 I'd like to wish Ford School friends and alum happy Ford School Spirit Day. Happy Ford School Spirit Day from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I want to wish everyone a happy Ford School Spirit Day. I'm so happy to celebrate Ford School Spirit Day with you. Happy Ford School Spirit Day. I'm wishing everyone a very happy Ford School Spirit Day. Happy Ford School Spirit Day here from Mexico, Aztec ruins. All the incredible places I've been able to study at in the last few years will always be the Ford School that will be like a second home to me. One thing I appreciate about being part of Ford School faculty and staff is working with an incredible group of students who are curious about world events and who are committed to making the world a much better place through policy. One thing that I most appreciate about being a Ford School alumni is that all the knowledge and experience that I get in at the school I'm using in my everyday work life. Best thing about being a Ford School alum is the network that you make along the way. I love Ford School Spirit Day. It's one of my favorite summer traditions. Under normal times I love hosting current students and alum here in Detroit to see the vibrant and creative community that we've developed over the years. What I appreciate most about being a Ford School alumni is the incredible network of alumni. They are just everywhere doing amazing things all over the world. It's an amazing school and I'm so happy to be associated with it. The skills that I learned from the writing classes to develop a policy memo for advancing the financial market in the country. I'll always treasure the incredible expertise, amazing connections and heartwarming stories from both my own professors and the Ford faculty at large. I will always remember the incredible policy talks with such prominent and pivotal speakers and decision makers. Whether it's studying for my first econ midterm with my classmates or listening to lectures and speakers at Wild Hall. My favorite experience as a Ford School student was just taking advantage of all the professional development opportunities that they offer. It's really incredible. I'm so proud of all that our alumni, students, faculty and staff have done in the last year and a half during this global pandemic to serve the public good. Just wanted to flag that the Ford School community is so supportive and it was so easy to transition into this grad life and that's something that I really appreciate about the climate of Ford School and the Ford School community. What we love most about the Ford School is life long friendship. Happy Ford School Spirit Day from Jerusalem and Go Blue. You know, very happy Ford School Spirit Day and Go Blue. I just want to wish you a happy Ford School Spirit Day and as always, Go Blue. Happy Spirit Day everyone. Take care. Go Blue. Go Blue. Happy Spirit Day again everyone and Go Blue. Happy Ford School Spirit Day everyone. Go Blue. Go Blue. I'm so proud of you. Enjoy the day and Go Blue. Naomi Goldberg and I'm a member of the MPP class of 2008 and I'm also the chair of the Ford School Alumni Board. On behalf of the Ford School Alumni Board, I'm thrilled to welcome you to the 11th annual Worldwide Ford School Spirit Day. It's great to see so many Fordies from around the world today and what a great video montage featuring some familiar faces from Wile and Lord Choll. I look forward to a lively conversation about COVID and the impact it's had on all of us on our work this year. We have a great panel featuring Ford School Alumni which will be followed by breakout sessions facilitated by alumni and students where you'll get a chance to catch up with familiar friends and meet new people. Thanks to Grace Evans, Courtney Sanders, and the Spirit Day Planning Committee of the Alumni Board and all the staff at the Ford School for their hard work in making today's panel happen. I am going to turn things over to Dean Michael Barr for a few introductory comments and then he will lead us into the panel. Go Blue. Thanks so much Naomi and welcome everybody. I'm Michael Barr, the John and Sanford Wile Dean of the Ford School of Public Policy and it is a great pleasure for me to welcome the Ford School community to this 11th annual Spirit Day event. Joining us today are alumni from all over the country and the world, current students, incoming students, some of our PPA junior summer institute students. And while we can't be together in person today, I'm so glad we're able to come together virtually and to discuss the important work that some of our distinguished alumni have been doing to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on all of us from a health perspective and economic perspective, a justice perspective. I want to thank the Ford School Alumni Board for their leadership in creating this event and their hard work in putting it together. I also want to recognize President Ford. He was born 108 years ago yesterday and for many of us, he provides us with a model for how to lead in moments of crisis. We honor his legacy at the Ford School by being a community dedicated to public service and to the public good. For our conversation today, we'll be hearing from four distinguished Ford School alumni, Allie Berry, Stacy Dean, Portia Hempel and Alberto Rodriguez. Allie Berry is a 2021 MPP grad. He's currently an emergency preparedness specialist for Wayne County, Michigan, where he has been actively working to address and mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on Wayne County communities. Stacy Dean is a 1992 MPP grad. She was appointed by President Biden to serve as the Deputy Undersecretary for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services Department. She works on increasing nutrition assistance, as well as on tackling systemic racism and barriers to opportunity. Dr. Portia Hempel is a 2015 PhD graduate. She is currently a survey statistician at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She is also the founder of Scientists for Social Progress, a national cross-collaborative platform and research consulting firm of scientists who develop solutions in the interest of public good. And finally, we have Alberto Rodriguez, who is a 1993 MPA grad. He also holds a PhD in Education Policy and Administration from U of M. Alberto is the Global Director for Strategy and Operations in Human Development at the World Bank. Over the last year, he has been responsible for providing leadership to the World