 This is a conversation about meaningful recreation. We're gonna be talking about nature and play in public space as a means to help us. And thank you for those who are having to crane their heads around. If there's a better way to do that, feel free to do anything that works. What I would like to do first is think about the nature that is nearby. And I was thinking that the Bay, the big beautiful San Francisco Bay is a few blocks down the street. Golden Gate Park is not too far away. The Presidio, over in Marin County, there's the headlands and the mirror woods, the old growth forest. And I was thinking just across the street, there's the Yerba Buena Gardens. And even out in front of this building, there's some grass I noticed, some kind of nice lawn. And there's probably birds and critters, seen and unseen all in that area. And then I was thinking about all of us. We're nature. I don't think we think of ourselves sometimes as being a part of nature. We might be nature's most perplexing creation, but I think we are our nature. And so I'm gonna call that all in to the room as well. And I'm getting hot, maybe just because I'm speaking, but it feels hot and we need to open the door. Let's make sure we keep things as comfortable as we can. So let me explain quickly this funny setup. We call it a reverse panel. And so the panelists are actually out there with you. They're almost like Easter eggs, right? They're in the midst of all of you. And that is sort of, you know, symbolically to suggest you're all experts and you have something to contribute. And also when after some small group discussion, they'll come sit up front and they'll be bringing with them your spirit, your ideas, your reflections that you all shared in the small group. So that's what this is. And for those of you who don't have a little pod, we'll make sure when that part starts that we've opened up these little circles big enough that you can each have a spot to be in. All right, now I'm gonna do a little grounding activity. If you wouldn't mind. And if you don't feel comfortable, please don't worry, but I'm gonna have my eyes closed, so that's what's going on. I'm gonna suggest that we close our eyes. And I'd like to think back three years. So it was October of 2020. We're a few weeks away from the presidential election. We were five months away from the murder of George Floyd and all of the necessary and ongoing conversation about racism in our society and its consequences and its roots. We were seven months into COVID. And I think we thought that it was gonna respect the calendar and be done by December. I think that obviously didn't happen. But in that time of lockdown and protest and pain, fear, confusion, et cetera, I'd like you to think about was there a person, a place or an activity that you turn to for some solace, for some break or rest? So was there a place that you went where you found that? Was there a person you connected with? Or was there a practice, maybe a hobby or an activity that you engaged in that brought you some relief? And I hope the answer is yes. And you can create a clear picture in mind of that. And I just, I took my deep breath early. I'm gonna ask you to take a deep breath and get that picture clear again. And I'm gonna count to three. And if you would, when I get to three, state the name of that person, place or thing out loud. And we'll all hear the resonance of that in the room together. One, two, three. Vaticanus Lagoon. So again, all open your eyes. I'd like to hope and suggest that there was some energy to that and that kind of the sound of all of us saying that and that we can count on that here today in these conversations and also count on that in the work ahead. All right. So I'm gonna have our three panelists. If you haven't found out who your panelist is, like your secret shopper in your conversation pod, they will introduce themselves a little bit about their organization. And just we'll keep it to about a minute, but they'll tell you a little bit about why they're here and why play public space and nature are related to the work they do. Then we have two quick videos from two of the different organizations that are here to give you a little bit more background on that. And then we'll turn to the group conversations. So I'm gonna start with Amalia here on my left. Hi, good morning, everyone. So nice to see this room so full and that we're here to talk about playing in workspace. My organization is called Paneria Foundation. It's an organization, it's foundation that funds organizations in the global South and the Americas and the Caribbean, specifically around catalyzing climate justice, grassroots movements, food sovereignty, and part of our work is thinking about how do we comprehensively provide resources to organizations that are doing the hard work and getting them funding so that they can rest, heal, and be able to do this transformative work. And so I'm really appreciative to be in this conversation and learn from all of you. Thanks, Amalia. Sam Lewis. Good morning, everyone. My name is Sam Lewis. My organization, ARC, the Antiracidivism Coalition, we're a criminal justice reform organization with a mission of ending mass incarceration by working in three areas. One, policy change throughout the state of California and now nationally. Two, rehabilitative and cultural change within our carceral system, including all of the prisons in the state of California. And the juvenile systems throughout the state of California. Three, robust reentry programming, including therapy and using ways such as nature to help heal and transition out of incarceration. Thank you, Sam. Deepdy. Hey everybody, I'm Deepdy Doshi. I co-lead an organization called New Public. We think about the creation of public spaces online because our belief is that our democratic culture requires spaces where all kinds of people can be together and be making meaning together in public spaces, an important part of that. But given that so many of us are now spending our time online, I really wanna figure out how we can kind of build those building blocks into our digital world. Wonderful, thank you. Wow, and I know that if I had chosen randomly any other three of you, we would hear some amazing work that you're doing. I think that there's a through line of course at SoCAP. The original tagline I think was at the intersection of money and meaning. So we know that people that come to SoCAP are working on change and trying to make the world a better place. I wanted to call to your attention