 Good afternoon everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Alita Sprague and I'm a fellow with New America's Family-Centered Social Policy Program and it is my honor and pleasure to welcome you to dismantling the digital poor house. One of the goals of the Family-Centered Social Policy Program's work is to demonstrate how policies, practices and systems that we believe to act with neutrality or objectivity are often deeply biased and a result of to reinforce inequality rather than reduce it. In automating inequality, Virginia U-Banks powerfully demonstrates how the data systems increasingly used to administer public assistance programs and social services despite operating under a near objectivity are often shaped by destructive narratives around why people are poor and what they deserve. In contrast, the question of how to harness technology to advance equity and effectively engage public problems is at the heart of New America's public interest technology program which aims to improve services to vulnerable communities by connecting public interest technologists with service providers and NGOs. As both of these bodies of work recognize, no single outcome of integrating tech with public services is inevitable but these outcomes are shaped by the presumptions and intentions behind new systems design as well as how their success is defined. As Virginia's work compellingly shows, without changing the underlying narrative about who is poor and why, tech-based solutions often only repackage prior systems fundamental flaws and provide new justifications for the exclusion and surveillance that have long characterized social policy for the lowest income individuals and families. For example, in the context of public assistance programs, automated systems have been presented as a way to support both greater efficiency and greater fairness in that they remove the element of human discretion from eligibility determinations. Too often, however, exclusion and distrust remain the governing principles that animate these new systems which is only exacerbated when they're hastily rolled out without thorough consideration of their potential impacts on the families will be most directly affected. Here in D.C., the Department of Human Services is facing a lawsuit after prematurely introducing a new technology system to process applications for SNAP or food stamps. When the system debuted in October 2016, residents reported having their benefits abruptly cut off without notice and violation of federal law. Others applications were significantly delayed due to flaws in the new systems design. Application processing actually became far less efficient, taking on average 90 minutes each from just 20 minutes under the old system. At the service center in Anacostia, a predominantly black community in southeast D.C., the system would crash every time it rained, a situation that improved only after the building was rewired. The decision to move forward with rolling out the new system, despite warnings from the USDA that further testing was needed, reflects a careless disregard for the lives of people in poverty that conforms to the long-standing narratives that have structured these systems historically. These types of decisions also have ripple effects across communities. Red for the City has reported a 40 percent increase in household-seeking emergency food since the new system was implemented. And troublingly, the increased rate of adoption of these new systems is occurring against a backdrop where the flawed narratives about poverty that have been with us for decades are being revived as effective political tools. We're at a time when policymakers are renewing calls for welfare reform, using the same tired stereotypes and racist dog whistles as 20 years ago, and broadening the scope of whom they deem undeserving of government support more than ever before. During the tax reform debate, for example, Senator Chuck Grassley drew ire for seeming to suggest that the 99.8 percent of Americans who aren't wealthy enough to be subject to the estate tax only have themselves to blame, attributing their failure to invest to a pension for booze or women or movies. And just earlier this month, the Trump administration gave states the go-ahead to begin imposing work requirements for Medicaid. Inspiring a race to the bottom is government's proposed unprecedented hurdles, the basic health care, such as drug tests, smoking fees, and lifetime time limits. This example underscores how people in poverty continue to be treated as the other, despite evidence that half of Americans will at some point in their lives fall below the poverty line. Many states seeking to impose the most punitive new Medicaid restrictions are also those championing automated systems like the ones Virginia discusses in her book. Illustrating heavy systems are in some cases being intentionally deployed as part of broader efforts to ration access to essential supports and scrutinize the lives of those in need. Against this backdrop, identifying how to change narrative about poverty and the power structures that perpetuate them is critical. Today we're talking about how we got here and what the digital poor house looks like, as well as what we can collectively do to dismantle it. We're joined by a really tremendous panel of speakers today. I'm going to start from the far right. We have Mariella Saba, an organizer and researcher with the Stop LAPD Spine Coalition and the Rdata Bodies Project. Next to her is Sherry Honkola, a national organizer with the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. Next we have Rose Afriye, who's the Executive Director of EmRelief. Next to her is Virginia Eubanks, who is the author of Automating Inequality, How High Tech Tools Profile Police and Punish the Poor. She's also an Associate Professor of Political Science at SUNY Albany and was a Class of 2016 fellow here at New America. And finally we have Monica Potts, who'll be moderating, who's a freelance writer and was also a Class of 2016 fellow with New America. And finally I just want to thank the New America Fellows Program for co-hosting this event and for anyone who's interested, applications for the Class of 2019 are due February 1st. You can follow the conversation online this afternoon using the hashtag Automating Inequality and following at New America FCSP. Thank you again for coming and please join me in welcoming our panelists. I want to be part of this exciting conversation with these exciting people. And so I wanted to start with Virginia, congrats on your book. I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about the origin story of this book. How did you decide to write a book about the role that data and automation plays in inequality and poverty in America? And I also want to say thank you to you all for being here and to my incredible co-panelists for sharing this with New America for the incredible support, including the fellowship with which the reporting on this book couldn't have been done, and especially to Rachel for making everything happen on the ground to make sure that people got here and that we found our way here and that we were able to have this amazing conversation. So I'm really grateful to all of you for being part of this conversation. So how I came to this project, how I came to write a book called Automating Inequality, I'm going to give you the very short version of a very long story. So I'm going to give you two sort of points of origin for the book. One is that I was a welfare rights organizer for many years. For about 15 years I stepped back from that work recently when I decided that I needed to learn to tell better stories, which is partially where this book comes from. And early in my welfare rights work I was talking to a young mother in Troy, New York, which is my home, who is called Dorothy Allen in the book. And we were talking about her electronic benefits transfer card, which is the little ATM-like card that your public assistance benefits get loaded onto in the sort of the era after the actual food stamp. And we were talking about our EBT card and I said, you know, like how's it working out for you? And she said, well it's convenient, it's nice, it's really nice to have it look like everybody else in the grocery store. But you know, my case worker uses it to track all of my food purchases. And I must have had this incredibly like shock to look on my face. This is 2000. And she said, oh you didn't know that did you? And I sort of shook my head. And she said you guys, meaning professional middle class folks, you guys should pay attention to what's happening to us because it's going to come for you next. Which I think was a remarkably generous thing for her to say. I just want to say thank you Dorothy for that advice. And that sort of began my fascination with working both on behalf of and with folks who were fighting for their basic human rights to food, housing, and other kinds of social assistance. And also to interrogating and looking at the places in which poor working class families were coming into contact with technology in their day to day lives. Because despite a lot of the rhetoric at the time, that said that there was a digital divide, that people weren't able to access technology at all. What I was finding in conversations with these folks is that technology was absolutely ubiquitous in their lives. But their relationship with it was very complicated and very fraught. So they mostly came into contact with it in the welfare office and the