Bank teams responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the largest global effort for vaccine financing and deployment. Before we dive into the discussion itself, a couple of quick notes about format. We're going to have some time at the end of the discussion today for audience questions. We've received some in advance already. If you would like to ask a question, please share it in the Zoom chat. We'll be collecting questions from the chat throughout the event. We hope you will also use the chat to engage in a conversation with fellow Ford School community members. Finally, after our discussion today, there will be a number of breakout sessions for you to join, where you can engage with your fellow Fordies. Please feel free to stay and mingle after the panel is over. And now we're going to turn to our wonderful panel. I'm just super excited to have this group with me, with all of us today. Really interesting panel bringing perspectives from different generations of MPP and PhD students. And I think what I'd like to do maybe is just start to give our audience a sense of the kind of leadership experiences you've been doing during this crisis itself. What issues you've been working on, how you've been advancing the public good through your work and the COVID crisis. And then we'll get into some more questions about management style and other leadership issues. So maybe if we could start, we'll just kind of go down the row and I'm not sure how other people are seeing you on my screen, but I've got Alberto up first. And maybe I'll ask Alberto to lead us off. What kinds of issues you've been dealing with during the pandemic? Obviously it's been front and center of your work. So I'd love for you to share a little of that with our wonderful audience. Well, thank you. Thank you, Dean Barr. And thank you for the invitation to this very interesting panel. You know, the pandemic has had a tremendous effect over our work. And because we are committed to support every country in the world in their development. And of course, this has been a tremendous setback in the development goals. Just in 2020, 100 million more people are expected to enter extreme poverty. As already entered extreme poverty. I'm talking 2020 and just that year as a result of the pandemic. In this year, up to this month, 23 million children have missed their basic vaccinations. And what's even worse, the school closures are expected to have an impact of $10 trillion in the losses of the affected children future income. What this tells you is that this is a pandemic that has affected everyone in every way. I'm not going into the data of, for example, the tremendous increase that we've seen in gender based violence as a result of people remaining at home. So what has the bank done? My team had to very quickly shift our gears of business as usual and move into an emergency response. We responded through very quick projects that supported the social protection systems in many countries, basically to allow countries to put money in the hands of families that needed to base for basic survival. This was particularly difficult because as you can imagine, in many economies, we have very high informality. So it was very hard to find registration and where people were in order to provide those resources. We provided a lot of money as well for different countries to build up their online education systems to get laptops in the hands of children. And of course, we also had a very quick response in the month of May of last year to provide PPE for in many countries resources so that countries could actually buy the basics from masks to gel to ventilators. And all of this happened very quickly. Then towards the end of the year, we moved into financing vaccines. As soon as we saw the vaccines coming up, we put out a facility that would allow countries to purchase vaccines very quickly. But we face a lot of difficulties. The availability of vaccines has been a very, very difficult issue. Developed countries, in a sense, cornered the market, not allowing vaccines to arrive to the poorest countries. We've been focusing on working with COVAX, with the African Union, and others to negotiate directly vaccines with different suppliers. My team has been in charge of trying to match the demand with the supply of vaccines on one hand. And on the other hand, trying to help countries prepare for deployment. Countries are weak in deployment. They may not have the cold chain. They may have not the vaccinators trained. They do not have a strategy to fight hesitancy, vaccine hesitancy. These are all challenges that we've had to face over the last year and a half. And I want to stop there because I know there'll be a lot of questions, but we've essentially spent $150 billion supporting countries over the last 15 months in all of this very ample set of interventions to try to get this pandemic over. Right now, we're not there. We have two pandemics. We have what's going on in the developing world, which is still very low vaccination. You may know that less than 1% of the habitants of low-income countries are vaccinated, while about 50% of the habitants of high-income countries are vaccinated. We have two worlds, unfortunately, in this pandemic. So we still have a lot of work to do. It's been very demanding. It's been fun. It's been rewarding. And it's been very stressful because the technical and political challenges around this have been quite demanding for us. And I'm going to stop there, Michael, in case to give space to others to share their experiences as well. Thank you, Alberto. A fascinating set of issues you're tackling and such an urgent time for the globe. We just thank you and I'll thank all of our other panelists for your service during this critical time. Let me ask Stacey Dean to go next. And Stacey landed in her job in the middle of the pandemic right at the beginning of the administration. And so I wonder whether you obviously had to hit the ground running. I'm wondering how you did that and what you've been working on since you started. You're muted, Stacey. Oh, I think somebody needs to make Stacey. I was like, you need to unmute me. Hi, Dean Barb. Very good to see you. And hello to everyone. It's wonderful to see some old professors and old colleagues and classmates. Yes, I started at 1201 on January 20th and joined a team of Biden appointees at USDA, not having sure who they were. There were about, I can't remember how many of us there were, maybe 20 of us. And the