 Let's give it up for the Vertigree Music Ensemble. Thank you guys. It's not lost on me if you were listening closely that the hook is Die Rabbit Die. So it's a, we're not killing any rabbits this afternoon. That's my promise to you. Vertigree is performing this weekend. They are Dallas' most innovative choir. They sing the Legacy of the Dust Bowl as part of the Elevator Project. And those performances are gonna be this weekend at Hammond Hall Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, the 27th of February through the 29th. Again, at Hammond Hall as part of the Elevator Project. So one more time, give it up to Vertigree. Thank you guys. We're gonna have a few more of those surprises through the course of the afternoon. So get ready to do some more hooting and hollering. My name is Clyde Valentin. Welcome to Arts, Culture, and Community Investment in the afternoon of what we hope will be a shared learning experience. As we explore one question together, a question we've been asking ourselves for the past 18 months, what does the act of true community investment look like? I'm the inaugural director of Ignite Arts Dallas, an initiative dedicated to people purpose and place out of SMU's Meadow School of the Arts. We formally launched five years ago and time flies when you're having fun and working hard. We do our work centers around arts and experiential learning for our students, the residents of Dallas, and the wider national arts ecosystem. We have co-hosted and collaborated on a number of national convenings that have taken place here in Dallas over the last five years, bringing people who've never been to this city for the first time and changing their perspective on what's happening here on the ground in a positive way, I wanna say, in a good way. Today in many ways is also designed as a convening, and we reached out to collaborators across the city to create an intersectional space of participants with multiple perspectives. That's you all in the room. I'm grateful for the support of the Trinity Park Conservancy, the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce, our colleagues from Yebab Buena Center for the Arts, the Business Council on the Arts, and our colleagues also from Culture Bank National. Particularly grateful to TACA for working alongside us over the first year of Culture Bank Dallas with all their operational and logistical support to help us get off the ground. So thank you, TACA, for being so supportive. We awarded the Meadows Prize to Culture Bank with the goal of spurring additional investments in the arts in Dallas. Investments that will transcend traditional philanthropy and diversify where and what types of resources become available to arts organizations and more importantly, individual artists. We'll talk about the emphasis of artists a little later with actual artists during our Culture Bank Dallas cohort session. This afternoon is meant to stimulate and invigorate your own possibilities within your purview of the city. Maybe spark new ideas for possible collaborations and if I can invoke a metaphor to you all. In your seats, there's a flyer for playwrights in the newsroom which is a piece that we call commissioned which is also being presented by APAC as part of the Elevator Project and the playwrights asked the journalists that they've interviewed through the Dallas Morning News tell me a metaphor for your job, what it is that you do. So in being inspired by that prompt, a metaphor that I wanna share with you to visualize one of our goals is to imagine all of us as weavers and tailors. We have the tools to sit together strong long lasting materials and we also have the tools to amend and make adjustments to see when a stitch is becoming frayed and needs strengthening. This is my hope for all of us doing our work to make the city a better place for all of its residents. What else can we weave together to enable stronger places? We'll be moving at a rapid clip between our segments with a few additional surprises. As I mentioned along the way, we'll be reserving questions for the final segment of the afternoon, the happy hour featuring DJ SkinPolitik, for housekeeping purposes, restrooms are out to the back on the left just before you get to the cafe. And finally a note about place. I think Rev Joel's in the back right there. I see you by the booth, shout out to Rev. We are in life in D. Bellum. Life in D. Bellum is a faith-based community. How many people have been in this space before just out of curiosity, quick show of hands? Okay, so maybe under 40%, that's good. So you're here for the first time. So why are we here? Life in D. Bellum is a faith-based community. We're sitting in a church right now. It's also a gallery, the one you pass through on the way in. This space is also an event space. It's a coffee shop, really good coffee I might add. And it's a shared workspace here to the left. It is flexible and economically sustainable because of its diverse income sources and volunteer-driven ethos. And most importantly, it is a trusted place by so many in the city. It's one of the first places I came to when I moved to Dallas. And it told me that there was home here. So I extend to you this. Innovative forms of collaboration that center arts and culture for long-term community impacts are not just theoretical in Dallas. They already exist in our city because this place exists in our city because the Pan-African connection exists because our cultural centers exist. So why couldn't we have five more life in D. Bellum's across our city? Places that grow organically and reflect the fabric of each local community that informs and fills the space with needs the community itself defines. So that's what I wanna leave you with. And with that, let's begin. I'd like to invite my colleague, Lex Lifehite, out on the stage to, from the Economic and Workforce Development Office from the city of San Francisco. A warm welcome. Dallas, welcome to Lex Lifehite, please. Thank you. All right, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much. Oh, we're in Dallas. You answer back. Thank you. Thank you so much, Clyde, for inviting me here today. So my name's Lex. I work in the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development. And in my role, I am usually a very persistent and sometimes effective advocate in City Hall for non-profit, for arts and culture. Normally when I'm out in the community, I'm there to listen and learn. And as I approach five years in my role, this is one of the first times that I've been presenting the work externally. So don't be shy about questions afterward or even helpful suggestions. And thank you for listening. Clyde just had you raise your hands. I'm gonna do one more time because I'm curious who I'm talking to. How many people in the room are artists? Raise your hand. How many people here are arts workers but don't identify as artists? All right. And how many people here would consider yourself somehow an investor of other resources in the arts? Philanthropist, other type of investor? All right. Thank you so much. So what I think I'm gonna touch on today is San Francisco people and demographic trends because I don't think you can talk about community investment without acknowledging people in the community briefly. I'll talk about economic development and small business assistance that we're doing in our agency and how that work connects with arts and culture. I'll talk a little bit about our cultural districts and that strategy and what that looks like in San Francisco. And then I'll go a little deeper into some of the work that I've been stewarding with nonprofit capacity and capital and by capacity and capital I mean organizational effectiveness, how to deepen and extend impact of organizations and capital largely I work on real estate but also working capital, that kind of money that you need to take risks and to be resilient. This is San Francisco. For some people who might not be familiar with the shape or size of the city, it kind of looks like a fist and it's seven miles by seven miles. We have about 883,000 people living in San Francisco proper. It's a city and county. So the city and county are together and we have a $12 billion city and county budget. When I was preparing for this and thinking a little bit about comparisons to Dallas, there are, well, San Francisco's about two thirds the size in terms of population just of Dallas city. And while we've had growth over the years, Dallas is growing faster, right? And our growth lately has been constrained due in part to affordable housing. The people in San Francisco, this is just a snapshot from dating back to 1990. So in 1990 you could see that, I think reading the monitors, about 47% white and that has gone down. Our Asian population has grown steadily from 1990 until today. Between 1990 and 2015, the Latinx and Hispanic population stayed about steady and the black and African American population between 1990 and 2015 decreased by over half. Over the last two years, that's the Latinx and black population in the city has stayed about level but the populations in different neighborhoods all together have changed really rapidly. And so the city has prioritized racial equity and economic stability strategies. Some of the, so that touches on some of the work of OEWD. Getting back to OEWD informally as we were gathering before the presentation today, I was talking with people just asking if they had a relationship with the Office of Economic Development here or sort of if they had a relationship to an ongoing economic strategy and most people did not yet. When I was leading a cultural center called Somarts as an executive director, I was aware that some arts organizations got funding from our Office of Economic and Workforce Development but I really didn't know what that meant. It seemed very daunting. It seemed like we would have to completely change what we were doing, do it completely differently in order to access that funding or be a partner of the cities to help connect immigrants, communities of color, low income populations with good jobs or to help start up businesses and do that kind of work in our city. But it was meaningful work and in the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, we have many different divisions. We have a film commission, we have an office of small business, we have a joint development team and the common thread with them is that we're all trying to advance equitable and shared prosperity in our city through many different types of grants and on the ground strategies. I'm just gonna touch on a few that involve arts and culture and I'm gonna take a breath. All right, so this first one is Mission Loteria and I need to give credit to my colleague, Diana Ponce de Leon who leads this work in our agency and partnership with the Mission Economic Development Agency. In San Francisco, we have many small mom and pop storefronts who struggle to get started, stay in the city as rent goes up and grow and along Mission Street, tactic that we're trying is Mission Loteria. Mission Loteria is working with artists to create a bingo card of sorts with cards designed by artists that reflect the icons and imagery of the Mission District and it's a six month strategy and different businesses will hand out different cards and we're hoping that it will increase the business there, they'll help people discover new businesses and as it's going on now, we're gonna measure it in six months to see how it works but so far in addition to helping connect people with the businesses along Mission Street, because of the talent of the artists, we have really gotten a lot of positive press for this so it's the kind of press and marketing that would be hard for businesses to afford and so far it seems like it's been a good investment. Another multi-agency partnership is the implementation of our cultural districts. So San Francisco has a number of cultural districts and it looks a little different in our city than it has looked in other areas. In other cities, sometimes cultural districts can be created or intended to drive growth in business and the way we've envisioned cultural districts, we have a heritage and economic sustainability strategy that is intended to put the heritage and visual storytelling of a neighborhood, the character of a neighborhood and the strategies for economic inclusion into the hands of the people who are living there. So the Office of Economic and Workforce Development works with our planning department on a community stabilization strategy. The Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development works on capacity building once a cultural district is created and our office connects the dots between businesses and nonprofits, artists and individuals living in a region who might be interested or ready or looking at the creation of a cultural district and then as it's being created, we help with capacity building and business planning for the individual and collective businesses within that district and also connect them with resources such as our SF Shines program which would help business owners make facade improvements or improve the accessibility to their business. Oh, I don't have a back button, but maybe I do. Real quick, thank you. So lastly, I have a joint development team. So joint development is one of the hardest things to describe but basically our joint development team works with real estate developers on big projects, projects that would take between five and 30 years to fully build and implement and what they're working on is trying to leverage the resources and investment in those projects for things like job training, economic inclusion, quality of life, open space, child care, affordable child care and arts and culture and the joint development team is really focused on the staging of that, sort of the order in which it happens and also things that are not required by administrative code or they're not required by code. So we're trying to get more out or as the former head of that division would say milk the cow but don't kill it. These are some examples of arts and culture organizations both permanent and temporary that have been supported through community, through developer agreements and we have just to name a few although they're not perhaps familiar to you, the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Mexican Museum, the California Historical Society, ArtSpan and Bindle Stiff. These organizations range in size. They are focused on the Filipino community in San Francisco, African Americans, obviously the Mexican Museum and we've had varying levels of success and many lessons learned from these, from negotiating these agreements and often they have to do with capacity and readiness and the sort of calibration of funding, like how much funding goes into the quality of the space initially versus maybe affordable rent over time. There are always tensions and trade-offs because in addition to including arts and culture space we're also focused on other competing priorities like affordable housing, like transportation, like childcare and in a perfect world that would be not competing but in the real world there are some choices to be made and again it goes back to that milk the cow but don't kill it. We often think that the developer can pay more than they think they can pay to have a project still move forward. Does anyone here not know what a developer agreement is? This is something I get asked by artists often in San Francisco. Everyone knows, okay great. Just to touch on that really quickly when office space or housing is being built in San Francisco and we're negotiating community benefits along with that there is a contractual agreement between the developer and the city and county of San Francisco. It's approved by the mayor and the board of supervisors. It runs with the land so when a developer makes this agreement even if they sell off the project the agreement would still stay with the land. They can't sell off those responsibilities. The developments are five to 30 years and so those are some of the sort of basic factors that go with a development agreement. At the time that San Francisco has been growing and booming and population has been growing one of the challenges we started to see really intensely around 2013 was that nonprofits were being displaced. Particularly in a central neighborhoods like South of Market for us, Mid Market and the Mission District. Organizations were finding that either their price was going up or when it was time to renew their lease they weren't being offered anything because the property owner wanted the space to be vacant so that they could sell it for a higher price and because of that the human services providers and some arts leaders came together and went to our elected officials and said we need to come together and we want to work with city agencies and make some recommendations to the city and that's how the nonprofit Displacement Mitigation Funding was formed. It was one time funding to just get through this pinch point where no one had realized rents would go up that fast. But what we came to find was that rents got high and they stayed that way and organizations have longer leases so what we were really looking at was for the next 10 years and maybe the new normal for us is just much, much higher rents which in turn create a new business model and that impacts the city because we have about 700 nonprofit partners who provide things like legal assistance, youth development, arts and culture, job training who help entrepreneurs every