criminal justice system and in the low wage work space. So that's where my interest in this stuff came from. And then after my first book came out in 2011, I went and did a talk in Bloomington, Indiana. I was sitting in front of a crowd much like you and talking about the work in digital dead end. And at the end of the talk, somebody raised this well-dressed man raised his hand and he was like, you know what's going on in Indiana, right? And I was like, no. So basically all of my stories start with me being like, what? So I was like, no, what's happening in Indiana? And he said, oh, you should come out to the hall and talk with me. So I went out to the hall and we had this hushed conversation where he told me about a few years before that the state of Indiana had launched a pilot almost a statewide program to automate all of the eligibility processes for the public service program. So for cash assistance for food stamps or a snap and for Medicaid. And that they had replaced local case providers with online forms and regional call centers that were staffed by private companies through a $1.16 billion contract with a coalition of high tech companies led by IBM and ACS. That this attempt, this experiment had gone so poorly that a million benefits applications had been denied in the first three years of what was supposed to be a 10-year project leading the state to actually break the contract with IBM. And then IBM sued the state of Indiana for breach of contract. And when he had mentioned this to me in 2012, they recently won the first part of the long series of court cases which is still going on today. And the court had awarded them an additional $50 million. IBM had awarded IBM an additional $50 million on top of the $450 million. They had already collected for this system. So it was a pretty classic debacle. And that's really where this book starts. So I go back and tell a little bit of the history of poverty programs in the United States and then we start with this case in Indiana. And what happened in Indiana? It's one of three cases in the book. And one of the things that's interesting to me about that is that I always assumed those EDC cards were just really a good thing. It seems easier, it seems better, it seems less doesn't single people out for stigma in the supermarket. And I think that's where I was coming from approaching your book and I think a lot of people are coming from as well. I always assumed automation was a good thing. It sounds good to me to be able to sit at a computer and apply for programs and have it run through some system that spits me back an answer and I don't have to go to a human services office and apply in person. I don't have to wait in line, which is a really common experience people have where they have to go down to an office, wait in line all day, give the government information it already has for each of the different programs they're applying to. This is a common problem I've heard in my reporting. So it's interesting to me that automation, you view it with a much more skeptical eye. And this will be a question I'll open up to the panel after this, but I want to start with you first. And that's what automation, do you see as bad or worrisome or something we should watch out for? So I think that's a great question. Thank you. So I think it's important to say that I don't think there's anything inherent in this technology that is, for lack of a better word, makes it another boot on the neck of the poor. There's nothing specific about automation that does that. I do believe that the stories I tell make visible the inequities that already exist in these systems and that those inequities are often intensified by automation because automated systems are so fast because they scale so quickly because they can often be really hard to understand. We don't really get, like going to a public service office and applying and getting pushback from another human being is a kind of bias that we understand very easily. Being told by a computer that you've been denied benefits because you've failed to cooperate and establishing eligibility is a different kind of a relationship and it's harder to understand how that happens. So one of the ways I talk about these systems is as diagnostics and intensifiers of the inequities that we already have in our society and I think in some ways in that way they can be useful for helping us diagnose the bigger problems that we're already facing as a culture and as a nation or at least that's my hope is that these systems concretize and intensify the inequality we already have in a way that can make it visible if we pay attention and I also believe that some of these tools can be used to fight back against the intention of a system which is often to divert people from benefits they're entitled to by law and to interrogate folks in a way that may lead to criminalization or other kinds of stigma. So I'd love to hear what other folks have to think. Yeah my next question actually is for Rose who you do work with technology to try to enhance that user experience and to think about the ways that people interact with the programs that they might be eligible for and so I was hoping you could talk to you a little bit about your work with Emory Leith and also the challenges that you face trying to kind of corral that technology. First I just want to say a huge, huge thank you to New America Foundation and also Virginia for writing this book and speaking truth to power and representing people who often don't have their voice at the table of decision making through public service delivery. So as she mentioned my work at Emory Leith is really about focusing on restoring dignity by transforming access to social services and interestingly enough we use technology to do that. And so we've built this easy to use tool on web and text messaging for low income Americans to find out if they qualify and also go on to enroll for social services and when we think about technology we're always trying to leverage it to help families actually access social services and not necessarily be in this position where they're penalized by social services. So some of the things that we confront while we're doing that is one, being able to provide a means and a mechanism for people to find out whether they qualify in simple plain language so like 10 questions which take less than 5 minutes to answer instead of going to wrangle multiple different FPL tables to be able to understand where you fall. So that's one and two that people should be able to find out about eligibility anonymously without always having to produce lots and lots of data to do so. And my co-founder Genevieve Nielsen leads our technological development and a lot of what we also do as a team five strong women headquartered in the city of Chicago is user testing and user informed development of technology. And so that's been a huge opportunity for us to really get feedback and understand what are the big challenges you have for example proving that you're eligible. So one of the great things, interesting things we launched this week was the opportunity for people to corroborate information that they don't necessarily have access to. One of our team members today in partnership with the San Francisco Human Services Agency really helped us think through so what happens when your employer doesn't get back to you on what you made in the last 30 days. You should be able to self attest to what you actually made and that there should be a timeline under which this happens. Just like there's a timeline when you're denied or kicked off benefits there should be a timeline that your employer has to adhere to so that you can actually verify on your own how much you made. And that's just one example. But I think when I think about the great work that you're doing I really think it's about making sure that low income families are represented in the conversations about what is developed each step of the way. Yes it's not inherent to the technology but the policies however are what are really challenging and making it difficult for families to access services. Mariela one of the examples in the book is that the homeless services program in LA and that's where your activism is and I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the interaction that the people on the ground that you work with have with data and technology and how their experience is shaped by that. Thank you. Thank you for the question and thank you for the opportunity to share this space. It's an honor anytime we have the opportunity to speak and I'm coming from Los Angeles thinking about a lot of folks that I've been had the honor to walk with or whose paths we crossed and so I want to honor and respect those voices that I'm listening here today. I am based in Skid Row. I was born in Los Angeles. My lineage comes from Palestine and from Mexico and that informs my perspective on the world and I've lived in LA my whole life. I'm in Skid Row where I daily witnessed people living in the streets in conditions of poverty, conditions that are intentional conditions of suffering and conditions where people have survived time and time again. For me it's important to ground this conversation in what this land has been forced founded on. It's important to know that these systems are operating on roots of slavery, roots of genocide and that this is not old. That we can think about what a slavery look like right now and I think this is part of what this conversation is bringing. What do these technologies look like