 As you can see, we have a packed theater and we don't have a movie to show, so I'm going to go over some ground rules so we can make it a lively but also productive conversation. So in the interest of time, because we have a larger than usual panel as well as attendance, I'm going to ask the following ground rules to be observed for tonight's event. Please silence your cell phones and speak quietly so that the panel can be heard by everyone. So what's going to be discussed up here is going to be very engaging and we don't want to diminish the conversations that might be happening around you, but please, if you can, just keep it to a whisper. If you have a question you want considered, please write it down and raise your hand and Sonia or one of our staff will come around and get it. There are cards on your table and we will come by and pick those up. There's also some materials in the back from some of the organizations here, including MALDEF, the Peace Initiative, and RISIS. I want to thank a few folks before we get started, particularly Charlotte and Lucas and NowCastSA for recording the event. You all will receive a link via email. If you RSVP'd online for this evening's conversation, you'll get a link so you can watch it again if you'd like to do that. It will also be on the NowCastSA website. I also want to thank former State Representative and Attorney Joe Gomez for contributing and helping sponsor this event, as well as our hosts here tonight's Antiquos Bijou Theater. It's been a while since I've been here and it looks great. My wife likes to come here quite a bit so now I know why. And I also want to thank my staff and our team that put this together, Megan, Sonia, Maria, Chris, Ruby, really appreciate this. We have had now monthly town halls throughout this area on a number of different topics. A lot of really interesting topics for policy walks, a lot of really interesting topics for any interested citizen in San Antonio. We had planned because we're in the midst of a rideshare debate and for those of you who like or don't like Uber and Lyft and rideshare transportation networking companies, we're in the midst of that debate right now. In fact, a very critical vote comes to council this month. We'll be listening to the concerns and the questions that arise from council this Wednesday. If anybody wants to take a look at that online or attend in person. So we were going to have a town hall about rideshare. Who doesn't like to talk about rideshare? But when we began to play in that town hall, we considered covering that topic. However, after the election it became very important that the community that we live in today needs some reconciliation. The San Antonio community is resilient. We are diverse. And many of us have expressed gratitude for pulling this together to simply assemble and discuss how we can continue to make progress on those things that unite us. Progress that is inclusive and sensitive to the traditionally marginalized and underserved members of our community. With this event is not my intention to highlight the loss of a candidate or a particular election or how we feel about it, but to foster a dialogue that we need as a community in order to keep San Antonio moving forward in a positive direction. I also want to make a special thank you to State Senator Jose Menendez. One of the reasons why we started a series called cultural conversations in our community is because this area in particular has seen its fair share of hate crimes. We are a very diverse city, San Antonio, particularly the I-10 corridor up and down. And last summer we saw a lot of anti-Semitism erupt within our community, so we thought, let's figure this out together as a community, talk about it, put our problems out in the open, because it was the community that gave us, it was the residents of this community that gave us the answers. When those incidents happened not far from where I live, it wasn't a directive from city council or a decree from the state that said that's not acceptable. It was the neighbors that lived in our neighborhoods that stood on corners with signs that say, we are together, we stand with our neighbors. It doesn't matter if they're Muslim, it doesn't matter if they're Jewish, Christian, any kind of group. That's a wonderful example of what San Antonio is. We all know that we experience that every day and I can guarantee you, or at least I know for sure that the people in this room feel the same way. That's why you're here. So we wanted to foster a dialogue that's public and open, town halls called cultural conversations where we can exhibit that. And so that's part of the reason why we're here tonight. So I want to first start by introducing our very distinguished panelists and thanking them for being here. So on my left here is Oliver Hill, president of the San Antonio branch of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People, which was founded in 1909. The NAACP is the nation's oldest and largest non-profit civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and their world are their premier advocates for civil rights in their communities. Their mission is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of all people and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination. We also have Patrice Castillo, executive director of the PEACE Initiative. PEACE stands for Putting an End to Abuse through Community Efforts. Their mission is to educate the community about the extent and often deadly consequences of domestic violence and to respond effectively through collaborative partnerships. Also with us is Phyllis Ingram, past president of the San Antonio chapter of the League of Women Voters, which is a non-partisan political organization encouraging informed and active participation in government. Wouldn't that be nice? It influences public policy through education and advocacy. We have the Yan Quayar, who is the communications coordinator for Equality Texas. The Equality Texas Foundation works to secure full equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Texans through education, community organizing, and collaboration. Equality