 So hi everyone, welcome to the building mobility justice breakout session here at the cow bike summit. My name is Axel Santana. I'm an associate at policy. I work on our transportation equity mobility justice water equity and climate resilience work. Just a few things that I work on, as if it's not enough. And I go by he him his pronouns. For those of you who are not familiar policy link is a national research and action Institute advancing racial and economic equity. We do that through communications advocacy and research. Do you go to the next slide. I have the next slide. I'm going to start off by acknowledging the land that we're on, which is a lonely and church annual land. And just a reminder to acknowledge the indigenous lands that you all inhabit and to give, you know, any time or money or resources to support local indigenous groups and give the land back to the indigenous groups that were here before us. And thanks to ginger for starting us off this morning with a land acknowledgement as well. The next session lined up for you today. I'll introduce our panel of awesome speakers. We have johnnie from Los Angeles walks executive director with LA walks and Nicole Chang policy assistant with climate plan. And we were supposed to have another panelist but she was not able to make it up this morning so we're just going to make it without her we're going to make it work. And so, before we get to their presentations, I want to first say a little bit about the topic today. And so we'll be talking about mobility justice. And for those of you who are new to the space mobility justice is about centering people over profit property or place making. We're prioritizing people's lived experiences. And it's the primary driver of change and emphasizes human infrastructure and emphasizes that projects enhance communities experiences rather than erasing or displacing them. And to understand the history of America is to understand the pain and trauma that has been inflicted on indigenous communities, black, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander communities, low income communities, LGBTQ plus and disabled folks. And so the way that mobility justice is to adjust those past wrongdoings of redlining housing discrimination lack of investment and over policing values community voices not only as essential data but as leaders in their own liberation. I mean pillar mobility justice is includes rejecting increased policing as a viable solution to save communities, as was discussed in previous panels and conversations throughout the day. And that police can't be trusted to keep our communities safe. And we're looking for alternatives to safety that are rooted in community and culture and healing and repair addressing environmental racism and is also an important pillar. Acknowledging that people of color and low income communities have historically born the front of environmental and climate disasters, whether they're human made or natural and we seek to rectify that and empower those who have been suffering for so long. It's all about power mobility justice is about cultivating collective cross community power, and it's about lifting up the voices of the most impacted communities and ensuring they have a voice at the table and are just driving decisions within their own neighborhoods. So, you know, mobility is so important for all of us. It's how we get around whether we walk bike or take transit. It's how we go to our jobs, our appointments groceries or families or social lives, and many marginalized people don't experience mobility in the way that they deserve to. Not everyone feels or is safe walking down or driving around town. And now everyone can easily access healthy food or medical care in their neighborhood and public transit isn't always affordable, safe or reliable for everyone. And so mobility, as you all know, is an intersectional issue, and it needs to be approached accordingly. So, about four years ago, a few organizations came together to create a network of advocates doing this work around the state. Doing organizing advocacy and policy work around mobility justice issues. And we're called the California mobility justice advocates network for made up of a bunch of difficult organizations, including policy link California walks climate plan and several others. And it really came out of a BIPOC mobility justice lab series hosted by people for mobility justice in LA. Yes, shout out to PMJ. And it's a BIPOC let's space, we meet monthly and we seek opportunities to collaborate and do work together. Similar things we've done together include hosting a few convenings, including a youth advocacy day at the Capitol a couple of years ago, when it was safe to do so. Our most recent work has been developing this guiding principles document which we're excited to share with you today and our panelists will be speaking to more about in a bit. And so the goal is document that we've developed is to put forth a set of principles that guide our work as a network, and in the hopes of encouraging decision makers to center the community voice and wisdom in mobility and transportation programs and projects. And we hope to advance deeper, more genuine, equitable and justice based community led approaches to city planning and the design of our built environment. And as we've seen time and time again, engagement is an afterthought and planning. And as advocates, we really want to ensure that residents and community leaders are at the forefront of their decision making. So that's what we're here to talk to you about today. And there's a QR code so if you want to pull out your phone and check out the document in real time you can do that. And I'll share it again in a bit later. Today several speakers to walk us through sections of the principles document which we broke up into three categories, community capacity and cash. And this is not an extensive list of considerations but more of a conversation starter between advocates and decision makers. And so in the document we share a little history of as a reminder of the fact that these disparities didn't happen by accident, that the result of policies and actions taken by those in power and a direct product of the races, homophobic, ablest patriarchal systems that have been created to keep our people marginalized. So we'll touch on the impact that COVID has had on this movement and how we need to leverage this time to make long lasting changes to improve our communities to be more equitable rather than trying to get back to what was deemed as normal, but clearly wasn't working for most of us. And so it was documented we outlined some promising practices associated with each principle and include resources and links to case examples where these kinds of actions are already happening and taking place across the state. And so once we hear from our speakers will have some time at the end for questions from the audience and so please write them down or keep a mental note. So with that I'll pass it to john to start us off. Thank you. Thank you, Axel. Hi, my name is john I'm with Los Angeles walks. You want to