now and what does automation mean in that and for me automation the way I've witnessed it and the way I see it in Skid Row is how quickly can we shuffle people into the jail or prison system. There's something about pace and oppression. In Los Angeles we also have a fight against drones. It's one of the cities where we've been having a fight police drones. LAPD has really been craving for some time to have drones and I bring in this technology into the conversation because it also has a lot to do with automation and for me automation also has to do with disconnection. Less human contact. More computer based communication and so I hear that question on how these systems try to mask racism, patriarchy, etc. all those harms and blame it on the computer. So when you ask that I think about what it means for people on the ground. Targeted bodies on the ground. These are just other ways that people are getting targeted and also these are this is also an opportunity for us to have this dialogue on how do we survive this, how do we overcome this and how do we be more humane as well. With that in mind I wanted to ask Virginia that and I'm going to also bring Sherry into the conversation here too but one of the things that you do is tie the work that you're doing to the historical story of the way that we've tried to end poverty before or the way that we've treated people who are living in poverty throughout the history of this country really which is why this is called dismantling the digital poor health and you go into poor houses a bit and so to you know for you a lot of the biases that we carried into the automation process just went straight into it so the way that we thought about poverty the way we thought about people living in poverty and deserved help those kinds of biases and prejudices went into the design of a lot of the programs in your three examples in the book. I'm wondering for you all too is this business as usual or is this a new and different kind of frontier when you talk about automation and when you talk about using technology and using data to kind of sort people and think about their services. So one of the ways I talk about it when I talk about the book is that these tools are very much more evolution than revolution that and I actually find it really really important I think as Mediella did as well to ground these tools in the moment in history where they actually arose. So we have this tendency to think of these tools as sort of falling from the sky like the monolith in 2001 and just like fully formed and completely divorced from any historical context. I have a tendency to think about technology in those ways. So it was really important to me to tell a historical story that helped people understand why these tools emerged in the way they did at the time that they did. So there's a bunch of stories in the first chapter of the book that you're all very very happy that my editor cut from 80 pages to 25 pages because I do love historical detail but I do tell a story about the history of poverty policy in the United States from about 1660 to today and I'm just going to tell one tiny piece of that story which is when I started this work I really believed that these tools may have arisen in the 80s with the sort of large scale availability of personal computers in government offices or maybe had arrived around the 1996 welfare reforms because part of that law was a requirement that offices automate and computerize a number of their sort of key processes. So I went to the New York State Archives to look for the tech specs of like when this change happens and I looked in the 1990s and wasn't there. I looked in the 1980s and wasn't there and I kept going back and I kept going back and I kept going back and I finally found the original sort of tech specs for what became the welfare management system in New York State and it actually they started working on it in 1968 and it's really important to understand that moment that these tools start to arise across the country because what was happening at that time was two major things. One was there was a very popular, very powerful national welfare rights movement that was having huge successes, particularly successes around legal challenges to discriminatory eligibility rules that had primarily blocked women of color from receiving welfare in the United States but also single women and other women that welfare offices found suspicious for some reason. So those are rules like man in house which meant that if you were a single mom and you were receiving public assistance, if you had a relationship with any man at all he immediately became financially responsible for your children. Rules like suitable home which meant that a case worker could come inspect your home and decide whether or not you deserved help based on the quality of your mothering or rules like employable mother which meant that for some women, mostly women of color their labor was, their wage labor was considered more important than their labor caring for their children so they were denied public assistance if for example they could get jobs in domestic service or in agricultural work. So these were deeply obviously discriminatory eligibility rules the welfare movement pushed back on them and one on basically every case and for the first time I believe opened up the full complement of constitutional rights to people receiving public assistance. So what happened is the roles expand really quickly and we never get to even 50% of people under the poverty line receiving public assistance in the United States but we come close to 50%. Yeah and I think that's important to emphasize is that I don't think there's ever been a time when the majority of people who qualify for these kinds of programs have received them. The vast majority of people just don't seek them out, don't receive them, don't get them for whatever reason. So between 1963 and 1971 it went from about 10% of four households receiving some kind of public assistance to close to 50% and it went from one in five children to those living under the poverty line receiving public assistance to four in five children. So most of the gains of the welfare rights movement went to children. So this is the moment at the same time you're having a backlash against the civil rights movement that the welfare rights movement came out of your recession begins right so there's budgets are restricting and at this moment I believe you see elected officials and bureaucrats and administrators facing this position where the professional middle class public is insisting that the roles constrict. You can no longer use discriminatory eligibility rules to kick people off public assistance and at that moment is the moment that we see these technologies arise. So we see for the first time things like number matching in the state of Louisiana that matched your social security number across many different programs to police whether or not you're disclosing your whole income and so you begin and at that moment like 1971 the welfare roles start to fall again and today we're at I think less than 8% of eligible families receive TANF cash assistance and you can see it really clearly aligning with the moment these tools are invented. So yeah I think you make the case in your book that it was just a new way to keep people from getting the benefits right and you know I think that one of the questions I have for you Sheri too is when you're thinking about organizing and being an activist around these issues do these present a new challenge or is it do these uses of technology present a new challenge or is it kind of business as usual is this you know newly terrible for you as an activist or is it just the same old terribleness newly terrible well yes and no I think that you know those of us in the welfare rights movement and you know I've been in this struggle for over 30 some years now fighting for my family and other families around the country and was actually the first welfare recipient to testify before congress to try and stop the welfare cuts but through this entire journey has been an effort to have our voices and to be heard and through all of these years we've had to take on the battle of being dehumanized dehumanized and tracked and it goes way back for me because when I was growing up my mom was a victim of domestic violence and they didn't have better women shelters so you know she was put into some category as a poor woman who had never worked outside the household so I was raised in nine different institutions so I spent a great deal of my life trying to learn how I believe that poor women had always revolted and when you ask the question are things worse now I would say yes and no I think that you know I live in a neighborhood where it's the number one murder I mean number one death rate in the country in Kensington in Philadelphia Pennsylvania and there's 40% of the folks are not even online are disconnected from the world but it's those we're living in a time right now in history that is so revolutionary that it's similar to like the invention of fire right electronics and communication and those of us that are low income and poor of color or from the south if we're not exploitable we're expendable and so I think that there's no accident you know when I organized the largest demonstration to stop welfare cuts I found myself in the back of a patty wagon being arrested for two counts of receiving public unlawfully receiving public assistance and the louder the voice you have about poverty in