framework that Alberto raised, I think was exactly the same, although played out differently, but it was basically the same issue in this country, right? We had two stories of COVID in terms of the economic impact. The president took office with the, sorry, COVID was raging in terms of its health impacts. But the economy was very much, I wouldn't say shut down, but was experiencing a downturn as a result of all of the measures that we were taking to respond to the pandemic. And the way that we experienced that was very much informed by our income or race and ethnicity heading into the pandemic. It just, it was just felt very differently. So when the president took office, we had 29 million adults and 12 million children living in households who said the week prior they couldn't afford or meet their basic food needs. And that was our challenge here at USDA was to figure out how to have to take that on. I will say that when I came in, this was, we were not taking this on anew. USDA under the prior administration and this extraordinary agency that I now work at have been working tirelessly since March and had experienced five different pieces of legislation equipping the agency with the capacity to build out the programs to provide more food assistance, provide more flexibility so that we could adapt to congregate delivery versus sort of a pick up to individualize the programs. So really, the president's objectives were our objectives, tackle the COVID first and foremost from a health perspective and all of the broader remedy necessary there. As you just talked about PPE deployment responding community needs build back better, which is then also think about economic recovery, but from an inclusive perspective and what investments do we need to come back from the stronger and fundamentally having equity infused all of it. So I'll stop there. I mean, that's a high framework. We have made tremendous progress. Food insecurity and hardship is much lower than it was when the president took office, but we're not there. And we have absolutely not done what we need to do. Sorry, we haven't seen the outcome and gains that we need to see on reducing disparity across the experience of hardship for where whites are experienced at a much lower rates than Latinos or African Americans or Native Americans. So lots of work to do there. So I'll stop and I'd love to hear from others. Thank you, Stacy. And we're going to return to the issues of equity that you and Alberto raised, of course, is a central theme given the highly differential effects of the pandemic on different communities. Let me turn now to Portia Hemphill. Portia has been also in the thick of things at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. And I wonder if you could give us an overview, Portia, of the work that you've been doing. Certainly, I'm thankful to be here with this fantastic panel. And I'm thankful to be a 40 today. I just wanted to stop and say that. Last year is no secret that it was extremely challenging. It was a very, it was a historic time to be in the federal government. And it was a historic time to be an American. We face challenges in terms of race and gender equity in the country. We also face challenges with the pandemic that heighten other challenges that we've had that have been steadfast like the digital divide from which really became apparent during the pandemic. And also we face some historic gridlock and in our American in our Congress and in the federal government. And so with those sorts of constraints, I found myself last year saying, how do we get past this? How do we get resources to those individual Americans in San Antonio or in Dallas who may be hungry right now? Because that is why I became a federal employee. And under those constraints, we didn't have a guidebook to tell us how to mitigate all of those constraints at one time. And there was a lot of room to figure out your own way last year, which could be both a pro and quite the con. And so what I was doing last year was I was working on behalf of 22 communities called Promise Zones in HUD and also USDA. And those are 22 distressed communities that are urban, rural and tribal, two tribal communities. And that show Promise for being at a higher level, given the given more resources, more targeted resources on the federal state and philanthropic in a federal state and philanthropic realm. So I had been doing this work for a little while. And here we are with about three and some change pandemics or or huge issues in the country that took that had the opportunity to really dismantle the work that we had done. I couldn't connect with my partners as easily over at Ed or over at USDA, et cetera, because I can't see them. I mean, besides this way, right? Which I guess is a way, but not the way that we are used to. And so what that led me to was what connects us? What makes this work move? What was the real genesis behind the work that we were able to do? What was the real driver? Was it really seeing people in person? Was it really that? No, what it really was I found after thinking about it for a while is people, people power, that is what moved us. That is what has always moved us. And that is what moved us last year. So when I when I narrowed in on what we were strong at and what couldn't be mitigated by these constraints, that led me to other theoretical propositions that I learned at the Forest School and in political science, which was how to solve collective action problems. So how to bring people to the table to say, hey, this is your work, you, you need to help us do this. That is the federal, state and local and philanthropic entities. So knowing having, having developed these sorts of relationships across those different sectors is what really helped me to help the American people last year. So bringing in people to bear, bringing a philanthropic organization that's like, hey, I really want to help Portia. But and I know we've worked together in these last couple of years. But when I see a lot going on, but I don't really know what to do here. And if I can really be of help bringing or me just saying, hey, philanthropic organization or hey, state level organization, you need to come to the table for this. Those sorts of things, those soft collective action problems that rested the work on people. And by being able to reach out to people individually and not just in a blanket email, but reaching out to people individually having that in kind of relationship is what really