the yellow journal that was available. And so thank you to New Public for providing the pens and the yellow journals are from Nature's Sacred and Alden Stoner here who is one of the other panelists. Her father passed away on Thursday. He was also the co-founder of her organization. And so needless to say she's home with family. But I do call them to your attention. They were a private family foundation that turned into an operating foundation and they make grants and have a toolkit for communities to build the parks of their dreams. So you basically apply in for money and technical assistance and then you can bring a park into being in your community. And they also do that in hospitals and institutions. So certainly check them out online. All right, Emilio could we run the two videos? Thanks. This is a story about all the stories ever told. It started through fires crackling and embers floating. Everything the light touched it warmed and illuminated the people, the gatherings, the public. Through light, we came together and shared the human condition. And over time, we found ways to create spaces of shared light, public places. In that warm space between people, stories were told. Connections inspired a shared understanding. In those public spaces, the sparks of change were ignited. The light was gold and gold was the light. As long as there's been light, there's been a push and pull, a tug of war over who gets to control it. You know that saying, money changes everything. This is the biggest campfire known to man. Where's the illumination? Where's the warm? We have all the light in our pockets, but it's not ours to keep. Light was gold and gold was the light. It became too precious. We lost sight of each other. It's time for a different kind of light. As generations before us have done, we need to invent new public spaces where we can share in the light. Digital spaces where we can see and welcome each other. Spaces where we can come together and make changes, big and small. Spaces that illuminate us all. So you never feel like you're alone, and I'm around hundreds and hundreds of other people that are on a positive track just like me. And it feels good to be able to be around people like that, like-minded people. And that's why we continue to do these things. These are, in my opinion, vitally important. We never had support networks like this before. So it's the good air. I think it feels like it's not an organization to me. It's more like a family. Throughout my incarceration, ARC followed me everywhere I went, being part of something beautiful. This is all about community. It's all about family. The magic is just people talking to each other and bonding and just becoming a tighter family. I'm so filled with love from this weekend. I just want to belong to a family. And that's what ARC is to me. Who's fired up? Oh, man. Thank you, D.D. And thank you, Sam, for contributing those images of the work that you do and the reason why you do it. All right, so I think we have all of us, a sense or a hunch from personal experience about nature and the outdoors mattering. We just got some more examples of how community building and connections matter. I'm just gonna share a few statistics from a huge library that I could choose from, just a few things that I thought I would call to our attention. Exposure to nature drops cortisol levels, bless you, by 21% in 20 to 30 minutes. And the research shows it doesn't even have to be like being out in nature. You could simply have a view of nature. So you could see a forest, you could see an ocean, and in 20 minutes, your cortisol levels would have dropped by 21%. Communities that have lots of trees in public spaces have a 40% lower crime rate where the trees are primarily on private property. So there can be trees, but if they're not really everybody's and available, it doesn't have the same effect. Kids that attend schools where there's a lot of greenery have three fewer days absent per year on average than where that's not the case. And one more juicy one. Oh yeah, this is, okay, this is about play. When mammals play, that's included, right, our brains change activating neural pathways that improve emotional regulation, increase problem solving and creative thinking. So again, there's so many statistics, there's a few. So the benefits are clear, that kind of builds on our hunches that that's so, but we know access is uneven, and that's not accidental. It's systemic. Did you know that the National Park System, which is one of America's treasures, was still segregated until 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. And even today, 90% of the visitors to public lands are white, while we are only 63% of the population. BIPOC communities are three times more likely to be described as nature deprived, which is an actual kind of description. So we know that many people don't have access, many people don't feel welcome. Internationally, it's also true. The United Nations has a sustainable development goal around open space and nature. One of the statistics that they base that need on is that global, cities in the global North have two times more what they call green space exposure for their populations than cities in the global South. And in the digital realm, where we now spend so much of our time, from 2003 to 2020, time alone increased by 24 hours a month for people, while time and companionship with shared leisure dropped by 14 hours a month, and simply just time in person with friends dropped by 20 hours. And during that summer three years ago that we were thinking about earlier, when the Black Lives Matter movement and other important movements were really active, when people of color were engaging online in civic engagement, studies have found that they were subject to racist, bigoted, negative messages at a far higher rate. This is not surprising than white people with consequential stress, anxiety, and depression results. So we talked about some of the benefits of play, nature, public space, and community. We've talked about some of the barriers and statistics that bear that out. And so now let's talk about some of the solutions. So I'm gonna turn the conversation over to your groups and the piece of paper that was also on your place, and your seat has these conversation starters grouped by the sort of expertise and experience of your circle leader. And of course, let your eyes wander all over the page and anything on there that you wanna talk about, anything else that you come up with, please, that's what