this country and if you've received any kind of governmental benefits you put yourself in jeopardy of going away. I know that one of the things that your organization works with is working with the state on the questionnaires that people have to answer and so have you found that automation has sort of what role does automation play in making that process better or worse for the users that you interact with and what are some of the things that you've worked with on the states so I would say that automation in a way that's profiling that is negative for users is not something that our organization wants to advance I think we are focused on how can we utilize big data to actually really better identify and help people who have been disempowered who have heard the stories about how difficult it is to access services that they're entitled to and have just completely decided that it's not worth the trouble and so one lever that we use and I think this can be complicated for different organizations but we use digital tools to first even help people who are looking for or googling for, binging for information to help them know that there's an option for them to first just again establish at a baseline whether or not they're eligible. Another thing that we've been able to do that I'm really excited about and proud of is that we've also been in conversation and negotiation with governments about what are the required questions that you actually need to answer to be able to submit a successful application and really mediating what the minimum number of questions are and enabling users to just answer that so that they can file a successful application for a meaningful consideration and so those are some of the wins that we've been able to have just by being able to use some of the things that we observe for example in some states there are application questions that go as high as 200 questions just to be able to get what's about $200 in EBT benefits right and so for us we have applications that are just over 20 questions and really being able to assess this is what's absolutely necessary to be compliant with the law and then I think for us really when we think of our bold vision around this is yes in cases where this government agency actually has data that's useful to the application process they should be sharing data so that the burden doesn't always fall on people who have the least amount of time, resources and just availability really to be able to share every single thing just so that they can qualify and get just what they're entitled to in America. I want to ask another question and then hopefully we can get to your all exciting questions but I wanted to talk about the Allegheny County example in your book which is the Child Protective Services Agency there and I think it's interesting because that's in people's minds because of that crazy case in California where 13 children or even more I'm not even sure I remember a lot of children were being abused for several years in several different states and in that story it was clear that a lot of different neighbors and friends knew something was wrong with that family and they just never called or reached out or tried to do anything about it and so I think one of the challenges we have with things like Child Protective Services is balancing this real need to help children who are in danger with what you experienced which is that following out the Allegheny County example which is that there's also not always what's not always balanced is the needs of the families who get caught up in that system so I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about that and what you saw the pitfalls of that program is being. And then I'm going to ask Mediela maybe also to talk about this idea of relevant information but it's something that's come up for you guys in LA as well so I'd love to talk about that some more. But yeah so one of the things I try to do in the book is I kind of step the reader through a process of starting with what really I mean everybody kind of nodded together about the Indiana case. It's a pretty straightforward case. I don't know what was in the soul of Governor Mitch Daniels when that program was planned so I can't say what his intentions were but I think it's really easy based on the evidence of how that program worked but it basically did not respect the people who needed help from the state or the counties and it started from the position that there was a lot of fraud that needed to be made out. And it started from a position where all people needed was like maybe a little push and then they would be supporting in some other way and the little push was that the state would declare that you had failed to cooperate in establishing eligibility and those are the notices that just said in like caps across the top you failed to cooperate in establishing eligibility. It said nothing about how you failed where that failure might be whether you didn't sign one form among 34 different forms whether you photocopied your driver's license and then faxed it to a digital center that then scanned it and it was unreadable like any of those things you could have been denied and the original notice actually they were taken to court on this and lost so you said nothing about the mistake that you had actually made. It's pretty clear that like the separation of case workers from the families that were supposed to be serving like they were responding to tasks instead of families through the computerized system said a lot about what that administration thought the relationship between case workers and the families they served was and also that the sort of how brittle the rules were your inability to make a mistake like a legitimate mistake that all mistakes are fraud basically is what that system said so I start people with that system because I think it's both technically and ethically fairly simple I'm happy to argue the details of that but each case after that gets more complex more complex both technically and more complex ethically so the second case I talk about is a electronic registry of the unhoused in Los Angeles that's called the coordinated entry system the folks who designed it call the match.com of homeless services and the point of the coordinated entry system this is not just in LA it's just LA has been a place where this work has a lot of this work has been sort of most innovative and where the housing crisis is most really that the stakes are really high there's 58,000 at least 58,000 unhoused people in LA County so this system basically asks unhoused people to take a really extensive survey that asks often very invasive questions that are supposed to establish their relative vulnerability and then prioritizes those folks with the highest vulnerability for the most appropriate available housing resources that's how it's supposed to work in theory we can get into that and the the ISPIDAT which is the survey it's a terrible acronym vulnerability index and service decision service prioritization decision assistance tool so we can talk about that a little bit later but I want to go get to the case that Monica about one of the things that we talked about is that that was really a best-case scenario right the Allegheny County system they had input from the community that it was supposed to be helping they had people who were really really trying to help it wasn't designed to to hurt people you know so I think that's I think that's one of the most interesting yeah and that's why I kind of ask people to step through this process with me in the book I just sort of start with the easy case and then kind of pull the rug out from under people a little bit as you go through to get to the really the deeper issues that are at at the heart of these systems so that quickly the Allegheny County system is called the Allegheny Allegheny family screening tool the AFST it is a statistical model that is supposed to be able to forecast which children are at greatest risk of abuse or neglect in the future in Allegheny County which is the county that contains Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania it draws that information from a county-held data warehouse that includes information from 29 different programs including things like juvenile parole adult parole the police 29 no I'm sorry 20 different Pittsburgh schools that public school systems the Office of Income Maintenance which is there was Pennsylvania's welfare office and a number of different agencies and it's used by intake screeners which are basically human beings who sit in a room and answer the abuse and neglect hotline and when they answer the hotline they answer a couple of questions based on their interview with the person who's calling and their research in the data warehouse and through publicly available documents they decide whether or not the allegation is actually abuse or neglect and what the severity of that allegation is they decide what they think the risk to that child is and then they run this model and the model gives them a score between 0 and 20 and it shows up on sort of a thermometer that's like green at the bottom and red at the top of the the risk to that abuse and neglect might happen in this family as Monica said in many ways this is sort of a best worst case scenario in that the the the system was designed from a participatory perspective so folks from the community were involved in the design Allegheny County has been remarkably transparent it's not one of these cases where it's like a private company