Because we don't ask people to vote. You have to raise money for your campaign. And they say, all right, don't send mail to anybody. You've never voted in the past. That's a waste of your time. And so if I'm back, if I'm thinking into the future, and we're setting a goal for ourselves as a legal voting voter, how are we going to expand the voting phase? How are we going to shape this in difference? We need to make sure that we're asking people to vote. Because it is as simple as that. So when I was elected in 2011, I thought, OK, let's do this. Let's go out and fight out through the highest protection of legal voting. The thing is, when you go after the same pie and decide never to expand it beyond that, then you're playing the same game with your several generations. And consider this. I prefer that the south side is in the middle. And when you're building a city, you have to decide where things go in the city. I sometimes talk to elementary students and they ask, what is the city council that do it? And I tell them, well, maybe you've heard of this game. It's called SimCity. In SimCity, it's a computer game that you can play in some places and you can play on the phone. Where you design a city from scratch. You design a city inside of a street stroke, inside of a hospital stroke, where the groceries go, the parks go. And I tell them, there is a city council that is like playing SimCity because it's designed and built a city. And we have been designed and built in the city of San Antonio for generations. But on the south side of San Antonio, we didn't get the university or we didn't get the nicest parks. In some cases, we didn't get streets to work on. In fact, here's what Hartford mentioned, that here's what Hartford, Florida, was the city's largest park on the south side. It was ribbon on two years ago. It was the city's land park. And that's where the cities don't work there. And so you want to consider being a policymaker on elected officials and having to make tough decisions about policy that affect people or even invest in infrastructure. Making a mistake. What they do is, they find out where, where they're going to hear about it and most of the time they don't do that in a certain area. Now, picture the city of San Antonio and think about what it's like to turn the lights on. If you were to turn the lights on in the entire city, great illumination of brightness would be shining the things. But if you were only to turn the lights on in those moments, if you had voters, then you would only have a strip of lights to the far north side, some flickering moments of brightness on the west side and the south side. And you consider that part of this self-propelled policy we've created is that we are moving to ourselves to the detriment of our entire community that we haven't decided to turn the lights on. I think we want to do that because we like folks like me off the hook every time we go in Spain. So please, the message for me at the very least in San Juan is that when we're thinking about your work and thinking about the importance of how a vote can make it different to love and show to our community you'll consider that sometimes it's as simple as saying to the community that we're going to have and raise some money and how to go through those values. So you know what? Let's try to increase it by five or ten percent but put some money to send mail to the scope which would be of sense to them. But if not for the people who are just Rodriguez and just going to this house they'd never get out. And so I was asked just to share a few moments of a question on that. It's odd for me that I get to do so now. It's been seven years now since I won my election and I'm getting old in my job and I'm retiring soon next year. But I truly think that that is one of the most important ways that we can change the community is to be a power vote. I can transform our city's education system in any way except for these school issues. I can get places for school board elections. I can transform the way infrastructure for the parks space and money that's invested in our city. I can just let folks just turn their lives on to get out of the government. And I know the way that elected officials, politicians, react is incentive, is disincentive. And the incentive certainly is to get the electives to use that as a strategy. No, for our folks in the south side of the Internet there's really pretty hard to keep the right on and we think it's incredibly important for your vote to continue. But to do so in a focused way that's why my ask of you all is to focus some of those areas for a long time that we forgot. The work is not complicated. Walking science is complicated. Calculus is complicated. Not going to give a genome is complicated. But this work is hard. Make no mistake about when you're not playing or approaching not having a register who has not yet ever exercised the opportunity to know where it is that you're supposed to vote. I'll say it for you too. You have a very good friend of mine who I grew up with. And we take time to get to the register to vote. I was running in 2011. I said, this is going to be an easy one. Matthew Rodriguez, two of my best friends and I was old enough to walk and I can remember the last day of voting I called Matthew and I said, Matthew, I'm not voting yet. He said, oh yeah, I did it last week. I said, Matthew, I'm looking at the voter book. You have it. You're my best friend. I need you to come out. And he said, oh man, you can see that? I said, Matthew, yes, I registered a few months ago. I went to pick it up and put it in the mail for you. You register, I confirm, you register, you're going to vote. You need to just walk over the South Park Mall. I can drive and I always think that's what I mean about how hard this work is going to be. It's not officially but it does take an extra effort. It does need to be actually working in some of these disenfranchised marginalized communities because they come to vote and they're going to vote and you have to aspire. Some of the people vote because But some folks just don't know what to do about it. And that's the one quick piece of advice model I know you've only asked me to come and speak for a few minutes. But there was just too much that I had to say. But it's been an incredible opportunity for me to get to watch, to do through doing this work. And I hope people will engage in the hardest of ways to do this work. And I'll give you a chance. I'm a son of an infant. My parents really didn't get past the infant. The reason I got involved with my first career began is not just in hoaxing the body in South Park Mall. But the reason I got involved in the intercity development was because when I was 12 years old, my dad was studying the economy of citizens of the United States. He was a doctor and I just didn't know what to do with life. And I even recall sitting in prison and we'd get home to work at a meat cutting plant here in St. Louis on a holiday on Friday night. We'd come home smelling terribly. We'd get stuck at the kind of work that they did. But I remember looking into the bed and I would come home and do these Boston tiles, take as hard half a minute to the town and sit down and get extended. But the citizens should be there. And so of course, after a while I got interested in government and I happened to see Matt, I told him that that was the most early question with quizzing my dad, named the three branches of the US government. Named the first original 13 college who said, give me what you need, give me that. I'm the first president of the United States. All of these things asked my father so that he could become a citizen. You know what the craziest thing about the whole experience in the United States? They asked the station to give him a 1999, he sweared to vote. And he held a certificate and he said to me and the rest of my brothers and sisters, he said, now that I've got this paper, this makes me a citizen, it allows me the opportunity and for you the opportunity to live in the American dream. And the next day he said, I'm really excited to finally act out a voice and here's an immigrant came to the country in 1988 and he reminded us and did not like him vote. Think about that for a second and think about how many of us take that opportunity. And I want you to consider that what's on the line, the stakes are too high for us not to be involved in a hard work. And what's at stake in the American dream, the access opportunity, really at this time, it's a very interesting time for the immigrant to spend a lot of time on a hard work. And I know the meeting with the board is up to the task of the challenge. We're in a city that is going through the important challenges that we're going through quickly. And from here on, we're going off to visit an apartment where folks are afraid that they might not be able to open their very near for that. So we need to remain in the second half of a non-group meeting without the reason which is the focus of our talent is on. We need to do that. The immigrant always held us accountable. In fact, I was hearing that message about our panelists and our questionnaires to continue to do the work and thank you to the women who have been working so hard to feed the energy that we're getting to see and really move the city. It's not folks like we, folks who have their feet on the ground and are usually being under them and your eyes in the sky. So thank you.