 Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thank you all so much for joining us today. I like Mark and very excited to have the opportunity to speak to these women about how they are all leading the charge in this world of harnessing foresight driven impact to shape the next decade. So as Mark mentioned, my name is Rachel McGuire. I'm a research director for the Institute for the Future. For those of you who are unfamiliar with us, IFTF is an educational and research civics futures organization. We have one mission and one mission alone and that's to help all of us individuals, organizations, communities be able to think more systematically, more deliberately and ideally more creatively about a long term future. It is our contention that by thinking about a long term future will actually make better decisions in the present. And I think to set up this conversation that we're going to have with Jennifer and Alandra and Carla about their role in leading this charge in the civic sector is to just remind us all of the urgency of futures thinking at this moment. I think I'm not alone when I say that a lot of us wake up every day feeling like we're living through something that was unimaginable. We're in some sort of world, whether it was a world changing pandemic, but there was a record breaking temperatures this summer that just never seemed to cease. Or even if it's the question of rights that we thought were settled and available to all of us that is no longer the case, we find ourselves oftentimes characterizing the world we live in as it was unprecedented and unimaginable. But at the heart of future thinking is really the argument to say that actually everything is somewhat imaginable. It's just that we don't really want to imagine some of these worlds that we may find ourselves living in today. It's hard to imagine a future that is unsavory, that is unjust and that is unequitable. And so a lot of us just sort of put our heads in the sand and think like, oh, I can't even imagine that future. So I'm not going to. But what that does then is when you wake up in that future, you find yourself in a sense of what we might think of as future shock. You feel like you can't make rational decisions. You can't orient yourself in the world because it seems so absurd. It's out of your logic of what you thought was possible. And for many of us, it puts us in the sense of like malaise and was paralysis when it comes to making decisions in the present about what to do next. The opposite of future shock is future ready. And so what we're doing at the Institute for the Future and in partnership with Youth Law Center and with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is to help bring this concept of future readiness to philanthropy and the civic sector at large. Future ready is the opposite of future shock because what it means is that you as an individual, you as an organization or you as the communities that we all live in. In some cases we serve. We're all able to anticipate systematic changes far out into the future and we're able to understand what the impact of those changes might be in the near term and in the longer term. And from that we're able to envision preferred pathways out of whatever unsavory future slash present we find ourselves in. And then finally and most importantly in future readiness work, we're able to shape the desirable futures we want. We are not victims to someone else's future. We are architects of building the futures we want. And everything I'm saying is fairly familiar in the corporate sector. There are plenty of sessions around strategic foresight where entities and corporate organizations have spent a lot of time thinking about a broad set of futures say unsavory ones, savory ones. And our work and the urgency we feel this conversation today is to say that the same tools the same processes the same mindsets should be available to every single organization, every single community and every single individual. And so a lot of the work that we're doing with these three women that are at the vanguard of bringing future readiness and bringing futures thinking to the civic sector and to philanthropy is to just is to do that to spread the work of futures thinking and future readiness across all all facets of our society. So, as I mentioned, I'm going to sort of with that set up not talk this much ever again. I'm sorry for the long wind I get really passionate about futures thinking, but I'm going to introduce have these three actually introduce themselves. And then Carla after she introduced herself is actually going to take you on a little adventure into futures thinking, then we'll come back have a conversation about their own for foresight journeys and what they're trying to achieve in their work. And then we'll open it up to you all for some Q&A. So mark is in the room, and he's got cards that they we can hand out just indicate raised by the by a raise of your hand if you'd like to ask a question, and he'll be collecting those so when we get to that phase of the conversation. I'll have your questions. So with that, let me hand it over to Jennifer Rodriguez who's the executive director of the Youth Law Center. Thank you so much, Rachel. Good morning, everyone. It's a joy to be with you here. It's my first so cap ever and I'm thrilled to see so many people have interest in the future. As Rachel said, I'm the executive director of the Youth Law Center. We are a national legal advocacy organization focused on ensuring that the systems that care for young people who are in the foster care and the juvenile justice system are able to support those children in use so they can thrive in the future. And then Landra Washington. Good morning, everyone. Really glad to be here and so excited to see you all. I'm a Landra Washington. I'm vice president for transformation and organizational effectiveness at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. And we are focused at the heart around ensuring that the lives of children, families and communities are improved with an equitable lens. So I'm really glad about the conversation today and look forward to the engagement. Good morning. Okay, so I see our interactive exercise is going to really have to ramp up the energy, but good morning. I'm Carla Thompson Payton and I'm vice president for program strategy at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. And at the Kellogg Foundation, we center all of our work on children, but we also recognize that children reside in families and families reside in communities and it will take all of us working through those ecosystems and those supports in order for children to thrive. And we want children to thrive right now. We don't want this to be something that's going to be decades from now, but right now in this moment. And so part of what we wanted to do as an organization was really shake up how we thought about the future. Often we're thinking about the urgency of now we're being responsive to what's happening to children in the communities in the right now. And it's not so often, even from a philanthropic point of view, which is a very privileged seat that we actually take a step to say, Hey, let's think about what we're doing, how we're doing it and where we're doing it. And let's think about where we'd like to go, not just for the next year or the next three years, but where do we want to be a decade from now? And so about two years ago, we began a process to think through how do we change our mindsets and then how do we engage the communities that we serve in new and different