 Yes, way to represent, way to model authenticity in all of our movings and beings and our inquiry. I'm so excited about this next conversation that's happening. It's been pure comedy in the back. Before we get to it, I want to just invite you all, I want to invite you to move, to take care of yourself, and to come closer. And I'm wondering, is anyone excited about the party tonight? Yeah, it's like 15 food trucks and two live bands and, you know, cocktailing and all of that under that glorious full moon. Did anyone else enjoy the full moon the way I did last night? Just, yes, in her largeness, her wonderfulness. And there's also these great book signings that are happening today. If you haven't stopped by the bookstore or connected with any of the authors, I know Vikram is signing his new book, Edgar Villanueva also, my sister friend Morgan Simon and Mary Ann Schnaul are all doing book signings at the bookstore today. So please stop by and purchase their book, meet them, talk with them. And I'm just, I'm excited about that. And I'm excited about the new conversations that are bubbling up, that always bubble up here at Socap. And, you know, if you want to start a conversation or you see something or thinking about now or over the past years that hasn't been brought up, this is your time, this is your opportunity. I'm part of a group of folks who, seven years ago, started thinking about a project called Impact Hub Oakland. That was actually a business that is thriving in Oakland, California. That was really sparked from a conversation here. So I know that, you know, the juices are flowing here, the opportunity, the sparks are here, we are the sparks. So this title of this conversation says, Cross Sector Collaboration for Lasting Impact and Racial Equity. We decided to rename it in the back to Zombies, Polar Bears and Racial Equity. I want to tell you why, is because these particular, these four speakers are way out there in their innovation. And they're laughing at it that way out there. Let me just start with the moderator. The moderator this morning is Cynthia Mueller. She's the Director of Mission Investments at the Kellogg Foundation. Y'all clap it up for the Kellogg Foundation. For the past few years here at Socap, the conversation on racial equity has been put front and center, really laid bare. And Cynthia is part of this team. They have made a commitment to where the conversation, the lens of racial equity is across all of their programs. In fact, they call the program their DNA. And so that's what has to be part of how we begin this conversation by really honoring and celebrating who we are and what we know and coming and meeting each other at the place where we are at. And so when I asked her about her background, she said, oh, native Alaskan. And I said, what does that mean? And, you know, she's like, well, it means First Nations, indigenous, that I come from the background or the identity of the folks who are NUPAC and Haidia. And I said, well, this is a really beautiful opportunity. And so she's going to be leading this conversation with Dibati Rohati, Dipti, I'm sorry, Dipti Rohati, as well as Dwayne Marsh and Napoleon Wallace. A little bit about each of them. Dipti is the head of Slack for Good and Public Affairs at Slack. I asked her what was bringing her joy and she said, of course, my kids. And when I asked, which is always a wonderful answer to hear from parents. But when I asked her if she had stopped at the installation out front and the question of being what is it that you love and hope to never lose through the climate change, she said polar bears. And then we got into this conversation on, well, that's like the quintessential answer when we talk about polar bears. But when I asked what does racial equity look like at Slack, she said it looks like empathy and then dropped this beautiful jewel that says, no one person is the full truth. And so I thank you for holding that space today. Dwayne Marsh serves as the VP of Institutional and Sectoral Change at Race Forward. You all might know that Race Forward just joined forces with the Center for Social Inclusion. And so his work is really around the collective soul and his hope that we don't lose that to climate change. And so he's going to be talking a lot about his work in that sector. And then I have Napoleon Wallace, who I just met, activist co-founder and lives in Durham, North Carolina and grew up in a town of 120 folks. I was like, really? That's what I'm talking about, graduate of an HBCU and also hopes that he doesn't lose his town. What are we going to lose to climate change as the water shifts, as the wind shifts, as the land shifts and as we acclimate to what is happening on the planet? And so that kind of conversation is important for us to have, but I also want to center the conversation around joy. And he is excited about their particular social justice lens around the municipal bond sector and asking questions again. Why did Ferguson happen? Why do these uprisings happen? What happens in protest? And so join me in welcoming Cynthia Mueller, Dibati Rojati, Duane Marsh and Napoleon Wallace to SoCAP 2018. Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you. And I'm Cynthia Mueller. I'm so excited to be here. I'm generally excited if you know me generally, but I'm really excited to be here and moderating this conversation about collaboration and how to promote lasting racial equity. I think I just want to sit on a moment. Actually, we were having a very good time back there. I think it was all the donuts. We're deep deep in a moment of, for this said, there is no one holder of truth. Like, just sit on that. And when we think about what we know and what we understand as investors, as social enterprises, as companies, how do we determine what truth actually means? And so when we're talking about racial equity and collaboration, we're talking about how do we change systems? And in changing systems, it's about creating options. And how do you get to options? You have to go outside your own sphere of relationships and networks and influence. And that's really uncomfortable for many reasons, especially as we are all working in this space and trying to establish deep and meaningful change for the communities we most care about. And so I want to start off with you, deep deep, in terms of talking about what Slack for Good has been doing with the last mile and returning citizens. I mean, Slack is an incredibly successful company. And what are they doing bringing in returning citizens to code? Sure. So in general, Slack, if you don't know, we're an enterprise software company. We build software that hopefully makes your working life more pleasant, productive and productive. The next chapter program is a program where we are taking three formerly incarcerated individuals and training them to be engineers at Slack for a one year long apprenticeship program. We've been working on this for about three years and we build enterprise software. We are not experts in racial equity, nor would we ever claim to be. And that's why we have wonderful partners like the Kellogg Foundation, The Last Mile and John Legend's Free America, helping us figure out how to structure a thoughtful, equitable and sustainable program. Our goal for this program is really threefold. The first is to create honestly high paying job opportunities for those individuals who are formerly incarcerated. Secondarily is to shift perceptions about the capabilities of these individuals who have committed a crime, but still have amazing, amazing talents. And finally is to create a blueprint for other technology companies on how they can hire from this underrepresented population within our communities. So that's really what we're working on, our apprentices start on Monday. We're very excited to welcome them to Slack. That's great. Napoleon, can you talk about the founding of Activist and what you all are really focusing on the mini bond piece and specifically talk about kind of how you saw the different systems, particularly with the rating systems and how that really has informed how you guys are developing this product. Absolutely. So one way to start that conversation is to talk a little bit about kind of what the municipal bond market is. So municipal bond market for folks that, you know, don't have depth of knowledge in that. It's a $4 trillion social kind of public good market that undergirds not just our local economies but our, you know, kind of local communities and in many ways kind of our society. And this market, despite its size, it's a debt market. Despite its size, has really been immune to some of the impact. We'd say ESG sort of risk considerations that have shown up in a lot of other places in the traditional sort of investment market as well as in the traditional sort of equity market as well as in the traditional sort of fixed income market. And we think that, you know, a lot of that has had to do with this increased separation of what we call the citizen bond holder. So if you think about over the past 40 years, the folks that used to invest in municipal bonds when it was a $250 million market or $250 billion market, the folks that were investing back then, they were locals that knew the investments were going to be impacted by those investments and in many ways had the kind of foresight to know that if they chose to have some erosive or extractive sort of interest around their, the way that they got their money back that that would affect the communities they were investing in. And what we've seen is as this space has grown between the investor and the citizen, the citizen investor, that we've also created this dissonance of how the dollars going into a community have affected the people in those community and what the community has been willing to do to get its money to pay back the bond holders to, in many ways, have become the principles. It's a bit of an agency issue that we see. This is how Ferguson happens when they say, let's take 25%, let's get 25% of our revenue to pay back general obligation bonds from fines and fees, aggressive sort of pursuit, civil forfeiture of individuals and then you have the outcomes and you have the interactions and outcomes like you have in a community like that. It's how we get a flint where you have these, a community that is trying to find a way. Well, there was a little bit of, we'll say there's current conversation about whether there was some fraud associated with that, but there wasn't a G in the ESG kind of placed on that community. And so activists and what we do is we are a municipal bond research fund that tries to integrate ESG, social justice as well as an advocacy voice in communities where we recognize that as folks are trying to pay back the bond holders or improve fiscal outcomes, in many cases, the places where those dollars are mined from are the participants and citizens and residents of a community that are the most vulnerable and least able to speak up for themselves. And how, just one quick follow-up, so in building out this product, what types of partners have you had to lay or to establish to really start to develop this product, really understand the municipal bonds? I mean, is it just activists? Is it folks that you've dismissed in the field? Like how has that played out? Absolutely. So, I mean, the municipal bond market, we're trying to affect change in a very