Texas envisions a Texas where lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Texans and their families can have full equality in the hearts and minds of our fellow Texans and in all areas of the law. We have with us Jonathan Ryan, executive director of the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, RAISIS, which assists vulnerable members of the immigrant community including asylum seekers, unaccompanied minors, immigration detainees, and survivors of crime. The agency also assisted low-income immigrants in filling family-based petitions. Finally, we have Selena Moreno, who is the legislative staff attorney for MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Founded in 1968, MALDEF is the nation's leading Latino-legal civil rights organization. Often described as a law firm of the Latino community, MALDEF promotes social change through advocacy and litigation in the areas of education, employment, and immigrants' rights, and political access. So please help me welcome our very distinguished family. I gave them just a real brief huddle. We're going to try to keep this conversational, and so their questions may, or the conversation will move. And I have given all of them the right responsibility to figure out who gets the microphone. There's two of them, so we'll make this work. So guys, the first question I have is, I think it's fair to say that part of what made this particular election so divisive was the rhetoric. President-elect Trump's rhetoric about women, about immigrants, about Muslims. And we had Hillary Clinton also called Trump supporters a basket of deformables. We can all agree, whatever side of the debate we were on, the dialogue was not where we wanted to be. So there was a lot of resentment on both sides, people feeling devalued. How important is language, and how can we turn that language around in such a charged atmosphere? That's my first question. The work that we do always focuses on how do you get people to change their culture of violence, and we always begin with our choice of words. And it's something that we emphasize in all of our educational programming that you don't get to physical violence by going straight to physical violence. It usually starts out with heated words, hurtful words, damaging words, words that can destroy the spirit. And that leads into the further types of violence that can occur between two people, whether that be in an intimate relationship or in an argument between two people that know each other or don't know each other. But that heated language is definitely a huge stepping stone to further harm that can be done. And so we always engage our students, our learners in a conversation about making sure they're very aware of their choice of words. It just really wouldn't look good for Patricia Castillo, the director of the Peace Initiative, to run around the city saying, we're going to attack domestic violence and use all the force that we possibly can to end it. Would it? So that's kind of what I mean. Words do matter, and words have consequences as a judge here locally found out this month. So I think one of the things that we have to do is think about the words that we're going to use. Don't just spew things out of your mouth, but actually think about what it is that you want to communicate and what words you're going to use to do that. First of all, I'd like to thank the councilman for having the forum. Now that's the question, I think one of the things that we need to understand, words do hurt. And words that are, the rhetoric that has been used doesn't lead to anything but violence. At the NAACP office, and I just have to tell you this, because already we are receiving heat calls. And that should not be in 2016, in the 21st century. So what we are saying that everybody is deserving some respect. And when we allow our politicians to use whatever rhetoric they want, or whatever words they want, we should have a responsibility to contact someone on their staff and say, enough is enough. We are all, first of all, Americans, regardless of your color, regardless of your skin, regardless of your ethnicity, regardless of your gender, regardless of anything, we're all Americans. So if you're interested in keeping and preserving America, or America, then I would suggest that when these kinds of words come out from any politician, you should be tweeting, you should be Facebooking, you should be emailing, you should be letter writing, and you should be telephoning, and tell them this is totally unacceptable. If I just may take on to that, this year we heard a lot about political correctness, and people not being politically correct. And I would ask you, when did manners, and kindness, and Christianity become not politically correct? Why is that a negative thing? I wanted to talk a little bit about communications. I mean, in my role with the quality sector, my job is communication. And my job is dependent on, one part of my job is dependent on the relationships that we have with people who make media. The media makers, the journalists, the over-the-air broadcasts. And so with this election, although I'm a woman of color, I'm part of the Jewish community, and I have many identities, I've mixed with any person, I'm now I feel personally affected, and more protective than ever of the media, and the people who make the media. I want to protect the journalists, I want to protect the people over the air and radio. And I say that when we talk about words matter, I also want to just point out the fact that what the media says matters too, and something as simple is if you see something in the media that you feel like is incorrect, and that you should feel compelled to want to build your own personal relationship with the people who represent you in the media, and they're not bad people, and they're human, and they eat, and they drink, and they sleep, and they really do at the end of the day want to do a good job. And if you can point to something that's incorrect, when we're talking about rhetoric, or words that matter, or words that are wrong, most of the time, sometimes journalists make mistakes, and if they have, they will