 Thank you President Napolitano and the Board of Regents, Chancellor Christ, deans and faculty, distinguished guests, family, friends and loved ones, and most especially the University of California Berkeley class of 2019. I am so sorry about the rain but I'm so honored to celebrate this day with you. This class has extraordinary strength and perspective. More than one in five of you are the first in your families to earn a college degree and 90 dreamers are picking up your degrees today. Each of you sitting here in cap and gown has worked so hard to get here. Let's hear it again for the class of 2019 to the graduates, families and friends as a mother of four who have not yet made it across this finish line. I am in awe. Let's hear it for them and to the 53 graduates who are joining Teach for America. Thank you. Your campus has sent more students to Teach for America than nearly any other school in the nation. I am inspired by what Berkeley stands for and by your generation. Jojo Lam, a Berkeley alumna who is helping build Teach for Cambodia, shared with me how much this institution influenced her. She said, when you're surrounded by people who care, it makes you want to care. Worldwide, Berkeley is known for student activism. As we heard from Chancellor Christ in your time here, you have acted against racism, sexism, sexual assault, basic needs insecurity, income inequality, anti-immigration policies, climate crises, suppression of free speech and many other systemic injustices. And even beyond this campus, your generation's commitment to political and civic engagement surpasses that of any that have come before. That's not just an impression. A survey of U.S. college students showed that your class had the highest levels of interest in political and community engagement in 50 years. We need your ongoing engagement. We need each of you to get into the arena of addressing the world's greatest injustices and societal threats as early as possible. After spending my senior year in college developing the idea for Teach for America, I set out to make it happen when I graduated 30 years ago. The journey to realize its potential first at Teach for America and now across Teach for All, a global network of similar organizations in 50 countries and counting has been challenging, exhausting, messy. But there is not one year I would trade for a different path. I feel extraordinarily privileged to have found my way to this work early enough to have had the chance to understand the complexity of the issues and to find my way to real solutions. Along the way, I've been able to work with and become friends with the most amazingly committed people. I even met my husband in this work and had those four incredible kids I mentioned earlier. I've learned so much, including from the more than 1,000 Berkeley grads who have joined Teach for America over the last 29 years and who are now teachers, principals, civil rights and immigration attorneys, elected leaders and social entrepreneurs tackling inequity from all levels and many sides. Most of you are heading into the working world where activism may not be part of your day to day. Many of you are heading to jobs in marketing, consulting, finance, law, technology. These are the right choices for you now given the many pressures and the passions that led you to them. But you may find yourself encouraged to back off your activism. I urge you to continue with it and to stay conscious that many of the institutions you're joining are built on in supporting the status quo politically, socially and economically. I think we all recognize that there are major problems with the status quo. We face many issues that seem intractable, climate change, historic levels of inequality, multiplying global conflicts and the way we've been addressing them isn't working. We tackle one piece and create new problems or we see only incremental progress or we are simply immobilized in a vitriolic and divided place. I'm betting on you to break us through. I'm betting on you to learn from previous generations to bring your energy and ideas and as the most diverse generation of college graduates yet to bring your experiences, your family histories, your community backgrounds to the table. I'm betting on you to make meaningful progress in the struggle for justice, freedom and a sustainable future. This is why I want to share with you the most salient lesson from my last 30 years which is about the kind of leadership we need to reach our aspirations. I've learned that we need collective leadership. Our culture is rooted in the ideal of the individual leader. We hear the word leadership and we imagine heroic superstars. We valorize the entrepreneurs particularly here so close to Silicon Valley. We want to be our own bosses to venture out on our own. This archetype deeply defines our vision of success in this country but the more I see, the more I realize that individual leadership alone will not get us where we're trying to go. When I started pursuing the idea of Teach for America as a 21 year old, I believed individual leadership was everything. I'd internalized no doubt because of my experiences growing up in our western culture that if I wanted to accomplish something I just needed to work harder and think harder. The experience of getting Teach for America off the ground and sustaining it only reinforced that mental model. Whether we lived or died seemed to me to rest on how much time I spent raising funds on how good my plans were. And my whole theory of change for addressing the extreme and entrenched inequities facing children was to cultivate a bunch of individual leaders, to recruit and develop individuals with leadership potential to help them succeed as teachers so that they had a real impact on kids and gain a deep understanding of the problem and its solvability. And then to accelerate their individual paths as school system leaders, innovators, advocates and political leaders who would pursue systemic change. But over time what I've seen in communities here and around the world has led me to rethink my belief in individual leadership alone. I've been thinking about the need for collective leadership, a kind of leadership where individuals work together in a new way. Collective leadership asks diverse groups to maximize their differences rather than be immobilized by them. It encourages us to come together, to speak, to listen, reflect, understand the whole picture, develop shared vision for the future and generate new solutions. Collective leadership recognizes that our power is so much stronger than my power. Over