large market, that has been around for a really long time and has traditional market forces like any other market. And so the ways in which we've had to do that is you can only get that done through collaboration. And that's collaboration with a number of partners that are engaged at every level. So we have engaged with banks who are issuing because we can tell them the company that you are, the place where you're about to make an issuance, there is some risk there that you want to be thinking about and that could affect the pricing of the bond and probably should affect the pricing of that bond. We have the similar relationships with local municipalities where we're going into municipalities and talking with leadership and saying, we recognize that you all don't see this as a current issue. And we also recognize that your debt holder or not debt holder, the ratings agency, doesn't necessarily see this as a critical issue immediately because they normally think over a two-year time horizon. But this is a five to 10-year issue that if you don't deal with, it will come back to buy and it will cost you kind of like your fiscal strength as a municipality. And that's only come from all of those sorts of partnerships. That's great. I think it's really interesting when you think about partnerships and the work that all of us do. I mean, all of us are pushing the boundaries on how we are building out these programs. And I think it comes from a place of humbleness of none of us are the sole source of truth. None of us know the answer and without strong partnerships and additional perspectives, none of us can accomplish anything that we're trying to. Absolutely. Dwayne. Yes. Tell us about care. What you guys have been up to. You're all over the country. You've got this incredible network. Yes, so we don't usually associate movement and movement building with government. In fact, a lot of people think of that as a place that innovation goes to retire, if not worse, right? But we've seen different, a new generation of jurisdictions that are looking for solutions. They're trying new approaches to get different results for the communities they serve. And when it comes to interrogating their most critical issues, jobs, education, housing, criminal justice, inevitably when we dig into that, it comes back to race. And the question is, what do we do about that? You name an aspect. That could be in an audience with 15 departments from an agent, a jurisdiction. Every department will look at their outcomes, disparities by race, literally life to death, life expectancy, infant mortality. These things aren't natural, right? They don't occur because, just because. We have to figure out why they happen and really resolve that. Why we formed GEAR, Government Alliance on Race and Equity. It's a membership network that's driven by members. It really pushes the question on how do we not just recognize that racial inequities have to be addressed but take action? And so we put those theories into practice. We provide service to that network. We support the individual members. We share practices that are promising. We look at how we can actually do subject area-driven action, including issues like sustainability. And we look at solidarity, because even though there are now dozens scores of jurisdictions throughout the country doing it, it can be lonely work. Institutional transformation is hard. So whether it's the Twin Cities looking at how they close their skills gap and not being able to have a workforce because of the differences in African American and other races and whites in terms of their outcomes around job attainment, if it's looking at Charlotte, they're looking at their land use patterns and how they do planning for the future that's really more equitable, whether it's looking at Albuquerque where they're trying to figure out how do we actually make our procurement more equitable so people can participate in that economy or a place like Seattle where a lot of this work emerged, really trying to go to maturity and figure out how to sustain the work. We try to support all these places. Ultimately, it's about institutional transformation, really positioning jurisdictions to take on just about anything. And I can already see that, you know, the possibilities, even in the agreement we're talking about some of the partnership possibilities, but really it's because while we really can't change our systems and our society without government, government can't do it alone. And so that's really the theory of change we have around this work. One follow-up point. So when you are, when someone approaches you and has an idea or a seed of an idea, what do you all recommend in terms of what's in place in order for a partnership or initiative to move forward? Like what in your experience? We really are trying to figure out how jurisdictions can normalize the conversation on race, build shared analysis, but also hold at the same time this duality of the need for urgency, right? Because this took hundreds of years to get here. You know, oh, it's going to take us hundreds of years to fix people's lives are at stake. We don't have that kind of time. And so how you hold that urgency and look at the long game, critically important. We try to operationalize systems, use data and tools and there actually are racial equity tools that jurisdictions can apply to figure out how you can get a different set of results with the programs you run. And then there's organizing. And that's not just organizing. We usually think of that as community organizing against the institution because they feel the institution has failed them. But organizing within our jurisdictions across silos and