 I think one of the things coming out of the pandemic, even going into it, but especially coming out of the pandemic is this recognition that local businesses are really important. Our supply chain and the resilience of our supply chain is really important. And our downtowns where we closed streets and people so organically came together because we were so isolated and desperately needed to see each other outdoors safely. People are recognizing that we need to create these vibrant places that make people proud to call this community home. And we have to find a way to support a strong economy with locally owned businesses. MUSIC Lana Proust is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Lana is the founder and CEO of Recast City. Prior to that, she was the vice president and chief of staff at Smart Growth America and led the technical assistance program at the EPA Smart Growth Program. She's a TEDx speaker specifically on the economic power of great places and a featured keynote speaker. COVID-19 has all brought us through a tremendously crazy time and brought about a historic collapse in jobs and people's livelihoods, devastating many small businesses and leaving storefronts vacant across the country. But even before the pandemic, main streets across the United States were suffering and cities relied on an unsustainable and inequitable economic development model as cities emerge from the pandemic, how they can take control of the situation and shift to a new model that supports long-term growth through thoughtful, inclusive investments in the local community. We're here today to discuss her book in Recast Your City. Proust really inspires us to change by showing what communities across the country have been able to achieve using this method. She highlights how Fremont, California worked to build up small-scale manufacturing business instead of relying on one major manufacturer while Knoxville, Tennessee supported a diverse range of business owners through small business training, programs and maker summit featuring producers of color. Elana, welcome to the show. It's so good to have you. Thank you so much, Mark. It's really a pleasure to be here. I really enjoyed your book. I only got the digital copy. I'm in Hamburg, Germany, so I didn't get the physical copy yet. It's pretty hot off the presses. You're launching during a pandemic or the tail end of a pandemic. How was that first and foremost? Was that plan that you start in the beginning of the pandemic? So, OK, I'm going to write this book. Now I got time. Or how has that whole experience been? Well, you know nothing about the last year and a half is anything any of us have ever experienced before. No, I started this book before we entered into this very difficult part of our lives. I started working on the book in the fall of 2019. The book is an outgrowth really of all the work I've done with communities, particularly smaller cities across the country, over my career and is a culmination or a pulling together of all the work that I've done with Recast City to help communities bring small-scale manufacturing businesses downtown and realizing that there's only so many communities I can work with one-on-one or even in small groups. And I needed to get the tools into more hands quickly. Because even before the pandemic, there was such a need. And then honestly, I ended up getting an agreement with the publisher within weeks of before everything shut down. And so I am one of those weird people who spent the first six months of the pandemic waking up at 6 o'clock in the morning to write every morning. Because my writing has to happen before 10 a.m. I'm one of those people. And it was, I mean, the pandemic is just a tragedy of our lives, right? The number of lives we've lost, the number of businesses that had to close, the inequitable impact of it on communities, particularly black and brown communities in the United States and around the world. It made it only clearer to me how much we need to change the way we've been doing things and how important it is to make it incredibly accessible for people to understand what to do and how to do it. I really appreciate you giving us that insight and kind of how it happens. I want to go a little bit deeper. So you provide local governments, businesses, real estate leaders, entrepreneurs, advocates, not only discussions and consulting, but actual tools necessary to build these strong local businesses and reinvest and reinvent, so to say, their downtowns, their communities that we've seen all over the United States and certain places of the world just go away when the big businesses go away or they decide they've sucked every resource out of that location and they move on to somewhere else that kind of, it's like a ghost town or you're like, oh yeah, that used to be our old community center. And you really, for a long time, so 20 years, you studied city planning, right? And you believe that every place is unique and has this livelihood personality. With all this 20 years of experiences consulting and then bam, you're hit with the pandemic, Black Lives Matters, Asian racism, crazy inauguration. I could go on and on all the things that we've seen a huge economic downturn in many respects I wanna know a little bit more. How did you weather that time? And because you've been talking about it and discussing it for so many years and teaching and educating people, giving them the tools, I know I'm sure you didn't say, aha, I told you so, but were there some learning lessons and did you also kinda say your door was being knocked down, how do we rebuild? How do we get back to something of sustenance? And I wanna know how you weathered that and what kind of learning lessons have emerged? Are the models you've discussed, are they proven to be better models for life to move forward for communities? And how are you seeing that now that we're emerging out of this? I definitely, I think we've seen a lot of things. I think from a personal sort of self-reflective perspective, I've been in this field for 25 years now. I can see that I didn't do enough early in my career for black and brown business owners, for black and brown homeowners. And that became glaringly clear to me over the years of my career. And so when I started ReCast City seven years ago, it's my voice, it's my business. I could shape it to focus on those needs very specifically. And so creating more equitable outcomes in the economic investments that communities are making, making sure that as communities go and find business owners to be a part of this program that they're bringing together business owners that represent the demographic diversity of their community and making that as a baseline requirement of the work with me was one of the ways that I could really get communities to think about this. I can tell you that at the local level, I've worked in places where I honestly don't talk politics, national politics with local communities, but I've worked in places that are all across the country, big city, small city, urban, rural, and they all believe in their citizens. And it's really heartening to me to see that what communities are willing to do when we really just talk about the people who live in their community and give them very specific and concrete ways, not only to reach these people, but ways to talk to them and what to do about it. And so all of my work is really about those two parts. How are we making sure that we're talking to the diversity of people in our community and understanding what works and what doesn't work for them as business owners, but also what are we doing about it? If we're just talking to people and not taking action, then I'm not succeeding in my work with communities. And so the book is really focused on that, making that transition from what are the conversations we need to have, who do we need to talk to, and then how do we take action? I think to your point about the pandemic, it really transformed so much, right? It not only about how we work, but where we work, and it honestly, in some ways, increased the opportunity to create successful businesses anywhere. And so now these smaller cities, like you were mentioning before, that maybe lost out on a big textile mill 30 years ago, they now can have an opportunity to inject sort of new economic energy into their community. And if we do it with the right steps, and to me, small scale manufacturing is a really key part of that, we can help them create good paying jobs, we can help them with new business growth, we can help them invest in their downtowns and main streets that have historically struggled. And so for me, all of this work is not just about who's getting the economic opportunity and business growth, but where are we putting them and who's benefiting from the location, like Main Street or an urban neighborhood center, who's benefiting from that investment in place and in the small business. I really like that. And it's so important that you mentioned that. You really wanna, and I wanna kind of take this and jump off into some other thought models and things that we've seen people emerging with. First and foremost, you're with a fabulous publisher, Island Press, and so they'll help you weather any pandemic, but they're centered around environment, around food, around community building, around local economies and thinking, how can we make America better? How can we help the communities? How can we help people who are struggling? And I've had many other Island Press authors on board. I had a professor, Shalanda Baker, who is a wonderful person on, she talked about revolutionary power, which is about the energy industry and how in local communities and indigenous communities, how really people of color struggle with that. The minute, actually during our podcast, I says, you know, boy, Biden and Harris or Kamala Harris are really gonna love your help. And she looked, it's like, you know, she didn't say anything and two days later, she became deputy director of the Department of Energy for them. So there's a lot of positive things that people who are actually authors are doing something and you're doing this with recaster city to help the communities