introductions a little bit so they can know who we are. So I'm john with Los Angeles walks. I am the executive director we're a nonprofit that does pedestrian advocacy. My background is a community organizer so before this I did organizing work around tobacco before that around schools. And so for me power building with communities to reach an objective and a goal I also do community organizing within my personal life I live in Korea town. Second generation Korean American living in K town LA so I do a lot of work there too but this is my jam I enjoy the stuff I'm always learning and growing and so I hope you all learn and grow with us today. Hi, I'm Nicole. Sorry this first time speaking in Mike I don't know if this working. Thank you. And I'm a policy assistant with climate plan and essentially where statewide network organization that works on the issues of transportation housing climate policy and equity. I don't come from a community organizing background more of a research background, which is what I mainly do, but that's what I want to do and aspire to do is like be a community organizing and kind of come from this mobility framework mindset. I think that has affected John. Let's give a note sorry let's start right in so as we should this document mobility just means a lot I think you can define it every different ways I think in this room we can probably define it every different way and so for the sake of this conversation I think it's worth noting that it's a very specific definition that we set as you we're not claiming that it is the definition, but it is our definition and hopefully it serves as a guidance. And so this was as Axel sharing this was like months and months of work collaboration and discussions that kind of came down into those these three categories which will go through today so let's start with community. Community. Residents know their communities best therefore we should listen to and trust their opinions decisions and wisdom when solving the biggest challenges. Next slide please. When I, when we go through this I kind of want you to see this as like you know rose tint glasses you put them on everything's slightly like pink. Think of this as the mobility justice glasses the lens in which we view our work, whether it's our community work, whether we're gauging elected officials whether we're gauging our own family. But this is the lens in which we see this work and see sort of not just the work by the movement. So I'm going to go through these one by one. The first section that my colleague was supposed to do that she's not here so I apologize if it's not as dynamic. I'm hopefully better with my section. So the first principles principle is local BIPOC communities and by the way, who knows what BIPOC means can someone tell me what that means. Thank you just black indigenous people of color thank you local BIPOC communities shape define and lead best practices. This is pretty self explanatory we know what is best for communities and so we should be considered the experts of our community and our community design. Second is community voices are essential data and decision making and I think this is another component that kind of is the first is we know the resources we know what our community needs. I think the word data is particularly important because oftentimes people think of data as what numbers exactly, but that is not often always numbers data can be anecdotes. What if you can't write what if you can't read right what is your data then you still have that of course it could be stories. It could be a performance and so there's so many ways of looking at data that I think is still short sighted. But I wanted to make sure we added in the community voice isn't just about numbers isn't just about a survey you fill out on a like it scale. It's far more dynamic than that. BIPOC leaders decision makers have authentic power. So this goes back down to power and power and power are we putting our communities and positions where they can actually make the changes right are they just volunteers. Are they just community advocates to give stipends out to are we actually seeding power to our communities and giving them the power to make their own decisions. Accessibility is intersectional. This really means a lot to me as a pedestrian advocate. Oftentimes I'm kind of jealous. Being here today I see a lot of sort of the differences between the bike advocacy world and pedestrian advocacy world and one area is definitely we don't have a built in business model and I wish sometimes we did. I wish we had shoe companies who were supported issues the way bike companies do. The reason I bring this up is when I talk to someone about pedestrian issues. I never begin it with saying how is it being pedestrian. It's always begins with them telling me about how hard it is to walk to school. How difficult it is to go to wait in the baking sun at a stop by stop. Right. Exactly. Yeah. The lack of shade. So this issue by nature is intersectional. But if you don't see this intersectional you're looking at the very narrow scope. So I think this is important because communities know this. This isn't something foreign to community members communities know this in like viscerally. So I think that's another principle. And then finally the last principle is by Park communities develop their own solutions for safe streets. Like I said before we are experts of a community. We are experts of our fields. And oftentimes it's not just experts of my physical geography. If I know how to engage a second generation or first generation Korean American community. I want to help that engagement and other parts of the city where that they're at diaspora maybe so it's not just me in my city it's also me in my community which beyond your physical boundaries. So with that next slide. So, I want to say that these are not really actually can go back a slide. These are not extraordinary right these are not that foreign. I think everyone agrees this is something that we all agree with. And actually if you just took BIPOC away and said communities in general deserve these things we'd all still agree. But the fact that this is so out of reach for a lot of BIPOC communities to show that something so basic something so expected is something that's so difficult to get. So I think that is why we've got to really frame this not just as all can use this but really BIPOC communities deserve this. So, the California walks. That's not my group of my colleagues group got a better group, but my God, sorry. This is some sort of the work that California walks is doing and I know one of the things I really committed to do is working with communities doing workshops doing training trying to build the capacity which we'll get into in a second. So, communities to engage power, move power and have power respond to them, and at times become power itself where there's running for office. And so I think this is sort of the work that they do at California walks. Next slide. And for those interested, they do have a program called a community safety ambassador training program where they do this kind