again, bridging into new arena as well. And then recognizing that we need new relationships with community that aren't just about input or even engagement, it's leadership, ownership, and a co-design of these processes. Yeah. Tiff, you talked about the humility that Slack had to have in order to develop this program. Talk about that point when you realize that Slack couldn't do it alone and that you didn't have all the answers. And what did that end up looking like when your own search is kind of setting up the partnership? Sure. I mean, we're pretty honest about our failures at Slack. It's something that we talk about. And so this program we've been working on for three years. So I took our CEO to San Quentin to last mile almost three years ago. And we were just blown away by what the program was building, the passion, the intelligence, the commitment of the students that we met. And we tried to hire one of their first graduates. So we were so inspired. We gave this one gentleman, and he's okay with me using his name, Allie Tambora, a stipend when he was released. We sent him to Hack Reactor, and we tried to hire him. And it wasn't enough. We thought that the coding skills that we were able to give him would be enough to have him work and thrive at Slack. And I think when he didn't pass the interview, we realized, oh my goodness, it's not as simple as we wanted it to be. And then we reached out to Kellogg knowing that it's a much broader, much more systematic issue we were trying to solve for to really think about how do we build a program that addresses some of these major systemic issues and to build it and work with our partners and to structure the program correctly. And then the last mile, obviously working with Kellogg. And then with Free America when we think about how to shift perceptions around this community. So it was very humbling to say we tried. It's not going to be as easy as we wanted it to be. And we're going to need a lot of help. And thankfully, the Kellogg Foundation stepped up and has been honestly just a gift in telling us how to think about these issues. But it was humbling. It was definitely humbling. We're like, wow, this is going to take a lot more work than we thought. Well, and I think from just to jump in on from the Kellogg perspective, I think what was really, it was humbling from our perspective because working with an organization like Slack that has tremendous respect here, here in the Valley and, you know, and the number of people that customers that it actually reaches and realizing here is a immediate need. We as this large institution with our processes that, you know, might be a little slower than what you guys do. Sometimes. Slack, it was incredibly helpful and insightful for our team to see how quickly you all could mobilize but also how we need to step up as well and be able to respond to these opportunities. Yeah. I mean, it's a good balance, right? We need one million engineers. And there are two million formerly or incarcerated individuals. It's math. Talent is equally distributed. There are some very talented folks. Yeah. We're incarcerated. So they should be making some money. Yeah. Napoleon, so the product that you all are building is incredible, especially when you think about the history as you share the community market and I think about the rating systems and the assumptions that they've made over time and you shared a little anecdote with me back so you can talk a little bit more about how this field is ripe for change and how you all are mobilizing for those individual investments. Absolutely. So there's a lot of great empirical research on the municipal bond market in terms of things that actually matter in fiscal outcomes and then the difference between that and things that are considered important to ratings agencies. So one example in 1968, we stopped redlining in housing, like, you know, Fair Housing Act. It wasn't until about 20 years later that we stopped including race as a consideration in local municipal ratings. I mean, and those are tied together. Housing values do affect municipal bond, you know, kind of fiscal outcomes, municipal fiscal outcomes. But there are all these sorts of like nuggets like that that we don't think a lot of folks are looking at. One of the things that we've really been, that we really found in the development of this is we started out with this idea that we need to bring ESG and ESG lens risk perspective. My background is around that work, high yield investments. Like, how do you bring ESG to the municipal bond market? We recognize that there are significant exposures around environment. We can be pretty clear about how those are impacting. I'm from a state that just had two 50-year hurricanes in a three-year period. So, you know, we recognize that resilience matters a lot. And there are bonds girding that. We have seen on the social piece that the way you treat your residents and your employees really matters in terms of talent you're able to retain, the engagement when something like OPEB comes up, isn't it? Like, how you deal with that? As well as the communication or relationship between your community members and, you know, the city. And then on the governance piece, any sort of governance issue has massive sort of negative outcomes. So, we've already seen that that matters. But the place we're trying to go now is that we believe that that's not enough. Sunlight disinfects, we get that. That's really important. But just knowing ESG risk without some sort of mobilization around it isn't enough. In the corporate market, when you look at equities, folks recognize what a risk is. They'll say, you know, there's significant risks of the CEO being the board