and they won't release what's in the algorithm like they've been remarkably transparent about what's in the model released all the predictive variables though not the weight which is like another thing that we can talk about and they've been remarkably accountable because the reason they're keeping it as a public something that's held by a public agency is they want people to be able to ask for transparency around it and they want to be accountable to the public in some way they designed the system in the first place you can just talk quickly about that because I think that that really gets to kind of the fundamental problem in the fundamental solutions which I hope we're all gonna talk about too because this was about the way it was conceived in the first place right so one of the things that I do in the book that's really important to the way I am able to tell these stories is I start from the point of view of the targets of these systems so I started in each of these places talking to folks in Indiana who had lost access to their benefits I talked to folks in Los Angeles who either who had great luck with the coordinated entry system or not the great luck with the coordinated entry system and in Allegheny County I started by talking to parents and families who had interacted with children youth and families which is what they call children protective services in Pennsylvania and they had a set of really legitimate and important concerns one of them was that the the data that feeds this model only comes from the use of public programs right so a family who struggles with addiction but gets help with their addiction through private insurance that experiences in isn't in this database anywhere if you have support from a nanny or a babysitter information from the nanny and the babysitter they aren't mandated with reporters that's not going to go into the system or if you have access to a mental health care that is covered by private insurance that information is not going to go into the system so the families that I was talking with are mostly families who use county resources to get the support they need for their families and they felt that it was a form of profiling that this model only collected information on people who reached out for public support and so they felt very much under the microscope and they expressed it in that word in those words that it seems like no matter what you do like you can't ever be good enough and that you're always under suspicion of potentially harming your children there's also some technical issues about how abuse and maltreatment are defined in the system I'm gonna skip talking about that right now but I'm happy to talk about it if it comes up in the question yeah but I think really the sort of take home is starting from the point of view of targets from these systems really gives you a different set of questions to ask when you talk administrators and designers and a really different orientation to that is attuned to how these systems make people feel and what what kind of emotional toll that has on families in all of these systems so I think that was a really important part of the book I think should we open it up to questions now from that group can I let Mediella do you want to do you want to respond to this thing about a lot of things yeah let's do one round of responses and maybe I'm looking forward to hearing you all and have opening this important dialogue one all this complex reality stuff that we're talking about one way I've been able to think about it is how our conditions of poverty created how are they maintained and sustained and to whose interests and then how is poverty also criminalized earlier I had to lift up genocide and slavery because this is this creates who has resources and who doesn't who quote-unquote owns land and who's renting land or trying to sleep on the land with dignity live on the land with dignity etc so anytime we're talking about data collection we are we have to recognize the power dynamic that exists in who is managing what system of a human need whether that human need is housing or food there's there are people who are in charge of managing these systems and then there are people who are in a position to have to seek them out and try to access these systems so there's there's a power dynamic in data collection and there's always a power dynamic in who's asking who questions and who has to answer these questions and there's definitely vulnerability in that so always to remember it's there's these are conditions that are intentionally created and there's the maintenance of poverty how is it sustained so when I hear about the coordinated entry system program and I'm in Los Angeles and I see a lot of empty buildings that could be used for immediate housing when there's people freezing in the streets I lift up the name of Barbara somebody who passed and lots of people whose names were not naming in the room who have died in the streets from cold and there's empty buildings so I think about they create this system that makes sense let's think about who's most vulnerable so we have some kind of system of housing but but if they really intended to house people we could solve that really all together in Los Angeles I mean while they're they're building all these high-rise hotels and LA is bidding for the Olympics so you see is it who's interest are we looking out for and it's a sadly profit over people and people become numbers more than people with lives people with emotions with pain with families etc and the criminalization is a very key piece to bring in I hope we can dialogue on it when you share the piece around California and the case that that came out it's important to remember that people in poverty are highly demonized are highly shamed for being public not only are their conditions created and sustained but also for being in poverty you are punished somehow it's your fault somehow you are the one to blame so in Jordan Downs housing project and in streets in LA in different places I see how CSP the child or PS Child Protective Services is is often something that's hanging over people it's a threat it's often used we can take your children away because you you're bad for being forced so you're a bad mom and and so there's an I being kept on on folks for that and so the people are living targeted folks are living under constant threat and I don't want to stay there I want us to also know that people also constantly living in resilience in survival and figuring out ways to to reclaim our dignity reclaim access to our human needs and rights as well that it's a story about poverty in the way that we view it and so with a lot of the cases of child abuse that are often touched on those are those are very much just about the conditions of poverty if you're homeless or if you're if you suffer from food insecurity you're deemed a bad parent but you know in other countries I think Sherry said this earlier that might be we would consider that a human rights violation but here it's a it's a problem of the individual something like 75% of child abuse and investigations involve neglect and not physical emotional or sexual abuse and it's not as clearly defined as you would think no yeah and it's and it's not to say that I met personally any caseworkers who are just looking to pull kids out of families for being poor but there is a lot of there's a lot of lack of clarity about the difference between parenting and poverty and being a poor parent and I think the system that I saw at least doesn't bring clarity to that particular issue and and I'm not sure is a solution to the larger problems that we face with children even family services I mean I really love your coverage of that specific case in Allegheny County because I think along with a lot of the questions Mariella raised I think it makes me ask why aren't we using data to better provide services in cases of quote-unquote neglect and why are we instead using that data to penalize families right and so one one thing that we do at M relief is for every user that comes to our platform and we've helped now more than 230,000 families connect to social services but we ask you know if you are ineligible you know these are or we refer people to programs food pantries within their neighborhoods and so when I looked and again I'll own that I have not looked you know thoroughly through the Allegheny County system but to me it seems like a great opportunity to identify where the zip codes that have some of the highest challenges around rental insecurity or housing insecurity and an opportunity to say why don't we provide our discretionary amount which in the city of Chicago it's 10 percent a caseworker can just say you know what you may not meet the eligibility requirements but we can make an exception for you right so why don't why aren't we using maybe some of that data that we learn and discover to say we need to be focusing our discretionary funding for housing in this area and prioritizing that so that we can better support these families and so another thing that I thought was really interesting is this this notion in the US also of what's called the authorized representative so a wonderful woman on my team named Kate she serves along with me as someone who can speak on behalf of a family when something doesn't quite seem right in terms of a determination or just to follow up about the specifics that in some cases unfortunately the Indiana case have just been automated away so if you're saying oh I wasn't approved right after