year and there are partners. So the agency is particularly the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, the Arts Commission and the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development we're looking at an ongoing strategy and we came up to the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative which is what I steward with many partners. Thinking about data in case you were making a similar case for investment in space deeply rooted in communities where you're trying to advance racial equity and business growth. This is just some data we used to make the case. We looked at how much money the city was spending on nonprofits and really the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative is just a tiny piece of that for organizational reinvestment and it's also really just gap funding. There's already some funding for arts and culture. There's already funding for human services. This is just funding to cover that gap created by a sudden increase. We looked at generally what nonprofits receive, really what the size and scale of that partnership was. And we also looked at the data from the one-time investment because sometimes it can be hard to get a city or any funder for that matter to make an ongoing investment. They'll do a one-time thing but then getting it ongoing, getting it permanent, having that stability you can reach for, it's much harder. To get the permanent investment, we looked at our two-year funding results and what we found was that nonprofits could secure a seven-year lease that they leveraged $10 for every dollar that the city invested in grants and financing so that includes loans and other types of financing. We had wonderful comps, comparable pricing for neighborhoods and uses that helped the city better understand whether nonprofits were coming to us in the future with a good deal, whether the price in that neighborhood was higher or lower in general than what they were being offered by a property owner. And we discovered a lot about cross-sector services. That means a youth development organization or a senior center that has ongoing arts and culture programming, for example. So many examples of that. Organizations doing arts and culture work who maybe historically weren't able to access arts and culture funding that was based on quality or versus merit or working in low-income communities, communities of color, immigrant communities. I'm gonna skip these examples because I'm a little low on time, but these are just some of the beautiful spaces and services, pictures that reflect the wonderful organizations who have found long-term homes through the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative. These are some of our partners who I'm happy to talk about one-on-one. We have many national and local partners who are focused on real estate readiness, grant writing, leveraging and finding volunteers to help your organization. And then these are some of the shared knowledge that's come out of this work together with agencies and nonprofits, things like Backfill and shared space opportunities, all the pro bono services who really is good at working with nonprofits on space and on organizational effectiveness. Financing nonprofit executive directors or small business leaders don't necessarily have to know about real estate or have that knowledge on their boards or in their heads until they have a real estate crisis and of course, lifting up what's worked for others. So far, we've had nearly half of our funding go to organizations that offer ongoing arts and culture resources in San Francisco, which is amazing because it would have been common before to see no funding go to the arts at all necessarily, that it would be focused on other services, safety net services that were considered to be a priority. And moving forward, we're working on this year, long term, below market space for organizations on the ground floor of affordable housing. We're so excited about connecting people to services and resources and many of these are arts and culture organizations. I'll talk about that just a little bit more with in our Q and A and we're gonna do a Q and A with Jennifer Scripps who is the director of arts and culture here in Dallas. That's my contact information. Thank you. Good afternoon, Lex. Thank you so much for that presentation and for everyone here, my name is Jennifer Scripps and I'm with the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture. We so far are not doing all of the cool things that you have been able to advance in San Francisco. So even from our conversation last week, I take this and thank you to Clyde for connecting us as a huge learning opportunity for our city. We talk a lot about the ecosystem but a lot of times I think we mean within the arts and our reach into economic development or talking about the value of our workforce sometimes does not necessarily have those advocates quite yet. We're building them across city silos, so thank you. But I did have some questions for you and we'll also leave some time at the end. We'll make sure for audience questions. So selfishly, city halls all over America need more people like you and your bio coming from an arts background running art spaces where it sounds like you did everything as art space leaders usually do to starting the, I wrote it down, ABBA, Arts for a Better Bay Area Network in San Francisco, you were really an activist. So how has it gone from that background day to day to working at City Hall and dealing with real estate developers who care about maybe a different bottom line? Sure. While I do have some contact with real estate developers, most of my work is still with non-profit leaders. I'm so lucky that way. And when this position was created at City Hall and they first advertised it, the job description kind of looked like a kitchen sink. You couldn't really tell what it was, it was everything. It was just working with the non-profit sector. And I was at the time an executive director of a cultural center with an operating budget of about close to $2 million, but in a free space that was 25,000 square feet. So really it was a bigger operation. And what I had found through doing advocacy for access to arts and culture for everyone was that I loved running a space, but as I was growing my family and getting older, I was really energized by working on policy and working more broadly within the city. So originally I just made a decision to explore the job and everyone I knew, everyone I talked to who worked for the city was like, don't work for the city, it's horrible. Which is why we don't get great people sometimes at places like the city. They're live streaming this, so I need to finish that sentence and say, and say that I was very, very pleasantly surprised to talk with the people at the Office of Economic and Workforce Development and discover that while there is a lot of red tape, a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of building public will for any type of initiative that you're doing municipally, that there's still, I really enjoyed it. I love red tape, I love entangling red tape. I wake up in the morning and that's what I wanna do. So it was the right thing for me and I'm glad I listened to myself and did not listen to other people who have different strengths and different things that energize them. Yeah, we're glad for it, so thank you. I found it really interesting that your work explicitly in our initial conversation called out both social services agencies and arts and culture and obviously for people like myself, I think one supports the other. But sometimes people do see arts as, well, they're not starving children, so they are maybe below in a priority. Can you talk about how the needs have been different or similar and how it's broadened the support for this effort? I mean, is that something that art should be doing more explicitly on the policy level? That's a great question. I think we have a very broad arts community in San Francisco, but because of our arts agencies longstanding focus on cultural equity, there are many, many organizations who are focused on immigrants, on Muslims, on different Latino and communities and so there was already a lot of connection happening on the street level, where there wasn't connection was on the city level because I think when it comes to advocacy, the people wanna know what they're able to get and access and so the temptation to just get funding for the arts or get funding for legal assistance is pretty strong and I think that makes sense when we're talking about services, even in your own how you are making a case for the money, you say if we get $100,000, we can provide this much legal assistance to keep people in their homes, but when you're talking about organizational capacity and real estate, having it be in one bucket can make more sense because the way real estate opportunities play out is just not a perfect microcosm of what your nonprofit sector looks like. It's not perfect, everything doesn't happen in a perfect formula across all the neighborhoods in your city. And you mentioned readiness, it makes that many more organizations and their boards and who they serve eligible winning opportunities arise. Exactly, yeah. Yeah, so I think that's interesting and I think that some of the articles Clyde sent through if y'all got them explicitly talked about health and other markers of well-being in the arts, so thank you. And then we were gonna save some time for questions but I also always love to end on the magic crystal ball. So you've had success, you said you're coming up on five years. Sure, yeah. And I'm coming up on four. So it's, you know, I feel like in city worlds sometimes I'm still considered new. Where do you think your work will go? And obviously, I guess it's impossible to know if the economy or other trends, but in the next say two to maybe five more years, where do you think this could go if you're in your portfolio of arts, culture and community investment? So over the next two years, as I mentioned, we're focused on some opportunities on the ground floor of affordable housing sites and that will take a lot of coalition building and fundraising together to get into those sites. It takes a lot of readiness. It is extremely complicated to work with not just one, but two housing developers. They're often in partnership and figure out what is a fair and achievable price for those spaces or to either rent or to own those spaces. So that's going to be a lot of work over the coming years with the nonprofits themselves telling us, and they already have told me what they need. They need more pre-development funding. They need more funding to build and plan for their capital campaigns and get their architectural renderings and all the stuff that happens before they even start to break ground on construction. So that's big. We also recently did a nonprofit sector economic study, which we're still finalizing, but when we did that in partnership with San Francisco State University, we got a lot of valuable data about which sectors tend to be smaller, the financial health of arts and culture, of social services, of education providers, and the way I hope to begin to use that in the coming years is to now take that back to the nonprofits and say, hey, look, it looks like you're working capital, the day's cash on hand for education providers, and I don't have it in front of me, so I'm not sure that's true, but that's going down and what can we do to help that our nonprofit sector, for example, is more mature, and we know that more mature nonprofit sectors tend to just be wider nonprofit sectors, so what can we do to help nonprofits start up and grow, to reduce barriers to growth? We're also focusing a lot on talent recruitment and retention because after many, many years of low unemployment, nonprofits are having a very hard time filling vacancies when they come up and the time it takes and the number of vacancies at any given time in a nonprofit is getting in the way of the work. And succession planning is a huge issue. I mean, some of these organizations that have been successful now have to backfill on top of that for key leaders, so. Well, should we open it up for questions? Can I turn that back to you for just a second and say, you know, in the coming years, what's ahead? Well, thank you, yes. So as we had discussed, we finished our cultural plan at the end of 2018 and have done a few big wins last year in 2019. The city of Dallas has been going through an economic development study and is focused on four key industries. Unfortunately, creative industries was not picked as one of the key targets, and so we are trying to find other ways to insert the healthy, and from our perspective, we have been focused on creative industries, so the notion of enlarging that to a broader non-profit industry is really interesting to me personally, but is new because my main day here before has been very much arts and culture. But working specifically in housing, Dallas has a huge crisis for affordable housing, housing that shares our need for housing across the city so that we don't concentrate low-income populations that are already concentrated and create more problems. And we are luckily starting to get invited to more of those conversations, so I think that that's going to be an opportunity, and then these themes of capacity building, strengthening boards is something that is ongoing, and it needs to be a larger percentage of our work kind of in the future than it has been, so now that we might have some more bandwidth. So should we open up for questions? Okay, who wants to go first? We have a hand. Could you put your contact information back on the screen again? I'm not that fast. There you go. Good question. Easy. Lex, I'm interested in the business community's involvement in what you do, in other words, you talked a lot about your engagement with non-profits, but how do you interact with the business community and how can they help? Because I think that's one of the key ingredients in this town to making it successful. That's a great question. Did you say your name? I'm so sorry. I'm Brad Todd. Okay, so when non-profits advocated for my position to be created within the office, well, to be created, there was some conversation about where, okay, but where is it created? Like, do we put it over in the mayor's office of community development? Do we put it in the neighborhood's team? And where they decided to put this position, and I think it has, I'm biased, but I think it's worked really well, is they put it on the business development team, which means that I'm in a team with my colleague who works with corporate headquarters in San Francisco, and my colleague who works with mechanics grudges in manufacturing, and my colleague who's working on recruiting international business, and so they have more day-to-day contact with, say, our Chamber of Commerce or our advocacy groups for different business sectors, but there is a ton of crossover of information, and so when a film comes into town, and right now we have The Matrix filming in San Francisco, when a film comes into town and they have a lot of valuable stuff that they've used in the production that they wanna get rid of, but maybe they wanna give it to a community benefit organization, I'm right there with the data at the same time that someone else on the team's talking film sector, or we just borrow models from each other, so the way that the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative was structured is being borrowed by our manufacturing sector lead who is looking at how we can preserve space for manufacturers and mechanics grudges who provide good jobs to people who maybe have a high school level education, and we took so much time to design that model and think about risk and think about how we make the grants and how we award them, and now it can be replicated in other industries, and I guess getting back to what about businesses we wanna give back, right? Part of providing the capacity and real estate readiness work is that we, because that is ongoing, we tend to know really early on when a project is coming along and might be well suited to other types of investment, and I really try to avoid picking and choosing because I wanna be an advocate for everyone, but when a business has made clear what their philanthropic interests are, whether it's education or job training or supporting immigrant communities, then I can at times provide them with like, well here are the 80 non-profits who do that. Here are the ones right in your neighborhood, for example, so it's just having that information at the ready for people who are ready to give. Hi Lex, this is Jerry from Dallas Truth, racial healing and transformation. I spend a lot of time in San Francisco for work, and particularly I'm thinking about the comparison of Dallas to San Francisco is really not a good comparison because Dallas is effectively getting rid of its cultural districts and really this ethnic enclaves are gone, so I think about a comparison is more so to Austin, particularly because Austin, just like San Francisco is kind of like pushed out this black residents, and culturally I was at the Fillmore Arts Jazz Festival, and I think about race-based policy, like redlining, and my question to you is does San Francisco have like race-based policies that I really think about like race-based policies like redlining, which really particularly talked about different communities, and as a combat to that, having like cultural equity or something