and to really give people empowerment that they once relied on governments or others to kind of deal up for them. And now they're really part of their community and getting involved in that. I do a lot with food and another author is Ken Meter who wrote a book for Island Press, Building Community Food Webs. And this thought emerges, and this is something that I wanna show you but I probably don't have it right in front of me. It's called Local Futures by Helena Norberg Hodge. And it's really about these local economies that are coming forward and emerging. Normally I'd show you the book, but I wanna know that if this is in the right direction from what I read in your book, it's chalked full of tools and it's not just for city planners and governments, it's for entrepreneurs. It's for those who say, man, I've lived here my whole life and I'm so sad to see that my downtown or my community is there's nothing there. I have to go somewhere else and it's just dying out to give them the tools to say, hey, if I don't like it, I can play a part in that change and you give them step-by-step questions and things that they need to do in order to do that. Plus on your website, you have this fabulous workbook or what did you call it? It's a downloadable questionnaire on how you begin the process. So you're so empowering with these tools. So my question really is to kind of summarize this. Isn't moving in the direction of building local economies, local futures, strengthening your communities, indigenous or not, empowering those people of color who probably are living in those areas and maybe what is there anything I'm missing on my understanding of that? I think that it's important to think about the way we've been doing economic development for the last couple of decades, four, five decades at this point. We've more or less taught an entire industry of people that they need to go do big game hunting. They need to go recruit a big business and that that's the only way they're going to fix a local economy. And we have entire offices of economic development authorities where they see their only responsibility as recruitment and branding. And that's how they've been designated. Either because that's what their board represents, there's a whole bunch of reasons why. And I think one of the things coming out of the pandemic, even going into it, but especially coming out of the pandemic is this recognition that local businesses are really important. Our supply chain and the resilience of our supply chain is really important. And our downtowns where we closed streets and people so organically came together because we were so isolated and desperately needed to see each other outdoors safely. People are recognizing that we need to create these vibrant places that make people proud to call this community home. And we have to find a way to support a strong economy with locally owned businesses. And I think in some ways that what came out of the pandemic was a lot of the recognition for that, where people weren't sure if they should go in that direction or not before because that's not necessarily what the training said. So when I talk to mayors or economic development or planning directors or city managers or entrepreneurial people in a community like what you were saying, Mark, they recognize that there is an opportunity that they wanna create a downtown that brings people together. They recognize that they wanna create a place where people feel included both in the business community but also personally. They wanna place in a region that looks cared for and they care about being part of a community and wanna invest in it. And so part of what we really work with communities to recognize is that that is the basis of your local economic success, right? Is that I always talk about, the cavalry isn't coming. We can do it ourselves. And I talk about that we need to invest in the people and the places in our community that there are, you know, when I work with communities all over the country, particularly our smaller cities and towns and I can go there and say, the skills that you have in your community are what will make you successful and those same businesses will be what makes you unique and a place that people wanna spend time and money. People are very proud to know that that is in fact an option. And the reality is is that some places will win this recruitment battle and they will provide enough subsidy to get a business that has 200 jobs but the vast majority of places aren't even in the running. And so we need solutions for all those other places and even in the places that are successful at the recruitment, we know that the vast majority of those jobs aren't going to local residents. And so we need to have solutions that are building up the economy for all the people who are already in that community. And that's a lot of what I work to do is really identify the people in a community that are already doing this. I talk about small scale manufacturing as a hidden gem because they are in every single community. It doesn't matter how small or how big the place is, there are people who make stuff as a business, right? Any tangible product, you know, my shorthand for it is hot sauce, handbags or hardware. Anybody who's making a tangible product that you can replicate or package, part-time or full-time solo entrepreneur, you know, having 20 or 30 employees, that is the heart and soul of these communities and also getting property owners on Main Street to understand that these businesses are not only viable tenants for Main Street, but in fact, they're lower risk than retail tenants on Main Street because they're selling in-person and online. So they're having, they have this diversity of revenue sources. They're literally bringing money into the community from the region or nationally. And so as we look back at the pandemic and how so many places either closed forever or had to pivot in these very awkward ways to figure out how to get online, when we look at businesses that are naturally occurring e-commerce and in-person, it creates just a whole host of other opportunities in our community. And then when we look at how do we think about who gets the storefronts on Main Street, and this is a question I ask a lot, is we can very purposefully help find business owners that represent the demographic diversity of our community and figure out what they need to get into our Main Street storefronts. I also, there's a couple of things. So in the first part of your book, you go into detail about some examples. So there's a lot of awareness too of people might not be aware of what past indicators or past performance of cities or governments that for communities, decisions that have been made that they might not even understand the whole ripple effect out of that. And that's the part you touched upon this, this big recruiting and branding please come. And I've seen it from Micron to Dell computers to many different types of organizations that get recruited into a certain place. And we're gonna create this many jobs. You're gonna get this kind of a tax break. We're gonna do all these things. And then when all those tax breaks and those things go away, that company kind of goes away too. Cause they're like, oh, we need to look for the next big place to give us those incentives. And Amazon was a wonderful, there's a city that tried to recruit Amazon. And they said, no, we're gonna decline. We're not interested because we're not happy with what it brings. And it actually is a negative thing in many instances for the local economies, for the locals. And there's many studies that have shown that it's not the best way to create these resilient or regenerative communities that we're really striving to be in hard times, pandemics or other climate change. How can our community be resilient to weather whatever storm? And it's not always by the big business, you know? And if you could go into a little bit more about some kind of teasing, I don't wanna give your entire book away, but I wanna tease some sections enough of it so that people can realize what a treasure trove it is, if they're interested in this area and really building a strong community, kind of some things to be aware of. And then we'll quit harping on the bigs and the big companies and we'll go into some other things. But I think it's important to address a little bit. Sure, so I think the thing I would land on, most importantly, out of all of that is to think about recruitment as one tool, not the only tool. And recruitment has a role. I don't wanna say that it doesn't in certain instances. There are some great benefits as businesses are growing in different communities. The problem to me is that in most communities, it's the only tool. The role of who supports small business and how do we grow small business is almost like hot potato. One department will say it's there, another department's responsibility and that department will say it's that, and they each sort of pass the buck in terms of who's responsible for small business growth or they think of businesses that are going to be in storefronts as a separate thing. Retail storefronts aren't part of our economic development strategy, which I never understand why they made that division to tell you the truth. I also think that there is historically, we've never identified part time in single person businesses as valuable to a community. Most data collection that happens in economic development excludes single person businesses if they don't have any employees and they certainly exclude part time businesses. And when we look at not only what happened during the pandemic where so many people lost their jobs and had to create a business or now coming out of the pandemic, all the more recent articles about how people are quitting their jobs because they want a better quality of life through their work. It is so clear to me that entrepreneurship and that ability to not only create a business for yourself but to create even a set of part time jobs for people in your community is going to be so important to our economic success. And so part of what I talk about in the book is thinking about not only where not where we