ways. And so many of my colleagues from the Kellogg Foundation is in the audience. I will not call them out yet. But one of the things that we wanted to do was really start our foresight practice. And so when we thought about this conversation, it's one thing for you to sit and listen to us, but it's another thing for you to be as part of the process and interactive. So I'm going to ask you three questions and these questions are around possible futures. We want to move from cynicism to optimism within those questions, but there's no right or wrong answer depending on where you sit really determines your outlook. What we want to do is open that mindset to think about other outlooks. So on a scale of one to 10, I'm going to ask you to raise either a 10 because you believe that this future is possible. A one, you have serious questions and a midpoint around whether or not it could be, but I need more support in order to get to a place of optimism. And so here's the first question. What do you think about the next 10 years of philanthropy or impact investing and the possibility of making a real difference in the communities that you serve? If you think it will mostly stay the same, I want you to raise one finger. If you think that it's going to be radically different 10 fingers or anywhere in between that scale. So I'm going to ask everyone to respond to this question. Can we make a real difference for communities that we serve in the next 10 years? I see some very optimistic people in the room. It's good. I saw a couple of ones. Hopefully this conversation will get you to at least a three. If not, we'll revisit. But when you think about the next 10 years, we went through an exercise and there are a variety of tools that we use as part of our practice. And for many of us in that room, we brought together almost 200 grantees and we asked them a very similar question. And they were stumped at first. They were like, we don't think that far in advance. And so we asked them to think about who will you be in 10 years? And that opened up a different type of conversation. And then once they thought about who they would be, who will your family be? Where will you be working? What's the world in which you want to live in? It began to really help folks stretch that muscle to think about the future. So that's one question that we typically use to open up the conversation. Question two, in your social impact world, what is your current outlook? One, are you mostly worried? Ten, are you super optimistic around what's going to happen? Let's see those hands. Okay, this side of the room is not optimistic. This side, that's all right. But again, there's no right or wrong answer. It's where we all fall within that continuum. And so it's trying to really bridge conversations to get us closer together to figure out where we're going to be on that continuum and how do we work together collectively? Our last question, how much power or control do you personally feel like you have to affect real change to shape the world, to shape the future of philanthropic or the investment? One, no control. Ten, complete control. I need some answers in this part of the world. What are you thinking? Again, varied positions based on where you are, but that is the reality that we face. Never will there be a time where we're 100% in agreement or we're 100% optimistic about the future. And never will there be a time where we don't have some doubts and some risk. What we've learned in our foresight practice, it gets us comfortable in identifying the risk, identifying the opportunities and helping us to set a stage for what's our risk mitigation strategy? How much risk do we want to lean into? What are the things that we're really optimistic about? And it helps us to be more thoughtful and planful, but most important, it also allows us to bring in new voices to the table. And so we hope through this conversation, we pique your interest in foresight and how to use this in the work that you're doing, because I will tell you, we've used it with our investment team for our $8 billion corpus. We've used this with our social impact team with our $100 million investment strategy, and we use it in our grant making team with our $400 million of grant making we do every year. And every single person came in on a different side of the scale. But at the end of the practice, they realized that there's something in this for each one of them, and that's what we're hoping you walk away from today with. So I will turn it to Alandra to get us started. Thanks, Carla. And I really appreciate the exercise because as we say, there is no wrong or right answer. It really is where you sit and how you see the future. I think for the Kellogg Foundation, as we thought about partaking up on this future ready journey, we've been tipping our toe in this for quite a while, and then really started to get into it in a more succinct and strategic way. Really about 15 years ago, our colleague, Diana Langenberg, who was director of our human resources department, who is now our vice president, introduced a set of her philanthropic HR colleagues to institute for the future and actually invited in the executive director, Marina Gorbis, to come and talk about how do you start to think about a strategy and a future around people. And talent and recruiting and retaining talented and high functioning workforce for philanthropy and thinking about what the future of work will even look like 10, 20 years out. And so she started to introduce colleagues to that particular piece of work just in the HR field. If we fast forward maybe to about 2017-18, our CEO at that time, who's now serving Lejeune Montgomery-Tabron, took the helm of the Kellogg Foundation, and she actually stepped into the role of thinking about ways that we can shift the culture of the Kellogg Foundation to think about our investments from a generational perspective. Understanding that change takes time, and it's going to take time over a generation. And so how do we really start to deepen those investments, get proximate, even more proximate to community, and work in greater partnership with community around the change that we want to see for children and families. With that work, she brought in IFTF to work with our board of trustees and our executive team. And I remember that day clearly. Carla and I were sitting across the table from one another, and at each juncture around Marina introducing those foresight tools and practices and how we could really embed them within philanthropy and within the Kellogg Foundation. Carla and I, our eyes just started to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And we were like, you know what, we're on to something here. Immediately after, Carla and I signed up actually to go through the training and development with IFTF, and then the pandemic hit. And so IFTF had to pivot as we all had to pivot to really navigate that. And they provided an online opportunity for folks to go through that training. And it was a game changer for us at the Kellogg Foundation. And at that time, I was co-leading around our emergence response to the pandemic. And we were able to use almost every tool in that toolbox in order for us to think about how we prepare for a future that we know is going to be uncertain, where we know that we will not have all of the answers and really getting the understanding that there will be plausible futures and possibilities, and how do we prepare for that? And so we had a group of maybe about 15 to 20 folks across the organization who served on our emergence committee that