that's not race-based, can it really come back what's happening in cities like Austin and San Francisco? Yeah, tell me your name again? Jerry. Jerry, okay. So that's a big question. Our elected officials just created an Office of Racial Equity, and part of what that office is tasked with is providing guidance and monitoring and measuring the progress we are making or not with our race-based policies and advancing racial equity in the city. One of the things, I touched on cultural districts, and the cultural districts really are a container, I don't, it's hard for me to articulate, but it's like a container for resources, often for communities of color in our city, and it's also a container for policy, and just to say one example, so in Caioventi Quatro, which is a cultural district in our mission district, some of the, they form the district first, and some of the policies that have been made around conditional use approval of changing the use of a building or a business, are focused on another program we have, which is the Legacy Business Program, so it's a really, it's a complex tool, but basically we've taken businesses that have been in continuous operation or 30 years or more, often businesses that have been nominated because they reflect the racial community of Mexican and Latinx immigrants in that neighborhood, and they are protecting those businesses, then with this other conditional use and legacy programming, they're saying if you're gonna change that business, or that business goes away, in order for the new use to be approved, it has to meet these five, some of these five priorities for serving low income communities and communities of color in that neighborhood. We have to work with state laws that prevent commercial rent control, so we have to work within that, and it takes a lot of creativity, and it really takes the feedback from people in the community to say, this works for us, this doesn't work, this makes it too hard to start a business, this is not doing enough, and that's where I think our Office of Racial Equity comes in. I could probably talk more about that. We should just talk after this, okay? Hi, I'm Adrienne with the Cedars Union. I had a question about the actual real estate development deals. In order to make this work, does the city buy property from a developer, or does the developer have to agree on making less money than they might on a commercial market? How close is this to sort of the way square footage lease might work without a nonprofit, if that makes sense? We could maybe, I don't know if it's possible to go back to that, the developer agreement slide. I'd say both things happen. When we're building affordable housing, the city usually has a ground lease, but not always. At times the city will purchase property, for example, right now we're consolidating a bunch of different agencies because in the past to do your pre-development planning and get your permitting, you were just running all over downtown to different buildings to do it, and that was hard for businesses. But with development agreements, normally it is a private developer who is purchasing that big piece of land and they're building so much. This isn't like a four-unit housing thing, this is like a big thing that's gonna take five to 30 years is when our office tends to be involved. It's more than a permit, it's a plan from five to 30 years. And I'm not fully sure I understand that stood the rest of your question, but the way the process kinda works is the developer already has contacts in the neighborhood usually that they're talking to. They maybe have one or two, nonprofits, maybe elected officials, maybe business owners who they're in conversation with and they're saying, here's what we're thinking, do you support this? If so, why? If not, why not? Then they'll be in conversation with our joint development agency and also our invest in neighborhoods team who's really on the ground in the commercial quarters. And in the early stages we maybe play a little more of like a validator slash sniff test role and say like, oh, it looks like you're talking to all the right people or oh, we noticed you haven't reached out to United to Save the Mission and this advocacy group that represents a lot of nonprofits in the neighborhood regularly comes to the planning hearings and offers their feedback. So you might wanna consult them before you get your hearing scheduled. So we're playing a connector role in the early stages to ensure that they have broadly done their engagement before they get to a planning hearing. Does that answer your question? And the reason why is that we do not have as a right development. There is no, you can't just buy it and build it. You have to go through planning hearings, have your project improved, get it entitled. If you could just buy it and build it, they wouldn't be consulting the neighbors. Hi, my name is Sasha and I'm with Big Thought and I had a two-parter question. The first is how do you ensure that the voice or what steps do you ensure that the voice of the community in which you're shifting for the affordable housing is represented in the room for planning? And then the ripple effects of that specifically come to mind like the police departments that are in those neighborhoods, in those areas, how do you ensure that they are also aware of the shift that happens in those spaces? Yeah. So this is probably more of a question for our Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development. But when our Office of Housing and Community Development issues a notice of funding availability, sort of funding to build affordable housing, some of the things they're looking for in that score in addition to the capacity of an affordable housing developer is also their partnerships in the community that reflect the people in that community. And it's a really important part of the NOFA in order to succeed. You really do need to have true connection to the neighborhood and the community that need the affordable housing. And in some cases when that NOFA is issued, it is also articulated from, usually from a community planning process or a planning, an area plan that has already taken place. It might be articulated what the ground floor use is. So for example, NOFA that happened not too long ago for affordable housing, it was already clear that they wanted a community serving art space on the ground floor. What I think our Office of Housing has learned over time is that they no longer say who exactly is gonna be in the space because often the most grassroots organizations might have a leadership change or we don't have a crystal ball. And so tying that into the developer agreement that's approved by elected officials exactly who's gonna be in that space can lead to problems down the line. They can't force the marriage. They can only introduce people to date. Yeah, exactly. But another thing that I think is important is our community development piece, it's an Office of Housing and Community Development for a reason and with the community development piece, there's been a focus and a new five year funding allocation that just went out that really focuses on funding the conveners in our different communities because the city's not always the best person to be getting together the residents and the small business owners. So we rely on the cultural competency and on the ground knowledge of conveners and we know that in order for those groups working in neighborhoods to be sustained over time, the city has stepped up to provide some funding to support that. Hi there. Hi, I'm Emily Hargrove with Social Venture Partners Dallas. Firstly, thank you for being here today. So Jennifer and her team do a really phenomenal job in promoting arts and culture and getting and advocating. But the fact that creative industries isn't part of the city's economic development plan shows that the city has a long way to go to really understand the importance of creativity in arts and culture. So from your experience in San Francisco, what would you say to our city leaders to really get them to look at that differently and to really say this is crucial in order for the long-term humanity and for the success of the city? You want me to tell Dallas what to do? We're all ears. That's how we learn. I think it is very rare that I'm not telling Dallas what to do, but it's very rare that I hear people in my community say, you know what we need? We need another city worker. The city needs to have one more staff member. Like that is really what's needed. That'll solve everything. That rarely happens, but I will say that being sure that you have advocates, whether they're new or they're already existing within the government, who somebody in the creative industries is consistently speaking on behalf of the creative industries to listening ears at City Hall, it really doesn't take that many people to make a difference. What it takes is consistency and the fact that whoever is your ally is accurately and broadly representing your interests and that you're organized. You hold together, right? When someone at City Hall calls other members of that coalition and asks if they stand behind it that they do because that can really move forward when you say these are our priorities, you're doing some work that is needed. And also getting back to why this role mattered, when it was created as a nonprofit advocate, people were really surprised that it was someone from the arts who was hired and not someone from the human services. That was kind of a big deal at the time. But not only me, but many people I have seen at City Hall in many different ways have made sure that arts and culture had a seat at the different tables. And to be always thinking about that has really made a difference. And just maybe two examples would be, or maybe even just one example, would be we have a, you know, a CDFI that awards new market tax credits. And for many years, the director of our local arts agency was on that board that made the decisions. And that meant that at times, arts and culture organizations could find out about that resource and just get to the table a little earlier and that there was someone in the decision seat who really was looking at it with an arts and culture lens. And so that's been beneficial. And let me add one thing. Thank you for your question. Two and a half years ago before the cultural plan, we would go talk to city council members and they would say, I don't have any arts and culture in my district. You know, it's all downtown. The arts district, you know, let them do their thing. And by highlighting the cultural spaces all across the city and we identified over 600 spaces like this where arts and culture are that sometimes were overlooked, but now raising the importance and messaging that and then also a real culture of valuing artists. We used to tell city council people, you know the most important real estate developer or business owner in your district. You know the most important dedicated artists or artists collective and you'd get this blank stare. We didn't do that publicly to embarrass them, but it is important that you introduce them to the people doing this work. It's not always necessarily the thing on their front burner, but over time I would say and we're again, we have a new council and we have a new mayor so the political world changes, but we have made inroads and so I know that this group is doing that work and I wanna say thank you, but as we push towards economic development and getting a seat at more of those tables for this workforce work and potentially aligning ourselves on things like housing and plans at the neighborhood level, it continues to be important and the work is never done. Maybe time for one more question. Oh hi. Yes, another thing we did do at City Hall is did our, we're on round three actually, what we call micro residents and Sophia's here. We've had a few of our residents embedded, if you will, in different city departments. So the library's department, planning and urban development, office of environmental quality, housing, which was, we got some great press. It's been invaluable I think of again, that culture of value at City Hall, thank you Tino, in letting artists that really are not even part of government at all be at the table to help solve some of our mispressing problems that those departments face. So yes, it's been great and I think the artists have found it to really stretch them as well because it's working in a different way. So thank you. You wanna do one more question? Is there another question, final question? I could probably make it available, I'd be happy to. Yeah. If we have 20 seconds, I'm gonna go back and stumble over Jerry's question a little more and say that I just wanna bring up two examples. So with the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative, from the very beginning we had five priority criteria for that program and we designed, it was a very different way of grant making for the city where it was like a two tier thing where we were scoring for readiness and capacity and feasibility of the project, but then we were also scoring for whether the organization was deeply rooted in a low income or historically underserved community, whether they had funding constraints that were unusual for their sector and whether they had taken some steps to mitigate risk, to name just a couple. And so as we've made grants and we make grants up to a million dollars for acquisition of property so they can be pretty large, but for those million dollars and those acquisition grants, eight of the non-profits who have received those grants are led by people of color and through that whole program, which this year is $7.7 million, it's a multi-agency program with a lot of intermediaries. Every time we do a request for proposals, we look back at who applied, who couldn't qualify, who didn't apply, and we really look at the different neighborhoods. We look for district parity and we also look for the communities that are or are not represented in a different round. So in the engagement piece, if we didn't see engagement from, say, the African-American community or particular neighborhood, then the next round we go out and we do workshops in that neighborhood. We make sure that we talk with the elected officials in that neighborhood to get suggestions. We talk with other non-profits about why they didn't apply, when we know they have real estate there and why it's not working for them. So it's really a living process of trying to continue to improve and make sure that we are achieving or that we're advancing racial equity through that program. Okay, well, thank you. And one more time, can we thank Lex and then we'll turn it back over to Clyde. I think that artists have always been the early investors of a community. They embody that just out of necessity. So it's more of investing my soul in the community that I'm serving. We're doing something that's going to last way beyond us. 20 years from now, what is it gonna look like? Artists are investors in the community because their first and foremost interest is to bring people together and to bring forth the stories and things that are interest to the community and in doing so, they build trust. A trusted place is when you show up, you speak to people and people speak back. It's an exchange. Once people connect, you open their world and you create this idea that my individual story is your story and that when I grow, you grow. The metric for any sort of impact, I think really comes down to one-on-one type of thing that you could possibly change one person's life by kind of inspiring a sense of creativity and the value of self-expression and also the right to express yourself. I think the long-term effect is that people take pride in what they have and I think that's the aha moment. It's like, oh yeah, anything is possible and I think the arts do that. So if we had more of these types of programs where we had time and we had the ability to listen and learn, I think that we would see much more vibrant types of and imaginative types of solutions to problems that traditionally we don't see. Good afternoon. Thank you all for coming out and sharing your time with us. My name is Vet and I'm a visual artist. I consider myself a community artist. Back in, oh, 2005, a friend of mine called and said, hey, you know what, I got some frames and I understand you do recycling. Do you want some? I'm like, sure. But you know, there's art and math and then there's real math. She brought over 100 frames and after I got out of shock, I said, well, I need to call people. So I started calling people and say, you know, I've got some frames, you want some free ones? Then I realized, wait a minute, I've got some other stuff they can use too. So I start giving stuff away, but I start getting stuff because what I found, there are like-minded people who are like this close to hoarding but not quite. I realized that I had three storages full of supplies and I wanted to find a better way to recycle because I realized I wasn't really recycling. I was just basting in the glory of my universe and so I had to proactively start giving things away. And what I found, there's like-minded people. There's other people and you know who you are. You're this close to hoarding. So by having a more organized way to give things away, you actually get more. You get more emotionally because you are tied to a community of people who are givers, whether they're in the arts or they're not in the arts. They're just people and organizations that