of training so I really encourage everyone to reach out to California walks. And I think they're great in this I think they get grants to these kind of trainings throughout the state and so they even come down to LA to do some of these trainings. So, which I think then takes us to the next part which is capacity, right. What good are these principles, if we can actually implement them if the community can actually practice them they're just words on a paper right. And so oftentimes what I hear is, we need to build the community's capacity, we need to build the community's capacity is often something that I hear very often. So next slide. So, for this section, we have three principles that we want to we want to sort of go over. The first is systems processes and structures are unequivocally accessible and reflective by pop communities. And so this is just a long way of saying our system serve those that it's intended to serve, right. And so for us to change the system we need to actually start thinking about how do we create these spaces to become more receptive to communities of color to buy pop communities. And so this isn't just applicable to government that could be applicable to your nonprofit to your community group your housing association your neighborhood council. But are you making these places accessible to buy pop communities and so a few examples that we do Los Angeles box is, you know, we make sure that we have the meeting happen at a time that is actually accessible right and we're not doing it at 1130 am when people are at work. We provide childcare we provide incentives and sort of. It's called support for transportation, not everyone can get to where you are meeting. Oftentimes, it's in a government building so people who are undocumented can enter in so space is incredibly important are you having a where it's actually accessible physically. Other things is childcare and all of our meetings we make sure we have childcare because parents are parents right they might not be able to drop their kid off or have someone watch their kid. So an example I often like to share is sometimes we have meetings and parks and what we do is we put the chairs out and sort of like a semi circle like a moon, and we have to face a playground so the parents can talk. But at the same time as we're talking they can keep an eye out on their kid basic stuff like that provides accessibility, but if you have it in a stuffy board room where it's inaccessible people without documents. We have no childcare, they're not going to show up, and you shouldn't be surprised if they don't show up. Also important is food, people bond over food if you should never underestimate food breaking bread is one way to really break community and so if you have a community meeting without food, I'm not going to be there. The second point that is inaccessible systems demand more provide much less to buy pop communities I think this is pretty self explanatory. I something that how many of you all grew up in a church or gone to a church. Right. Are involved with like your, your community, whether it's like a local bike club, whether it's like a local like neighborhood association, so we're all involved with our own pockets of communities right where we have community we understand each other we see each other. The feeling in that space, right of camaraderie of understanding the consensus building that happens there. How do you replicate that kind of mood within the government spaces within your community meetings within your community outreach. You know I think of like growing up the second generation Korean church, the dynamic in that space is completely different than dynamic in this room in this conference and city council meetings, but I always think if I want to bring Korean people to a first chance to a city council meeting. How do I show them that the dynamic that they see that the comfortable within the church is also possible in city council meetings. So that's the level of engagement we have to do with different communities right we have to think about what it is their experiences like. And so, we go to the next slide. So, something that I want to say before I go on to this is, um, in the beginning I say, I often hear we need to build capacity we need to build capacity of communities they have grants and foundations give out money to build capacity for communities and often what that means is we need to get immigrants, people of color to learn English to use Twitter to use zoom and call in at a city council meeting and be able to get their points in within 30 seconds. That is often what capacity means for a lot of folks, which is incredibly unfair. We're putting an immense amount of burden on people already disadvantaged already out of reach of power to build this stuff so they can engage power. When often I think we should be building the capacity of power, because they have the resources for the government to collect our taxes. So how is government reaching our communities an example I often bring up is. So I keep bringing up my own story but that's how you connect right as a Korean American. There's an app called the cow talk. Anyone heard of it. Okay, I got a head shake. I'm sure if there's a Korean person in this room they're like yeah my mom has it. If you're Chinese it's we chat for the Spanish pink community Latino community it's what's up. What's up. But do you see governments in these spaces I have not the pandemic when everyone moved online I have not. So is government also building their own capacity to reach communities so I think there's got to be a little bit of a boat a little bit of a give and take. So the next one is BIPOC communities and their trust or organizations have the capacity and resources to shape the outcome. Experts should be paid like experts, or so they say. So I think the reason I bring up Yolanda is because she began as a community advocate showed the city what good community organizing was and the community realize we need to bring her in we need to pay her we need to have her represent the community and do the work and she's been kicking ass since kicking ass before what am I saying, but I think that is incredibly important. The picture here is actually our promotoras and so what we do at Los Angeles walks is we developed a safety program, and much like our promotora is in the public health. There we go right. So for those who don't know is a very established sort of profession in the public health world where if you have a community with language issue, not language access issues cultural access issues, instead of having a professional community like John Yi or city staff are coming into a community setting up ten and saying I'm going to give you resources. What you do is you give the resources to a community member themselves, train them and then have them go out into their own neighborhood. So similarly, in transportation securing a life saving infrastructure is so difficult just like healthcare. And so what we did is we train community promotoras who are next expert navigators of city systems. So what we do is then they then train