were in the 70s, which is the comparison I make in the book, but where we are today and how different our economy is, access to the internet and the ability to make a business and sell something tomorrow, anywhere in the world, completely changes all of that and our access to training. One of the most amazing things to me during the pandemic was the ability to make introductions, over Zoom, over the world of email and of course phone as well, but to be able to work for instance with SAP and Indiana on growing their program in support of small-scale manufacturing, be able to introduce them to a person, a business in Chicago who provides training for product businesses to improve their e-commerce and distribution and marketing and retailing and then be able to help them bring that together to existing small-scale manufacturing businesses in South Bend to grow that sector very purposefully in the community, being able to work with 37 Oaks in Chicago and make that introduction and let them figure out what they wanted to do. That's making a real difference on the ground in South Bend right now, right? And the thing that I think is important in all of this is in economic development and in planning in particular, we often talk about long-term plans. We talk about plans that are five, 10, 30 years out and I come from a city planning background. That's my training in all of this and the case that I make to folks is that there is so much we can do right now. I look at horizon of three to 12 months and when I work with communities and this is a big part of the book is this whole set of steps that I provide in the book are ones that I take communities through in four months. And so it's not about waiting for some big and all be all planned to be done. It's about talking to people and understanding needs right now and doing it in a very purposeful way. But we do it in a way so that we can create a place with businesses that define the downtown that bring people together. In Bellfellower, California when I had a chance to work with them earlier this year and you're right, a lot of people during the pandemic sort of realized that we have these businesses, they are hidden gems, what do we do with them? How do we get more of them as their downtowns had increasing number of vacancies? And so Bellfellower, California, we worked with them and we interviewed a fashion designer and fashion fabricator that was already in their downtown and being able to ask her, what do you need? What works well about being here? Why did you pick Bellfellower? And she raved about how amazing this community is and how supportive they are and how supportive the city government is. And then she could talk about the challenges, the events she wanted to create with other fashion designers in the LA region, but they couldn't do pop-up events. So we could get into the nitty gritty of permitting and reviews and find really simple straightforward fixes that could make a difference for people's lives right now before working on any future real estate development. And so a lot of what we look at is, how do we create that unique destination? How do we help build community wealth? And how do we do it in a way that can't be replaced because no other place is just like this? And that uniqueness is what will hold that, will bring in the attraction of people both from the community and the region, but also means that you just can't be replaced by the next mall or strip center down the way because nobody else is just like you. You tickle upon this a little bit in the book and especially towards the end you say, I didn't plan on the COVID and thing as you close out the book, but there's some things that occurred and I wanna see related to the book and in your views, what you experience, what you see and how you maybe foreshadowed or addressed these already in some respects in the book. We're seeing a lot of people change their complete work routine. They are a mass exodus from certain cities. I mean, New York City people were leaving in droves because if they weren't gonna work and they're gonna do remote, then they're gonna go somewhere nicer where there's a nicer community, but they're also fleeing to get out into nature into other places in some respects. But then also just now there's this big discussion about going back to work. Is this the type of work that I wanna do and so some are shifting to entrepreneurship or others are shifting to new community-based type of working or different types of jobs that have more meaning and maybe wanna create something else. Is there something that you can kind of tickle a little bit more on that and what you were seeing and what the realities are in some of the communities you've been working with? Yes, I think that we're not gonna see as much. My belief is that we're not gonna see as much shifting of population as people are talking about. I think that the reason that people lived in the big cities that they lived in are now already true again. All of these businesses have opened back up. The people who left the big cities were the people who had the income options. Those are predominantly white population, higher income population that had the option to work remote. We know from the research over those last year that it was disproportionately black and brown employees did not have the option of working remote. And so I think that part of what we're seeing and this is part of some of the great interviews that I had also in California is people really sort of taking a reckoning of what their job is, what's the opportunity and how do we, if we can create more entrepreneurship training programs for people and access to capital, both micro grants as well as low cost loans, how do we help more people become entrepreneurs and control that fate for themselves? At the same time, I do think we are seeing, and I think we were seeing this before the pandemic too, a return to home. So more small cities that the youth as they, the millennials get older, have kids are more interested in going back to where they grew up even if they ran away from it initially and investing in those places. So I had a chance to work in Heflin, Alabama, small town of 5,000 people, and they are having a housing crisis because youth wanna, the young adults of the community wanna move back home, and we could work on their main street, which is honestly a few blocks long, it's a small place, but have this really exciting energy that's a combination of people who have moved back home, retirees who ended in the community but wanna create a new local business, and then some longstanding legacy businesses where people are quite literally training up people, others in the community to be a part of it. And so I think there is a really interesting opportunity to say, how do we take advantage of these resources that are out there nationally online? How do we apply them to what's going on in our community specifically to make sure that we are a place that creates opportunity for people who are from there or who wanna come back there or obviously any new people who wanna move there? I think that there is an interesting opportunity around saying also where we wanna do investment and what kind of investment we wanna make has a big impact on this, right? I mean, one of the things that's going on in a major way in US cities and communities right now is the American Rescue Plan funding. Every, all of the communities are getting their first tranche of two of the funding now more or less, and those communities can use that funding for infrastructure, right? Water pot holes, basic things like that, but they can also use it for economic distress and use it as a way to rebuild and build a stronger local economy. And, you know, my plea to people is to really think about how do you use this funding to create this perpetual economic engine that benefits more people in the community and really thinking about how to be a place of business, a place that families come together, how do we create more opportunities for black and brown business owners to both launch and grow businesses? And for a lot of places, how do you build energy in a place that isn't just a pass through, which is what has happened in a lot of our smaller mean streets or sort of old commercial corridors and really thinking about that investment. One of the great examples is Columbia, Missouri. So we had a chance to work with a community improvement district called The Loop, which is featured in the book a whole bunch because they've done some amazing work. And they are really looking at the future of this corridor as a way to say, how do we become a place for our community, for our families, but also as a place for commerce, for growing jobs, for growing entrepreneurship. And they really, in an incredible, thoughtful way created, decided they needed to create a mission-driven outset of outcomes. We worked with them to find all these small-scale manufacturing businesses in their community, and they found that one of the highest things in demand was commercial-shared kitchen, that people had all of these home-based food businesses, but nowhere to grow to be able to market their product more widely once they could have a health-stamped, health department-stamped space to do their production. And so they, in the middle of the pandemic, launched their commercial-shared kitchen, and it has in partnership with it this training, right? And so all of a sudden, we're starting to see this connection that places are willing to make between training and appropriate space for business growth with mission-driven outreach to make sure that you're saying, we have target populations, we wanna make sure benefit from this in our community, and we're gonna do purposeful outreach to make sure that we find them and that we're responding to their needs. That's absolutely beautiful. Another part is that in, you kind of, I think you almost tickle on it as well, but I wanna go a little bit deeper and ask about it. Population growth and flux coming in the future tells us a lot about where our infrastructure is everywhere in the world, but specifically in the United States and how well it is prepared for the future, just