correct them, or if they don't understand maybe something, as well as you do, they will go out of their way to learn more about that topic, because they want to do a good job for the community that they represent. Words absolutely matter, and if we have any doubt that all we have to do is ask children. The president-elect started his campaign, launched it, vilifying Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, and you saw some rhetoric throughout the campaign, and right after the election, the very next day, I'm married to a high school teacher, my husband's students, my husband Andres' students were asking, does half of the country just not care what happens to me? Do they hate me? And so words absolutely matter the very next week, the last couple of weeks, I know Malta, we're running a hotline for school bullying and hate crime incidents, and we've received multiple calls, and I know, I love my city, I'm a San Antonio native, and we like to think that we're immune from that, but we got several calls right here in San Antonio. Two incidents, one at Warren High School, one at Antonian High School of kids being told that there's going to be a wall built and a chance to build a wall and send them back. And so these things do matter, and kids fill it the hardest. One other quick example in the education setting, recently at the State Board of Education, there was a fight related to approving a textbook, Mexican American Heritage that was filled with offensive stereotypes, and I think it's hard for us as a community to feign shock that there are bullying incidents when we're seeing, even in the textbooks that are being proposed for our students, things like Mexicans are criminals and the Chicano community wants to destroy US civilization as this proposed textbook had, and so definitely they had it. In the summer of 2014, my organization, Riasis, worked at Blackland Air Force Base with approximately 2,600 unaccompanied children from Central America that were being kept there as many children were coming to the border. I'm sure that many of you heard about that. Today, my organization is working at a military base in White Sands, New Mexico, in the middle of nowhere, where there are twice as many unaccompanied children being held by our government, and I bet that you didn't hear about that. When I was working at Blackland Air Force Base with these children, we have a 30-year docket of experience of cases that we've taken that we brought before the government that have won, and we know what a winning case is. And we found, when we spoke with those children, what the United Nations found, what every other credible organization finds, that at least two-thirds, if not 80% of those children were refugees who were eligible under our current law long-standing for asylum status and protection here in the United States. What I heard in 2014 was a president announced on television that this was a humanitarian crisis, and in response to those words, we heard our past Secretary of State and next Democratic nominee for president say that these children needed to all be sent home. The response to that so-called humanitarian crisis was for that president to have the senior members of his Department of Homeland Security sign affidavits under penalty of law that declared children and mothers coming from Central America to be the greatest threat to our national security. He then used that humanitarian crisis to build the largest for-profit prison system in the country right here in our backyard, filling the pockets to the tune of billions, hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for for-profit prisons, detaining these so-called threatening and dangerous mothers and children. We then saw, Monday before the election, that president signed an emergency appropriation granting $330 million to the Department of Homeland Security to build more for-profit prisons for these people. That was the day before the election. When the best of us allow our convictions and our values and our principles to be cast aside for political expedience, for convenience to get through the crisis, just to get to the next stop, we do this now, we make these ones heard now and we'll get to a promised land where there will be others who we can help. This is what happens. If we are walking into an administration that's got a deportation machine, it's not because it's going to have to build it. It was designed, it was built, and it was tested by this administration. And now it is in the hands of a future president. That's what happens when you allow a little pain to be exacted on a few vulnerable people in order for some future greater good. And that's what happens when you use language, effectively and cannelly. Because we think about one side, one team is for, one team is against, what I've seen from the immigration perspective is bipartisan support for laws that repress, subjugate, and exploit immigrants in our country. I'll represent communities that work considerably with the public that you serve. You're public, you have public phone numbers, you have email addresses, you are all very accessible. What are you hearing from the communities that you serve about where we are today? Not just here in San Antonio, but across the country. And what are the anxieties and hopes that people have shared with you? And don't be shy of talking about hopes too. I've always optimistic that there is hope, regardless of who's in the White House. I have to tell you a little bit about our culture. Since we've been here since what, 1619, and we've been called everything, and vengeance servants, and then slaves, and then in some textbooks, they want to say people workers. But the point is that I have hope that cooler heads will prevail and that even Mr. Trump will realize that America is a democratic country, a republic that cannot be toyed with, or his own, or better word, a wellness. I think it has to be understood, even with the Congress, that they're going to have to rein in some things that he's saying that make sure that this country remains the greatest country in the world. We cannot afford to let this slip by. Because if we