their own peers to secure life saving infrastructure. So these are our promotoras who actually partnered with LACBC the by coalition, and they're training their peers on eBikes because they're going to actually have a contract now with LADOT to go and they're paid for it right. And they're being paid to go out and now talk to businesses to adopt eBikes for deliveries. And so for us. This is how you pay community members. We would not actually say that we should do more. This is the best we can do right now. But this is the level of payment and of respect I think we need to communities and it goes with first paying them contracts and the number of city contracts that I've seen where they actually hire people from outside the state to come in and do community engagement work. It's really appalling like we were in a bit we were actually applying for a contract with the city. And there was a firm in Miami who was going to lead the community engagement work and they got I think $100,000 of a million dollar contract and they only gave us 10,000 when it was based in Korea town and they brought us on because I have my career town background. So just goes to show you how messed up just the the contracting system that could go on and on about that. So we'll go on to the next one. Finally, government must build their capacity to acknowledge and reconcile past harms. I think this is incredibly important. It's two sides of the coin. Acknowledge and reconcile. I see a lot of acknowledging. I don't see a lot of reconciliation. After the civil unrest that happened, you know, a few summers back during the BLM movement, we saw a lot of statements coming up from transit agencies about how messed up they were how they're going to do better, you know, and companies are pulling that out. But what was the response? What are you actually doing? Right. And so what I would say is, at the end of the day, it's really simple. It's about money and power. Are you giving up money? And are you giving up power? If you're not doing either, then you're not doing your work. You're just acknowledging you're not reconciling. And this isn't just with governments. This is all your board. It's your neighborhood association. It's your local clubs. Are you giving up power? And are you giving up money to the communities that you're serving? Or are you just building new programs to serve that community while hoarding the money, but saying that you're building them, you're building these programs to serve them. So I think it goes back to, it's pretty simple. I don't know how more to say it, but are you giving up money? You're giving up power. And so, sort of the ways that we've done it at Los Angeles walks is actually, we moved towards a flat pay structure. So, one of the staff members had to reduce their salary for other staff to raise their salary and we willingly did this because we realized having an unequal pay structure isn't right, isn't going to work for us. When it comes to writing grants, we actually bring our promotoras in to work with them on drafting the grants, drafting the budget. When we do our budgets, we make sure that what word pay to staff is the same rate as that we're asking them to pay our promotoras. So again, how are you bringing them into this work? I think there's participatory budgeting that people talk about when it comes to developing your organization's budget with the community. You know, that also goes into program building. Are you building the program to the community without promotoras? We built a 10 month training curriculum, but we realized we really can't build that on our own. We have to build it with them because by building it with the community, they actually have skin in the game and they're willing to run through with it as opposed to if you came sort of a space and you dropped it down. Yeah, thank you. Sorry, my notes. Yeah, and so I think I'll end it with this. What does reconciliation look like to you in your world, in your community, in your home even, right? And are you doing what are you giving up money and power to reconcile so I will end it with that. Thank you, John. Let's give it up for John. Thanks for those remarks and your great work. And if you have questions for John, save them and we'll have some time at the end to share. So now we'll pass it on to Nicole to tell us about the cash principle and the document. So I'll be expanding more on the money concept that John was talking about. So with cash, there needs to be a transparency and funding methods and allocations to ensure that the public knows where the dollars are being spent and make sure that it's an equitable manner. Next slide. The first thing that it should happen is that by pop community should receive meaningful investments from progressive revenue sources. So as Axel was saying before there's an undeniable inequity that is clearly there because of the disinvestment in communities of color. So there needs to be an investment in transit in housing in parks, and there needs to be transparency and ensure that these communities are a part of the conversation. So, and also there needs to be an establishment of a funding pot to make sure that the there's continuous and sustainable revenue. I think in terms of what climate plan has been doing, we have been, we are not really like a community organizing, we're more on the statewide level and what focused on the policy. So, we've been trying to allocate for not allocate but advocate for more transparent funding, just making sure that when we attend the guidelines workshops that states hold. We make sure that it's like transparent and make sure that communities are involved in the conversation. On the next slide it talks about by pop communities receiving compensation as professional experts. So that's basically what john was saying before. Don't pay the researchers are a third party paid the people that are the community experts. And so some actions that you could take to do that would be to allocate dollars to fund the meaningful community collaboration, and also leverage for philanthropic funds to empower residents to advocate for their own needs. On the next slide, it talks about participatory budgeting. And as john was saying, it's more of a democratized way to allocate funding because people are coming up with the solutions, and then they vote on what needs to be funded. And one of the ways to implement this is to ensure that it's a best practice in transportation funding. So essentially, all transportation agencies that are applying for funding would have to do like participatory budgeting as a way to get a community to engage in things like that. On the last slide is mobility investments and the need to provide intersectional intersectional benefits and avoid harms. And this is basically where climate plan has been working for the most part because we've been trying to make sure that our transportation funding is aligned with our climate goals. So pushing them to align with our climate or our equity and public health schools. And so we're requiring mobility investments to include anti displacement climate resilience and