simply for, and I'll give one example, for the population growth that we currently have, and doesn't matter where it's trajectory could and should be, whether it's nine or 10 billion, would mean that we need to build 63,000 new classrooms every single week, just to meek up for the demand of the new students that are coming online. Now, United States has developed country and we think, okay, hopefully, the infrastructure is set enough there to cover that demand, but I know nowhere in the world are we building 63,000 classrooms every single week, and that's just one small example. I'm moving to talk about community food webs, we could talk about many other things. For just the assessment of whatever community you go into, you say, is the infrastructure where it needs to be to support no matter what color, people of color or anybody, that community moving forward and how would recity and recasting the city and building these new communities and these local economies, what an impact that would have to really secure this, again, resilience and regeneration of so many communities around the world, especially in the United States that really need that. What's the question though? I mean, that's a great statement. I pause because I thought, you look like you're ready to jump on that question, but... I mean, the infrastructure is woefully behind. I live just outside of Washington, D.C. I can tell you my kid's high school has 14 different trailers outside of a very, the largest high school in the state because it doesn't have enough capacity. I can tell you that part of that is because there is a countywide fight about looking at the school boundaries and talk about something that is a loaded conversation that's just latent with racism that nobody's talking about the racism in it, right? We have exclusionary housing. Most of the county is single-family zoning, so there isn't enough housing in the county for people who wanna live there. I saw somebody who did this fascinating analysis that I did a quick back of the envelope for my own area that said, if we have X number of people graduating high school in a year, and I think we were around 50, 60,000 in our community, that means that even if we assume that in four years, they're gonna, let's make a grand statement that in five years they're gonna be two-person households. That means we need X number of housing to be built so that just our kids can move back to the community. I mean, it just puts the whole world of what we're building and what we're not building into a different perspective. I spent a lot of my career working on housing options and transportation options. That was the sort of the community development world I lived in before I created ReCast City, but obviously all of those pieces impact the outcome. And honestly, if I work in a community that needs those kinds of pieces, I have no problem speaking up about them. Bellflower, California, they recognized it before I got there, but their need for new additional housing downtown where they have a new commuter rail station or a transit line coming in downtown, they recognize it, but they know they need to do, they need to get the construction going faster. But we're at, I mean, honestly as a nation in so many different ways, we're at these crossroads, right? Are we gonna create space for more people and more opportunity or are we not? And are people going to see it only as a lack or an opportunity? So I've worked in a lot of communities that have suffered for a very long time that have a psychology of place that the pie will never get larger. And it's really sad, right? They only see it as if you get something, I get less. As opposed to our more successful cities that have recognized that we will just keep growing the pie and we can keep growing opportunity. I think when we talk about housing and jobs and investment in benefiting people who we did not benefit in the past, I think people often see it as a small pie that they're getting less of as opposed to creating more opportunity for more people. So, yes, I mean, I think there's a lot of reckoning that has to happen around that in the United States and communities across the country. And that's also looking at our small rural communities that lost jobs decades ago that we haven't had effective policies to support them, right? This is across income lines. This is across urban rural lines. This is race, immigrant, ethnicity, native population. Whatever line we have, there have been biases about who wins and who doesn't. And so I think a lot of this is really about how do we approach local and economic and community development differently to create different outcomes? Focus on these existing businesses. Focus on growing them. Focus on growing more of our own local businesses within the community. I focus on small-scale manufacturing. There's plenty of people who focus on other things. Within that, how are we investing in the people in our community and their skills, especially people who wanna make stuff and can literally bring revenues into the community? And then how are we investing in those places, the downtowns, the main streets, the neighborhood centers, where people can come together safely again, where people can be part of a community and feel included? And then what are we doing to build that ecosystem, the infrastructure around them that supports that entrepreneurship and that downtown revitalization? There's really specific things that we can do. And it's honestly not rocket science. It's just not that hard. It just takes some really purposeful conversations and some very purposeful outreach and then a commitment to take action. And that's honestly who this book is for, is the people who recognize that there is amazing value in their community, that the people in their community are worth it and that they are ready to take action. And they don't wanna just keep looking backwards at what didn't work in the past. And that's what I really truly love about your book. I mean, it should be called a workbook or a tool book. I mean, it's so full of fabulous things. And then you even, like I mentioned, you even offer more on your website and people reach out to you to kind of, if they need help, how can they get that help or be guided? And I'm sure you guide them in the right direction, which is so vital. You've nicely framed it for me because I'm kind of leading you into a few bigger questions if you haven't caught on to that yet. So during the inauguration and even after, there's a lot of nationalism of people coming back even more local and kind of getting into this thing, drawing borders and lines. But those existed before. We've had the problems all over the world, but in the United States before, we're all team members or crew members of the spaceship earth. There are no boundaries, borders and divisions. And the best examples of that is really air, food, water, species and COVID. They did not stop at any boundaries or borders what imaginary or real. So to say, oh, we can't go into Texas or we can't go into wherever because there's a border there. And those borders, whether our school districts or cities or communities or states on and on need to realize they're part of a bigger system kind of and this interplay. I was speaking to Noam Chomsky, Arizona University professor still to today. I think he's 86, 87 years old now he's still going strong. And he's very boisterous about the economics as well as others, the studies are done. If we open the borders, are jobs gonna be taken away or is it better economically a better stimulation? And so, he says open the borders, the studies and everything we see it's actually a really positive thing. But the example I wanna give and then I'll get to my question is really we experienced that during the beginning of the lockdown, the pandemic. So the Brexit was voted on before, but then with the pandemic, they closed the border and all those immigrant workers that could go into the United Kingdom were no longer allowed. But the vote was around race and about people taking away jobs or homes or economy issues that they were gonna take something away from them about the pie that you discussed so eloquently. Now that the borders were locked because of the pandemic, nobody jumped into those jobs. And there was, I kid you not, minimum 400,000 food jobs, producers, farm workers, cashiers, gastronomy that needed to be done just to produce the food for the country to eat. And there wasn't a single person who made that vote that jumped into those jobs that they voted that were being taken away from them. So some of these decisions, city planning, government planning, whatever around race or borders or somebody's gonna take something away, whether it's your children moving back or whatever, this increase of the pie or how you so eloquently said it is just not real. And that's not how we build up these local futures in these communities. And we've seen the example, thankfully through the pandemic, but we've seen it throughout history and the statistics and the data lies. And that's why I like your book is because you educate people with something that they maybe didn't look at before in that respect. One last touch, before I asked the question to kind of drive it home, most communities would first start with an assessment. What is the population? What is the size? What's the economic? How many people do we employ? Kind of get a picture of that. In food, I do that. And Ken Meter, who I mentioned was on the podcast does that as well. And all over the world, what we're seeing, which is crazy is that there's communities more so even in farming communities or those who are big food producers or even where there's big production that they're importing just as much food of the same type of food as they're exporting. And it doesn't make sense. They're exporting it because I guess the payment or the commodity will pay them more overseas, but then that community is importing somehow that same potato. They're exporting a hundred metric tons of potatoes somewhere and importing the same, whatever the product is. And unless we do those assessments, we don't understand how we can keep it local, keep those communities