have too much stuff and they need to give it to someone else. So that's really what art cycle is all about. Not only do I give away art supplies, but I also teach. Well, once you get the stuff, what do you do with it? Well, you have to provide a safe place, a common place where people can come and learn how to use all that stuff. But the real benefit is that you share your stories. That little piece of lint that you have been saving for years and years, there's a story behind it. So you're not only sharing your physicalness, you're showing your emotional part of how you connected, how that object had a history and now it's making a new history. So by continuing to do that, you not only educate people, you bring in new people who never thought that they were artists and have a chance to be creative. And I think that by doing that, we all benefit. We save the planet one more time from something going into the landfill. Oh yeah, and you're recycling. Now, as you can see here, shares of your story is the most important thing. And that's what bonds us as a community. So my suggestion is get rid of that piece of lint. Hello, my name is Fred Villanueva. Thank you for being here. So my name is Fred Villanueva. I'm an artist and half of the founder of Ash Studios, over off of Ash Lane, close to Fair Park. We're situated between traditionally Latino East Dallas and traditionally Black South Dallas. So we've been doing a lot of different sort of art experiments. I do wanna underscore that I am an artist and so I've actually in the past five, seven years, to seven years have been going out into the community and also have been doing a lot of learning from my community but also giving back to my community. And so really I think that working alongside Ignite Arts and other great artists such as Daryl Radcliffe and several hundred other artists has kind of brought me back into the realm of being a cultural worker. So I wanna read some stuff here. Usually starting with an ambitious vision inspired by other artists and investor artists seeks to fulfill a need for himself and others. Ultimately adopting groupthink where the most impact can take place, one individual at a time. This groupthink requires trust, trust that people can be themselves regardless of dominant social perceptions. So basically that kind of means that what we've been doing is taking a lot of art supplies offsite but we also went through a period where we kind of opened up the studio in a year of radical openness and brought the community into our art space and into our yard and stuff like that to kind of rediscover really what talent and creativity and what other people who are not necessarily fine artists think of as an artist. So we learned a lot from that and then we sort of flipped the script. We started going out into the community and taking our brand of creativity out. And so that's kind of the project that we're continuing to do today. We've been going out to different rec centers, we've been going out to Jubilee Park, we've been going out to Fair Park, all sorts of environments to really kind of share our creativity and continue to inspire and to get inspired. So this sort of cultural exchange is ongoing. So I also wanna read, let's see here, artists work that show as a connection to the community instead of elitist disconnection is inspiring. Approachable accessibility to art is key for cultural ecosystems where constant renewal over generations must be established for real longevity. So thank you. Hey, welcome to Break Break Break Borders. So Break Break Break Borders is a social enterprise set up economically empowering refugee women from war-torn countries. We, through the powerful storytelling of food and culture, break bread with the communities and break down borders at the same time. I grew up in Taipei, Taiwan, raised by refugees. I came to the States actually when I was 13. 16 franchises of Chinese restaurants and the Southwest later, my parents actually purchased the franchise here in Dallas, Texas. My mom, who was the chef, used to hire immigrants and refugees and come to work in our kitchen and she would train them with job skills and send them on to bigger and better opportunities. So I thought what better way to honor her legacy than to continue her lifelong work? That's how Break Break Break Borders was born. So Break Break Break Borders, my name is Jinya, Jinya Huang and I'm the founder of Break Break Break Borders. So we're set up as a social practice artist. I founded BBBB to invest in our immigrant and refugee community. Through the job creation opportunities, we have built bridges in more ways than one. We not, you see like our community cooks don't just drop off the food, they actually do storytelling at the events. So they share who they were, what it was like traveling as refugees abroad, coming here to America and then what it's like to cook with Break Break Break Borders. So through this immersive culinary experience, not only are the cooks' lives transformed, so are the diners. We have been in spaces where we have found that on an average, actually it takes refugees about seven years to acclimate to local economy, but having access to living wages, Break Break Break Borders has been able to accomplish that in two years. And just for example, it's been amazing to see cooks like Rania that she has used to actually lose sleep to cook for eight people, but now she has the confidence to cook for hundreds with the training from our organization. And with this multiplier effect, and we have been able to empower 20 women like Rania to economic independence and to impact 80 family members to serve over 9,000 people and spread our messages to over 60,000 people wide. And so as you can see, this is not about me. This is about us and our sisterhood. Thank you so much, the city, Ignite SMU, Culture Bank for this opportunity. Thank you so much for your love and support. So I'm a mom, a poet, and a cultural worker. I'm also the founder of Zemiitas Literary Initiative, and we plant the seeds that grow lifelong readers. And I'll be honest with you, I'm boots to the ground, get your hands dirty, and stay in the background sort of person. So this is totally out of my comfort zone. But I'm here because I know that this is how change happens, like real meaningful change. And this project was born because I wanted my children to grow into their purpose. I realized early on that that meant creating a world where they could explore anything and everything. That their childhood needed to be filled with explosions of colors, sounds, tastes, and experiences. And I learned just as quickly, unfortunately, that in my community, the place that we call home a long history of neglect and indifference by city policies and a lack of genuine community engagement and communication with organizations left me traveling across town and to other cities to fulfill those obligations. So Zemiitas was born out of a mother's need to give her children and the children who live around her a chance to do more than just exist. It's about creating opportunities for children to flourish. This project began as a story time for toddlers at a community center and it's grown to incorporate different components because we understand growing a lifelong love of reading requires more than just teaching the mechanics of letters and sounds. So we strive to create positive connections by setting up reading nooks with free books and community-owned businesses, hosting kid-led book clubs using a model we created that moves away from a curated book list, through organizing story times and cultural workshops that allow families to experience different modalities for the telling of stories. And thanks to culture bank funding, we were able to set up a website last year and are rolling out a toolkit and podcast later this year. So basically we give community the power to have some say over what they read, to allow them the opportunity to experience storytelling through the use of oral stories, music and the visual arts and to give them access to characters that look like them in a space that's safe and comfortable. And we all know that the barriers that our communities deal with are interconnected. The issues lean onto each other and create a series of hurdles that feel too great to overcome. So the solutions must be built in a similar way. They need to be a bridge to help people over those hurdles. So when we come into a community, we start by collaborating with existing community spaces, both brick and mortar and pop-ups. We do this because we wanna know that we want those spaces to know that we see them as valuable stakeholders and that we're just there to build on the economic and cultural infrastructure that's already there. And doing this also helps to mitigate issues that some of our families deal with like transportation and time constraints that keep a lot of families from participating in activities in the arts sometimes. Once we do this, then we work on implementing the experiential parts of our project, which on a short-term basis helps families gain access to books so they can start libraries in their home. And on a long-term basis, begins to build the idea that reading is something fun, that it can be done alone or with family and in community. And this plants the seed for community engagement and the lifelong love of words and everything that comes with them. Greetings, how y'all doing? I just wanna say that I'm here standing on the shoulders of my ancestors whose innovation and creativity allowed them to survive and thrive through all types of injustice and redlining and all types of things to even be on the land that we very much standing on right now, deep-Ellum. So I come on their shoulders. My name is Tisha Creer and I have a delicious food and juice venture food business called Recipe Eucliff. Recipe is a project born from the work of Susu Cultural Business Incubator, which is dedicated to stimulating the local, creative and cultural economy with the goal of launching healthy, locally-owned business hubs and communities of color in the face of gentrification and displacement. Susu conducted two years of business development and cooperative economics workshops and pop-up markets and underused spaces in Eucliff and South Dallas. And Susu markets focused on local businesses in health and wellness, cultural retail, education and literacy and performing and visual arts. Our thought is that the human capital, okay, our thought is that the human capital and communities of color are our greatest asset and we value investing in this proven potential. Communities of color have historically produced content that others profit from. Our goal is to do our little part in shifting that dynamic to reaping the benefits, the return on investment from our creativity opposed to that creative capital being exploited or co-opted. Next to human resources, the resource of space is so valuable in how it is utilized for humans to gather. Recipeo Cliff was established in 2017 after the purchase of 1831 South Ewing with a non-traditional loan from the Embry Family Foundation and the Real Estate Council of a thousand square foot retail space on Ewing, like I said, on Ewing Avenue. We have since served thousands of residents and visitors fresh juice and plant-based food. Recipeo Cliff educates visitors daily on the health benefits and culture history of the natural ingredients offered of our plant-based menu. And of course, research has proven that connection between quality of food and quality of health and life is integral. We hold space for classes in workshop, for food entrepreneurs to share the kitchen space and a community board for local businesses to promote their services. Now that we have established the viability of the business on the block, several new businesses and property developers are moving in, a block that seemed of forgotten value and lacking city investment. This act of investment and activating a commercial property with a profit bearing, fresh food business proves the potential and viability of locally owned property development concepts. Through Culture Bank, we have started food gatherings to strategize ways to collectively acquire and activate even more an additional neighborhood property design its development and save space for arts and cultural workers to grow our neighborhoods and continue the work of activism and it's a continuation of work, like places like the Pan-African Connection, the legacy and the preserve, the cultural space, like places like Black Dallas, Remembered and Clean South Dallas and so the legacy of so many others who have done this work for many, many years and the history of our city. So we believe we the people, we the developer. Recipe of Cliff, thank you. Hello, my name is Sara Cardona. I'm the Executive Director of Deathrow Dallas and I'm very proud to carry on the legacy of my parents. Deathrow Dallas was founded by my mother, Cora Cardona and my father, Jeff Hearst. When Cora first arrived in Dallas 35 years ago, she came from Mexico City as an actress, trained and ready to do theater and found that there were no opportunities for her to work on the stages of Dallas. That was in part for two reasons, one, because in those days there were prejudices and discrimination against Mexicans basically in terms of both language, she had an accent and also because there were no stories being told in which she would have a place. So these two things informed her work and in many ways still informs what Deathrow Dallas has done and unlike other theaters, she did not have the luxury of just simply producing plays but really became an investor in the community here by telling the stories that had not been told by reaching in and listening and developing new plays, educating Dallas audiences about the rich legacy of the Latino language of Spanish, Portuguese, indigenous languages, Latino, the many intersectional ways in which the Latinx community has thrived over the centuries and also had along the way created job opportunities, so workforce training, training actors and many other people who have gone on to become cultural workers and transform the ecosystem of Dallas in terms of the arts. What you're seeing in the images is a new project that we started with the Culture Bank Initiative to take this idea of both stories and empowerment through narrative and also embracing bilingualism, sharing language and finding ways to help people who are new immigrants to Dallas who have language barriers come to feel pride about who they are and see that their language is actually a benefit and also to benefit the Dallas workforce because these are individuals who are not actors, who are lay people, people in the community who have sought out Dallas and are using theater methods, methodologies. We have professionals teaching classes over nine months on the weekends and using body and voice as a way to kind of create a safe space for people in the community who are construction workers, people who are working in the service industry. They would come on the weekends, take our classes and basically felt very safe doing what would normally be like the purview of Toastmasters or something. So they in turn have gone back out and shared with us how this has transformed their ability to be confident in the workplace. We have a demand now for these classes where we had started out working with actors. Now we're working with new immigrants in our Dallas community to help them with language acquisition and with confidence building. So thank you all very much for allowing me to share the power of theater and the power of our voices in our bodies. Good job, y'all. Really nicely done, yeah. Want me to start? Yes. Hi everybody, I'm Penelope Douglas of Culture Bank and you guys are amazing. Of course, we agreed that we'd have a conversation among ourselves about a couple of things that we've been learning about together during the process of this cohort so far. One of the things that we've talked a lot about is the fact that often artists who are creating a tremendous impact in their communities are grossly undervalued and part of that may have to do with the fact that we're viewed as individuals or as enterprises that aren't rigorous about the way in which we provide evidence of our impact. We respectfully disagree. So one of the things that we thought we would try to converse a little bit about are just a few examples of ways in which you've all witnessed testimony, actual evidence of the change that you're working towards from your community. So we won't be able to show a lot of data or metrics other than some of the highlights you presented already, but perhaps just a few examples, very personal ones. And Ophelia, do you want to start? Do you have an example for us? Sure, I was sharing earlier that one of the things that we do is give away books. And so we set up typically at the Latino Cultural Center. That's one of the sites where we go to every year. And there's a grandmother there, sweetest, sweetest woman. But she looks for us whenever there's an event now. And she says that, she told me, she always takes books and she takes books and books. And one day she said that she hoped she wasn't taking too many. And I was like, no, that's what they're here for. And she said that basically what she does is because she's on a limited income, she doesn't have the ability to go to the bookstore or to buy gifts for her grandchildren. So she takes our books and she saves them for her grandchildren. And when birthdays come up or for holidays or when she feels the need