increasing transit priorities. So make sure that not only are we allowing bike infrastructure and pedestrian infrastructure in to be like fundable but to prioritize these projects when they come across state agencies. So we're going to encourage investments to go beyond human needs and a sense of community and culture. While we don't really advocate for that but I think that's really important to bring up that funding doesn't just go towards this, but it's like going towards a sense of art. As we can see in the room it looks, it looks much better and much community. So we're going to empower BIPOC communities to design investments. So I think on the screen or what was on the screen was a California transportation funding report card, and this kind of gets into the boring parts of policy. Essentially it looks at transportation funding guidelines and tells you what has been in those guidelines. These transportation agencies require anti displacement transit priorities, and most of the time, they don't. And that knowing that I think with this report card, you get to understand what to advocate for in terms of transportation agencies to make it make sure that the mobility justice framework is implemented. And I could pass it back to Axel. Thank you, Nicole. Let's give it up for Nicole. Thank you, John and Nicole. So just wrapping up that principles conversation, you know we really hope as I mentioned that this will just be a starting conversation between advocates and decision makers we really hope that city planners, researchers, community organizers and other folks who are responsible for making these decisions really look at these principles and think about what does it take to actually have equity and mobility justice within their community. So any way you can help us, you know, spread the word, feel free to connect with us. Before we go to questions from the audience, just want to quickly ask our panelists to spend a couple moments telling us a little bit about some of the biggest challenges in your work and some of the solutions that you're most excited about. I guess I have to start because I have the microphone. So I think one of the biggest challenges for me is going into transportation funding and all the nitty gritty. There's something that I feel like is like insider knowledge which is basically chart C and if you look at that and look it up like in chart C it's this really complex matrix of where funding is going and I think is like trying to translate that information into something usable is very complicated for me and also it's just like on a personal level trying to implement the mobility justice framework because as I said before I come from a researcher background, and I feel like that in a way has like a different mindset than like community organizing in the mobility justice framework. We're trying to change that right. I think for me a big challenge is the last one on my team they'll probably give you a different answer but since I do a lot of the development work is just funding. There's just not enough money out there for this kind of work and I'm sure the EDs that run these organizations understand that the number of grants that I've seen where they ask a community to pass a law under a year. What? It's absolutely ridiculous and they give out money for that and then they cut the money after a year so it's like yeah change the world in a year and good luck. There's just not and this isn't it's not just as foundations and grants it's also with city contracts. If you want to do work that involves a community you have to start with year zero now with year one you got to build from the bottom up and there's just not enough money out there that's really dedicated to this kind of hard work. I come from the public health world so I did tobacco organizing. If you want to see a field that knows how to put money into issues and actually work with communities you look at public health. I came from actually California's tobacco control program. The state of California decided to tax ourselves millions of dollars to then funnel in and combat tobacco and California has one of the lowest rates of smoking. We have the most progressive laws around tobacco and it's because we put money behind it but we just don't have that kind of patience or foresight I think amongst the funding class to really do that so funding is a big problem of ours. Yeah, I hear that John I think even at policy link where we sit as an intermediary trying to you know bring movements together and make sure that things are intersectional we struggle with building that momentum you know folks are busy on the ground limited capacity not able to take on bigger projects and just really hyper focus on their local fights and so it's hard to build that bigger movement whether it's statewide regionally or nationally. So I can only imagine you know at a grassroots level what that looks like but I think it ripples really up the ladder. So with that I think we'll start taking some questions from the audience and I think we had an eager Yolanda up here. If you want to start us off and I can come around with a mic. John, you know, I didn't realize the kind of the structure that LA walks has now in terms of working with the community and the way you have to do the shifting with the the salary so when my hats off first off that you guys just took that step. It almost sounds like a co op type of, you know, approach and so I wanted to find out kind of what kind of model did you base that on because, and how do you see that long term, you know, working in terms of building maybe more advocates and and creating kind of this new path. Yeah, you'll learn of the flat pay structure is not an easy thing because what you're trying to do is you're trying to create an egalitarian system within your, your, your organization which is great. But you still operate within a capitalist system so let's say I'm gone one day and they need to hire a new executive director that ED might want a high salary or if the board wants to hire someone that's quality they might need to raise a salary. So, even you might make the changes within your own worlds, you still operate in a torrent in a river that's rushing by you and so you got to balance this you need a good board and I don't have the answers I'll be honest with you. But I we're just trying our best day by day. So john you might have run into my mom Esther Schiller she worked in tobacco. My God I love Esther. Yeah, she's. Anyway, so you're bringing up the tobacco models. Yeah, she's we can talk about we can talk later. Anyway, the tobacco model was. So first of all, all the many of the state attorneys general sued the tobacco companies if you remember that. And there was a settlement, and all the states got a piece of that. And then California also passed the tobacco tax so we, we kind of collectively agreed that cigarettes are bad. And it's okay to tax people who buy them and encourage people to not smoke and also make more non smoking spaces. The analogous situation in our world would be cars are bad. And it's a little harder sell at the moment, although I think