brought them to the table solving those collective action problems. And once you get them to the table and you solve the collective action problems, then you are able, I was able to help solve coordination problems. So now we have a group of people together who want, who have the same goal in mind, which is to mitigate issues that are facing, that are, that are negatively impacting Americans at the time, but they need direction about how to come together in order to make the best impact. So solving coordination problems. And once I was able to get those people in the room together or get those people in theoretical room together, there was really no room that we can get it to last year. That's where the magic happened. That's how we were able to get, you know, 60,000 units of PPE to rule in, in tribal communities last year that really needed it and may not always be the first stop in, in a multi-billion dollar philanthropic organization's mind when they think about where to give money to. And being able to contact my folk over at Ed or contact my folks at Justice, HHS, the list goes on 13 to 16 federal agencies having developed those relationships. There wasn't a mechanism. There was no mechanism that helped us to do that. Besides our relationships with each other. And that is what helped us to move. And I was able to, I was able to gather information of critical, regarding critical resources in terms of grants, in terms of webinars, in terms of actual in-kind resources, in actual cash, bring them to the table, help them to figure out what source of things the communities needed in a real-time way by virtue of having relationships on the ground with communities. And being a conduit to those community, with those communities, to these federal agencies, to these stakeholders, to these philanthropic organizations. And then being able to create an organic, an organic environment in which we were still targeted. It's organic, but we were still targeted. We still were coordinated. We still had objective. We still knew what San Antonio needed, what Philadelphia needed, what Los Angeles needed, what St. Louis and Minneapolis, which was on the news a lot last year, needed. And because of those relationships, I was able to create an information stream, real-time information stream to be able to round up all of those resources and get it into a one-stop shop for those communities so that they can determine from there for what they might want to apply. And the results of that were tremendous and helped some of our cities that would have gone under, would have gone under in terms of providing critical resources to its citizens, which in turn could have led to higher fatality rates. That is really, that is what I did not want to happen. And when I learned that these critical PPE resources were able to mitigate those things, or this grant was able to mitigate those things, that made, that reinvigorated my love for my job, my love for my country, and my, and the love for being a 40 and learning about all of those, those theoretical propositions that became real-life manifestations. Thanks so much. A great, great set of lessons about leading during the crisis. Let me last turn to Ali Berry. And you've been working intensely on the ground in Detroit and Wayne County more broadly. I'd love to hear what your experience has been this last year. Thank you, Dean Barr. And hello to everybody. It is an absolute honor to be on this panel. I've been an emergency preparedness specialist with Wayne County for over a year now, working to address and mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on the 43 communities in Wayne County. As was said by the great panelists here, COVID-19 has been affecting people in so many different ways, and it has been targeting everybody. So nobody is safe from this. When I joined with Wayne County, we had to hit the ground running to really mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on these communities. And this is before vaccines. So to mitigate it, pop up testing sites, increasing testing within the county, also providing PPE, especially for low income areas was a really important thing to do. And that's something that we really were trying to focus on. One of the greatest things, now that we have the vaccine, the vaccine is a great way to really tackle this pandemic. So of recent, a big part of my job has been to really establish and operate COVID-19 vaccination sites. Now, one thing to highlight, which is because COVID-19 does impact different people in different areas so differently, we have to ensure that our response is targeted in that manner. So whether you have a certain initiative, making sure that you are going out to communities that are hardest hit by the pandemic, or making it a little more accessible and accommodating their needs. So Wayne County has 43 communities, and we have to be able to do just that. I think one of the greatest challenges in all of this, and I'm sure everybody can relate, is that working in a pandemic, you're working in a high pace, a really ever-changing environment. We're dealing with this pandemic, the last pandemic of this scale occurred in 1918. And none of us were around to really experience that. So we're all here facing the facts as they come out, and I think that makes it a really stressful environment to work in. One thing I learned from that is being on the ground, being with people, being in communities, and seeing the effects really helped me work on the initiatives and some of the things and the projects that we need to do. Oftentimes, if we're working in an office or what have you, you lose sight of what the reality is out there. And so I think the greatest thing really is being in touch with the people that are being affected by COVID-19. And that's something that I really made sure I was very mindful of during my work. One other thing, another big challenge, the pandemic has been ongoing. We have reached one of the most important points in the pandemic. When the vaccine finally arrived, we finally have something to combat COVID-19. And early on in vaccine distribution, everybody who was really eager to get the shot went out and went out to get the shot. And as you know, recent there has been a decrease in demand for vaccine across the country. And we still haven't reached that 70% threshold that many experts are putting for us to hopefully lead to herd immunity. And so I think right now is one of the most important times. We're close to 70, but