to give them something special, she gives them the books that she's gotten from our reading nooks. So it's a great example of an exchange of something very valuable. And it's really transcending our traditional notions of how we do that. And in return, obviously, this is a grandmother who's building a tremendous amount of well-being for an extended family. So thanks for that example. Anybody want to go next for an example? I know you all have them. So you want to go next, Fred? Sure, I'll go next. I think we can hear you. You just need to talk into the mic. Oh, just talking to the mic. OK. All right. Wrap into the mic. I got you, Fred. Yeah, so I mentioned. Well, we're not here. I mentioned that we go out into the community. So one of the most incredible experiences I've had was going out to the Beckley-Sainer Rec Center and doing a workshop painting with a bunch of kids who would rather be playing basketball but were actually painting with us on these huge banners. And then, of course, the Dallas police officer kind of joined in. And then out of the mouth of a Dallas police officer was like, I wish you would come and do this with the Dallas police. So that really seemed to sort of kind of set off a light bulb in, I think, our minds. I think that there's really a need there, you know, and maybe from the unlikeliest of places, you know, that there's this need to really build understanding and empathy. And so I think that that's, you know, for all the research that we do when we go out and do work, real professional artwork, important work. I mean, make these connections. That, you know, we actually have the ability to make a massive cultural shift in understanding one person at a time. Beautiful example. Thank you. Do you want me to keep going? Okay. Keep going. Just talk right in. I had the pleasure of meeting a young woman who had five children. She had one on her hip, one was at her side, and then had another older boy with her. And the other two were off with her dad doing some kind of outdoor camping thing. And she was actually getting a break from having all five of them with her. And so when, and they just happened to be at the library. This is at the Adelia Library. And so she said, well, so how does this work? We have to pay for it. I said, no, everything is free. And she couldn't believe I said, no donations. You just come and get what you want. Well, the youngest of the two, of the three that were there, she didn't have any problems. She got her little shopping bag and she just started throwing stuff in. You know, she couldn't have been more than about five. She didn't know these were art supplies. She just knew she just wanted it. Whatever it was, it was free. And she had her little pink shopping bag and she was just going to shop. Well, the boy was kind of shy at first because always thought, well, you know, arts and crafts, you know, he's probably made fun of because he used to do knitting and crocheting. And his mother said he was really good at that. But she did not have the money to get all the fancy yarns that he wanted at the store. So this is a perfect opportunity for her to allow him to shop at will. And because people were generous with me, I was able to pass that on to, you know, unbeknownst to me. He might be the future, I don't know, knitter or designer or whatever. But again, it really changed my opinion, too, on what people traditionally think of as a boys and girl or gender specific when it really wasn't. It was something he really loved to do. So again, it made it accessible and also made it affordable. Thank you very much. Tisha, I know you've got a couple. Yeah, I've got a couple good ones. Just real quick, one thing that I tell all the time is at the juice bar, you know, we sell vegan food and fresh juice. And we tell a lot of stories that go with the food and juice because, you know, food has stories, right? And so one of the things that we make is the hibiscus tea, which is also known as Jamaica, which is also known as sorrel, which is, you know, it has all these names, wherever it's used in the world. And our mailman comes in every day and gets his, you know, his drink of hibiscus. He told us, we're in our fourth year now, and he told us last year that the doctor reduced his blood pressure medication. And he said, I hadn't done one right thing except drink, drink that hibiscus. And so that's, I mean, wow, for that to, you know, be a daily part and be accessible to him and that it actually transformed his health is a really beautiful thing. And one other thing I wanted to say is we have a small little community table where you can put your, you know, people can put their flyers and business cards and things like that. And it's been so many cool connections that have been able to be made from just that, you know, that one little shared space, like one of my friends and mentors, Marvin Reese is here and he, I call him the bridge builder, but he saw a card there for these young people who have an Airbnb company and he linked them to a young developer in the community. He's in the room, Don Johnson and they are connecting and did business, just offer that little table of exchange and it just speaks to the value of being able to have space for people to do what we naturally do. You know, we can be healthy and positive if we don't have all those roadblocks in the way. Thank you so much. Jinnah, do you have a good example? I know you do, again. Yeah, of course. So thank you for this opportunity to share our stories. So at Break Break Break Borders, we hold many different catering events and it could be from four people to 40 people and 400 and at this one particular event, we serve a population from various places from anywhere from Syria, Afghanistan, Burma to the Congo and so on and so forth. And in particular, this group of Syrian women did the cooking for a group over at Paco in college and I still remember there were people very leery of coming up to eat Syrian food. They didn't know what it was going to be like and we try to explain that, you know, it's like really healthy Mediterranean food and with a lot of spices and, you know, and after they heard the stories from the women about just their life and sharing their, you know, so openly their food and culture and this gentleman after eating lunch came up to us and said, I didn't know what to expect. I was actually quite frightened at first and he said, you know, he had never met a refugee let alone a Muslim before and but the moment that he ate this chicken kebbeh, this one dish that had this amazing rice, he said, it brought me all the way back to my grandmother's dirty rice from New Orleans and it's those food memories that are and, you know, food is such a just amazing universal language and as a form of arts and just sharing that with people, like it just was so powerful to hear that he was affected in such a deep way and we were, yeah, really honored that he held space for us like that. Yeah, so thank you. Thank you very much. And you can just, if we had the time, we would all probably want to converse with you about some of the ripple effects of that and some of the ways in which translating fear to love and again, cohesion and the true story of an immigrant community shared through food, all the things that you just alluded to, Sarah. So the other day I was coming out of a meeting from the Latino Cultural Center and it was on a Monday so the center was actually closed and as I was walking to my car, a woman drove up and she said, is this Teatro Dallas? And I said, no, but I'm Teatro Dallas, I guess. And so she said, can I talk to you? And so I was dashing out and I said, well, why don't you call me in a little bit? And she did. I got back to my office and she had already called and she said, do you speak Spanish? And I said, yes, of course. And so we started speaking in Spanish and she told me that she had driven, when she had seen me in the parking lot, she had driven down from Carrollton and that was the first time she had ever been downtown Dallas and had ever even been to the LCC and it was kind of a Google accident because we present there a lot but what she was looking for, she said, I heard that you have these classes for ESOL. Well, they're not really ESOL classes, they're theater classes and I explained it to her and she was so excited and it was a word of mouth type of situation and I knew right away, she told me she was from Columbia and I knew right away that what had happened is that she felt comfortable coming to us because there are ESOL classes in libraries and other places but this process has been spreading where it's this sense of being with other people and she had heard it from a friend who was also Colombiana so it's this idea that what we're doing I think is feels safe to people and right now, obviously immigrants from Latin America do not always feel welcome and they do not always feel safe and they're very wary about where they go or what information they give but the minute she was able to speak Spanish and she had heard from someone else, it was this big relief and she's gonna start taking classes with us actually next month so it's really exciting. Again, just a terrific example, thank you so much. Do you want me to make the segway and then you take over? Sure. Okay. I'm gonna turn it over to Clyde here in a minute but one of the things that we also wanted to have a chance to converse about and then converse with you all about, we hope later is all the opportunity for new forms of investment that all of you see right in front of you so just being able to talk a little bit about the fact that artists and enterprises like these not only for themselves but around them see really important investment opportunities so maybe speaking to that a little bit and also perhaps a little bit to like sometimes it feels to me like we're just one step away it's not a very far distance we have to travel together to be able to create those investment opportunities so if you can just speak a little bit to an example of that, that would be great and I don't know who we should start with so I'm just gonna let you take over from here. Okay. So, Jin, yeah, maybe we could start with you in terms of something we've talked about. I mean, we wanted to embrace this format because this has really been our process for the first year so we wanted to kind of lift the veil a little bit. We made it clear the very first session that it wasn't sort of a traditional grant that had the expectation of like three deliverables or something, you know? And I remember stingly some of your faces like, what, you mean we could just do what we really want to do? And we were like, yeah. And then so what's the outcome for success? And it says that we learn together and if you learn something, you share that with us and we'll carry that forward. And that's really been the spirit of the pilot and the cohort thus far. So I wanna just say that that I have personally been energized by these sessions over the last six months with this particular crew and I look forward to the work that's in front of us as we drill down a little bit more with each of you but on the drilling down side of things, you know, part of what we've attempted to do with everyone is, hey, it isn't just about this one project, it's about all of your work and the longer-term impacts that it's having. Coming from this position of power of not just I need your money, you actually need me to be in partnership with you to achieve these greater goals. And we've been touching upon that a little bit through the afternoon. So what are some of the things, those areas of investment that you feel would not only catalyze your work but given what you know to be true of your respective communities, would just be a catalyzer, right? So maybe we can start with you, Janya. Sure, so we had talked about how, you know, running a catering business, you know, is built on a lot of having an incredible space to make that food, right? And so we have been looking for community partners in the city to get access to commercial kitchen. And throughout this process, we were very fortunate that, you know, majority of the ladies that we work with reside in Vickrey Meadow and there's a particular mosque that actually, where they worship at. And through these conversations that, you know, that are just super open, we found out that they had an assistance program that had funding that could possibly turn their kitchen at the mosque into a commercial kitchen where our ladies can access and actually utilize, you know, for the catering service. And instead of a traditional commercial kitchen that is located, you know, in Plano or further in Dallas, that might have cost over $25 to $30 per hour, this mosque decided to jump through the hoops and really kind of debunk a lot of those policies that were made in place to kind of create those barriers. And they jumped through the hoops for our community cooks and was able to certify this kitchen and their organization into a commercial kitchen that where our cooks can access for only $8 an hour. And so it's not a charity case. It's not, you know, I pity you and here if I give you this, it's, you know, the ladies are working really hard and they are able to access this and pay for it and feel really great about it. And so earlier you were talking about, you know, spaces like Life and Debellum and, you know, provide that kind of safe space. Like we'd love for more places like mosques that create these kind of commercial kitchens, you know, in multiple parts of the city where other immigrants and refugees who are interested in creating their own small food business and become, you know, food entrepreneurs have access to this type of setup where they can, you know, make living wages, become entrepreneurs and take that next step to support, you know, an inclusive economy. And so that really kind of, you know, made us think about further and what those, you know, policy changes would look like and as we ripple effect this further. Great, thank you. In the video that we shared at the top of the session, Sada you talked about towards the end of that video, the gift of time, right? To sort of illuminate or discover, you know, the problems that maybe we don't see if we're functioning in a different horizon, right? Or timeline. And I think that's one of the things we've attempted to foster in this space, right? So can you just talk maybe a little bit about the program, that story you just shared was pretty incredible. That's Senyota that came down from Carrollton, inquiring about this very thing. But can you maybe pick this up in terms of your ideas around what the opportunity investment is for your work? Sure, so I guess I, like many other arts organizations or not I, but the theater, we're used to 12, 18 months where you have a project and then you report and you, and what happens when you do that is you have to construct a timeline and you have to construct ultimately a final product or project and what I really was very invaluable of this experience was that it put the emphasis on process rather than a product and it gave us the time to discover things. So I did go honestly go into this thinking, okay, we'll do theater for wellness, like kind of that methodology because we were already doing some workshops like that where we use theater for kind of social well-being and kind of emotional healing and things. And when we brought in the early participants, actually they told us that's how they were interested in. What they were most excited about was learning English but also doing it in a way that was fun for them and where they could use their Spanish to feel empowered to learn English which was not the experience that they were having when they were trying to learn English in traditional ways. So I had no idea that that was what they really wanted and we learned this through the process but had we not gone through that process and had the ability to not have had a specific final product that we were working towards, we would not have discovered that and we've had a lot of demand for this and now what's happened is trying to figure out a way in which what's comfortable for our organization would be to scale it in a nice way where maybe we can do this outside of our space and possibly do it in other places but we have to train our own actors and professionals to work with the community, they have to be bilingual. So there's certain things that we need to do but it was a really great eye-opener because I feel like in a strange way taps back to the heart of the experience that my mom had when she came here and it's sort of a strange cycle that's come back so I see that arts, our art organization, a cultural organization, we have a, we've always been aware of social responsibility but sometimes that is so deeply embedded in your DNA and I've realized like really one of the beautiful things about what we can do is around language and bilingualism and really empower people to become better citizens and also better workers through that so that's something that we're really looking at being able to use theater in that way. Thank you, does anyone else wanna jump in on the opportunity investment question, Tisha? You know when we started the little juice bar, the recipe of Cliff and it's where we are is we're about a mile up from the Dallas Zoo. I guess everybody hears from Dallas because you're here right here, yeah, right. We're about a mile up from the Dallas Zoo and that whole section right there, it's just there's not a lot of necessarily businesses, there's a few