thriving. And also with the forethought that those families and those children would hopefully come back and wanna live in those communities where they were born in after they've gone to school or whatever. And so the question is kind of a broader aspect. One, how do you feel about this global citizen view of the world or global community member of the world, whether even though you're living in a local future community, you still see that there's a bigger influence of the world around you. And how would that help local communities, local futures and this recasting your city by the removal of some of these outdated antiquated ways of doing city governance and infrastructure and planning in advance for the future, but using that in actions that those today can apply. That's a really big question. Just a small question there, I just. That's a really, a really big question. So I'm gonna simplify this a little bit as I answer it. Please. I think that the tools and the techniques that I talk about and the need that I talk about in the book is universal and international. I think that there are in every place in the world we can identify that there's have and have nots in different ways for whatever reason. And that there is a lot of research that shows that if we are helping the people who historically were the have nots build businesses, create good paying jobs, we actually have lots of economic research that shows that that benefits the entire economy. Not only is it the right thing to do, it's also from an economic sort of big number crunching helps the whole economy get stronger and has more people being able to then spend money back in the community, right? We're then creating these social benefits also. So when we look at small scale manufacturing, these are the kind of businesses that people are really proud of showcasing that they can sell within the community and market or online like on Etsy or Depop or all of these amazing platforms that are now international as well with products. These businesses create destinations so that people can come together and be together in a way that retail on its own just doesn't do. And they diversify a local economy so that we're not overly dependent on one industry. I think that when we think about this international or this world citizen that I always go back down to the local. I mean, it's where it makes sense to my brain. I did a lot of work at the federal level for a long time and there's really important things that happen at a national level in any country. But I think there are so many controls at local levels that we have a responsibility to use those controls for the good and that we can work at the state or national or international levels as well but that in any local community, we have this ability to think about who benefits from our investments. No matter if the investment is time or money or programming or real estate, we can do it in a way that helps more people build wealth for their own households for the community and not just continue to invest in ways that in the past where well, it's for the public, right? But the reality is that the same community of people and in the US predominantly white people would benefit from those investments in the past. And so one of the key questions, and this is to me part of that sort of universal citizen question is when we are making changes, when we are making investments, who do we wanna benefit from it? And being really specific about that and answering that question, even if it makes people uncomfortable. And I promise you, I've made so many people uncomfortable with this question, right? The place I start, and this is the first step in the book is, what outcome are you trying to achieve? Let's be really specific about it. What does it look like? What does it feel like to walk down the street in that downtown? Who is in those storefronts? What are those businesses? And then the second question is who should benefit? And let's be really specific about who should benefit from it because if we're not, then we're not gonna necessarily achieve all those other outcomes that we're trying to achieve. And if we know who we wanna benefit, then we're gonna go make sure we talk to those people, we're gonna understand what works and what doesn't work for them now. And we're gonna build investments that really make sure that they address the needs of that community. And the truth is, is that sometimes the benefits cross racial, ethnic, immigrant status and internationally. And sometimes they don't. And sometimes they're very different. One of the amazing things that I can take no credit for, but I just got a chance to witness, I had an opportunity to work with this wonderful neighborhood organization in Lafayette, Louisiana, called the Macombisé Coterie, which is the Neighborhood Association. Macombisé is the neighborhood. And the leadership in this community, and this is the story that we start the book with, is amazing, a woman, Tina from the community, Tina Sheldon, she worked with Habitat for Humanity to get control over a vacant house in the middle of the neighborhood and turn it into a community house so that the neighborhood that had been neglected honestly by the city and the state for a very long time was taking its control itself and creating this space where people could come together so that the kids could go there to do homework after school so they could have computers set up for people in the community to do job applications. And one of the things they then added to this space was a business academy so that people in the neighborhood who had home-based businesses, maybe that were part-time or full-time, could get training on how to make their business more resilient, how to grow the business, how to grow their market. And it was an amazing thing to see how they very purposefully said, we wanna make sure we're benefiting our community because honestly, nobody else is. And I think that that's important to think about how are we making investments to make sure that we are helping people where they may not be getting help from the city government or the state government, but that there are other ways to support these community members, the people in our community and their businesses. I love that you said that because it really ties to, so I have some burning questions, some really hard questions besides the ones I've already asked that I usually ask and you've kind of almost answered one of those, not only in your workbook, but in your book, you go through those questions, you talk about, describe what it's like to walk down the street and in your community and what do you see and what's at stake and you're asking kind of, do you like what you see? What do you think should be there? What would that look like? Things like that, so I absolutely love that. But the question now, and I ask it in a more global, much bigger, what does a world that works for everyone look like for you? But I'm gonna flip the switch and say, what does a community that works for everyone look like for you? It's a great question, right? I mean, I think it is this, I think that the first step in that is making sure that we're asking a diversity of people that question. And right, I mean, I literally grew up in this planning world, right? I've been in it my entire career and I have spent years either being part of the problem or hopefully being part of the solution of how do we do outreach to a diversity of people? And this is something I spend a lot of time on in the book honestly, in a way where I looked back at it after I wrote it and I was like, I feel like this is too easy and that somebody's gonna look at it and say, well, of course that's what we do. But the reality is that I realized we needed to give people a system to say, do I have the diversity of my community engaged? How do I find the diversity of my community? The reality is that people have their personal networks. That's just who we are. We have, I don't know, there was some research at some point, you have 150 people that you actually know, I think is the number. You can tell me, I'm totally off on the number. But we have our own personal networks and if we are in leadership roles within our community, we have a responsibility to make sure that we're building up a network that represents the demographic diversity of our community. And if we're doing economic development, we often will have to build that from scratch because we never built that in the past. And so going out, and this is a community or a set of individuals in the community that I talk about in the book called The Connectors with a capital C. And these are people who believe in the community, believe in the potential of a community, wanna see it succeed and have those stronger relationships and have trusted relationships in a certain subset of your population and your community. And that we literally need to go and sit and have coffee with those people one-on-one to say, this is what we're working on doing. This is who we're trying to reach. Can you help? What do you think we need to do? And build new, honest relationships with people that we maybe never had involved in economic development or community development in the past. And that could be people who have been involved in entrepreneurship, but only in the tech entrepreneurship in the past. That could be faith leaders. That could be cultural leaders. There's all different kinds of leaders we have in our community that know the people in their community and are trusted in their community. And I emphasize that they have to both believe in the future and the greatness of their community and be known and trusted within their community because we know that we sometimes get one or the other. And that it's really important to think about getting that combination in these connectors. And the truth of it is that when we start engaging these people, we're building our own new network to a long haul. So a lot of the things that I'm most excited about with this work and that I'm excited to have in the book is that these are networks and these are systems that can be used for the long haul to build all sorts of capacity in the community, to