there's still lots and lots of work to do. And one thing that we have to be mindful of is making sure that we are providing the information for people, educating people about vaccines and about its potential. Of recent, we've heard that those who have been, that 99% of recent COVID-19 deaths were people who are unvaccinated. So this is a testament to the fact that vaccines work. And I think right now combating vaccine hesitancy and making sure that we are able to make vaccine accessible, we can provide the information, answer questions to people is really important. And there's still lots of work to do, even though we're close to 70, but still lots of work. This is one of the hardest parts of the pandemic. Thanks, Ali. Both Ali and Portia have already talked a little bit about how they addressed their own leadership set of skills during this crisis. Portia and referring to the importance of relationships and building on relationships. And Ali, in terms of having a on the ground focus that help keep you motivated and on task. I wonder if Alberto and then Stacy, if you could share some of your own lessons about the style of leadership that you've needed to use during this period and how it's been effective or cases where it wasn't effective and you had to adjust? Maybe Alberto, if you could start and then Stacy. Happy to start. I was asking Stacy to do so, but I'll be happy to do it. The leadership style and the leadership that one has to bring in these situations really has to come in many ways from inside. And I'll tell you why. No course prepares you for this. This is a situation where you are facing enormous urgency coupled by a completely, a large element of uncertainty. And Ali talked about the fact that we knew very little at the beginning and we were building as we walked in the knowledge, coupled with a very rapidly changing environment. We got vaccines and now we got variants and we all thought we would vaccinate our country and we never suspected that what was happening in another country in Africa would have such an effect on what happened here when other variants, for example, developed. So this changing environment coupled with another factor, which I think we all need to recognize, is that it brought personal hardship for us as people, right? Some folks of course were facing the family issues, you know, the loss of loved ones, friends, illness in many cases, mental illness due to the isolation and the stress or simply having to work from home in the company of all your family around you. And all of this together really, you don't learn these things in a course. But what I do think is that the discipline and the goal setting play a huge role. And those kick in automatically when you actually establish patterns and when you actually build on the relationships that you have. I think Portia was making a very strong emphasis about how much personal relationships and being able to be empathic about what others were going through play such a critical role in your leadership. I have to tell you that obviously nothing of what we've done and what my team has done could have been done with the people, without the people that work on the ground. Many of them not vaccinated because they're working in countries where we don't have vaccines yet available. And it is their energy that really you want to bank on and their ability to be empathic with those that they're working with. And I have to say that this is what you're doing in leadership, I think, is you lead from behind, you learn from what your team is doing, and you basically try to create an environment such that they can do their work supportive, empathic, providing guidance when needed, but mostly listening a lot and understanding that they themselves are going through hardship in these very difficult times. Thank you. I was going to say that's why I wanted Albert to go first because of course it's just yes, all of that, all of that. The one thing I'll flag from my personal experiences, I came into a leadership role in the administration. I used to supervise a group of around 10 people and now I have 1,500 people reporting, not directly to me, but after me. So it's a big shift, but really knowing that it's a tremendous agency, they couldn't be more committed to the mission of addressing the needs of hungry people. And my job is to set the direction and to create the conditions for them to succeed. They were really already exhausted when the administration went through a transition and it would have been completely off base to step in and say, okay, we're here now and now everything's okay. Nothing could have been further from the truth. It wasn't okay. And of course that would have not done service or paid respect to the extraordinary work they had been doing. So really the idea is to again set the conditions, tell them where you want to go and set the conditions for success and then make sure that they know you've got their back. This was all providing the direction, but also the cover and the space for them to do their work, which they have in an extraordinary way. So I'll stop there. Yeah, thank you Stacey. And both of you and Ollie and Portia before you, some terrific lessons for all of us. Let me ask maybe Ollie and Portia to say a little bit about how you think the Ford School helped prepare you for your current work, if it did. Again, I'll have Ollie go first and then Portia. So I recently graduated from the Ford School this last May. And I really credit being in this position and being able to do the things I'm able to do now through the Ford School and the experience. I mean, to begin with, I actually started working with Wayne County right after my summer internship and that's sort of how that came about. So I credit the opportunities and the resources that the Ford School has graduate career services and their team. But some more experiences that I got from the courses, especially that I learned. One of the courses I took was IPE, which is a three-day simulation event. We're able to discuss topics and play certain roles. And one of the first IPE sessions I had, I was acting as a state senator to work on solving a solution for water infrastructure issues. But within this simulation, there were a lot of stakeholders. There's lots of different roles from congressional leaders to executive leaders, businesses, advocacy groups, and nonprofits. And we had to work together to solve these issues, but also keep in mind that every stakeholder has very diverse