started to embed and learn these tools in a way that helped us to think about the future of the organization and where we want to be as we emerge out of the pandemic. And I'll tell you, all of those assumptions that we hold about philanthropy and what we can and cannot do, we challenged every one of those assumptions. How we give money, how we show up at work every day and what that looks like, how we work synchronously and asynchronously with one another. And we also thought about how the future will look for children and families as we do our grant making and our investment practices. And so those became real game changers for us. And as we emerged out of the pandemic, we became an organization that looks so different than what we looked like and practiced so many different ways of doing philanthropy than what we did before. And that really was helpful for us. The other thing that we did is, you know, it's always the saying that grantees have, don't do anything for me without me and include me in everything that you do. That is a principle of the Kellogg Foundation and part of our DNA as we really embed the voice of our grantees and partners and communities. And so we also invited them into the conversation around how we should emerge from the pandemic. And what does that look like for them in the future using many of the questions that you practice and saw today. And then lastly, as we continue to think about our strategy moving forward, and Carla alluded to this, we've been able to engage our grantees and engage our partners and vendors going on a future ready journey with us. And from a strategic lens, 10, 20 years out, how do you really need the Kellogg Foundation to show up for you? What are the plausible and possible futures that we see, and both on the end of being highly optimistic, as well as those things that we know we still have challenges around, and what will it take for us to address those challenges. And so our future ready journey has been a game changer for the Kellogg Foundation is really shifted our mindset, and it's shifted the culture of the organization to always be ready to step into a futures thinking frame. Thank you so much, Landry and thank you Carla for immersing us into some of the orientation to the future that will do in foresight and future ready journeys. Jennifer, tell us about Youth Law Center's future ready journey. Yeah, absolutely. So I started this journey at a much different place than Carla and Alondra did. And I wish I had met the Institute for the future before the pandemic hit. But as it happened, I guess I met just at the right time. So when the pandemic sort of flipped our world upside down, one of our funders the California Wellness Foundation held a pandemic future scenario training for all of their grantees and they were trying to help us navigate sort of the unchartered waters of figuring out what to do to create the end result as the pandemic went away. This was your one of the pandemic, and how to actively think about building towards that. So this was fascinating to me because as a leader of an advocacy organization. I think, you know, we are always trying to, before I understood what futurists were, I would say we probably were doing the work of futurism we're imagining worlds that don't currently exist and then trying to figure out how can we develop the changes necessary to actually create those worlds. But hearing the kind of tools that the Institute for the future had in sort of being able to not just charter through this time of uncertainty, but really actually build and identify what we needed to be moving towards was really, really helpful to me as an organizational leader. So I went to this training and came out with a million different ideas. So organizationally, I'll tell you that we were in a transitional period. When I became the executive director of the youth law center, my experience was as an advocate and a lawyer. I had not led an organization before and the organization that I took over leading had six very experienced decades long civil rights lawyers, and they had sort of grown up and develop their advocacy skills in the civil rights era. That's how they thought about the work. Those were the strategies they used. I had transitioned to having almost all of those folks retired and this brand new cohort of lawyers who thought very differently about how to achieve change in the world. And so I was sort of standing on the threshold of all of this historical information we had about change and then a whole new generation of lawyers who were coming in and thinking about advocacy and lawyers, not as the center and the like nexus. And so I went to this training for change and for us for change, but really as empowering the community to lead the change that they wanted. And so organizationally we were in flux in our strategies and then the pandemic came in and in some ways the pandemic actually created what I live for, which I am always looking for an opportunity for change. I think where is the moment that we can get systems to change the way that they have been doing things for decades, sometimes centuries. And most of the time people are resistant to that, but the pandemic sort of forced everyone's hand and folks were, you know, who work in the bureaucracies that we advocate to change were forced to do things differently so it actually was an opportunity for us. So the things that I loved about learning from the Institute for the Future was when the values were completely consistent with the way that the Youth Law Center operates, which is we are all about at the end of the day building power with the young people that we advocate for. I started my advocacy journey actually as a teenager. I was a member of the California Youth Connection, which is an advocacy organization of young people have experienced foster care. And so when I started my advocacy journey, I knew that this was something that we're not going to win unless we make sure that the people that are closest to the problems but further away from the power and the resources to change are really the architects for that change. That's what Institute for the Future believes too is necessary to building power in the futures that we want is engaging those folks. So that was thing number one that immediately drew me to the Institute for the Future. But the second piece was the really concrete tools that you heard mentioned. I think my eyes probably got really big on Zoom too, hearing them because one of the things around coming out of the work as a youth advocate and becoming a lawyer is that when you grow up, in the system, my experience like so many other young people's experience was that we by necessity of being raised by a government system never had the opportunity to vision what a good future would look like, what a desired future would look like. So as a result, what we were doing was the limits of our imagination were kind of like what we had read in a book or seen on TV around the way that children should be parented and raised. And I tell people all the time that I didn't as somebody who grew up in institutions and who experienced homelessness. I didn't actually understand what the future I was trying to build for the children and youth we advocate for was until I became a mom. And once I had children of my own and I can see this is what we want. We want our children to be loved. We want our children to be held as sacred. We want our children to have to become happy, healthy, 40 year olds. Right. All the other goals that I had set sort of for the future were too small. So