and there's definitely not a lot of food businesses and there's definitely not any health food businesses and things like that. So a lot of times people who are maybe not familiar with the neighborhood would say well what demographic is gonna come over here for juice and smoothies? What's gonna come over here for that? And it was like well actually I live over here and I wanna juice so if I wanna juice then I probably am at least representing a certain amount of other people who want a juice. And so it's just the, so I'm thankful that we were able to get the connection with Lauren Embry and that she was able to invest in us and then so we were able to kind of launch and prove that idea and then just to be the understanding that that's not the only concept that you wouldn't believe would work in certain areas. There's all kinds of like oh yeah, what? Yes and there's all kinds of businesses that have been around forever who are doing like incredible cultural work and have just been there forever. And so without much support from the city, from any of the, some here and there change and things but like that real support that helps them to actually really build it. So it's been through the people that these type of businesses and organizations are able to start and thrive. And so yeah, with the culture-ranked work and getting to have a time to sit and talk with even more of our neighbors about even more things that they would like in the neighborhood, that has been really, really great and it would just be phenomenal to have more just direct investment into these type of concepts that transform entire spaces. I certainly look forward to our subsequent learning and explorations. I mean, having participated in this on sort of like also the national level, going to places like the Social Capital Conference or co-cap, which happens in Oakland and learning about cooperatively driven business models, cooperatively driven fund structures. There's all this learning that I think is completely applicable to us here locally, you know? And I think it's quite okay if the city missed a boat on including creative industries in the economic development piece to kind of pick up what Lex said, then you just have to pick it up and do the work and continue to kind of chip away at that. And I know we're gonna continue to do that together, together, right? So yes, Sarah. I was just gonna add that I think that there's an educational component for businesses and philanthropy, and I had mentioned this before, I think that in other industries, there's experimentation and long-term investment like in pharmaceuticals or science or all of that. That's normal, but for some reason, people don't do that with the arts. They don't say, okay, you know, we're gonna invest in this slightly longer term, more experimental with the same level of trust that is given to biologists and scientists with the idea that it's not even necessarily that they're gonna come up with some new medicine, but that they might discover things along the way that filter out into other industries. And I really feel like it's educating the people who support the arts to understand that we are no different than scientists or engineers, that we also require trust and time and investment without a quick product because what we live in the communities, we understand them and we need that level of respect. Right on, I think that's what we're gonna end it. Right there on a high note, thank you, for real. So we got one more session. We're gonna be transitioning. We're gonna exit this way, y'all, and thank you again, each of you. I hear the voices of mine and may when a child is born into the world, the child comes out of the mother's womb and the child lets out a scream from the other side of the universe. In indigenous culture, the people in the room answer the child back. They say, no, no, no, no, and it is so that the child knows that they are not alone. That is the beginning of call and response. I say it, you say it. I say, Lily, you say, I say, this is for the people. It's time to make some change. Time to move the needle. Make some change today. You say time to make some change today. Say this is for the people. Some change today, some change today. Say time to make some change today. Keep it going, say time to make some change today, today. I'm looking to mobilize a movement. Organize adults, elders, and youth and trigger a campaign more real than the truth. Get your boots and suits and armor. I'm looking to partner with members of humanity who believe in the greening of our society, dollars circulating into business. I'm thinking some social entrepreneurship, this global societal commitment to reshape the minds of our children, to inspire them to invent inventions for the sustainment of our earthship. Life can be as good as we wanna make it. I'm looking to mobilize a movement. I think we need some venture capital and construction on the corners. Enlightened corner store owners, donors of the good cause. I'm looking for the leaders of the future who can stand before the forest and see habitats that inhabitants can inhabit at. I'm looking so forward to that. Watching the seed grow into a plant at the community garden where we all put elbow grease and palms in. I'm looking to mobilize a movement where the organized have objectives and capital improvements, regenerations into the sys. Urban design, design with you in mind. Can't y'all see it now? How it all goes down when two fish struck upon a pound like two ants standing on the mound. We work for the colony. We think in both economics and ecology because we understand from the annuals of our Earth's modern history that nothing can be achieved without these two things. Economics and ecology, y'all follow me. This is real life, honey, is it ain't no tweet. So as we think about the next thing we gon' put up on IG, I suggest you go and get you one. Go and get you a seed. Because the way I see it, if we can mobilize a movement, we can be the change we want to see with just a few meetings, some capital and some strategy. Y'all follow me. We can be the change we want to see with just a few meetings, some capital and some strategy. I don't know. It's just a thought. Something that I don't know might spark an idea. I'm sorry, this may have been worse coming to worse. Clyde, I'm sorry for this art burst. So we just put the last session participants on the spot on purpose. So thank you, Eva Menti for that. The next session, give it up one more time for Eva Menti. Thank you. So this next session is the collaborators. So we have some funders and some institutional leaders that'll be joining us monetarily. But we're gonna begin first with someone who I've known for a really long time. I think I've grown up professionally a little bit with this person, it's safe to say that. She's definitely punked me a whole bunch of times in a bunch of different ways. And I'm thankful to you for helping me grow in that regard. But this is my Coddle League and friend, Judy Lee Reed from the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia, give it up for Judy Lee. Clyde and I have known each other since we were 12. So we're going on our 20th year in our friendship. God, oh boy. Everything I'm about to say has already been said. And I'm so grateful for that. So nothing I'm gonna say is new. It's not gonna be said as sexually as this group has delivered it. The artists today have been truly inspiring and I think have given us all the key messages we need to go about our work. But let's see if I can do this. So I am Judy Lee Reed. I'm representing the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia. We were founded in 1945 with a mission to improve the quality of life in the greater Philadelphia region. Through our mission and the foundation overall, we improve education for low income children. We ensure a sustainable environment and we foster creative communities that enhance civic life. I've been with the foundation's program staff since about 2018 and I direct a program called Creative Communities which makes about $35 million in... I'm already messing up. I'm supposed to be showing you guys these great slides that I did not do, so. Here we go. Apologies. The portfolio I direct makes about $35 million in grants each year around two main areas, arts and culture and public space. I joined the foundation following a tenure in New York City directing a portfolio of grant making for a different foundation where we work nationally and focused on social justice. That history along with a decade of work exploring and developing systems of support for independent working artists has allowed me to consistently engage in today's topic of community investment, arts and culture and to consider it from a variety of different vantage points. I don't know if there's a single... I don't know if there's a single act of true community investment or if true community investment is actually the complex interplay of many, many acts but I think it's an important question that we ask and it's certainly one that I would love to guide our work. It's an important lens through which we can evaluate the success of our work. If at the William Penn Foundation we're dedicated to improving the quality of life for Philadelphians then we are inherently investing in numerous community types in myriad ways. And as we do that work we have research, we have historic and emerging data, we have past and current experience that helps us get at that question and I'm gonna offer some things from the foundation's perspective around what we're learning, what's challenging us. As my response to this central question and I have to admit that it's an answer that's still unfolding within our philanthropic practice and it is by necessity quite incomplete, still in formation and it might not be completely satisfying. So arts, culture and public space, these again are the main grant making areas under the program I direct and they're the topics that obviously occupy the discussions that we engage in at the foundation. For William Penn, again, they exist under a single program strategy but we have found very much that developing an understanding of how the two sectors work independently is important in order to develop a true equitable plan for community investment. And if in the end we believe we're successful if our strategies recognize both the distinct challenges and the opportunities for intersection, cross-pollination and multiple benefit. So we're gonna get started with arts and culture. This is a sentiment. I love this quote. This is literally what people would say to me when I first got to the foundation. It was quite a welcome. And it's the sentiment I encountered numerous times, again, where city rich in arts and cultural activities but at the same time were burdened by struggling organizations and these organizations were perceived to be financially unstable and to be losing audiences. But as we dug into the data and explored the arts and culture landscape in Philadelphia, some interesting trends really emerged that complicated the statement. In Philadelphia, we've spent, the foundation has spent enormous resources building and supporting and at times sustaining arts organizations without a deep analysis or consideration of who the actual participants in those organizations were and what the relevance of these organizations would be to the people of the city as the city evolved. As a consequence of that disconnect, 97% of foundation giving, and this is aggregate foundation giving including William Penn, but not solely, in Philadelphia goes to benchmark or mainstream organizations. Most of these organizations are situated in our downtown corridor and most serve a predominantly white audience and just to put a little bit sharper detail on that. We just recently finished a study where we found that in a study group of 10 performing arts institutions, audiences were across the board around 80% white and I'll just go on to say that in sharing some of this data with our friends at the Wallace Foundation which works nationally on audience development, they were not surprised. They see that around the country. And really this is for us in Philly in stark contrast to the actual demographics of Philadelphia where people of color represent 66% of the total population. That points to directly at one of the key reasons for the disconnect between giving trends, cultural offerings, and community engagement activities. And notably, we've under resourced the field of culturally specific organizations. While over half of the population is comprised of people of color, only 13% of the total number of arts and cultural organizations are culturally specific. And by that I mean really serving people of color, serving diverse ethnicities, et cetera. If our communities can't see themselves in their experience within these institutions, it's difficult for them to see the relevance of those organizations in their lives. We have to ask ourselves how the organizations can change to meet these challenges and how we as a philanthropy can adjust our grant making to support cultural production, both for profit, not for profit, and all the hybrids in between, outside of institutions and inside of institutions where cultural production is happening. The second point I'd like to draw attention to within our arts and culture work is that we've been following the conventional wisdom that suggests investing in legacy cultural institutions is a low risk proposition. These are the pillars of our society and they represent some of the signature institutions of our city. They carry deep links to the sense of civic history and tradition. That conventional wisdom also suggests that investing in small to mid-sized organizations is high risk. And yet our recent evaluation of our portfolio has painted a different picture. The small and mid-sized organizations have in fact grown their unrestricted net assets, which is a key data point in their financial reporting. They've also diversified their income sources and they've increased their earned revenues. These are the hallmark of stable, even vibrant investment vehicles. The large institutions, on the other hand, haven't quite fared so well. Large for our purposes are 10 million and above in revenue, in operating revenue. Large institutions have continued to grow their annual operating budget, but they've decreased their unrestricted net assets. And notably, much of the coverage of that budgetary growth has been covered through income from endowments. So we really need to think and reevaluate the conventional wisdom I mentioned earlier. If we look at the data objectively and follow its lead, we can increase the efficacy of our giving and in turn find ways to improve the relationship between our institutions, organizations and communities. In many ways, funding strategies and the rigor with which they're implemented can act as a guide to many institutions and organizations, helping indicate progressive approaches to connecting these operations at all scales and to the communities they seek to serve. Institutions must better meet the needs and expectations of their current and future audiences. And this really echoes the first takeaway about audiences and communities needing to see themselves in the institutions and organizations seeking to connect them. But it also points to something else. While the demographics of our cities have changed, so have the specific ways people interact with culture and with institutions and with organizations. So this doesn't mean that all these entities need to turn into these Instagrammable experiences that we're seeing proliferate around the country to quite amazement in my family. It means that we need to think more carefully and critically about the accessibility and the relevance of programming. We need to ask ourselves how welcoming are these spaces to people of color and to others whom they have yet to serve. It's also important to note that these, while these takeaways are objectively critical of their trajectories of both our investments and the organizations and institutions themselves, they don't suggest there's no place for both in our communities. Instead, and in particular, when we take a step back and look at these takeaways holistically, we can start to imagine possibilities and solutions. So while I'm describing the potentially diminishing value of our philanthropy, that our philanthropy has had through our investments in arts and culture, to me, everything we've heard about this afternoon underscores these trends and offers promising counterpoints and ways forward. So I'm gonna shift over to public space. And again, it was really kind of the strange kismet or whatever that expression is, where Clyde asked me to speak and I said, oh, did you know I also work in public space? And so I'm gonna share a little bit about what we're learning on that side of the shop. Public space, by definition, is place-based and specific to local contexts. As a result, there aren't universal truths that apply to all public spaces. Instead, we have to consider numerous and finer-grained inputs. The environment of an area, its history, its culture, its local economics, and the intentions of residents, visitors, neighbors, and more. And all of that at a neighborhood level. And as we do that work, we need to be clear on our priorities. As we navigate these many contexts, the methodologies we build and implement will be an important reflection of our intentions, our understanding, or our lack thereof. In distribution this week, and