chair. And an entire community of investors have galvanized around that issue and made a point of ensuring that in the companies they're invested in that that's not happening. In the municipal bond market, you have things that are just as important, just as critical to fiscal health, but there's no galvanizing community of investors, community members, local elected officials, otherwise getting together and really trying to force the issue to a municipality of you need to change this practice. And so that is what we're building toward now because we think that, you know, nationally, we are a state, we are a country and all of our locals have been supported by access to credit. And we feel like we're in a place where if we don't start to recognize some of these risks and really push those to the forefront as being critical to the sustainability of our credit system for municipalities, we're going to end up with some real grave consequences not in a 20-year horizon but in a 5, 10, 15-year horizon along the way. Sounds like you guys need a network of municipal governments who have an alignment on racial equity to share your values, perhaps. I don't know, it's just a possibility. Do you know one? I've done some work, yes. We were joking behind that we were going to make some commitment and I think that to move forward, and I think what really resonates in all of these different, your different organizations is that in order to embed this racial equity, no one of our institutions are the institution that has the playbook, right? We know what we know. We have the data. How do we use the data? How do we validate what works, what doesn't? But also, how do we pull in the right players at the right time, at the right pace, right? You know, I remember when we had the conversation about returning citizens, right? The whole term, the words that we are using to talk about these communities to, you know, how are we positioning in the right agencies and how are we engaging in this about how we're preparing them? So before we add, I just want maybe quickly each of you, you know, like, you're in the middle of this. You're in this, and it's not perfect, right? This is us taking a leave because systems change is not perfect. And apparently we're trying to change a system that's fundamentally been in place for centuries that we all are participants of. What would you leave for others who are thinking about strategic partnerships to promote this lens of racial equity? Girl. I want to go first. Sure. I would, we, when I got some friends in the crowd, would say that a few things, one, and this is going to be very specific to our work, we all live in place, we all live in a community and we all love our communities. There's no question about that. I still rep Eastern Carolina, like, you know, I didn't leave 20 years ago, you know, like, I mean, I still rep it, you know, to the core. So I think that we have a responsibility to really put our own sort of investment lens around the places that we live and recognizing that, you know, the players that are trying to improve or change, in many cases, they might not sound like us. They might not look like us. They might not be pursuing things in the same way that we are. But if we could get to where we're all thinking along the same timeline, we're not just thinking about the political window or we're not just thinking about the municipal repayment window or the budget window, but we're thinking along the longer term that there's an alignment there that could really help to change and a coalition there that could really help to change some of the kind of core concerns that we have in our local communities. And I would just push that out to anyone. If anybody is doing that sort of work now, we'd love to hear about it. Three things I guess I'd say. One, move with courage. Talking about race, not an easy thing to do. And this moment for our country in particular, very divisive topic and polarizing in a way that doesn't serve anyone. Well, maybe it does, but doesn't serve our collective good. And so we have to be able to step into those spaces and recognize we may not be comfortable in them, but we have to make that progress. Second thing I'd say is build network to the whole theme of this cutting across collaborations. When our network got New York City to join, we were thrilled at the thing of the largest city in the country. We were thrilled when Fort Collins, Colorado joined. It's a college town just north of Denver because we know that these issues cut across demography. They cut across geography. They cut across political ideology. There's not a single place in this country that's not dealing with issues around race. The last thing I would say is just how we should move in the world and anything, but particularly on this issue, consistency, integrity, and delivery, right? Be consistent in what you're talking about. Have integrity in how you do this work. Deliver in what you promise. And I think we'll find ourselves in a much better situation for the short and long term. That's right. That's right. And I think speaking from a perspective from corporate philanthropy, many times it seems like it's not okay to try something new and make a mistake. And it is. That's how you make lasting changes. It's okay to make a mistake. It's okay to take your time. And it's okay to ask for help. As I said before, we are really good at building enterprise software. We are not necessarily the best folks to build out a racial equity program without a lot of help. And so it's okay to ask for help and it's okay to make mistakes. That's our panel. Thank you so much. You can find everybody online and have a great rest of the conference. Thanks.