we're getting there. There's funding mechanisms like a gas tax and congestion pricing there's a ways that government can collect money and funnel that money into community work to all those money goes to highways right now. So we have to divert the stream. Anyway, more of a comment than a question. And there's also a pilot program happening in California around real usage charge as well so with the electric bill electrification of vehicles, making sure that it's not just the gas tax for that. John representation. Can you talk a little bit more about the board. I know that usually it's pretty vertical. A lot of them are donors usually. So how do you empower over the direction of the organization. Did you have to show them that model first or tell me more about how you how you did that. My board's pretty progressive. And so it wasn't that hard to convince the board. But then the concern did come up about like what if one day I leave or one of other staffers leave me to hire someone with a higher salary so I think they're aware of that challenge but they're willing to take that risk so you need a board does willing to jump with you. So what is the future of the state they wouldn't be able to answer I can't even answer that right now so I think we're just taking it by day. Oh, I'm on my way over here because I saw someone I'll come back to your ginger. So as you've been implementing this newer model that you're presenting on what have been some of the challenges that you face whether that's internally or externally and how you've overcome overcome them or working on it. So I'll talk about the program because I think that's one of our most innovative ways of approaching because a lot of community groups I'm sure you all part of bike clubs where you have a traditional nonprofit and you have membership whether they pay a fee or they're part of his volunteers. For us we are membership membership is our format or us and what we do is as we secure city contracts we bake them into those contracts so that they get paid for the work. They build their resumes they build that experience that one day hopefully like the public health department or transportation department will create their own program program and then hire them full time. And so I'm really looking at, sorry, Yolanda to bring you up again, but the trail that Yolanda is blazing is I think something that has to happen in every transit agency, the way that they're doing in public health, but a challenge that we're facing is, is our undocumented mothers to be even more specific is how do we pay them that's not under $600 because if you go into over $600 you have to require their tax information. How do we pay them so they're not just like volunteers and we give them stipends or a gift card to Starbucks. How are we getting hard cash, and then I'm not only getting the cash but treating them with dignity when you give them the check, instead of having to do all these weird sort of ways to get the money and I think right now that is the biggest challenge that we have is compensating and paying our undocumented from us. I think more on the statewide policy side is just all the red tape that happens with funding. A lot with transportation funding a lot of it's like funnel towards roads and highways, just because of the way that we've structured are and made law, so I think it's like trying to get rid of the red tape and also, yeah, just getting rid of the red tape is like. Yes. So, with climate plan where we have a with co sponsoring a lot of that's like AB 2438, which essentially is trying to get the climate action plan for transportation infrastructure into the transportation plans and the transportation plans would better consider like climate resilience and equity within their planning process. I'll just add from our perspective, it goes back to the capacity as John was mentioning about grassroots and community based organizations being able to connect at the statewide policy level when they're so hyper focused on their local fights and it does impact them right but they don't always have the capacity to be able to engage and so how do we as an intermediary make sure we can be that bridge and that liaison between the statewide policy work federal policy and local policy so that's something that comes up often. I'm so excited to be in the room with y'all. And I have a, I don't have so much a question but as this thing that I've been kicking around in my head around mobility justice and I'm changing the executive director of by key space. And it really has to do with the first slide y'all put in here which is the fundamental 10 of mobility justice, which is we are listening to and respecting the wisdom of our communities of color. And something that I've been thinking about we've been struggling with here in Oakland is that communities of color are still in the torrent of capitalist car culture. And when us as mobility justice advocates and active transportation enthusiasts are going out there and say hey we're going to take away your parking put in bike lanes. People don't feel good about it because our communities of color are still embedded within, you know, our car culture. And so something that I've been thinking about is adding on to our vision of ourselves as mobility justice advocates as also like culture builders and storytellers. Because in one way, the, the really loud lesson that we want to tell the decision makers hey listen to communities of color. That's like for the decision makers and for us, we also have to do like culture change work within our own communities. And in that way we have to be leaders, you know, like, if we listen to people we're still going to get orange shoes all over the floor. If we if we listen to like what our communities of color are saying right now, what it might result in is like the slow streets program in Oakland where they were really successful in white neighborhoods and then people hated them and we took them out in the black and brown neighborhoods. And and that again results in inequity. So this is kind of the thing I want to just like shoot out there see like what your experience is have you been thinking about this you know tell me more. So I do a lot of organizing a campaign or guys I'm pretty involved with the Democratic club in LA. And I do a lot of canvassing in Korea town and Korea town if you've been in LA is a very dense a lot of apartment buildings. So I go down and when the gate opens I run into access to the doors and so often go through the garage. I can tell you, you can go to the most wealthiest building to the most low income, the poor support Koreans, every car is going to be a black Mercedes or Alexis. The low income family will have a church car and a regular car they take to work. So, yes, car culture is embedded, not just in wealthy, well to do communities, but even in our communities, immigrant communities, and especially, yeah, it's because it's wealth. It's a symbol of status. It's how you get there. And so I never I though I listened to the podcast war on cars in the field. I never say I'm anti car because I will alienate so many