backgrounds, interests, and composition. And that is one of the biggest things that I learned is that whenever there's an initiative at hand that I am working with, I have to tailor a solution to accommodate these stakeholders. Now, this is a simulation. So when I went out into the real world, for example, we had over 3 million face masks we wanted to distribute to the 43 communities in Wayne County. And one thing to note is Wayne County is a very diverse county, and we have to be able to accommodate every single community so that we can make sure that those masks get to the people that need them. And so I had to work with these various municipalities, different organizations, institutions, and tailor and make sure that I am able to get those masks out there, barring any barriers that were present to not make that happen. So I was able to pull in those experiences. And this is just one class. This is IPE, but in reality, many of the classes we took from 510 to 587, where we worked in simulation environments, but then also in some classes, we worked with outside entities on a project. I'll end off with one more really important thing that I really took from the Ford School, which was the quantitative analysis skills that I gained through going through their courses. One thing to note is data is a very valuable thing, and good and sound data, of course. But especially when you're dealing with a virus, when something is so new, we don't know a lot of things, data can't paint a picture that we might not otherwise notice. And so I was able to utilize the data analysis skills that I learned from program evaluation or just even our statistics class. And I'm able to take in the new information that's continuously coming out, analyze those informations, create reports so we can make get a driven decisions, but also do other things like create projections and so we can and then create target-based approach to the solutions that we wanted to provide for the different communities. So I think being able to take simulations and the experiences, the collaborative environment that you had there at the Ford School and then use those experiences directly into the real world and some of the more technical skills like data and implementing all together, I think it's the biggest takeaway I had. As for me, I would say that, well, I was at Michigan, I embarked on and finished a joint PhD in political science and public policy. A lot of times people asked me, well, what's the difference between the two? And I think that the difference between the two really came to fruition last year. So in political science, we theorize about actors. What do political actors do under what conditions? Who gives what, you know, when, where and how? And the Ford School taught me about how to own my own power as an actor. And that is a difference. I can actually be an actor. I can also theorize about them too, which is also great. So I can do something and then think about why I did it like that afterward and then think about how I can do it again better. So that's what I would say is what I really learned from the Ford School, that it is incumbent upon me, it is incumbent upon us to be good actors and in whatever environment that we're in. So I talked a lot about my position at HUD, but as the founder of Scientists for Social Progress, there was also a lot of work that needed to be done outside of those 22 communities that I work for. And so, developed Scientists for Social Progress to get together intersectional scientists that are powerhouses in their own right in order to come together and solve a collective action problem by coming together and then coordinating ourselves in order to target service organizations in terms of improving their data capacity, which led to critical grant-making processes or grant writing processes, et cetera, that led to them getting more money on the ground, service organizations that had potentially nothing to do with the federal government. I recognize that I'm a product of a lot of such service organizations when I grew up in uptown community in Chicago. And I've always wanted to give back to those to those sorts of organizations. I did not always know how. Poor school equipped me with owning my power as an actor and then using my noggin to figure out who do I know, what people power do I have, and how can I use that to the best advantage of another facet of the American people or organizations that help the American people. And that is kind of the genesis of Sciences for Social Progress. And last year we were sure enough busy with all the issues concerning equity, all the issues concerning making sure that Black women were in decision-making roles. And I say that in that way it was a great year to be able to show our prowess and be able to really help communities in ways that I know that we are unique in being able to assist. I credit the Ford School and the Department of Political Science for helping me to wrap my mind around how we can make theoretical propositions work in real life. Thanks, Portia. And Ali, terrific insights from your time at Ford. We've gotten a lot of terrific audience questions coming in. So I'm going to start weaving those into our conversation and maybe I'll start with Alberto. If you could answer one of the audience questions is about how do you incentivize governments to collaborate with each other in the crisis, particularly, you know, we have a set of rich nations that have different interests from the poorer nations. You know, what's been your experience about trying to bring everybody to the table to help solve what, as you said, is clearly a global problem that affects everybody? It is. It's a great question. I think that we've come to an understanding finally and it took a while because, as I said earlier, we were all learning in the process that it is really true that no one is safe until everyone is safe. But it took a while to understand that it took actual real life experience of having solved the issue in some countries and then seeing that you then had an impact from another country. Let me give you an example. When India's numbers went up dramatically and India had to close their borders, it turns out that India was producing a large number of the AstraZeneca vaccines that were going to go out to the rest of the world. So everybody was heavily affected by the fact that India's cases went up very highly and that the borders therefore had to be closed and exports were closed as well. So all of these