we're hoping to do. Now those of you that are, I'd love some help expanding the circles a little bit and bringing some chairs and maybe moving the couches back a little to make room for some of you so you can each have a group. Or I guess let's do group conscience. You could also decide you wanna lead your own group. I'm kind of happy either way, but I would love you to be able to hear from the panelists as well. So let's do it. I'm just gonna, a few little things I picked up as I was walking around, for you three to just have a moment to collect your thoughts from that rich conversation because I'll ask you to reflect a little bit on what you kind of brought forward generally. I heard an interesting conversation in Sam's group talking about sleeping under the stars at the retreat as such a big experience, but also looking for small experiences like just gardening and getting your hands on the soil. What can that do? In Deep Tease Group, I heard some conversation about the value of finding inner space. And in Amalia's group, I heard a conversation about urban green space. I mean, it was probably better than not, but if there's like the middle of a traffic circle, how relaxing is it to be, maybe better to be sitting by a tree, but still, if you can't really even hear the birds, what kind of an experience is that? And does that count? And what counts as kind of a break in the action? So if I can, I'll ask you to just kind of, what are you kind of bringing forward from that conversation? Just a little kind of summary moments, and then we'll talk a little bit about the specific questions. Oh, and by the way, that clock is like 10 minutes fast. So it's a little distracting. How much time do we have? Total? So we're gonna go until in the real world, on the real time, we're gonna go until 10 till, so about 20 minutes total. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I definitely took away from one of our people, one of our participants is even at our retreat, it's still work. But it's play. So it allows your staff to decompress. It allows staff like your one with nature. The other thing I shared about our annual river wrapped in retreat, which is being one with nature in a way that's unique for people that have been incarcerated. Because if you think about it, if you walk out of a cell, prisons are made of concrete and steel. And many of the prisons don't have very much greenery or flowers or grass. And now imagine being able to sleep under the stars in the sky and the stars look so close that you could reach up and grab them. But they're really not that close. But it's a level of freedom of feeling free that deeply touches your soul. And so it's invigorating, it's fulfilling to the soul to be able to do those things. And I shared something else I can't, I can do it maybe at the end about using water or filling yourself back up. In the work that we do in social justice and in so many nonprofits that are filling the gaps that government may not cover, oftentimes you have to really be aware of burnout, not just for yourself as leaders, but for your staff. And so these opportunities for play, for retreats, being one with nature are vitally important to make sure that you're able to continue to push forward and help heal the social ills that we're all working on changing. Yeah, I was actually kind of building off of what you're sharing that a lot of our conversation was about workplace and our own relationship with work and needing rest and needing to hear our inner voices and then also our role as leaders in our organizations of kind of creating these spaces of connection and community. I'm sorry, just turn yours off. Mind's up. Now is that better? Oh, too much of my voice. But one of the reflections that is that I really appreciated, I forget your name, sorry. Alok asked, as a manager, what can I do to kind of support creating community within my team? And Christine, I'm even reflecting on the way it is that you chose to set up this panel. I think it's a little bit unusual, right, that people walked in and there was not a panel in the front of the room. And in fact, as a panelist, I also find this as a much more joyful experience in terms of like being with you all. We were in small groups. We were able to get to actually introduce everybody as opposed to speaking to, you know, from our perspective, a group of people who we don't know where they're coming from and from your perspective, kind of just hearing only three voices when in fact there's so much intelligence and collective intelligence in this room, that in fact, our workplaces, and we talked about playing nature in public spaces, but our workplaces are in fact where we spend a lot of our time in community with one another. And in the moments it is where we're not trying to kind of like move the bottom line but really kind of create this environment that's like allows every individual to really thrive. How do we take off our manager or our leader hat to and put on that kind of community stewardship hat? And what that framing, that difference in framing may do in terms of unlocking your own imagination of kind of the experiences it is that you're able to create for your team? Yeah, I appreciate what you both have said. And in our space, we talked about green spaces and the importance of green spaces in so many different ways. We talked about the intentional and unintentional ways that we can gather and meet folks and celebrate our cultures and each other's cultures and that having the ability to go to a plaza like what we see in other countries where it's very natural place of convening is that the town plaza are where parks that are meaningful green spaces that actually allow for the sound of birds as opposed to the sound of traffic does get you to your best place of thinking and some of the most unexpected conversations. We talked about issues of equity in being principled to the way that we think about green space and the access to green space and all of the incredible data and Christine talked about some of the data points in terms of access to green space and how that impacts our own health as well as who gets to access that green space and the limitations that there are and how do we begin to build solutions from those communities and connect the dots between what is accessible in terms of programming that is already out there and the many of our institutions offer programming that is really robust in terms of breaking some of these stereotypes and barriers to access to green space like SAMS and