of our community members because they rely on their cars for daily life. They struggle every day to find parking because parking is so difficult. So I think you're totally these conversations are nuanced and the panel before I was talking about jaywalking laws. When you talk about j decriminalizing jaywalking, we talk about decriminalizing jaywalking with first gen Koreans. Maybe like what the heck are you talking about that laws are to protect pedestrians. So it's about law and order of in the perspective and I get it. You know, they they're communities incredibly dangerous and so this law makes sense. So I think there has to be understanding and conversations that are tough and difficult. But again, you can't be as a community organizer, you can't be ideological, you can be ideological if you're doing something else but at least as an organizer, you can't be ideological. You have to meet your community where they're at and then move from there. Yeah, I appreciate that comment ginger. And I think it really, for me, it makes me think that it all goes back to funding our public transportation and transit systems, because if we had efficient affordable effective systems, we wouldn't have to be so car reliant. And yes, there would be, you know, as you could rent a car, do whatever you need to do if you need to like look some stuff around whatever, but we wouldn't be so car dependent if we actually had systems that worked for people right. Yeah, funding transportation and transit is another piece to remember. And I don't know if you want to say anything about that Nicole. No, I think you covered it. I'm really excited that you have the promotoras program promotoras is like special place in my heart. And that is something that I would love to bring to our community. I wanted to know, have you noticed the impact that they, I guess, share some of the challenge or I guess my thoughts are like, they're like how am I going to like how do I sell this idea of to my parents, you know to my grandparents and I've been working specifically with the Spanish speaking community and so kind of like what are some of the like the wins that that the promotoras have been able to see in their community so not just like outcomes right like oh, you're going to do 10 lessons go out to your communities and tell 10 people about it, but like what is the actual impact that the promotoras program is doing in the communities. And this is not a promotoras, but in order to start a promotora program you have to have trust right they have to trust you to participate in this program. So the first thing we did is we asked them how do we serve you want to speed up let's get a speed hump here. You want a decorative crosswalk and figure now which we just got in January for $75,000 that the city paid for, we'll get that for you will organize that and so the first thing is, what are you as an organizer bring to the table that they'll start with that and so that's we spent three years just doing that getting speed humps, crosswalks, bus furniture and the big crosswalk that I just mentioned. After you do that, then I don't know about creating a promotora is another field but this is how we did it when you start doing that the community, as they go through that campaign go through that struggle they just realize how messed up the system is. And then from there we're like you know you can actually make money off of this those people over there they're making money off of this. They're the quote unquote experts. So why can't you be experts and so we bring in the problem of the public health. It's been done before. Right. Why don't we replicate it. And so I think it's a conversation you have to have it's not going to be done within a year. And I'm sure you have the trust of your community so maybe you can start it now but I think you need to build that again year zero need to build that trust first, and then I think you can you can do a promotora program. I appreciate your perspective about listening to the locals experts. You made it sound in the first slide though that there was agreement right away about what things to do. And we know there's often not. That's more common that there's going to be disagreement on what needs to be done. So how have you how have you overcome or built consensus when there are diametrically oppose opposing views on things. I would actually correct a premise and what you're saying. It is not my job to build consensus. That's not my role that is a community role to develop their own consensus. I'm not I'm not being cheeky but but I think what you as a good organizer, your job is is to build a table to facilitate I'm sorry to facilitate building a table where the rules are very clear amongst the community. Right. This is how we come to an agreement. This is how we resolve tension. This is how if we have discord we resolve it. You need to build that initial table but to have that table you need to have trust. You need to see each other. You need to break bread. And I know this sounds really lovey-dovey because we come from the government world where it's not like this at all. And so I think you again as an organizer I'm not here to tell you what to do or to say or to say you're right you're wrong, but to help build mutual rules and how we come to a consensus and agree. But again that takes time and money unless you want to put time and money I wouldn't recommend you do it then because it's it's worth. I don't think of the phrase moving at the speed of trust, which I feel like I heard a year ago and now I, it applies to everything. Thank you this is really great. I work for the government. I am really interested in the participatory budgeting that you mentioned and I'm wondering if either of you have examples that you could give where this has worked and particularly where it's worked in a BIPOC community. I don't know I don't have examples. I wish I did but I was supposed to do the research on this I didn't. So, will we have a second question because if I want to bring my community members into building my budget with them. I first have to explain what a budget is why nonprofits have budgets. I learned that through my professional no one taught me that I have to learn it as I did. So it's not like they're going to learn it as well so I have to train about what a budget is. I got to talk about revenue streams I got to talk about balancing the budget sheet and all of that and so that is something that we at Los Angeles walks call a shadow curriculum. This is the stuff that the foundations don't fund. This is the work that contracts don't even think about right they just think it's already baked into the process. So for you to even get to the level of participatory budgeting in whatever sense you want you have to build that shadow curriculum and do that training. And that's something that we're still working on now and we're trying our best to get it funded through government grants and contracts by saying this is this is an critical part of workshops right how to do emails how to work how to use Google sweets. Like that is a skill unto itself. And so I think you need