my interview what is the document that is standing between me and my entitled benefit right and so being able to create a very clear feedback loop and although yes we can use technology to profile we can use technology to hurt families but we can also use technology to say this is the exact document that you absolutely need to get by this date so that we can facilitate $250 into your family's food budget this month right we can do that on text messaging for users who frankly they ran out of data this month already even if they have access to the internet or we can do it on voice for users who I only have a landline this month right and so I think it's all about one not buying into this notion that it's an either or it's either automation or its humans I think it's actually both there are systems that need to use both and we just need to be holding our counties states eligibility workers but also our technologists accountable to make sure that clients are at the center of how we're creating these systems I want to respond very quickly just to like a larger thing that's being raised here which is so in Allegheny County I think they would say that they are doing that that interaction with the child protective services system isn't primarily punitive that they are providing avenues to resources for folks and that they don't as the first go-to pull kids out of families right and that we can argue about whether or not that's how CPS actually works but that's what they would say about their system I parents find interacting with that system much more complicated than that they don't see it as straightforward resource sharing and they definitely see it as a form of policing of their families so there is some difference of opinion about that from the administrators and the families but I think what I heard not just in Allegheny County but also in Los Angeles what I heard administrators and systems designers say over and over again is that these are these are necessary triage systems that we don't have enough resources to go around so we have to make better decisions database evidence-based decisions about where those resources go and that's kind of what I want to push back on because I think sometimes these systems can be systems that are basically providing empathy overrides that that make decisions that are too hard for human beings to make because human beings believe that like if you have a belly button you deserve housing if you have a belly button you deserve food right so being the person in charge of making that decision of their 58 on-house people and a handful of resources who do I give them to that these systems can provide like a release valve for the ethical how ethically troubling it is to ever have to make those decisions exactly so I feel like part of why I'm so excited to be part of this group of people on up here today is that everybody who's here I feel like has a different and incredibly important perspective on what the actual solutions are and in the book I say you know we're gonna have to make huge cultural changes in how we understand poverty we're gonna have to make huge political changes in what we believe public services do and in the meantime the technology is gonna have to do less harm but I would love to have do a little talking about solutions yeah and then make sure we save time for questions as well let's go ahead and open it up we have about 20 minutes so let's go ahead and open it up to questions and okay well I have a lot of solutions and I'm dying to tell you I you know I just think first of all whenever there's a conversation about poverty there's generally nobody in the room and I think that that's a really important piece knowing Virginia in all of that she does if she brings that important voice into the room and that's an important way to like bring back the humanity and humanize this whole conversation because you can begin to get really crazy in the process I think that you know what we need in this country but the poor needs in this country and what we're in the fight for is that there is a resistance to all of this that's happening in this country you just don't know about it it's not going to be televised you're not going to see it on the internet and it's very organized and so how do we develop the opposite how do we get organized like the resistance in Chiapas to lift up what's really happening to people to stop buying into their narratives I mean when we talk about dead big dads are we talking about dead big dads or are we talking about unemployed fathers are we talking about you know horrible scarlet letter promiscuous welfare recipients are we talking about an economy that doesn't provide living wage jobs or childcare or all of these kinds of things and you know we need to start being you know stop looking at just the nonprofit industrial complex and looking at how everybody's out here justifying their jobs for however many poor people are around and begin to see who really benefits you know from that paradigm and begin to lift up the voices of the organized poor in this country that don't need any more pity they need political power we know what's wrong we know what needs to be done and the other side you know I don't see things as like left and right I think that and I don't perceive from this notion of scarcity there's plenty to go around and we need to start documenting this abundance and mapping the wealth and how there's no reason for hunger and poverty and homelessness in this country these are not questions of development I mean not questions of development or scarcity this is about corporate greed and you know so from the beginning of time and with technology we can either lift up and start talking about these truths or we can continue to suppress the very things you know right now we got all the noise going on over here when the real stuff needs to be talked about that's going on over here because a lot of these conversations always start from the point we just don't have enough money but that's really a political position that's not a fact but it's it's kind of treated like a fact yeah exactly like those are political decisions that are arrived at but I think one thing to note and this is something that Dr. Martin Luther King rose in 1968 but many had many supporters both on the left and right is basic income but I do think for us to even arrive at a world where basic income is achievable we have to remember some of the big challenges that we're currently facing that Alita also reminded us of today is that link between work and public support right and so making sure we break that link is really I think one of the key things that we need to be striving for if we're going to arrive at a world where we can abolish poverty with a policy such as basic income and one of the solution bits that I just want to point out that I've learned from the work of the poor people's economic human rights campaign and and Sherry is also about reframing who identifies as poor and thinking of poor as a political identity and so one of the things I think is really revolutionary about the poor people's economic human rights campaign is they invite people to see themselves as part of the poor if you've ever lacked one of your basic human needs and so I think that kind of solidarity building that which doesn't erase difference and doesn't erase the fact that we experience poverty differently depending on other parts of our identity particularly race and gender and geography but that does help us see resonances in each other's experiences in a way that builds a political force right I think that's really important yeah okay we have a question up here so going off of the point on corporate greed and also the limits of budgets and maybe you answer this in your book but I'd be curious to hear from the panel in terms of developing quality tech like tech and really good products and services a lot of that is determined by budgets as well and so in the IBM case even you know was Indiana even able to secure a decent bid or was IBM also like low balling them and then couldn't actually turn around and deliver a quality product how much of that do we see just across the board when we talk about social benefits and tech and products and services yeah so the short answer to that is that the procurement process there were two bids and one of them dropped out leaving IBM so there is a real issue with sort of monopoly and and sort of sweetheart and it was the company that was that had that the person directing the program had used to work for yeah there's all sorts of complicated you'll be that look at the book there's a lot of information about that process in the book but I think you're asking really a larger question and something that Dana Boyd in writing a review of the book pointed out which I think is really important is actually building the tech well it's actually quite expensive and so we should think twice before we see these tools these tools as primarily being about efficiency about administrative efficiency because it often if you're gonna build tools that don't police and punish then it's actually often harder and takes more time and is more expensive so thank you raising a really important point but I want to give other folks a chance to respond I would say also the contract vehicles that exist within a state are also a point of advocacy and analysis I would say that one of the reasons why we work and have great partners in the state of California isn't just because it's it's one of the places where there is a great