the people who most need it and how do we begin to create more of that sort of access and as a funder part of the biggest barrier is how funding comes down as opposed to really per meets up and is built from the communities that are most deserving and most in need of those green spaces and recreation and play and all of it. Yeah, and I just, you know, I wanna just add to that building off of this idea around community stewardship like I see, you know, I don't know, I mean, SAMS video was really, really touching to kind of see the imagery and the circles and the joy and yeah, that sense of freedom it is that you're creating through your work and that in itself is community stewardship. It's really thinking about what the design is. Is it a rafting trip or is it a rock climbing trip? Is it a one-on-one conversation or is it a group conversation? And that we do actually like there's a lot of these micro design like Christine set up the room this way, choices it is that we have and that they're human beings at the helm of making those choices. I think about Susan on my block who there's a, what's it called? When like in the middle of the street there's a round green thing, a traffic circle. Yeah, like the, and she waters, she waters the plants and as a result, we have yellow and orange pops of color on our street. And that also is an act of community stewardship. And I think that as we think about kind of this funding challenge, you know, I think often it's kind of framed as bottoms up or top down, but in fact, there's this layer in between of these community stewards of these individuals that is who are really deeply connected to the community making these design choices that I like believe that we need to trust more in order to create more of these spaces. One thing I just want to say before, and this is on and off topic for all the funders that are in the room. Let's finish some of the things that we start with. And I say that from the perspective of watching all the way back to when I was a teenager. If you remember, we as a country when I say this, we were supposed to end hunger in Africa. You remember the concert, we were talking about that this morning. We are the world. There's still children starving in Africa. We didn't finish that. Like let's finish these things that we start especially here in this country. There are things that we start because it's cool and chic at the time. And then we move on. Let's get it done. Please, I can't tell you how important it is. When I see we begin to work on something and there's commitment to really change it. And then we change it a little bit. That's enough. Let's go on to the next really cool thing. Let's not let that happen out of things that we are working on. Let's finish them and make our entire country better. God, that sounds like the mic drop moment. Dare I say anything else? I don't know why I should. If you'd like, I know you got to speak with each other and depending on which group you're in with some of the panelists. But if there are any questions from the group, there's certainly time for that and feel free to raise your hand and belt it out. You keep it here, right? No, I just want to respond to what Deepvi was sharing from her group in terms of the importance of work and workplace, et cetera. I couldn't help but think about five years ago when we were all working in the office and the amount of time we spent at the Water Fountain chatting with people, building relationships and friendships, or in the pantry or wherever it was. And then COVID came and we were on Zoom all the time and I used to miss that like hell, right? And so you find different ways of communicating with people or connecting with people. But on a Zoom call, you probably get that 30 second window before the call starts to crack a joke or say whatever you have to. But I find now when people are going back to work, sorry, it's back to what it used to be. And I think I love that just being able to connect with people even if it means it consumes a lot of your time. That's so important to have that human connection. Hi, I'm thinking about urgency. I think that's a big theme. And I was reminded of the ways that we've been trying in our work to slow down even and sometimes especially when the moment mean is particularly urgent. To just like at the beginning of a staff meeting when things are really heightened to take five minutes to ground and breathe just to check in with one another in terms of where we're holding personally before we head into the hardest part of the work. And I was really feeling like that's an important aspect of this, like getting into play, creating that space. When we went into the Zoom rooms, like we gather a group of Muslims and Jews every other week and there's always like hanging out, but the water cooler or carrots and hummus or the dessert or like whatever it is. So we started just creating rooms at the beginning of our sessions for our fellows, like you can choose where you would go on that table and just go in and have whatever conversation you might have with them if you had been in person. So those moments of slowness, I think help us be stronger in the moments of urgency. And I was feeling that as we were talking. I was thinking because of the work I get to do and my playful podcast. Sometimes I wonder and I was thinking that this morning especially given what's going on in the world right now this week. Is it indulgent to talk about play and fun? Or maybe, and I'm building on sort of Sam's comment, maybe that's the thing we haven't tried yet, right? Maybe that's, have we been working on these problems for a while? And did we get diverted? Did we stop before it was done? And maybe inserting some play and joy and love and that sounds all touchy-feely, but okay, maybe touchy-feely is part of what we need too. So I'm really grateful for the spirit that you all brought into this conversation and I think you'll take with you and really thank the panelists for their time. There's a little cushion built in here so you have time to come up and have some additional conversation with each other. Also, speaking of fun, today, 3.30 to 5.30, our firm Impactful is having ice cream social justice at an ice cream shop in the lobby of the Palace Hotel on Montgomery. Me and Miracle has these cards that would, and so anyway, scoop's on us if you wanna come by for an ice cream scoop. And then please feel free to take a listen to the podcast and hear some people doing great work and also having some fun. Thank you. Thank you.