interactions, this understanding that we are an interconnected world in so many ways, whether it is through commerce, through the movement of people, you name it, became extremely clear. I actually believe that a pandemic like the one we have gone through and we are going through shows us exactly the fact that borders are an invention, that things move very quickly between places. And I think that this is one of the lessons that we're learning from this pandemic and that will likely be applied also in other issues that are similar, global nature like climate change. Whatever happens elsewhere is going to affect all of us in very different ways. This is a lesson that took a lot of time. It took real experience and the only thing that we could do was engage very closely with governments and with pharmaceuticals and with the rich and the poor governments to try to find the right solutions. And we are happy to see lately that there is an increase, an important increase in global solidarity, but we are paying the price for having come into it so late. Thank you, Alberto. Very powerfully said. Maybe Stacey, you could take up this next question which also comes from the audience. And it's this, how do you balance meeting the current crisis moment with speed, efficacy and action and at the same time managing staff as humans with empathy and understanding? So how are you trying to think of your, you know, in your current role about the meeting both those kinds of objectives? That's interesting. You should probably ask the staff and not me, but whether it's working. I think so I do monthly check-ins with my senior leadership team and one of the things that I ask them to report on every month is what do you need to take off of your plate right in order to, you know, in Washington when you want to pass legislation that costs money, there's a pay-go system right? You have to pay for it, you have to offset it somewhere else. I do think that's true of work too. And so wherever possible trying to call that out. And it's also true that part of their humanity is their desire to serve, their desire to be engaged in really important moments and to support their community, which is, you know, part of their work. So it's also true that if it is really important we want to make sure we're giving space for the true experts to be in the room and to, you know, to affect change over time. So it's a balancing act, but the most important thing is to say in order to do this what do you have to do less of and really try and respect that because that's part of leadership too, right, is setting priorities. Thanks, Stacy. I think the useful lesson I could use myself is helping the staff let go of things that are lower priority items. So I think a constant struggle in these times. Portia, one question that's come in from the audience and maybe you could just share your own personal perspective on this is to what extent do you think that the changes that we're seeing in policies in response to the crisis are just kind of one-off things in the moment? Or do you think that they're going to actually result in any lasting change on the issues of equity that you were talking about before? Great question. How will I answer it? So I think that, y'all don't know me at all. You know that I'm very honest. So I really would say that it's important to have very progressive dreams in terms of equity and outlooks. And will we see everything that is being pushed out? Maybe not. Will we see it all like next year no, I think that's like not realistic, but due to the changes that we're talking about the federal government, I think due to the changes not only in what is being proposed in terms of equity, which is important. I also think that we also have to realize that the federal government itself is changing. Like for instance, HUD, two-thirds of HUD can retire right now. HUD has like 7,000 less, 7,000 less, like there were 12,000 HUD employees in like 2001 and there are maybe less than 4,000 now. And two-thirds of that 4,000 can retire now. Do you see what I'm saying? That is not a good look. So we are the change. It will be people coming from the Ford school that will help shape the new way that you speak of, Michael. And that is why we haven't seen that yet. So I don't have the data to support my notion, but I do have the data to support that there are going to be new people in the federal government and that a lot of younger folks have been the ones pushing these equity movements. And so, yeah, they may be correlational, but I think that they also might have a relationship there beyond correlational. And that when we have more 40s, when we have more graduates from Michigan joining the Presidential Management Fellowship, joining and not just only in the federal government, but we're having a cultural shift here. This is not just about the federal government. This is not just about COVID. This is not just about George Floyd. This is a cultural shift. We're having multiple cultural shifts at one time. And who will respond to it is what you're really asking. And that is us. We'll respond to it. And this generation under it will have more years to respond to it, right? And so I think that are we going in the right direction? Yes. Has the Biden administration outlined a rigorous plan of equity? Yes. Will we see it all at one time? Likely not. Is it important that it's there and in place? Yes. Is it important that we take it seriously and try to push it as far as we possibly humanly can? Yes. And do we need more 40s? Do we need more critical thinkers? Do we need more intersectional sciences? Do we need more intersectional policymakers in order to push that? Yes. Come on, join. I think we can. Thanks, Portia, for that inspiration for all of us. Let me give the last audience question to Ali to think about. And the question that happens at all different levels, international, state, local, federal, but maybe you could focus on your experience in Michigan. The question is really asking about the politics of dealing with the public health crisis. There have been lots of political reactions that may not have exactly followed the science and acutely so in Michigan with respect to the governor's actions, a lot of political opposition from the legislature and so on. How much of that kind of filtered down to the ground of the work that you were doing in Wayne County? Did it interfere with it or were you able to function kind of despite the noise that was going on? Great question. And