need of people who are eligible but not receiving but also they have vehicles within their contracting process that really look at are you someone or are you are you an entity that's a nonprofit for example are you an entity that's providing a service that's in the public good you know things like that that really start to I guess level the playing field or open the playing field so that it's not just the corporation with the largest resource chest if you will to be able to navigate the process and then successfully win the bid I really think that we have us have as a point of advocacy to look at what are these contracts how transparent are these contracts and how are we making the playing field level for organizations to do this work well and also I think iterative processes to do this work well right because I think some of the the contracting processes can err on the side of being a little archaic and it's just sort of the scope of work and as soon as you've written it down it's like unless you want to go through a serious amendment process you can't change what you're going to deliver even when you're getting user feedback through a participatory process that this needs to shift and this needs to change right and so that's I think a huge opportunity as we look at advocacy around service design hi you you mentioned a few different ways that people justify or motivate the development of these systems you know the the triage argument the efficiency argument the fairness argument so I work mostly more in the international space unless with United States focus issues but one justification that we hear a lot is reducing the scope and the opportunity for corruption if you're dealing with an automated interface then there isn't a person there to try and extract a bribe from you and whether that really holds up in all cases is another question but it's certainly a justification that people use is that something that you've seen working in the US context as well or have we fixed corruption and that's not one of the points of real complexity and something I'm really interested in the book which is in the US context this comes up around issues of discretion right like how much discretion should front line social service workers have to make decisions based on people coming to them in human relationship right and historically it's really important to acknowledge and be really clear that frontline caseworker discretion has been often really damaging for folks particularly people of color in our in the public service system that said after 15 years of welfare rights activism I can say one of the only things I've ever seen get someone through the system successfully and to an outcome in their life that really changes their life is also caseworker discretion so there is this real tension with the real discrimination and real individual bias with the benefit of having rules that are flexible enough that you can actually meet solution to meet that I don't believe this technology fixes that tension and I think in some ways it makes it worse and I'm trying to think of like a really specific example but I think I'll just let I'll let some other folks respond as well but I think that's the parallel to corruption is around this issue around how much discretion is appropriate. The one thing I will say is that the thing about seeing bias coming into a system as coming in through frontline discretion is that that means that you only see bias as a property of individuals and an issue of intent when in fact bias is endemic in all these systems and in many in in some cases at least that discretion can actually balance some of the bias that's already inherent in those systems so it really requires us to think about bias discrimination and injustice in ways that are systemic and structural and not focused on the individual not focused on like the guy taking the bribe or the racist case worker right like that we that we recognize that these are systemic issues that we have to tackle in a structural way. Did I jump ahead of someone? Okay I'll be quick. Hi Virginia, Mary Madden from Dayton Society. Sorry I couldn't see your talk in New York but this is fantastic and really enjoyed hearing from the rest of the panel. My question relates to sort of adding another layer of complexity onto your very helpful progression of telling these various stories of these case studies in your book and that is to to talk a little bit about what happens when we add the layer of immigration status on top of poverty and so I'm particularly interested in part due to some of my research looking at what foreign-born Hispanics express as their privacy related concerns what happens when you start to look at some of the systems like ICE is trying to build where we're gonna determine the eligibility for people to get visas based on their social media behavior for instance and so I wanted to just sort of pitch that to you to talk a little bit about sort of the future of how some of these challenges can intersect. I think folks we had a bit of this conversation earlier today so I think I'm gonna let other folks respond to that but I want to say one little thing which is this also has a historical precedent which is the moment that we see the thing that's called the scientific charity rise in the United States which was the idea that we needed to be more scientific about the way that we were dispensing aid and this was in like 1890s in the 1890s it actually rose at exactly the moment that we were seeing the move towards immigration restriction and exactly the moment that pushed back against reconstruction in the south collapsed the like the federal aid to newly emancipated slaves right so that they're these historical threads are very much caught up in each other but I yeah I'm gonna leave my response to that and let these incredibly smart people respond to that that great question. Very relevant the painful and violent reality of detention and deportation is not new unfortunately and it's been happening so I think about every family that's been going through it and in a large information sharing environment people are very highly aware that they're they are easily tracked and traced and targeted and can be detained or deported at any moment whether that is in a school setting or in the street setting or in a work setting or anywhere so those concerns of course are they live daily in people's lives so I also think about solutions to and community defense and how are we protecting each other and and defending each other so I I named that because all of this creates a overall culture of fear and all of these systems are able to function and operate under a culture of fear the way we can undo that is by seeing each other and see whether we're neighbors that we actually you know come out of our computers or our cell phone shells and and see each other know who's who and we don't see who's who to criminalize them but to see how we have each other's back and remember those values and wake up to the the fact that being undocumented is a forced identity and so we need a fight to undo undo that as well I think I just want to add to a couple things that were said around budget and the automation and it eliminating corruption somehow it's important at least in Los Angeles and I wonder for each city and folks representing here what the budget looks like at your place locations in Los Angeles law enforcement has over 50% of the budget so that tells you where are our resources it also tells us that policing is very much infiltrated within school systems within transportation systems within hospital systems housing systems and they have all these they have all these resources so that's those are the kind of results that we get we get policing an intent to police our way out of societal issues and that is not the solution so part of the solution is making sure we can divest from those violent systems and invest in in systems that generate life or community based system so yeah that's a very real fear and so we all have to play a role in in supporting and guiding and protecting and this whole thing around us and them I think we have to be very careful because I think we can create a false sense of security especially organizers that approach movement building around silos as opposed to what are ways in which we can work together by all means necessary in order to you know build this massive movement to take on the very powerful resources that were very powerful institutions and structures that were up against okay yeah you're right your little finger was right behind his head so my name is Sakina thank you all for being here I can't wait to read the book very excited I work for a group called DC hunger solutions and I do snap outreach every day with clients throughout DC and advocacy and policy work around that and I have a lengthy question and I wrote it down so I'll just read it in 2014 the DC Council expanded access to snap benefits by raising categorical eligibility to 200% of the federal poverty line versus 130% and they raised the minimum benefit for snap to $30 versus $15 for the last 10 years my organization has ran a snap outreach campaign in partnership with DC community tax aid during tax season to reach more low wage earners that get free tax assistance and are also likely qualified for snap so you try to reach those folks but at the same time the technical technical issues that were mentioned in the opening remarks about DHS and DC are very real and make connecting residents to snap benefits another