do, we all will pay. Like I said before, my culture and my culture, we have gone through the gamut since we've arrived here. We have suffered everything imaginable. And I don't think we're going to suffer any more than we've had in the past. Things might get a little better. I would hope so. I don't know if things could get any worse. So we just have to make sure that we all do what we need to do to make sure that this country remains as it is the best in the world. I also think that it's important to continue naming and calling out and speaking truth to the hate that does exist out there for various groups. And the name-calling and the shaming and the put-downs is unacceptable. It is not really representative of what this country was founded on. And we need to take those risks and just speak it as well as we need to take the risk to hear it. Because until we are able to do both of those things, we're not going to be able to move forward. Thank you. Thank you. I would say that a lot of the things that concern our organization are around voting, voter turnout, voter education. In this political election, only 57% of registered voters came out to vote. And registered voters improved this year. I mean, we had the highest number of new registered voters that we've had in many, many years. And yet only 57% of those came out. Lee partnered with, and Kathy, if you'll help me out with this, was it Uber? The other thing that concerns me personally is that 40% of Republicans and 57% of Democrats voted straight party tickets. Not one Republican judge was elected in this past election. And there were several of them who were excellent judges. And if people had taken the time to inform themselves about them, they wouldn't have been voting straight party tickets. So those two things concern me, and those are Bear County statistics. San Antonio is a great city, but we have serious issues on the east side of town, on the west side of town, that we all need to try and help solve in one way or another. It's really easy for me to get and understand people, I'll just say it, old white people that live on the north side of town, because that's who I am. So I need to make an effort to understand the people that live in other parts of town. They have different experiences that I do, and if we all do that, we'll start to build an even stronger community. I'm going to say something that people will agree with me on this panel. I hope they do. So before the election, we received a lot of emails, a lot of phone calls, a lot of Facebook messages, direct messages on Twitter. People asking us like, what do I do? How can I help? And we always tell them, here's where you volunteer, here's where you sign up to stay informed, here's an offensive, take a place. And the entire team of Equally Texas was racing themselves for a battle for the upcoming 85th Texas Legislative session. So we were already preparing ourselves to battle some bills that we specifically believe are anti-LGBT, anti-people that we represent. And so when you ask for the election, I started to see lots of groups. Many people in this room might already be part of like a Facebook group, or like something with their church, or another nonprofit, where people are showing everything, what do I do? How do I help? So not much has really changed since before and after the election. I don't even think calls and emails have increased. But the question is still the same, what do I do? How can I help? There is a little bit of an internal panic that I hear in people's voices. I read their emails when they reach out to the same, what do I do? How can I help? And my point is that before the election and after the election, it's still the same. You just need to show up. If there is an organization on this panel, or if there's a faith-based community near your house, there never has been and there still is not. Even now, there's not a shortage of the need for time, talent, and treasure. So even if you feel like you don't have money to give, you might be able to volunteer. If you feel like you can't volunteer, you might have a skill that you can offer to people that are working closely to the issue that you care the most about. I'll talk a little bit about hope. I do echo many of the statements that have been made, and I won't pretend that there hasn't been a lot of fear and confusion, particularly within the Latino immigrant community. And for those of you who walked in, we have a one-pager, both in English and Spanish. It's a frequently asked question that answers a lot of the common questions that people are scared about. But I want to talk about hope that I see, particularly with the young community of Dreamers. Dreamer students, kids that were brought here when they were young, that have lived among us as our neighbors, but do not have legal status. And what I've seen in their response after the election has been, you know, we are here to stay. We're going to use this as an opportunity to build our movement, and we're going to continue to build our movement in a way that is inclusive of the Black community, the Brown community, our trans brothers and sisters, of making sure that we stand to protect our Muslim brothers and sisters. And you've really seen that energy among young people, and I think that's something that we can all learn from. Communities at Riasis. We provide legal services and protection to immigrants, but we are also a thought leader, an organizer, and a big part of the national debate and narrative on immigration topics. And so I've heard from different communities different things, and it's in a way a lot, it's not what I expected or what one might expect, kind of counterintuitive. From a lot of the smartest, most educated, most well-equipped people that I know with organizations and institutions at their hands, I've heard and I've been reached out with cries of, they're shocked. They're dumbfounded. They don't know what to do. They can't believe that this is happening. And from those who I work with who are vulnerable, who are victims, who fled countries that have oppressive governments, I've not seen that same level of shock. If anything, they've