it's evidently clear that throughout this pandemic, politics has been involved in a lot of things related to it. But one thing that we do need to set straight is you have public health and you have politics and a lot of times the two don't mix too well, water and oil. And public health is relied a lot on science and science. You have factual information to back a lot of things. So one thing is in any initiative or any strategy that we have forward, we're basing it on the science and the facts. And I mentioned this earlier, data. I mean, data is a really important thing. And that backs a lot of the things that we wanted to do. So yes, there's lots of rhetoric out there and a lot of times that can hinder, especially in the realm of misinformation. And one thing I highlighted about early on in this panel, which is this last feat of the pandemic and trying to hopefully get to 70% and above vaccination rate, people need the information to feel comfortable to get the shot. And if there is incorrect rhetoric out there or just bad information that stems from politics and what have you, that might make it a little bit harder. But the main thing is, we have to be able to separate that noise and put it behind us and just go with the facts, go with what's available in front of us and keep pushing forward and making sure that any initiative that we are doing, we're making it accessible to everybody and that it's available. Thanks very much for that. We're almost out of time for our panel discussion and we're going to go to breakouts in just a second. Let me just ask each of you take 30 seconds and final thoughts putting you all in the spot, leadership in a crisis, issues you wanted to hit on that you think maybe we haven't spent enough time on or just emphasizing key points. So let me start with Stacy. Well, thank you again for including me in such a really interesting event and I've learned a lot. I guess my quick thing that we didn't touch on is, and this is going to sound horrible given the scope and scale of a global pandemic, but it's also important never to waste a good crisis, right? Change is very hard to make and so we need to respond to the crisis, we need to lead in the crisis, but if this this this catalytic moment where we have movements, let's make it much broader for a longer term, good. And so, you know, the Build Back Better Initiative is sort of a theme around that, which is if we're going to invest and we're going to make change, let's do it for a long term, good. I think that's true with respect to leadership and organizational change as well. Thank you again. Thanks Stacy. Portia. I just say that imposter syndrome is a fallacy. It's not true. It's not real. I have never gone to school during a pandemic and I don't know, I don't pretend to know how you all make feel who are in school right now or who may be facing some challenges at work or what have you. I just want you to know that imposter syndrome is not real. People who have more power than you are not smarter than you. Go and actualize your own power and make them good use of it. Thanks Portia. Ollie. Thank you again for having me on this panel. You know, one thing I just want to to put out there, you know, one of the greatest lessons we learned throughout this pandemic is is taking care of one another. You know, we've we've been getting those text messages from each other, especially early on in the pandemic when people were hunkered down at home. Hey, how are you doing? How's it going? You know, how can I help in things like that? So as a leader, I think one of the biggest things is is trying to see what is behind people, you know, what's behind, you know, people like if anything's going on at home and being able to accommodate that at work. So, you know, be mindful of others, you know, if they need help, help them, you know, and also take care of yourself. Another big thing I learned about fighting a global pandemic is that it's tough, but it's also a marathon, not a sprint. So, you know, you don't want to burn out. And I think that's really translatable and a lot of other work that, you know, a lot of us are doing and will do. So I think that's really important to be mindful of. Thanks, Ollie. Alberto, last word. Thank you, Dean Barr. And again, thank you for this invitation. I've learned a lot hearing hearing the very different experiences from different levels of government with the pandemic. Now, listen, on this question of leadership, I go back to four things which incidentally were things that I learned in Michigan and that you actually perfection as a student in Michigan. One is go back to the evidence always, discern fake news, and the only way of doing that is going back to the evidence. The second thing is put your heart and your brain into it. There are no second chances. This is urgent. This is an emergency. This is unique. It's a chance to put everything of you into it. The third one is be empathic to those around you, not only the people who work with you, but also the people who are around your own daily life. People are going through tough times. This is a very difficult moment for everyone. Empathy is one of those things that builds community. And the last one is take care of yourself. I think Ali touched this very well. People are looking at you. When you're in a leadership position, people are looking at you. Even if they're quiet, they're observing how you react to the issues, how calm, how objective, how passionate you are. And therefore, you need to be taking care of yourself because you want to precisely send that message through your actions, through your words, and through your smile. Alberto, thank you so much. And all of our panelists, Portia, Ali, Stacey, for sharing your wisdom and your experience with our fellow alumni. I've really learned a lot and really enjoyed the conversation. A great deal. And I wish it could go on for another couple of hours. So we'll have to return together for a more informal chat, not on Zoom in the near future. Audience members, please join me in thanking our wonderful panel, just a fabulous conversation. We're going to now move to the next phase of our Spirit Day celebration, which are breakout rooms. And I encourage everybody to stay and participate in the breakout room. You see at the bottom of your screen a place to join. You click on the breakout room you want to join and hop right in. And I hope to see all of you in those breakout rooms for the next little bit. Thanks so much and see you shortly.