those concrete tools are really critical for folks who haven't had the opportunity to imagine a future in that is worthy of them to use to do that and like just as a very concrete example. I remember one of the things that IFTF had us do in our training was they said, you know, tell us something that is true right now about your organization during the pandemic that you are struggling with. We all wrote that truth down. And then they said, write down what the opposite would be. And none of us wanted to write down what the opposite would be because I didn't sound realistic. It didn't sound practical at the time. But then writing it down, let us know this is what we this is what we want to build. So that was all so helpful. And I integrated those things immediately into our advocacy again as advocates were opportunistic where folks we are constantly we know where we want to go but we need to be figuring out how to get there. And looking doing the foresight practice of scanning for signals and trying to figure out where are there places that people are living the the future in the present was sort of critical to figuring out where we can go. We also engaged the Institute for the future to come in to work with us on a project that we have been funded by a tipping point community to do to reimagine the transition that young people exiting foster care have. And this is critical because the majority of those young people are black and brown young people. Most of them are exiting to homelessness to you know dependency on on the same systems that we're trying to move them away for every negative outcome you can think of. And so what we thought was one of the problems in the area that we advocate in is that people not only sort of use the present to set their their goals. They actually use the past. So when folks were thinking about what would a good life look like for a young person who is exiting foster care. They were relying on the experiences of people like me who exited foster care a decade or two decades ago. They were relying on ideas about work that were really outdated that you could go into a trade not that you would have your first job with an algorithm as a boss as an employer. And many of our systems it's a contraband to be to have a cell phone or to be on the Internet. So really outdated visions of what it takes to thrive. So we brought in the Institute for the Future and we brought in the advocacy organization of current and former foster youth the California youth connection that I mentioned. And we actually have the Institute for the Future train those young people in becoming futurists and you know sort of futurist juniors I guess would be the right way to say it. So teaching them all the tools that they needed to imagine this future for young people in 2035 where they are exiting foster care and they are fully prepared to thrive. And that to me once again felt like that's the work that we need to be doing in terms of sort of taking that project and pushing it across our organization. We adapted other advocacy models that we have as well in response where where we're doing now is making the investment in the community and the folks who are going to live those futures to be able to vision with us. And then we bring in the legal tools to help them achieve that future. And that to me feels like the right approach to change. I think they are bona fide futurists those young people. And we often say that artists and young people get the future more than than the rest of us do. And I was actually at that training with the California youth connection and I remember one of the ideas that they generated about what it would feel like in 2035 exiting foster care was that you could be a foreign exchange student that you could travel abroad. And I thought I wonder how many policymakers and well-meaning advocates would sit around and try to design a benefit set of services and supports and just not come anywhere near the ideas that they were designing for themselves or what we were calling future use. What can you imagine for their future. So it was a reminder that once we get their ideas and we get their voice all our role is to just amplify and act on. Now Carla when you started your remarks you've made this comment about how your you know your drive your passion is that every child to be thriving right now. And then we got into this conversation about the future. Now oftentimes this will get set up as a dichotomy that by thinking about the future you're ignoring the problems of the present or we'll say I don't have time to think about the future. Can you see the amount of fires I'm putting out right now. I think this is true for all three of you. So I'm curious if you'd each respond to that. That what I might say is a false dichotomy between the future and the present. Right. So it's one of those things that we constantly face in our work. It's always the urgency of now the urgency of now. But if you don't create an opportunity to think about how do you move past the urgency and what happens when this crisis. Remediates itself. You never get to the point of being prepared for the future only preparing for the urgency of now. And we wanted folks to break that cycle of thinking around it being a negative experience and being something that doesn't allow children to have pathways that they've never experienced before that doesn't allow communities to try things new and different. And we also wanted to really dismantle what's the risky proposition that folks have in their mindset around why the urgency of now is the only thing that they can focus on. And so we began the conversations to say OK yes we recognize the urgency of now there will always be a focus on the urgency of now. We want to create the room and space to think about if you had all of the resources available all of the will available all of the communities being able to voice what they wanted for success which looks very different in every community. What would that look like. And there was a really long pause because most folks never really get to the space around what does it look like when we've arrived. What does it look like to be on a different path in that journey. What does it look like if we were able to actually really dismantle these systems that have held and marginalized communities for a really long time. And when folks began to think that they were actually creating the box that they were operating under then the conversations around what's the possibility. If we have an opportunistic mindset what does that change. Who would we partner with that's different than who we're partnering with now. Are there other sectors that are facing similar issues that we should be engaging with so that we can solution together. Have we actually even talked to children and families around what is it they want and do do those priorities align. And so for us it was really around creating a new conversation with new questions. Some of them would be solution. Some of them would be things that we want to work towards. Some of them are the urgency of now but we can only focus on the now. We actually have to focus on where we want to go because if not we're just spinning in circles and we've all know what it's like to spin in circles. We've seen decades and decades of spinning in circles. If you really want children to thrive you have to break those circles and figure out where else can we go and what's the new thing that we all want to aspire for in the work. And so it takes time to get to that space. I will not say that we have figured it out fully at