build out other parts of the small business community, but also just in terms of different kinds of engagement to figure out what else needs to happen and how else the community can succeed. And it is about creating more good paying jobs, right? Small scale manufacturing businesses are generally gonna pay 50 to 100% more in salary as compared to a retailer service job. That was before the pandemic. I know that's a lot of that's changing up very fast right now. So that was a couple of years ago, but right there also filling vacant storefronts and they're making people proud of their downtown and who gets that opportunity is completely based on who we talk to. And so just getting people to have an honest conversation about that is really an important goal for me to make sure that we are thinking about how we're creating that community for everyone. And I love that because it's a few things. So it's not really about just building this community like a development project or revitalizing old communities or downtowns. It's truly about and in German, so I'm in Hamburg, Germany, but in Germany, it's bread is called Brot, B-R-O-T. And it's also an acronym in English that stands for building a relationship of trust. And you mentioned trust and you mentioned building these new relationships. And that's really about these. And I think the number of your ride is somewhere between 100 and 150, is at its limits that you can build your inner circle, but those 150 people have another 100 and 150 people which spreads very exponentially quick on how you can truly build a community of people who are aligned and would like to see the same for the future. I wanna tickle on a few more things because in your book and you just mentioned it now, this development, economic development but also community development, community building, things like that. I'm a sustainable development goal advocate for the United Nations. I'm big on the sustainable development goals in the Paris Agreement. And so I talk a lot about the environment and sustainable development, but a lot of people don't have never heard of it but they don't know what it is. But development is what we do all the time in community cities or wherever. It's development of commercial and residential and communities, we're developing them to build them up. And there's different ways of doing that. So there's the high carbon scenario, business as usual. We just go in, we use it and then when it gets dilapidated or old, we just tear it down and rebuild or hopefully we're in a good community and we like to do it the low carbon way where we restore and repurpose and build it up in a more sustainable way. But that development part of normal development is really the same except for its sustainable development. It's something that is gonna sustain itself in that community, in hard times, in climate change, in economic downturns, in pandemics and you're sustaining that community and wages and employment and many other things for the future generations. For when the kids come back that they'll have a place to say, I hate to go visit mom and dad because it's so boring, there's nothing there. No good ice cream, no good stores, nothing. And I wanna be in the big city where I can get my Amazon package in an hour and stuff like that. And so sustainable development is really is an important part of the development and building these, bless you, building these relationships is so important. But there's another layer that goes on to that and that's what you also tickled upon that I kinda wanna go deeper in if it's okay with you, if not just tell me we'll move on. But it's, you mentioned the systems and we touched upon how communities are part of a bigger system, cities and states and things like that. But the entire world, all international organizations in the world in 2018 switched to this systems dynamic modeling and not a place far from Washington, DC where you're at in Durham, New Hampshire is where Dennis Meadows and Donald Meadows live who wrote the book, The Limits to Growth and did this MIT World Model 3. They did it at MIT, which is in Boston. That was kind of the emergence of the systems thinking and systems dynamic modeling. And now all the international organizations, UN, WHO, a world economic former have all switched since 2018 on their websites, transformational maps to systems maps, systems dynamic modeling in the way they solve global grand challenges. What I see is a little bit different in the tools of communities and cities as some of them are outsourcing or contracting to others to take over governance for cities and communities in some respect because maybe they have those models and that stuff. But do you also see in the development of communities even though it's ground grassroots and it could be community members who are starting this questioning phase and making sure they're connecting with the right leaders and elders and people who need to be evolved in this broad, this relationship of trust that they have the tools available out there besides just all knocking on your door and what are the steps? Are there some bigger tools or models? SDGs have SDGs cities and tools available for people to use them on a city level and things like that. Are there some kind of a tools that can kind of help them with this process and also connect the dots that maybe would tie to bigger other systems that ripple out? I'm definitely not an expert in this sort of international trend towards the whole subsystems analysis side of it. So I can't really speak to that part of it so much. My experience is that we have an overwhelming number of tools just to talk about it a little bit more generally. There are, I think it is more about paying attention to what's working at the local level and who's benefiting from it. And honestly, that's a lot of what I do is I'm consuming a lot of the successes at the local level both in terms of programmatic the successes that support small scale manufacturing and other small businesses to start and grow but also real estate models that help both starting businesses and scaling businesses. And then the capital investments that are necessary both directly to the businesses but also to help those programs happen and that space happened. So I don't think that in general we're missing tools. I think we're in general more missing a way to tie it together and maybe that is the system side of it that you're talking about. And honestly, the book is I think much more of a system with a lot of tools sort of interspersed within it but I do think that we have to figure out this way of understanding what are we trying to get? What are we trying to achieve? What is that reason that we wanna bring people together? Do we want more entrepreneurs? Do we want more jobs? Do we want to build community pride? What are we doing to build a place that feels like home again, right? It is as much as I started my career as an analyst I was all about numbers and maps and number crunching. That is where I started. That's where my heart sits. So much of community development is emotion. And we see that every time realistic development comes up in a community. It is so much about emotion. And I think that we have to have a reckoning about who gets access to those resources and who gets access to those investments and being really clear about, if we look at small rural communities and the income divides in those communities, I will tell you that a systems approach to a community that hasn't had a major job center for a long time, they don't see a reason for a systems approach. They don't see what the potential is. They don't see that there is a potential in their community necessarily even in their elected officials. And so the question then is, how do we get even the thought process in more people's hands to say, yeah, there are a great set of skills in our community. There is great potential in this community. It just can't be dependent on the revenues that are earned and created in our community right now. We need to have a way to bring more into our community. And that honestly is where small scale manufacturing thrives is that ability to help people build the revenues from the region and from national or international. And so I think we have to think about who gets to benefit from it. What are the tools that we used in the past that maybe created those divides? And then what are the tools that need to be very purposefully deployed so that we're benefiting more people? And that we do have this sort of defining moment right now coming out of the pandemic just to change the way we've spent our money in the past. And honestly, one of my greatest fears right now is that at least in the United States, and I think this is probably true of a lot, not every country, but a lot of countries, people love having amnesia, right? You wanna get rid of that horrifying experience, right? In the United States alone, we have 600,000 people who died, right? Families that have been torn apart, let alone once we start talking about Brazil or India or other countries in the world and lives lost. And I think that there is, to me, a real fear of this amnesia that people just wanna move forward and forget about all of the lives lost, all of what went on with Black Lives Matter and what else we need to do around that. And people just wanna sort of go into, you know, celebrate on the streets. And I think we do get to celebrate on the streets for coming out of this, but I think we also have this defining moment to say, did we really mean all of the stuff that we said over the last year? Our local businesses, in fact, important to us, is a redundant supply chain that actually can support us in times of emergency. Is it important to us? If so, then local procurement needs to be spending money on the local supply chain so that it has anchor products that it's selling within the community so that when we need them in times of emergency, they can still pivot and create those things for us, right? There's very concrete things that we can be doing. So I would just say that we have to think about the system side of it, but not get stuck in the system. We have an opportunity today to be very concrete