the past few years I've been fortunate to spend time with Anse Puayti, Teach for Haiti in Creole. At its outset its incredible CEO, Nejean Paul Deroli spent more than three years in the rural communities where her team was planning to work, building relationships and considering one question, as a people when are we at our best in Haiti? Stemming from that question came conversations about education and about what the community wanted to be true for its young people. Nejean listened to reflections that repeatedly focused on respect for local culture, customs and community. Collective leadership gathers entire communities to exert leadership. The people in these Haitian communities came together, listened to each other and created a vision for what would be true for their kids by the time they're young adults. That they will have the education necessary to provide for their families, be proud and value their own heritage and be active citizens and leaders committed to social justice for all. Almost five years into this work this collective leadership has created transformational changes. To share just one example, although it's technically outlawed, Haitian schools for decades have utilized corporal punishment as the primary discipline system. This practice is embedded in the country's colonial past, passed down from generation to generation as it has been in many parts of our country and in the world. And yet in the five years since Anse Puay-T launched, whole schools have shed that entrenched approach and created positive discipline systems. This is deep change, change that laws could not affect. How did it finally happen? It happened because diverse people came together, listened to each other, developed a vision and realized that they would never get where they were trying to go using that old system. They chose to become more invested in the new vision than in the old ways. In our country we too often fail to create the space necessary to bring people from different perspectives together to develop new paths forward. Take what's happening here in Berkeley's backyard in Oakland's public school system. Thanks to so many committed individuals across the system there are many things to be hopeful about. In the past 10 years alone graduation rates have risen from 55 percent to 73 percent. Having first visited there 28 years ago I can tell you that today many more of Oakland's children are on a path to college and to meaningful careers yet there is still so much trauma in the system. Maybe some of you followed the news of Oakland's recent teacher strike protesting untenable teacher salaries that are not enough to let teachers live sustainably here in the Bay Area. The successful strike and hard fought resolution resulted in an increase in teacher pay of 11 percent over four years. That is not nearly enough to keep up with rising housing and living costs in this area and many are concerned that that deal will bankrupt the district. Why can't we figure out how to enable teachers to live sustainably and take care of themselves and our children? What I know for sure is that there are no easy answers and there is no path to progress without dialogue and generative problem solving. We need all the actors students parents teachers advocates employers philanthropists and government leaders to talk and to listen. We need them to consider together the whole picture not only teacher pay but housing costs pension costs our willingness to pay taxes in support of public education and more. And yet this kind of discussion seems utterly impossible. It's impossible because there is deep anger in the community particularly at the philanthropists who've been investing in the city and at any advocates or organizations that accept their support because it's corporate leaders who have had a loud voice even when they played a role in perpetuating the income inequality at the root of Oakland's issues with so much anger and fear there seems no way for people to come together to get to know each other's perspectives and develop new solutions. So we're stuck and Oakland is just one example of dozens and dozens across this country where this same story plays out. To create different outcomes we need to develop different capabilities than most of us have learned. We must learn to build authentic relationships across lines of difference to see strengths in those from different walks of life and different ideological perspectives to listen and learn from each other. We must develop the muscle to think beyond our individual pursuits and hold the space necessary to bring diverse people together. And we must be literate with trauma our own others and the world so that we can have generative discussions even when others hurt us. Class of 2019 I want to challenge you to lead us forward differently to make it your life's work to create dialogue to make it your job to replace judgment with curiosity to co-construct a vision of the future that works for all not for some. You don't need to wait to find yourself in a position of influence we need you now. Seek out a conversation with someone who has a radically different point of view and listen generously be curious and willing to be surprised. Understand that just like you they have hopes and fears things they value and things that make them feel vulnerable. Make time to do the inner work to understand yourselves know your deepest values and take time for your own healing because as we ground ourselves we're able to be more generous with others and more generative in our public and collective spaces. Always look around the table and invite in voices that are not heard and if you're the one who can offer an unheard perspective something that can move our shared humanity forward have the courage to speak up even when it feels difficult. Real progress requires moments of tension and if we approach those moments with generosity and curiosity rather than resistance and blame we can find entirely new ways forward. This may be slow in the beginning but I've come to realize that many diverse people trusting each other and working together is the only path to achieving a just peaceful sustainable inclusive world. I'm placing my hopes in you with every generation humanity goes through an evolution and we're going through one now. Your generation brings new wisdom consciousness and a yearning for justice. We need your imagination and collective spirit. I'm so excited to learn from you as you live into your potential as a generation of change makers and create the world we long for. Thank you class of 2019 and good luck!