the Kellogg Foundation nor to the communities that we work with. But if you don't have the conversation you actually don't move forward. And so for us it was engaging folks in a new conversation allowing the space for that. You know what I don't know and that being completely okay. And then also inviting them to think about who's missing from the conversation. Yeah, Rachel and I appreciate the question and I'll just build on that because as we think about even philanthropic practice and what that looks like for us and how we engage with our communities. When we think about that dichotomy of the urgency of now and thinking about the future. For us we continue to feel a little bit stuck as a W.K. Kellogg Foundation and even how we showed up with our communities and what our communities and grantees and partners said about us. Right, so we have been in many of you if you're in philanthropy you might know the Center for Effective Philanthropy and all of the great assessments that they do in this space around philanthropic practice and effectiveness. And as we continue to look at those scores and look at that feedback, we really realized around some real opportunities to get unstuck in that space. And how the tools from IFTF really helped us to think about ourselves in a different way that aligns with what we're hearing from our grantees and grant seekers. It also starts to help us reflect on where we are missing the mark with all of this and starting to challenge those assumptions that we've held. And many of those assumptions if you're in philanthropy, it's around evidence-based practice and making sure that it's working well in community. Market rate return. Market rate return. It's around general operating support versus program support. And so all of those things we really started to internally reflect on in our foresight work and our future-ready work and start to think about practices that we can dismantle and just put aside and say, you know what? That's not working for us anymore. It's not working for our grantees anymore. And as we think about the future, how do we show up differently? So there is, I think, you know, a balance with that and it can get a little dicey, I think, in some of those conversations. But for us, it is how do we push forward with this particular work? And one of the tools that we've used to do that, and Jennifer mentioned around the signal, and we did a signal swarm within the foundation. And I think probably now we've collected over 700 and something signals where all staff are going out and really thinking about what's out there in the future for the lives of children and families for nutrition and health and family economic security. What does that look like and where are the innovations and how can we start to learn about those innovations? But also, we started to test assumptions that were deeply held conventional wisdoms within our foundation and how do we start to break away from that using our future-thinking tools? And that has definitely helped us as a foundation shift our practices and show up in a way that's more beneficial for our grantees and grant seekers. And as we started to do this work, we also saw those GPR grantee perception report scores skyrocket and change and reflect the way that we're now wanting to show up with our grantees. And so I would just say with these particular tools and the way that we've used them, it's both been an inside-outside approach that has been beneficial for our foundation. And the only thing I would add when we thought about it also from our investment perspective, the investment of our corpus and our social impact investing, it also allowed us to think about what's our risk proposition and is our risk proposition aligned to our values. And as we think about market results, is it only a financial result? Is a social result? Which weighs more in any given interaction and any given investment? And really helped us to begin thinking about, yes, we all want the returns, but at what cost? We say we want to work with a diverse market, but are we putting up barriers that doesn't allow that diverse market to actually engage with us in the ways in which we know it needs to happen? What's our language in this space? How are we creating an open door for folks to approach us? And the most importantly, how are we partnering in our network with other folks who are in the impact investing space so that they can learn that what we're learning and we can share our investment ideas, our investment strategies and help to build a broader ecosystem to really get resources to communities that have been historically left out in the market. And just to build off of that, I thought another game changer just in that space is how we blend those two across the foundation and how those who traditionally aren't working in our mission driven investment work and our PRI work are now clearly understanding more of the language and the integration of that work. And before it was two sides of the house, right? You had your grant makers on one side, you had your mission driven investment work on the other side, and never did the two meet. And I think with the way that we're approaching it now, that strong integration and that blending so we can understand where philanthropic tools can actually help to fill in the gaps around that has also helped us in our work and helped us to move the needle around what we care about. Thank you, Jennifer. What would you add? I would just add from a perspective of somebody who is doing the work that it is really critical to know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're certainly not going to end up where you want to be. And for my team, it is certainly a balance. We are advocates. So again, my team tends to become experts on sort of the harms now in this moment. And it lies a good tool for addressing those harms for prescribing stop doing this thing that's bad. You know, don't do this, don't treat children in this way. It is a terrible tool, though, for dreaming a different future and having people think and behave and sort of changing the culture. And you really have to understand sort of be able to analyze the gap between where you currently are, the urgency of now, and where you're trying to go so that you understand what the problems are, like and do an accurate read on what the gap and the problems are between where you are and where you're trying to go. And then you can make sure that you are developing strategies that are not misaligned. And this is really important to me because I feel like as the leader of this organization, I do not want goals for our children and youth that are that are low goals. I do not want goals of, you know, we will not have children dropping out of high school or we will not have children who are hungry or we will not have abuse and neglect. I want high goals. I want goals around joy and happiness and feeling like you can contribute to your community. The only way you can do that is by having a foot in both places, both in the urgency of the now and the other foot in here's where we're trying to go and constantly assessing what's the gap between those two places so that you can strategize so how do we win, how do we get there. And so I feel like for my team, it is constantly keeping them on track to like both and and I will say that something is that is critical in that is that the work with IFTF really helped me as a leader understand that what I needed was I needed time to think and strategize. I particularly during this pandemic period would often be on like zooms responding to