and very action-oriented and do, honestly, a half a dozen different things that could make an enormous difference for a lot of different people. That those half a dozen or more things that you do is truly the only way that you're gonna really tackle and start addressing the situation and improving and making it better. Just how I kind of tickled a little bit about those international organizations. They all came to the realization that these global grand challenges can't be solved with a siloed or linear lateral approach that they really need to be a systems approach in. And as you said in your book, it is really a bunch of systems and tools to approach it in that way. But it's, and you also said this, you're like, is this too simple? It is pretty simple. When you put it all together, it could be complex and say, oh wow, this overwhelming. But it's not, we're really capable of seeing the systems view of life and realizing that everything in our world is made up of systems and by taking that in a very local way for our community. So I love how you brought that up because that is so much the key to solving our issues very locally and having these local economies that are strong local futures and really thinking about how can we sustain our community for the influx of visitors and families coming back and coming and going to, because we're a vibrant, lively community and that's going to continue that way. The second and very last hardest question I have for you that's the burning question, WTF. And it's not the swear word, even though maybe you've said this and people in your community have said it this year, 15 months, but it's really, what's the futures or what's the future? And what I mean by that, just to caveat a little bit, are our futures local, regenerative, resilient? What's your plan? I don't wanna know the governance planning. What's your future moving forward? And I'm almost asking for what's your model or your goal for the future? That's another very light question. Thank you, Mark. So I think the future, it does tie to that complexity of the system's question, right? The thing that I think is unique, one of the things that I think is unique about this book and about my work is that I really work with communities to make the case that how we support small business, how we support local real estate and how we create capital opportunities are in fact three systems that we need to tie together for a successful local economy. And most of the time in the past, we've looked at these things individually or maybe two of them together, but not all three. And that it is really important to think about all three of those pieces together, both from a startup perspective, but also from a scale-up perspective. There's so little we've done as a nation, locally, state or nationally, to support existing small businesses in our community and to help them not only be more resilient and strong as a business, but to help them scale. And so that there is an amazing, untapped resource in those businesses. If we take 10 local businesses and help them each add five jobs, we have 50 jobs that are never gonna leave our community because they're already tied deep into our community. And they can be in our short friends and they can be a part of our community and really make a difference for a lot of people. So I think we have to, as we're looking at the future, we have to be thinking about how we're tying those pieces together. I think that we really need to make sure that we're looking at the details of things like zoning. Can we allow artisan manufacturing on our main street? We have to make sure that the stuff we're already investing in supports the target populations who we wanna benefit and the kinds of businesses that can make a big difference. So that we don't just have tech incubators. We have incubators that are focused on small-scale manufacturing and other locally owned, local growing businesses. And we have to have a way to help folks get a foot in the door. So we have this whole history of real estate space. Property owners have decided that certain businesses are high risk. So how do we help as a community or as city leaders, how are we helping those businesses that are emerging and that might not have a long history, a long banking history, for instance, how do we help them become commercial tenants? There are so many really specific programs we can put in place to make a difference for these businesses, both in terms of getting access to capital, but also getting access to commercial space. That we really need to think of what these barriers are within a community and figure out how to remove them as a part of it. So I think as we think about the future at the local level, to me, it is as simple as who are we sitting down to have a cup of coffee with, across the table with in person now, because we can, it's very exciting. And thinking about the diversity of people that we wanna make sure that we're sitting and talking with and meeting with, I'm a huge proponent of going to visit small-scale manufacturers in their place of work unless they're home-based businesses so that we can actually see what they're doing and how they're doing it and really let them show off the pride of what they're creating. So I think so one part of the future is being able to sit down and have a cup of coffee with new people. And then I think the other part of the future is really thinking about who are we investing in and where are we investing those dollars? Who benefits from each dollar we're investing? And being incredibly purposeful about those investments that it's not just from the public sector, it's from the private sector too. I think one of the things that we recognize coming out of the pandemic is that we all have a responsibility to make sure that we're doing good in the world and that doing good can be good business too, but that we have a real purpose to making sure that we're creating more opportunity for more people. And that that's gonna benefit the local economy in a whole bunch of different ways. I think that particularly our smaller cities have this unbelievable moment right now with the American Rescue Plan funds coming, with this online access to training and the ability for businesses to sell anywhere. And that it honestly, it's the time to harness the moment and create these defining downtowns that build wealth for members of every community. And that's across the nation and across the world that we can do this. I love that. And I really love how you tied in the systems as well. And I believe that is what your book from end to end really is such a powerful, it's a wonderful read, but it's also one that's empowering to those with the tools and where to look and to ask those questions, just like I'm asking you the questions that hopefully many of us would ask already. With the question that I asked prior to that about the systems there was one more thing that I kind of wanted to address and see with this. For a couple of reasons, the reason I like your approach and that you think in the systems and you have those tools is because what I've personally seen not only in the US, but in Europe where when you're trying to build a new community or a new place of business or organization as a local future or something that's part of a community to build up the infrastructure, you many times become in competition or run into larger organizations that are vying for that same space. And by using those tools and that systems way of thinking and embracing that as a community after you've had coffee with those people that also see that vision, then it's kind of like you're able to go against the David and Goliath type of a situation where you can in many times have that same strength and power, not always, but many times you can have that same thing where the city planners or the local governments that you're asking for permissions or looking to change or develop the communities with will give you more incentives because you're a local business. And so I loved how you kind of address that. I don't know if there's any more that you've seen that that is the case or anything if you wanna address that, but I just wanted to say, I mean, I'll just give you one example. I was up on a property where it would save 200 jobs that would repurpose an old brewery that was closing down and moving somewhere else and give those jobs back and be used as a manufacturing for new brooks within the city. And I was by what's on that one I lost out. I was blown out of the water by a bigger company that wanted to turn it into residential housing. But sometimes you, it is this David against Goliath and the systems that you had, if I'd had them back then it might have been a different outcome. Right, I think that, so there's a somewhat of a different conversation and not really hot markets versus the not as hot markets for cooler markets. I think that in the cooler markets, the one of our steps is really we get everyone around the table who is supporting small business in any way we figure out what's effective and we figure out how to double down on what's effective or make sure it's reaching more people so that people can see that it's gonna benefit their organization or their work. It's not about being at cross purposes. It's really about how are we building everybody up together to get there. I think also communities that are making the investments in these businesses and putting it in their main streets, putting it on their corridors, putting it in their downtowns and figuring out how to support them are seeing just great successes that other communities are gonna wanna copy. And so there is nothing like city leadership in the world of wanting to copy somebody else's success. And so I think that's one of the most important things we can do is share those successes. I think from a real estate standpoint, like you're talking about it's all, it's local politics and it's local policy. We have a history of what people call highest and best use, which I do talk about in the book a little bit. My question always is best use for who? Best use for what? It depends on what our outcomes are that we're trying to achieve and who we're