social benefits very difficult and not to mention DC uses a paper application for snap not an online application and it's like 10 pages long and on top of that just learning that 50% of people nationally that are poor actually participate is a little discouraging knowing that people do this work day in and day out and so my question is what's one practical step or recommendation that I can take back to my job or even to DHS in DC to really maximize the positive impact of those expansions that came about in 2014 and my last piece about a budget being a moral document there's a really great organization called the Fair Budget Coalition in DC that pushes the DC Council in the mayor's office to do work that reflects the human needs in DC so onto the question of just what's one thing I could take back to make sure that these expansions work and that you know we're reaching as many people as possible that's actually just an incredibly difficult simple question right what's what's the one thing we can or two or three or ten that that we can do yeah like actually how people how would people feel about me going last that be okay because I'm just straight up trying to find time to think about my answer so I I would say I think it's so exciting to know that you work with snap for folks that everybody knows what snap is right want me to pull out my card but the fact that you're working with the Fair Budget I mean I think that it's absolutely important that we build and keep our lens and our eyes on looking at like I was talking about earlier the real thing which is like lifting up the the the whole budget piece I think that I was kind of indirectly raising this this issue earlier about a false sense of security right I mean some folks approach you know we'll do we'll do the homeless organizing over here the immigrant rights organizing over here the welfare recipients right the organizing over here and the thing is is like at any given moment even if you're if you're not an immigrant you are disposable you are you can they can get rid of you just like this because in most states they can go up upwards of like eight years and find something you know you didn't report the five dollars that you got or whatever and the next thing you know you're going away because you happen to be an uppity welfare recipient that that talked about it out loud so I think that the number one thing that you can do is you can find out where your local welfare rights organization is or anti-poverty organization that isn't funded by the cat and is led by the mice you know what I'm saying and that could be one of the most powerful things that you can do is to put other poor families into a relationship with other organized poor because they will figure out the solutions I agree with advocating and creating spaces for organizing I also think that just grounding and food being a human right is important and and I'm not having to navigate so much or step on eggshell so much to fight for something that is is very much needs to be redistributed needs to be our right I think also how to how we can enhance those efforts or maybe thinking about how people can access land and access reclaim and remember our wisdom and our knowledge to plant food as well which will help us be more reconnected to reclaiming and respecting the land to and give people more power and access to food I think if people in through our data bodies project that I want to lift up we're doing this work in Los Angeles Tawana Petty is in Detroit and Tamika Lewis is in Charlotte and we in our any interviewing folks and asking them what are their solutions and folks have asked have shared just simply they'd like for systems to just ask relevant questions to to not over ask many questions that puts people on in a situation with where they're wondering who and why are you asking and who are you sharing this information with to and that they can be supported and not stigmatized in accessing food there are many ways that people get disqualified off of that so if we can start eliminate some of those ways that people easily get disqualified off of their access to food which is very discouraging I think those are a couple things immediately about the unnecessary questions when she mentioned the 20 page document but I feel like I need to talk to you off line after just to kind of talk like so who's asking what questions you know just so many things but I think first pushback challenge and engage in conversation around what is actually required on the 10 page application just because I think sometimes one advantage of the online application digital interface is that you can actually test that my co-founder Genevieve Nielsen does so much awesome work in like helping really understand programmatically which questions are actually required sometimes with these downloadable PDFs there's just no transparency or visibility into that and so really first engaging in dialogue and I and I also just want to say you know carefully to because yes in many states they say all you really need to do to apply for snap is have your first last name and signature and I think I believe it's social security number but if you submit like maybe a thousand of those to a DC welfare office or SNAP office what that could then produces a backlog that then interferes with a lot of people getting services and so for us it was about engaging in yes a dialogue with eligibility workers as well around like what is the threshold of data that if we submit it that we can actually also still ensure the service that needs to be delivered to our families so that that's that would be a big thing and then in terms of just like overall design I know that just because what's available that the state or district has is just a PDF that doesn't mean that the way you engage users your organization has to just use that as a means I know we we looked at a PDF and thought maybe we could text to it maybe we could programmatically fill it out and then use documents sign it you know and also I mean of course you have to navigate and think about will eligibility workers then have to transcribe that information if that happens to but I think process aside I think centering understanding that food is a human right giving your families encouragement you who you are able to talk to I know I spend quite even though I'm executive director of our organization I spend quite a bit of time every week just talking to family really being able to give them assurance and encouragement that they can get through this difficult time in their lives and then as they feel comfortable sharing their stories so that they can be centered in the process of how these services are being developed and so I look forward to talking to you after I know that's that was a lot but thank you and I swear I'll keep mine short but I want to have a closing thought which is we were talking about this a little bit earlier and how wonderful it would be to have a system of food assistance where you had to opt out if you didn't need it rather than you had to opt in right just say like you know what everybody gets food assistance if you don't need it let us know and we'll stop sending it or don't spend it and that's fine right like so that's just a really different way of organizing how we think about who deserves what and part of how we get that's that's a really hard thing to accomplish though and part of how we get to that point where that seems reasonable and rational rational to everyone is by to echo what Rose and I think what everybody's saying is by telling different kinds of stories and by I mean 51% of people in the United States will live at some point between the ages of 20 and 64 below the poverty line two-thirds of us over the course of our lifetime will receive a means tested benefit right but we tell these stories about public assistance that sound like it goes to just this tiny percentage of really marginal really pathological folks but it's not it's all of us and I'll tell you a very fast story about this which is so I was a welfare rights organizer for 15 years and I defined myself for that entire time as an ally but not someone who had ever received public assistance myself six weeks ago right the 15 years I worked on this six weeks ago I went to a conference where we were talking about universal lifeline which now is what people call the Obama phone 15 30 years ago was helped with basic communication like some some kind of some ported part of your phone bill would be paid if you couldn't afford it and I was talking to this woman I was like oh yeah I was on universal lifeline for years and I was like oh god I was totally on welfare and for 15 years of welfare rights organizing I was saying that I hadn't been like I literally my job was to help people see themselves as part of the community of people who received welfare and I didn't get it myself like there's something really pathological about how we talk about public assistance if people can only see themselves as part of that group of people in the most stigmatized possible light right and we don't talk to each other honestly about it and so I think telling honest stories will go a long way to help build this political identity which will help build this movement which will help push back against this unjust system that is an excellent note to end on I think I believe we have books and if you'd like to get one and I can sign it I'd be happy to do that but thank you so much if you want to buy a book and I'll be sitting in here signing if you'd like me to do that