things both inside the organization and outside the organization for 10 hours a day. There was no time to think about anything. And part of what I really needed was I needed the time to think and strategize and to expand my reference set. I cannot tell you how much I live, have lived, breathe and slept literally foster care and juvenile justice for my entire life. Those are the experts I listened to. Those are the people that I know that's what I read about work with IFTF really helped me understand that the only way to have the kind of creative thought and vision that we need to have that our children and youth deserve us to have in this work was to read and listen to and learn about from everyone else from every other sector from the business sector from organizational psychologists from people who understand climate change from people who understand what the future of AI is and tech of a workforce and be able to integrate all of that into what our goals are for our young people because they deserve that. So you three are very talented advocates and so you're convincing this group that you've got this has some value so here come the hard hitting questions. If you have more send them my way we've got a few minutes still to ask your questions. Okay so it sounds like you got some buyers in the room but now they're interested in understanding what are the largest barriers to democratizing this kind of training and tools and thinking to an even wider audience and what are your roles in increasing that access. So I think the largest barriers that we work with who we know and who we're comfortable with and that we don't actually really open up that invitation for folks who have different belief systems different processes different ways of doing business to engage with us. And so one of the things that we did as part of our practices that we not only left it open to our grantees but we left it over to partners we left it over to journalists to vendors contractors folks who weren't grant making not in grant making folks were focused on children not focused on children folks who wanted to think only about investments in market rate returns versus folks who want to think about how do we move people out of poverty and so we brought them all into a room. Typically we would segregate them OK those who are working on children issues in this room those who are working on workforce issues in this room those who are contractors in this room. We said no we're going to have an open space and we mixed everyone and I will say we were very nervous because we weren't sure what was going to come out of it but that's what made it even more valuable. The conversations that folks began in that room one made them recognize that the humanity in all of them that all of their value streams were very important to them even if they weren't shared value streams. And that there was a space to have an honest conversation because at the end of the day everyone wanted to have a better future and not just focus on today. And to the willingness to hear things that made you uncomfortable the willingness to continue the conversation past that initial conversation and then the willingness to put resources out there for folks to be able to continue that conversation. And for us that's how we democratize the process where it's not the Kellogg Foundation sitting in that leadership seat. It's here's what we're doing here's what we've been engaged in we want to share it with you we wanted to be a reciprocal process. We don't only want to extract information from you we want to be able to give you back everything that we heard but we're also inviting you to have this conversation in your community and have conversations with people you've never spoken to before. And for us we believe by demonstrating that value stream it gave folks agency to demonstrate the ways in which they wanted to approach their work in their local community and for us that is don't ask people to do what you're not willing to do yourself. And that is the value that we entered into the space. Yeah, I appreciate that Carla. And I think another barrier just for the Kellogg Foundation and I think for the sector in the field overall is really how safe do you want to play it. Right. And so I think we get into these places and these spaces of privilege and safety where we do not really want to hold up a mirror in front of our philanthropic sales and say where are we really missing the mark on making change in the world. What does that look like for us moving forward. And I think the example that you used and what I really got out of it as we were kind of thinking about how will these conversations go in the room with the mix of folks from just all across the spectrum and what that looks like. Because how safe do we want to play it. And what are the risks that we really want to take in this space that will even have the Kellogg Foundation showing up in a vulnerable way and being able to answer hard questions from individuals around. What will it really take for the Kellogg Foundation to get us to this space that we're envisioning for the future. And how are you going to reflect about yourselves and your practices and how you're showing up with us in this space. So for me there was just this space of vulnerability that's really interesting. And I think the other part to that question for me is the role that we play in this is how we show up every day challenging philanthropy in this space to think differently. How we show up with that lens of equity and for us at the Kellogg Foundation. Our DNA is around racial equity community engagement and leadership. And how do we really start to push the needle around that with a future thinking lens that takes in to account all of the ideas and perspectives that people are thinking about in this particular space to improve the lives for vulnerable children. So you know my role is to really be out there pushing around those spaces and being the provocateur in that space as we continue to rise to the challenges. And I'll just do a quick I'll represent for the grantees. I don't know how many of you are in the room there but I will say that for us the barrier is capacity and resources. I was fortunate enough to have a grant that allowed us to bring tipping point in for the sort of time limited project an advocacy project. And that has what has allowed us to really do this. Most funders and investors do not fund opportunities to imagine they fund the work but sort of they want to know what what are your deliverables what's going to happen quarter one. What are you going to change what's going to happen quarter to what are you going to change this kind of process does not fit neatly into that kind of proposal process or even reporting on outcomes. So it's really really important that if we want people to be able to imagine the futures they're going to build and do that in partnership with the right people the people who are impacted that you fund that work it was incredibly time consuming and resource consuming I'm going to train the young people who were advocates and I will tell you it has paid off times a thousand because they took that training they took it for this project yet we're building a campaign there. Yes but they also took it into their own daily work back in their communities and into their own lives. So that's a huge investment that is worth that time. And in contrast I'll tell you I got the opportunity to go to an organizational IFT training that had no resources attached I just went and learned I brought I dragged along a colleague with