trying to benefit. So we have historically over the last, I would say 30 years, we haven't said that middle income jobs are a priority in most of our communities, but they need to be, that's at least in the US, that's the major gap we have. We have a ton of growth in high income jobs and we have actually a huge loss and now growth in low income jobs in the country, but we have nothing left in the middle. And so that's how we're gonna build community wealth. That's what we're gonna pull people out of, out of low income and poverty wage jobs is by creating more middle income jobs and more opportunity for people to become business owners. So I think that it's important to think about in all of these cases from a political perspective, what is the outcome you're trying to achieve? What's the policy for that space? What's the zoning for that space? And then how are you using your tools to achieve that outcome? When people point to just let the market do its thing, nothing about any development in any of our communities is based on a pure market anymore. So it's bull. So then the question is, well, what do you actually wanna do? And are you willing to say that? And some people are and some people aren't, but the places that are willing to do something about it, I think we'll see that they're gonna make the biggest difference in their community to build wealth for more members of their community and create a more resilient and stronger local economy. And that's truly what I love about your book is because it's how to save not just your downtown, but to use small scale manufacturing to get that manufacturing back in. And all around the world, we're seeing food production, manufacturing of goods that are basic resources in some effects have left our communities and our cities. And just the simple wisdom of things is in times of pandemics and times of need or where there's a flood or drought or whatever else. And it's affecting more than just a city or community is affecting a state or a country. They're not gonna ship that food from where it's been grown outside of those communities into those communities during that time of hardships. And that's when you've gotta say, what are we gonna do? Are we gonna build a victory garden? Well, that does take a lot more than a few days when you need to eat and drink and have all those other things. And so I'm really big on how do we revitalize cities to manufacture on a different scale in the city to be a little bit self-sustaining in that. And so I really like that about your book as well. Those are all the hard, hard questions that I have for you. The last three questions I have for you are really for my listeners. They're something that kind of messages you can give them to help or empower them, make their lives different or things that maybe you didn't get to address and my weird questioning about your book and about your journeys. If there was one message, you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that truly has the power to change their life. What would it be, your message? And if it's more than one, that's okay as well. Well, we'll go with the system. You introduced that by saying it's a smaller question. That's not a smaller question. I would say that it's important for people to realize that change can happen in a matter of months, that we can have successful outcomes within our communities within three to six months and that the book is really a way for people to understand what role they play in that and how to create the successes that their community needs so desperately now. And if the success is about filling storefronts and vacant spaces, it's about doing that. It can be about bringing new revenues into the community. It can be about bringing together the diversity of small business owners, but ultimately it's really about valuing the people and the places in our community and that people need to recognize that they are of value and that the places are of value and that I know I talk about that a lot in the first chapter. So for anybody who wants to get that first chapter, it is available on the book website for free to get that introduction at recastyourcity.com. But I think it's important for people to understand that all of this works and it really can happen in the short term and that success can be right there by working with the community in this way. What should young innovators in your field be thinking about if they're looking for ways to make real impact in their community? Oh, wow, that's great. Young innovators should get a whole bunch of people around the table. I mean, I think it really has to start with talking to people. I think young innovators can be some of the best people to bring a diversity of people around the table and talk about what's working and what's not working without feeling like they have some skin in the game yet, necessarily they don't feel like they have to defend an existing silo or an existing program and having honest conversations. I think it's great to have honest conversations about what works and what doesn't work and who's benefited in the past and who needs to benefit in the future. And then to be innovative about creating programs and real estate projects. One of the most exciting things I've been able to see over these last bunch of years is these new real estate projects. And honestly, it's not just young people. It's across every different age and group but people investing in real estate space for small businesses and particularly even micro retail space for small scale manufacturers and figuring out how to make this happen in the private sector because they know it's the right thing to do and it makes financial sense. So I think there's a lot of really exciting innovative things for people to look at across the country and then figure out how to adapt into their community. There are some really interesting things that I've seen specifically with that going on around the world that tie into sustainable development. So normally if you try to mix large scale, heavy processing, production, manufacturing in a city or community scale, it doesn't work because of the emissions, the pollution, the water treatment, many different factors. And then you also, when you see them most of them have security, they're fenced off, they're very, they don't want anybody to film or anybody to come in, whatever it is. We move to renewable, more sustainable practices, renewable energy, different processes for water, different processes for sourcing and doing our manufacturing and production. It actually becomes kind of an open source transparent type of a process where you can actually be in a community, you can be in a city to do that right there. And I'm not just talking brewery or gastronomy, I'm talking pretty good size scale, small scale manufacturing where because you're using those practices, it's something that's not gonna harm the community or you don't want them to see what dirty business you're doing or whatever else. You can let them behind the scenes and to see what you're doing. So I think it's just a better model. The last question really is what, and I think you really touched upon it earlier in your 25 years of experience that you wish you would have done earlier, but what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far that you would have loved to know, have known from the start? That's a great question. I think one of the things that I learned along the way from some amazing wise people who do community development is how much it's just based on the people, how much it has to be based on the, I call it the small the politics of who's at the table to make things happen, but how purposeful we need to be about who gets to be at that table. And I know that's something that at least in the United States has been a big part of the conversation recently about who gets to see that the table or building a brand new table. And that in all of my work in community development when I talked about housing and transportation and reinvesting in downtowns before downtowns were cool, we never talked about what is the role of small business and how do they make or break a neighborhood and its longevity and its resilience and that learning that over the years from working with people in the community is really about how we're building community wealth and how we're building places that aren't just limping along but are really thriving for the people who live there. And then it's not always about bringing more people into the community, which is a necessary outcome in some cases, but it's about taking care of the people who are there and creating more opportunity for those people. So that would probably be my lesson, although I'm not sure I would have known what to do with it if I'd learned that at the beginning. Do you, does HUD have a federal position, a White House position? Is that a federal type of a position? Yes, HUD is a cabinet secretary. Is that what you mean? Yeah, do we have to worry that you're gonna be stolen away from recast to fill that for the Biden-Harris administration to really show them how it needs to be done? Well, I'm very happy working at the local level with communities. My main way of working with folks is either one-on-one with communities or through our ReCast Leaders Program where we bring five communities together for 12 months and we train them up on everything that is in this book and then some help them make it happen and then mentor them through implementation of their work. And so it is truly my passion to get to work with the local community leaders and to help them see this through. And so that's where I will be for a long time. Well, I'm glad. I think that's very fitting position and you're gonna do great. I hope you get many urban community leaders knocking down your door wanting to go through that process. Oh, Alana, thank you so much for letting us inside of your ideas and sharing ReCast Your City, how to save your downtown with small-scale manufacturing. It was a pleasure to read it and it was a pleasure to have this discussion with you, I thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me, Mark. You're most welcome. Take care, bye-bye. Bye.