literally, I just signed a letter for this report to go out to numerous folks. It's a new research, a body of research that's really literally hot off the press at the foundation. We conducted this research with Temple University to review the existing body of evidence on the benefits of public space. And I've excerpted some of these findings that we think are central to our work as we consider these questions of authentic true community investment. So the research paints a stark picture of the widespread inequality in urban public spaces. Study after study found that the benefits of public space are available disproportionately to wealthier, whiter neighborhoods, while the harms of poorly maintained public spaces among them, depressed property values, fear of crime, poor air quality and more litter, accrue to communities of color and to low income neighborhoods. In higher income neighborhoods, even correcting for the higher tax base, a virtuous cycle supports these public spaces. Residents volunteer their time and personal income to support local friends of groups, neighbors solicit neighbors for additional support, and the quality of public spaces is sustained or even improved. In lower income neighborhoods, the opposite is sometimes true, often true. Members of the community have less time and financial resources to contribute to maintenance and improvement of public space. And without these crucial elements of support and sustained civic and philanthropic investment, the public spaces deliver a few of their intended benefits. This dynamic probably doesn't surprise most of you. It didn't surprise us, but we certainly feel we can leverage this data to the benefit of our communities. By recognizing the inequity of public support and the inherent imbalance between high and low income communities ability to contribute, we can make smarter decisions about where funding might produce the most benefit. Many of our public space efforts aim to help our city's bridge social divides. And the concept of bringing people together to stimulate connection is probably not one new to anyone in this room. Certainly was something that we always held as one of our goals for public space investments. But the research actually found that there's little evidence that public spaces alone can create connections across differences. The interactions that these spaces foster in some cases result in a superficial civility, but there's no current evidence that suggests public spaces meaningfully reduce or eliminate societal divides and prejudices. And then finally, public space investment that catalyzes economic development is often associated with displacement. That's both an objective takeaway from our data and a perception that is shared by members of certainly diverse communities. Major investments in public spaces that are guided by business interests and that focus on economic development for instance flagship arts institutions and urban parks may risk contributing to residential and commercial displacement. And investments of many sizes and intentions that exclude robust community engagement from the start often produce changes in the social and cultural tone of local communities. So together, these learnings about public space highlight really three essential considerations for us at the foundation. And it's something that we're now in very robust conversations with all of our stakeholders about. The first is that we need to support community engagement that recognizes potential barriers and that prioritizes residents' challenges to participation and that responds directly to their interests. Second, we need to invest in maintenance as well as stewardship activities in low income neighborhoods. This can help us mediate the inherent disadvantages that I was speaking of earlier and can improve the value of these public spaces. And third, we should consider programming that can build those social connections. This requires us to recognize that in most cases the space alone won't accomplish this goal but in thinking longer term, we can support pathways for diverse community members to build that social capital. And I think many of the examples we heard about today really resonate with that idea. So as we plan our funding strategies and work with local institutions and organizations, one of our responsibilities should be to prioritize the goals of communities that we seek to support. The context we work in are diverse and complex by their nature. And earlier I noted there's no one size fits all approach to public space and that's because there's no singular definition of a community. We have to work both at the highest level of a broad objective strategic perspective and also at a more intimate level of the communities in which we hope to foster positive change. If we're able to do that, we might achieve true community investment. And so while the observations and findings I've shared today put quite a number of challenges for our work in both arts and culture and in public space into sharp relief, I wanna end by sharing some optimism. I think it's really important and so here it goes. We believe we have an opportunity to follow this evidence and we truly do. We're gonna put our money where our mouth is and we've already started. So after decades of capital investment in kind of regionally significant public spaces and in public space as an economic driver, we're now paying much more attention to close in neighborhood investments. Through the widely publicized rebuild program which is the city of Philadelphia's largest single civic infrastructure project, we're investing up to $100 million in the renovation and deferred maintenance of libraries, parks, and recreation centers across the city. And that matches the city's own capital budget to the tune of about half a billion dollars over the next 10 years. Many of these crucial community centers really, they host an incredibly diverse set of activities and residents. And through this program, we also are addressing a workforce development component where we have minority women business enterprise goals in the contracting and we hope that this model is better approaches to equity in the city. And we also believe it creates a dynamic cycle of empowerment and investment in these areas. Again, we're really trying to look at investments as complex tools. The second project is we made a pilot grant to our local LISC office and to a small CDC called Strawberry Mansion Community Development Corporation to support the implementation of a home repair program in a predominantly black neighborhood adjacent to a key public space investment in a historic park. This parallel initiative hedges against real estate speculation and potential development by supporting critical repairs to historic homes, providing household financial training and tangled title services that sends a clear signal to residents that the park improvements are for current residents. And then we're also supporting arts and culture projects and programs across the city. And I don't have time to talk a lot about them, but we were really happy to see we did a mapping exercise. We have money going into every neighborhood of the city. We wanna do more of it. We were glad to see that there's an enormous amount of activity we're already supporting. That activity is beginning to shift in important ways. It has always been inspiring and joyful. We're now looking at relevance and we're keenly interested in those projects that are of residents' conception and design. And ultimately, this weaving of public space and arts and culture investing helps us make connections between community wealth-building, arts and culture activities, and resident engagement. We are, all of this work really began several decades ago, but we really feel like this is a new beginning and we're so excited about it. And we hope that we can continue to be in a lively conversation with you all as we go forward. Thank you. So now, should I do this? Brent Brown from the Trinity Park Conservancy, Terry Loftus from TACA, and Deborah Cullinan from Yorba Buena Center for the Arts are going to join me and we're gonna have a conversation. Doing multiple things. Hello. Hi. That was our mic test. You like that? Okay. So our charge is to have a conversation as collaborators. Collaborators that have a commitment and interest and commitment to arts and culture and community engagement, community development. And I guess, let's just get right into it. I think my first question is, we'll start with you, Terry, if that's okay. Okay. If folks were to look at your work currently, what would be inspiring to them as acts of equitable community investment? That's an interesting question for us because we are, as most of you know, a funder of the cultural arts in Dallas. So where we have been over the last 50 years or so has been a conduit of providing funds across the board. Where we are today and moving forward is how do we affect change within the organizations that we provide funding to to move their programming and services into community. So that's an initiative that we have, we play in right now around capacity building and thought leadership, but we're hoping to do a lot more up. So it's the donors who support us are, we're hearing it from all fronts. So the people who support us financially, the grantees that we fund, there's this synergy that's taking place in the cultural arts in Dallas today that I think is more vibrant than it's been ever. So it's allowing for collaboration in ways that we haven't seen before. And Brent, same question. Okay. So I think at first, a lot of people, especially when it comes to the Trinity would say, I'm not so sure about that. And I think that's fair. I think there's been a real loss of public trust in the opportunity of a promise that the Trinity could be a unifier versus the wedge and divider that it historically has been. And then in the creation of kind of a gathering place, a park, Simmons Park near downtown, West Alice and Oak Cliff. But then I would hope that they would look at the work we've been doing since 2017, engaging with communities near the park, as well as the kind of in depth looking at what's been talked about in the past. There's over 115 studies that have been done or plans, whether by the city or by institutions in and around that space and sort of the detailed analysis that we did to try to amplify voices that have participated in the past and not just think we're starting anew. And then coming forward to the development of what we've done in what's an equitable development toolkit, which is looking at two things. How can we develop Simmons Park equitably and how can in the creation of a great park, can we help to have Dallas be a more equitable place? And those are things we're struggling with and that we wanna build an accord a partnership with the communities around the park and a synergistic, and I'll just say, it's spatial, it's functional, but it's also financial. Can you say more about that? We had a fun trip. So we're trying to build this park that's like $175 million investment that's a public park owned by the city. It'll create over $6 billion in economic impact. Who does that value accrue to? And who benefits and who doesn't? West Dallas gentrification is already set in due to the construction of a public bridge. Private investment is there, it's happening. Neighborhoods are seeing increased property taxes. So I think it requires, in this case, as you're building a park to advocate and be partners with others and to step forward and say we need to bring anti-displacement policies to place before the park breaks ground. We need to put in place financial capture, value capture, something that, the park's gonna create an immense amount of value. So how do you not only have an accord between a public park that's gonna build great value in the city, but also have value accrue or be captured in a way that helps to steward the public goods in new neighborhoods that will be developed. So there's a lot of vacant land as well and stewarding businesses, et cetera. And so it's, parks like this are infrastructure projects. And only building the project and not considering the greater contextual impacts and sort of in essence, the project is to build a better Dallas or a better place and then we could get into a whole language of well for whom and who access. And in our efforts here, it should be done in a very equitable way. And we could get into a discussion of that and we've used the GAIR definition as kind of our standard right now. What is, just for folks who don't. Oh, I always get the acronym wrong. I'm so sorry, but, but you know. We can't Google it. Yeah, yeah. It is one really where, you know, who you are and where you live does not stand as the definition of your opportunity in sort of my kind of, removing institutional barriers and practices that exist and being cognizant and calling them out by name is an important part of this work. And so we're working at it. I don't think we have all the answers. I don't, as you said, I so appreciated you. The part can't do all this. It requires municipal government. It requires active engaged citizens, communities, non-profit organizations, philanthropists, foundations, et cetera, an entire network, so. And there's something interesting about the necessity for alignment, right? And, right. And I just wanna, and we're gonna get to Deborah Cullinan, but I have a feeling it's gonna take her a minute to introduce herself since she's from out of town. I'm happy. And she's happy sitting here in between our, but Terry, this alignment of goals, can you talk a little bit about that as you're having these really dynamic conversations with both grantees, constituents, and your investors? It's interesting to follow up on that because one of the key components is, you know, when you, Sara kinda went on this when she was up here earlier. So when you think of projects like The Trinity, when you think of the cultural arts, you know, Sara made the point that, you know, we should be funded and vetted like, you know, technology, engineers. And the cultural arts and anything that involves community engagement around parks were directly, positively impacts the constituents and citizens of a city. Those are already proven. So no one can dispute that being accessed or exposed to the cultural arts. It's not an educational component that will benefit someone's life from childhood through adulthood. So one of the things that Clyde heard me preach about, I think one afternoon in my office was, I did not, even though I studied performing arts, I didn't make a career of it because I didn't think I'd make any money. So I spent the bulk of my career in advertising. But I had years of education and exposure to the cultural arts, playing trumpet, French horn and grade school, high school and college. So even though I didn't make a career of it, by being exposed to it, it made me a better person, spirit, individual. Don't want to get into the weeds on this, but it may be a better person. So there are public spaces, access to the arts that are economic to me, economic drivers for the city of Dallas that I don't know outside of Jennifer's office, and I hope that I'm in trouble for saying this. Outside of Jennifer's office, I'm not sure that the city has completely embraced, but that's where the growth potential is. And to the point here is, you don't build these public spaces, you don't take cultural arts into the communities to where residents and citizens have an opportunity to access it on a level that is best for them without that benefiting them. So from an economic development perspective, you don't build something like the Trinity Park project and not make it available to the people who are affected and would benefit from that. Housing, Dallas has no other place to grow but South and West in some degrees East. So how do we collectively, from the city as a partner, to various 501C3s who are around public spaces, cultural arts, workforce development, coming together to make all of this happen? So then that's a better selling point from my perspective to our donors. It's a better selling point to the people that we grant funds to in Taka's case, in the cultural arts, to where it's a holistic approach as opposed to looking at it in silos. Thank you, thank you. And Debra, from your perspective, can you can go all the way back to the first question or you can jump into where we just... I'm gonna go all the way. Please. Well, let me set the context. And before I even do that, just thank you for your generosity. It's been a really rich afternoon. So just to set the context, I am the director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. YBCA is widely understood to be presenting an exhibiting organization. We're a contemporary arts center. But what we really are trying to do is transform that paradigm completely. And what we want to be inner striving to be is a forum for art and social change. We also are a think tank or an institute that's working on national projects that have the potential to transform our field. And a lot of what we are trying to do is help build awareness about the essential role that artists and art play in any social change effort. And we have lots of examples of how we've done that from working with the San Francisco Planning Department to really shift the culture of planning in our city to the project that is headed up by Penelope Douglas called Culture Bank. And that project is the reason that we're here. And thank you Clyde for your vision and for bringing us here