me but we did not have the capacity to implement what we needed to implement because there was no no funding. If I had my way queen for a day I would make sure that every organization had a I would love to have a futurist on our team who was constantly thinking who was implementing processes in the organization who could be my thought partner around understanding you know what are the future forces that are going to impact our children and youth and how can we be as smart as we possibly can in our advocacy work. But so far I have not found the RFP out there that will allow me to bring that futurist on staff. Well you just take a minute and then I'm going to ask Jennifer a question. Well I'm asking her the audience has asked for a couple concrete examples of using philanthropic tools in the PRI space. So think on that while I just you know you mentioned the capacity of the grantee being a barrier but I'm also watching you right now think about narrative change with policymakers which feel like another piece of this story that now we've got this foresight. We've got this future vision of children in 2035 that is centered around family connections and joy and and a real new definition of what success and thriving looks like for children that are that are exiting foster care or young people really 10 years from now. But now you're now you're in the work of translating this great content to policymakers and to get them to who think also very incrementally to get them to think big and bold and not only think but act big and bold. So I think it's a little bit too about the work of foresight to action in in your space. Yep. I can go second. You go and you want me to go. Yeah I mean it is a significant barrier. I would have always thought that policymakers sort of the reason they run for political office is because they believe they are architects of the future and they understand that they hold that change. However they are feeling right now like the future is happening to them as well. And so getting them up to speed on what's happening with the climate. What does that mean for children who are displaced from a family. If we have climate emergencies and we need to have children relocating who are not connected with family and extended family. Like isn't that an emergency in in our state in our country. Getting them to understand that getting them to think about what does it mean to be really holistic in an approach to mental health and behavioral health and also how to think how to think positively about our children as children. I think that is that is a huge barrier and so much of that has been I hold us as advocates to blame for this because we have gotten so good on educating policymakers on the urgency of now that they think about our children as sort of a collection of the worst things that happened to them on the worst days of their life and all of the statistics around the things that we're trying to avoid. And we have not shared this expansive vision of what our young people could be in the future. And so there's a lot of work to do to win on this campaign. We have to convince them that our young people are worthy that the system needs to be the one that's accountable not the youth accountable. The system has to be accountable for those outcomes. We have to help bring them up to speed on all the future forces that we now understand are coming down the pipeline and what those mean for children and youth and families. And that's an incredible amount of work. And I do think I really appreciate what you said about a multidisciplinary approach because I don't think we can do that alone as advocates which goes again to sort of the capacity. I think we're going to have to sort of have a unified voice around what the future is that we're trying to create for all folks who are vulnerable and then lift up the special needs of particular populations like children and youth. Yeah, the baseline. Yeah. Okay, a couple examples. So example for our program related investment portfolio. So our PRI program is not traditionally housed within our impact investing portfolio. It's actually housed in our programming grant making portfolio. And we do that because we want ideas that are generated from communities on the ground to burgeon forward. So what we've been trying to do and what we've been doing successfully for the past few years is for every PRI. There's an opportunity to do traditional grant making to help build their capacity, get those groups ready, have them build their networks. Think about what skills they need to have internally to their organization in order to be ready to take on this financial responsibility and figure out how they can schedule out their repayments. They work in partnership with our program related investment officer to really think about what are the things that you need to do as an organization to be able to pass your financial due diligence. Where do you want to start and where do you want to go? How do you, how are you thinking about moving from a PRI to MRI? What are the sorts of things you need to have in your trajectory? What are the partnerships you need to have? What are the financial stability you need to have? What training do you need to have? What coaching and mentoring do you need to have within that space? And we give folks time to think that through. It's not that we believe that everything we do doesn't have risk associated, but we try to mitigate those risks. But we also try to ground it in the value of what's necessary for that community. And for us, if the community is asking for it, it's a way for the community to think about it better tomorrow than we're willing to take on that risk recognizing that not every loan will be repaid. We work that through. We recognize that sometimes we think, okay, we can start off strong, but midway through, they have to have a mid-course correction. And what we've done is build really solid, respectable relationships so that when folks are running into issues, they come to us early so that we can solution together because we want their success. And so particularly during the pandemic, when lots of things were not working out the way we desired, we put out an open call to everyone in our MRI, PRI, or traditional grantmaking and saying, if you are struggling and facing issues, come to us. We will help you figure it out. We will convert whatever you have into general operating if we need to. We'll give you more indirect expenses if you need. We'll figure out if we can reinvest more resources to get you through this patch because it's a partnership. And a world crisis shouldn't be the reason why you don't have success. And so for us, that's how we brought our foresight practice because we recognize that you can't predict today what's going to happen tomorrow because as we learned foresight is not about prediction. It's around planning for the opportunities ahead. And so we wanted folks to feel very comfortable that we recognize that the crisis of today doesn't necessarily block an opportunity of tomorrow. And so we changed the ways in which we supported organizations to get them through that crisis. And because, you know, it's always that first person that tries it that says, oh my goodness, if I'm honest with them, what will happen? And that first person was honest. And then there was the ripple effect. And folks recognize that we were actually going to do what we said. Their success was important. We were willing to navigate our internal policies to bring them closer to success. Last question for you three before we close. And then as Mark