 Many thanks to our sister Sabine for that meditation. Before we get into our community agreements, I just want to remind you that there's a conversation lounge for you to have conversations to, or a break to take from this conversation, just to take kind of, you know, good care of yourselves. Now let us remind ourselves of the community agreements that have guided our time together all week. We want to speak to be understood and listen to understand to the extent possible, given this virtual platform. We want to be present and engaged. We want to value our time together and to create the space for meaningful conversations. We want to remind ourselves that challenges only lead to solutions. And again, we want to take good care of ourselves and each other. And by joining this space, you're opting into screenshots. I wanted to give you, so first thank you and welcome to day three of SoCAP Spectrum 2020 convening. Again, Spectrum's vision is to gather business leaders, entrepreneurs and thought leaders, cross sector practitioners and investors, together to address the urgent needs of access, inclusion and impact across capital markets with intention and authenticity. Yesterday we focused our intentions on inclusion, on Tuesday we focused on access and today our focus is on impact. We've had two wonderful days of conversation together. And as we've sifted through the themes and threads, what was not lost on me and I hope not on you is what we need to name as foundational to this struggle of access, inclusion and impact for entrepreneurs of color. That is structural racism and a white supremacy culture. Over the past couple of days, it has come up in different ways and in different forms. And I just want to express a couple of things that have been on my mind as I've listened to the different conversations. We were encouraged to look at the structural roots of access at the intersection of racism and the economy. And we were challenged to ensure that hate would not be the face of the American dream. There were conversations about visibility and separation, narrative and how the inability to see one another drives the solidification of preconceived notions, biases in our policies and decision-making. That that has bearing on access to capital and inclusion and that we need to develop new tables. So narratives, networks, policy changes came up over and over and over again. There was conversation about power sharing and how people of color share power a lot but that that is not reciprocated specifically by those who hold more power than those who don't have as much but share anyway. Structural racism is foundational. So what do we mean by structural racism? All right, so that's too big of a question to answer in the 15 minutes that I have to share with you but I'll try to put it in a nutshell. Tima O'Koon's piece around white supremacy cultures offers a list of characteristics of culture but to understand structures, one must acknowledge America's DNA is in patriarchy, capitalism and colonization, thus racial hierarchy of a human value. It's connected to colonization. And this is a much longer and complex conversation again but it's necessary. And so for the sake of time, I just wanna share a few things that we all know about capitalism. It necessitates exploitation and often philanthropy, the nonprofit industrial complex acts as stopgap remedies in the public and private sectors appear to be transformational but in actuality, they act as temporary sad to those wounds, those wounded by the harms of a dehumanizing system. When we're saying that structural racism is foundational and that's the reason why we're having such a difficulty for instance, getting capital to entrepreneurs of color, what we're actually saying is that we need a fundamental structural shift to the DNA of our country, not only by tinkering inside the systems that are only designed to provide sad. We keep asking, how do we get capital to entrepreneurs of color? It's not hard to give away money. I was a funder, it's just not. The difficulty lies in the mindsets that inform policies, practices and processes that are in place to create those barriers. We normalize those barriers as things like credit worthiness or rubrics of success or the networks that folks are connected to or the industries that are hot in our growth industries and the list goes on but people make up those rules so that's what the encouraging part is because people made the rules, the rules can be changed. There is a through line about mindsets, networks, policies, narratives and the connections that between those mindsets that are the everyday mundane expressions of racism and dehumanization and they lead to the moments that we find ourselves in today. I've been talking to a lot of folks across the country about the connections between COVID-19 and George Floyd and this conversation here today that we've been having all week is no different. There is a connection. Can you see that connection? It's not a far walk. It's not a different hymnal. They're from the same playbook. How is it that you get from a mindset that doesn't allow you to give capital and expend capital in communities of color to the depth of a human being and a system that protects those who do the killing, right? Those are all connected. So when Sarah Ebelhardt says native people need to be seen, they are invisible. When Erica says we're being pigeonholed around particular conversations and discussions. When we talk about lack of networks and separation, when we talk about race as a risk factor in and of itself, we talk about the lack of family and friend equity that Sharice talked about yesterday. I mean, think about it. Black people on average make about $10.50 more than when we were enslaved. Think about that. So what will it take? Sounds like nothing but to do it. Just do it. Invest in entrepreneurs of color with the same regard that we invest with white people, particularly white men. We just believe that they can be successful. And even if they fail, it's okay. Failure for them is not only an expected but a feature of learning in the brand of their entrepreneurship. Earlier this week, there was conversation about how to leverage white allies. And Keisha shared it again at the top of the hour. And I shared with her that one of my white allies suggested to her white comrades to focus their energy and efforts on spending down their privilege because they couldn't possibly spend it all down. So in this season, where allies are trying to figure out what to do, I would offer these thoughts. Be intentional. Be anti-racist. It's not enough to be racial neutral or race neutral. Develop a set of anti-racist strategies across your bodies of work. Policies, processes, structures, the segments of your organizations. Heck, your friendships, right? Develop those anti-racist strategies. Particularly as it relates to access to capital for entrepreneurs of color, develop structures of accountability. Chicago Beyond talked about noticing and relatedness as powerful tools to transform in the direction of racial equity. Develop those metrics and mark increased capital to communities of color. Invite communities of color to hold you accountable, like real accountability. Afford entrepreneurs of color the same level of opportunity. Account for their situatedness as entrepreneurs of color. Account for their histories in this country and how they're tied to these systems. Support entrepreneurs of color exclusively white spaces. If you go up and you don't see people of color, what actions will you take to change that? And in the same way, if you show up and you're the only person of color, what responsibility do you have to bring someone else along? There was also the work that our brown brothers and black brothers and sisters need to do. Not because we're at fault for this system, but because we must make sure that we remain whole from the negative impacts of it. We must be on guard for the ways that white supremacy culture are internalized by us. I too affirm our value in the same way that Julio got us started on Tuesday morning. I affirm our worth as a people and our ancestors left us the blueprint of love and strength. We are enough. We do in fact matter. And Jay Bailey challenged us because we matter, we ought to invest in our community, not just white folks, but we ought to invest in our community. Yes, white supremacy structures and culture, they're alive and well, especially in this space. And we all must do our part to dismantle it. And now today, we turn our attention to impact, how we move those with capital and power to think and act differently, more equitably to people of color, particularly entrepreneurs of color, such that more capital is deployed in their direction. I wanna welcome to the stage and turn our attention to our first lightning bolt of the day, Michael O'Brien.