so that we could understand and be inspired by the work that's happening in Dallas. With Culture Bank, as you may have seen if you were watching some of the content in a transitional moment before we heard from those amazing artists, Culture Bank really understands and positions artists as essential early stage investors in their communities. And we think that artists are uniquely situated to see and lift and develop assets that matter to people. And you heard it today from all of the artists that we have the great honor of working with. These are things like language skills, green spaces in our community, intergenerational knowledge, the things that make us alive and rich. And what we see is that people read that signal wrong and invest on top of it. So that is the opposite of the true act of community development investment. And what we're striving for is the kind of investment that is driven by artists in communities where the community is empowered to develop assets that matter to them. And that is what we invest in. So, oh, time's going by very quickly. Okay, I wanna make sure because everything that folks have shared, it's incredibly compelling. It's going to be amazing to see all of this unfold. But what are the challenges that you're addressing right now in the near term as you're trying to manage through planning and implementation across a number of different contexts? Brent, you sort of smiled first. So, can you take the question? I don't know, there's some pain in that smile. So, this is a physical project, right? So, you know, and in my work, I'm an architect and I've employed really the public interest as the primary driver and influencer in my work historically. And I think I've tried to bring that to this. You know, we are in a series of activities, right? We're trying to complete a $200 million capital campaign, right, and we are well on our way with that and having success with it. And simultaneously with that, we're trying to work through technical challenges of actually building a public space on a river, right? And making sure that it is accessible and way before that, you know, building the kind of coalitions and relationships that are very personal with, you know, leaders but, you know, business owners and individuals all around this sort of kind of geography. Literally about a three mile diameter in the middle of the city, so it's big. And, you know, a rewarding thing of that is like last night I get a phone call from a neighborhood leader, right? That has a question about a zoning case that is about three quarters of a mile from the park. And they're just asking a question about it and they don't know the language. So, we're trying to work on, and in many ways I think it's building in the biggest challenge is having the capacity within the neighborhoods around the park and to be frank in downtown, there's plenty of capacity there in West Dallas, the understanding of these systems. And so, trying to take the time through all that technical engineering and the stuff that everybody wishes would move faster and trying to take the time to attend to helping to build that capacity at the same time as a partner, not by a kind of teller, you know, if I can say that, right? I don't know if that's the right word, you know, just. So, and trying to let that be in service to what those priorities are as those priorities become identified or change often. And on top of that, I've already mentioned it, is how do we build this financial relationship between the construction and the value creation of a public space that takes care of it, but also brings about what we've not seen in this city and in Frank, most major public projects like this don't realize, which is the whole suite of public goods in the communities that get developed or get a level of protection, so that affordable housing exists, small incubation spaces, space for the arts, space for education, that otherwise will not be realized because the market will not necessarily prioritize them. So, this is where I think the public-private partnership is unique and having a two-party relationship now, which is official in a contract between the city and the Conservancy, what we don't have is that third party, I'm gonna call it a community benefits agreement or a community contractual relationship that begins to quantify and hold another level of accountability. And unfortunately, you know, I know there's a hesitancy, and I think you're right, Jennifer gets the value of the arts and public space and not every other department in the city does, I'll emphasize it further, even though they've done economic studies, I don't know that we're qualifying it in the same way, but we can't rely on our elected officials to represent the communities, and it's a real reality. So, how do you build capacity and power in neighborhoods and I think that comes about through these relationships that need to be formalized? And so how and who? And that's, it's very difficult. So one of the biggest challenges is who could the party to that community benefits agreement, you know, from the community that has the capacity over a 30, 50 year period of time to work at the scale of a city? Thank you. Harry. From my perspective, it's gonna be funding and access. So one of my objectives since I have been at talk for a relatively brief period of time is from a fundraising perspective is to raise the, raise more money for the beneficiaries that we fund. The second part of that around accessibility is not only funding these organizations, but based on the constituents and the demographics that they serve within the arts district in Dallas, but more importantly those, they're probably a lot more cultural arts organizations that are not in the arts district. So how do we collectively help all of them in addition to the funding that we provide, reach and build partnerships, relationships with the residents and the demographics that they're serving and that's where I think the bulk of capacity building is more effective because you're not, there's not the expectation that to see a play, to see a concert that these individuals and families must come from wherever they are in the city to the arts district as opposed to us taking the arts out to them. But I think to Brent's point it's also when you look at collaboration and coalition building, all of these touch points, all of us are in the same sandbox and these touch points very much connect. So if you look at exposing kids to the cultural arts and what we might want to call, I hate labels, but what we might call low income neighborhoods, there are different priorities if you're not touching the family as a unit as opposed to just trying to expose the arts to children because if you were me back when I was in school, shortly after the Titanic sank, then you are, my thing was music. My mom came from a cultural arts background so it was very important to her even though she was raising us on her own, she had two kids in music and one in dance so that costs money. So you've got music lessons, instruments, dance lessons, what have you. Not all parents see that value even though their kids may have an interest in that, their priorities might be different. It may be rent, mortgage, car payment, bills, what have you. So if we're looking at this holistically from community spaces, public spaces, cultural arts, education, how are we reaching out and capturing the entire family unit as a whole with partnering with organizations that may also provide workforce development for the parents so that collectively we're hitting the entire unit. I think that's an exciting component from a funder's perspective as well. So when I look at my donors moving forward, I can say not only are we providing general operating grants funding for arts organizations to do what they do better, but we're also helping them reach these unique demographics across the city that they need to engage with and educate. So that's a long way of saying that it's all connected but for me it's funding and accessibility. And just to go back to kind of where you started with the question of challenge, you talked a little bit about, you first talked about the funding issue which of course is in some ways can be seen as a first step but it seemed like it was as much about kind of navigating out of the arts district and thinking about what, and I just, I'm wondering if you can just say maybe two or three more sentences about that. What do you need to build that understanding or to build the capacity within your agency to think about how that extension of resources and investment takes place? I think the sell to, for example to my donors is not a big leap. I think they would easily comprehend that. I think the greater challenge is taking advantage of the synergy that I mentioned earlier as it relates to the cultural arts in Dallas because if you look at the landscape today compared to five, 10, 15, 20 years ago, Dallas has come huge strides in the cultural arts that's due in part not only to arts organizations but also to Sarah's point earlier, there are more diverse organizations that have come online that are now being supported not only by their own efforts but by individual donors, corporate partners and foundations. So when you look at funders who get it and where we need to be, the Embry Foundation for example, which I think Lauren's still here out there somewhere. It's partnering with the cultural arts organizations to make sure that we are assisting them in moving content and programming into these communities. So for example, if I had the time and effort to go out tomorrow to raise money for this one initiative, it might be something along the lines of partnering with Jennifer in the city of Dallas and assisting our cultural arts organizations into taking program into neighborhoods using the public library systems. So most, I think most if not all, Jennifer will correct me if I'm wrong, most of, nearly all or most of the public library system, public libraries in Dallas, excuse me, have black box theaters. Most of them go largely unused because they're just not well known. So between rec centers, public library systems, assisting the grantees and taking programming into these institutions that the assets that the city already owns, I think helps move the needle. So it's partnering with our, the arts organizations that are in our portfolio and helping them do more outreach to where they're exposing more people to the arts or to public spaces, so. Great. Jennifer, I'm gonna just switch that question up a little bit. No, I'm not. Go ahead, give it a whirl and we'll see what happens. Or we could, okay. Well, I just thought because we are running short on time and I wanna, I'm feeling self-conscious because I feel like there was such great conversation after the artist panels and I know folks are really dying to kind of dig in and exchange among the group and probably in reference to a lot of the stuff that's come up in this panel. So I'm wondering if you will close us out and tell us what, from your perspective as you're looking at Culture Bank as a network of activity that could potentially touch multiple types of communities both measured by the city or even within a city in a neighborhood, what are some things that you think we should be thinking about? Yeah. You know, I'm going to start with a response to the, because I have to. You know, I've learned from lots of people who are smarter than me that sometimes the best thing that we can do is make a problem bigger. And I think in the arts. You said the best thing? Better, it's a better thing to do. So, and in the arts, I think a lot of times when we are asked the question, what's your major challenge? We do tend to think about funding and resources and audiences and things like this. In my mind, I want to make the problem bigger. What is the issue? And to me, the reason that Culture Bank came into being is largely due to the fact that we lack imagination. And as a society, we cannot get out of the boxes we are in. And it is really up to us, right? And when I think of the arts sector and all of these extraordinary public benefit institutions, large, medium, small across this country and all of the resources that go into the work that we do. And I just want to, a call to action to say, what can we do to imagine ourselves as a system that would fuel the public imagination so that we can move beyond the systems that we are in today? And so Culture Bank, you know, and this maybe is my way of trying to help close. But the reason Culture Bank came into being is because at YBCA, we want to be that place. We want to be a place that develops the conditions for all kinds of people from across sector to come together to think bigger and to imagine new paradigms and new systems. And what better place than an art center to do that? So what happened was Penelope Douglas, who is also an artist, but many of you may not know, is considered to be a true pioneer and hero in community development investment and social impact investment in this country. She's a mentor of mine, someone I've learned a great deal from. When I went to YBCA, I asked her if she would come and facilitate a cohort of YBCA fellows. They were asking questions around equity and labor and why we work at the same, and I'm done, at the same time. Yeah, at the same time, that's fine. At the same time, Penelope Douglas is at YBCA doing her artist thing and facilitating this extraordinarily large conversation about equity and about labor. She is also simultaneously because of who she is doing a residency at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. So just hold that for a moment. The artists and the bankers, the conditions are swirling. We start to talk about the fact that community development investment is largely not working. Billions of dollars in investment and look at what has happened to our communities. In fact, some would argue it's done more damage than good. Social impact investment, some would argue, is not social impact investment. It still is about return and it still positions those with wealth as the most powerful people in the room, right? And that combined with the fact that we all know that there are artists like the ones we heard from today who are working across this country and having transformative impact. One classroom, one block, one neighborhood at a time. And this is a huge, largely under-realized, under-capitalized ecosystem that if it was just understood and invested in, we would have better outcomes. And so that is what I would say that we should be thinking about. Artists are essential. Arts organizations can transform themselves to be key players in more equitable development and we're seeing it more and more year over year. Thank you very much. And please, before Clyde comes up, would you join me in thanking our panel? Thank you again. Please give them a warm round of applause with Tauzy at the end of the evening. But I'd be remiss. Thank you not to mention the fact that we've been live streaming this whole time via HowlRound TV. So thank you HowlRound for supporting us and spreading the word nationally. We are also, as a result of the live stream, documenting each session. And we'll release those to the RSVPs. Feel free to forward them and share them with others. And the report in Judy Lee's presentation will include in that as well. And again, feel free to forward with others. So the last little exercise, and I'm going to need some shout-outs here. Don't be shy. I'm looking for five words. Just five words, words that have resonated with you, words that come to mind as a result of you sitting here the last three hours with us. And I don't need you to raise your hand. I just need you to shout out a word. Strange. Strange. Hold on. Strange? Exchange. Imagined. Imagine. Belonging. Belonging. Aliveness. Aliveness. Asperation. Asperation. So, help me remember those. Exchange, belonging, aspiration, imagine, and alive. Can we say it live? Alive. All right. Rob, what's up? You good? Let's do it. This is my city. This is my city. This is our city. The mic is good. The mic is checked. It's a little strange, but I'm joining y'all for this cultural exchange. Just so you can understand, this is my nation, my city. And let's melt with imagination. And still getting down just so you know that I survived. I always stay alive and I can count one to five. Doing it like this and I get very vicious. A city like Dallas, you know we stay ambitious. Gotta understand and I respect them all. We'll be the talk of the town more than a tiny wrecking ball. Let me see what's next. Let me spit just like this. Grab the mic with a nice grip and still coming through when it's a legend I am living. I'm known to imagine kind of like John Lennon, but we're still getting down. Shout out to the people doing it for the love and not really for the evil. You gotta understand it's for community development. We know how to work together. Disregard my levelings and still getting down. Come on, somebody tell me. Dallas's ecosystem is getting real healthy. We got strides and let's make the exchange. Let's have a conversation. Let's go through the pain and doing it like this and respect all of it. Let's talk about it at Happy Hour with skin politics. Ah, thank you ladies and gentlemen. We appreciate you. My name's Rafael Tamayo, please. Let's go have a nice little chat at Happy Hour. Thank you to all of the panelists. Thank you to everybody involved. Give yourselves a round of applause. And let's go have some bites and some drinks with DJ Skin Politics. Thank you.