mentioned, we'll come back so you can ask them more questions on your own. It's a question around optimism. So we'll end and maybe we'll ask you each to keep your remarks to 30 seconds here. How do you balance the optimism of futures thinking in a moment when our democracy and everything it has enabled us to imagine is facing its strongest internal threats ever. Sure. Thank you, Rachel. And thanks for the question because I do think that there is a balance. And what I always go back to just even personally is around the humanity of our work and my values that really drove me to this sector and understanding how I can show up in that space. And so for me, it's around humanity, how we all understand our connection and interconnection with one another and what that really means. And even in the face of these challenges and even in the face of everything that we're seeing, you know, in our communities that we're seeing on the news that we know is happening both locally and nationally. There is still an opportunity to engage around our shared humanity. And I really try to keep the optimism in that space. You know, I think for me, it's helpful to understand what optimism actually is and what a powerful force it is, you know, you have to feed optimism. And part of doing the futures work, I think does feed the optimism and it feeds at least my own sense that the future isn't just happening to me, all these things in the world. I can create what I want to create. And I will tell you, I think I'm oriented a little bit different to this just because growing up under the conditions that I grew up with and starting my career, we are working with young people who had been failed in the absolute worst ways by systems and had their lives basically close to destroyed like they survived their experiences in the system. And then seeing them emerge magical. And those folks is in the audience, I won't call out, but, you know, just the level of resilience and pride and, you know, just incredible optimism. And I guess that is the word that it that those young people exhibited. There's no way to be pessimistic to me about the future. And, you know, I have a commitment to myself. I tell my team this too, that the moment we're no longer optimistic as advocates, time for us to go take a break. Time for you to go do something else in the world, because the people that we are advocating for, they need us to believe. They need us to create, you know, as long as we're up and living and and walking and have some power and some opportunity to change things. There's reason for optimism. And so I feel like I want to be very clear that I think optimism is a practical force to you can't be unreasonably optimistic, you have to understand the moment that you are in. But this work sort of helps you, I think, understand where you are and looking at the long arc over time. You know, what I didn't finish my thought earlier, but what I was going to say is that one of the things I've learned in the futures thinking is how important history understanding history, knowing history, knowing what worked before what didn't work is to being able to build the future. But being able to understand where we are in the arc of history is also reason for optimism. And, you know, when I'm thinking about the some of the things that I'm still very frustrated about that we work on, I think, you know, we still are working on, for example, the fact that people do not understand that parents and family and loving nurturing interaction between parents and children that is the intervention period. There is no system other intervention that we can fund that we can give that will deliver for children that kind of outcome. But then I think, you know, 30 years ago, we were trying to help people understand that it was not acceptable to hogtie children in cells and leave them the basement. So we're fighting a different fight at this moment, and I need to understand where we are in that fight. And that gives me some of the energy that I need to stay positive and to also know that, you know, the changes incremental some things we have to start over for when we have a, you know, unexpected crisis in our community, whether that's a war or a climate disaster or pandemic, they're always going to be those things. But, all in all, we're making progress. And when I think about optimism, you know, the work that we do centers on children. And our goal is that all children thrive and we recognize that not all children thrive all the time and there's different circumstances that block children from being all that they can be. But when you, for me personally, when I think about the young child, and I think about the curiosity. When I think about the ways in which they're expressing joy. When I think about the ways in which they're building the blocks for who they're going to be as a well rounded adult. That keeps me optimistic. There's always going to be challenges. There's always going to be rest. There's always going to be moments when you get up and go, Oh Lord, not today. But at the same time, you know that that could be a small fragment of your day, as opposed to your entire day. And for me, I'm always looking to surround myself with folks who have a level of optimism about the promise for tomorrow. And for us to feed each other with that energy around what we can do collectively to make the difference that we want to make. And so, you know, land has seen me on my best day. She's seen me on my worst days. But at the end of the day, the commitment is always there. We're going to do everything we need to do to make sure that children thrive. We're going to work in every hard conversation. We're going to talk to people who we wouldn't talk to them if we could avoid it. But the reality is it takes all of us coming together to change hearts and minds. And that's what we committed to when we came to the Kellogg Foundation. And if I may, I would offer from from observing the communities and the work you're doing, the three of you are doing what I would say is that futures thinking itself is a powerful intervention. When I think about what happened in the room when those young people were invited to not only think their future but describe it and define it and put the like the texture to it. It lit up the room. It gave them a sense of agency and kind of force for what they're advocating for that I don't think they felt they had permission to and no one needs permission to dream a future. But I think some people oftentimes are misled to think that other people only certain people get to define the future. And I had the same experience in Jackson, Mississippi watching a young woman talk to me about her future and all of a sudden as the conversation went and she recognized it's her future. You know, she has agency she has choices and that there are there are good forces out there that are working to help her choices and her dreams become reality that itself can be an intervention on its own. And I just wanted to add on that. I mean, going to another area where I'm immersing myself neuroscience. I mean what we know from neuroscience is that the most powerful intervention that we can do for folks who have experienced trauma is give them a sense of agency over everything that we can possibly do. And so many of our communities have experienced unimaginable trauma and tragedy and so this is an intervention in that way is it's not only giving them real agency and not a feeling of I get to make the power but the real concrete tools to do so and the forums to do that work in. Yeah, the wiring, the rewiring.