to build in that that again year zero that trust building that that that those technical skills you need to do that to participate fully in participatory budgeting. I think there are pilot pilots happening across the country around participatory budgeting and I think there has been a successful one in a community in New York. I don't know off the top of my head but I can put the link and after this after this show. Any other questions. Charis Rosario with Latino Health Access in Orange County. We have been using the promoter and model since day one when we are funded in 1993 started the organization. So anyway we said promoters promoters community health workers as well known in public health. So you can help promoters are like youth or five year old. So it's this peer to peer approach so instead of like you thinking that you're the expert that you're going to change the communities you actually create the space for the community to flourish and do and organize them so you just provide the space so thank you. I love to hear you like we're pretty much yes. I love to hear that and I'm glad to hear it in this type of spaces and mobility this. You cannot often hear like the promoter model in this type of work right. Mainly in public health so I'm glad that you're also connecting this and you're giving this space for us to actually think in that approach. I want to ask you like it's been a challenge for you to convince public officials or cities or funders to give you funding that two projects are going to be led by promoters. Foundations like it because a lot of foundations are about equity and so city or scag. Well in Southern California. Scag they funded actually one of our programs which you applied for share this but the wine guard foundation recently is putting money because they liked our program. I will tell you though when it comes to our individual donors that's where the trouble is because it happened to me we were part. Of the active transportation and active transportation plan we're in charge of all the community outreach and engagement and when we were doing the budget we said we need. A look at funding for food or for stipends or we need to pay for a part because where we is where we hold the community workshops and a lot of that funding or that expenses were not covered by them so it has to be out of our pocket. So do you experience the same thing because they don't they don't validate that those double those are strategies providing food. Like I always say like you need to have the three at fun friendly and food but they don't consider that strategies for our retail retention. So how do you deal with that. When you say it comes out of our pocket you mean yeah you're right it comes out of our general funds. The number we had to dip into our just general funds that were not tied to a grant or a contract for community fund for doing a block party because community. So if I put them with those come to us and say we want to do a community block party. If we have the resources who am I to say no though because that they see that as a tool for their community to do the work and to get to reach their goal. And so there have been times where we had to reach outside of our grant to fund those kind of projects and it's a matter of educating funders and I don't know if we're doing as nonprofits. Maybe we should band together and create our own union to educate funders because and one thing that we did recently is we did a reverse RFP where we released an RFP. We asked funders y'all should come here and apply to this RFP and this is how much it costs is what you want to pay for. Come and I got all this great secret responses by the foundation. We liked it we liked it but only a few actually came out and so we're still waiting for more. So some foundations definitely are moving towards it which is really great to hear but I think I think there should be more organizing amongst organizing nonprofits so. Sorry I have another one. For us it was really hard at the beginning to submit proposals to call transfer OTS obviously you need to always need to have a public entity like a city partner up with you or you partner with the city in order to apply for funding. But also the process of feeling at all the paperwork that they require. You're not eligible for a lot of things and like how you deal with that or how you handle that. You get on a portal. You have to like release a statement every three days. Let me know that you're bidding. We haven't had to go through that yet. Most of the contracts have been through invitation or through another or more traditional process. So there are a class of contracts we don't pursue because it's just too complicated. We don't have the bandwidth as an organization. That's why if I could hire someone yeah it would be someone to help me with with exploring contracts or better yet. How do we get a promotora to pursue the contracts without me without needing us because in a way our team began as community organizers and now we've become almost like job growth supporters or what is it like career developers. I don't know what the term is in that field or helping them secure contracts. And so it's we just need we need to build again. We need to have that shadow curriculum to build the communities capacity to pursue these contracts on their own. And so we're talking about you want to create your own business your LLC. So you can pursue these on your own and not have to go through an individual person or a group like us. But it's all about building that capacity. Thank you for those questions any other questions from the audience. Awesome. Let's give it up for yourselves audience. Maybe just to wrap up if both of you could just share a little bit in terms of how either audience members can get involved or a call to action that you'd like to get out there. I think it was in the response I gave before but I think supporting the legislation AB 2438 would be would be helpful just because it better aligns our transportation funding with climate and equity goals. So that would be like calling to the legislator, I think is also visiting the report card that climate plan created, which I'm sorry I don't have the link and it's going to be one of those like visit this website. So it's a comment plan CA.org slash report card and no one I actually could drop it in the Hoover so I'm going to do that. So I'll put that in the good idea. Move as well. And the second thing is, I kind of like the idea of working with more nonprofits so I'd love to talk with nonprofits about how we can maybe like band band together and do some systems change. Thank you both and if anyone is interested in joining the California mobility justice advocates network feel free to reach out to myself. And check out our principles document that we just reviewed and share it with your networks. And if you have trouble, you know with the QR code or whatever just feel free to email me and I can get it to you. But with that that concludes our session and I'll give you a few minutes back so you can go chill before the next session. Great job axle moderating. Thanks everyone.