seen this before. If you've got a neighbor or a friend from Central America, from Eastern Europe, from Africa, from the Middle East, you might want to talk to them a little bit about their experience in their home country. Because what I'm seeing from my clients, from women in detention looking at me, it's that gaze, that gaze of those who know, towards those who don't know yet. And to those of my friends who've been involved and who have been saying, I don't know what to do and I'm shocked, I will say that the First Amendment, I'm sorry, ends at the front door of races for my staff. I have banished the term shock. I have banished the phrase, I don't know what to do. Because the truth is that we are exactly the ones who know what to do. What we are going to, what we know historically here in this geography, and for a long time, with respect to how undocumented people and marginalized people are going to be treated, because this is a moment for intersection of all of us who are under threat. And we are under threat. We do not need to fancy around this, is that we have to come together. Because we know what is going to happen. It's going to be the expansion and the exportation of what's already happening here to other communities. We're here in a nice small art house theater. What has been, in many respects, the oppression of the marginalized, has been an art house movie that the next president is going to take to a theater near you. We've seen this movie before. We saw it last summer. And it's our job to inform the rest of what's coming, because it's coming. Well, I want to compliment first, I want to compliment you all, because this is obviously not an easy dialogue to have. And I want to compliment all of you out there for being attentive and us tackling some really difficult issues. But let me talk about, let me get to something Jonathan was saying about division. If you looked at an editorial, not editorial, electoral map of the United States after this election or any other, you will see coastal communities and you'll see red in the middle. If you go a little bit further and you look at counties, you'll see more purple. And really, if you look at cities versus rural areas or even urban areas versus suburban areas, the divisions are that much clearer. That's not me. Okay. So I want to ask you, I think there's clearly an urban rural divide with a lot of these issues, even the urban suburban divide has been shown in this and other elections. We're polarized, as many would say, and the organization represented here serve specific groups. What do you think that people don't understand about your organization that they should know and what do you think would surprise them about? Full surprises already, I didn't expect any silence after that. I think something that I have to talk about is that refugee and immigration law, which is the law that I very proudly practice, is the legal monument that was left after World War II that was implemented and passed in this country and enforced in other countries around the world by a little generation that we call the greatest generation. And the reason that we do that is because they were a people, a generation of people. So I was taught, I'm an Irish immigrant, grew up in Texas. I went to elementary school, I went to middle school, I went to high school here in Texas. And perhaps I was naive in what I believe, but I believe it and I still do, that this was a generation of people that went to war not to defend their borders or to advance their interests, but to defend a principle. A principle about how humans treat humans. How the strong treat the weak, how the rich treat the poor. That was a line that they drew in the sand with their blood and then they came back and they drew it into our laws in ink on paper. Chiseled it in stone. And so to many people who think that I might represent the margins of our society, I disagree. I am here to defend what I know to be the core principle on which this country was founded. And that's what I know about my organization. If we were all to be just truthful. And when the councilman asked about the urban rule divide and the suburban divide, that started even, it's been a long time, it's been happening all along, but it started in 2008 and many of you don't want to acknowledge that, but it did start then. Because we had senators and congressmen said, our saying at the very first day of Mr. Barack Obama's presidency, we're going to make him a one-term president. And we're going to do everything we can basically to keep him from being a good president. We're going to make him fail. It was on some top rose shows that I hope he failed. What about our belief of fairness for everybody? And what about the so-called privileges that you might think you have that I don't have? This is where the divide came and has been festering for a long period of time, eight years just about. And with the rhetoric that was given during this election season, it just festered that even more so. So now we have what we have and it's up to us to change it. How do we change it? As it was said before, we have to take action ourselves. We have to ensure our legislators, our congressmen, our senators, follow the constitution themselves. We have right now a Supreme Court position that's open, used by one senator to not bring it forward because he wasn't sure it would be the kind of jurist he would want there. But let's look at the jurist that passed. What did he bring forth to us? We're now having a lot of issues with our Second Amendment where everybody says it's all right to have a gun. We have more guns on the streets now than ever before and it's going to even get worse. Now we can take guns everywhere, even into the bores. What kind of nonsense is that? But we still are applauding those folks that support this senator. He's dealing with the Senate. So it's up to us. 2018 is coming. If you want to make some changes, make them in 2018. As I say, throw all the rascals out. Then we can see some change. For the most part, even though we've been doing this work to educate our community since probably the mid-70s, late-70s, to educate San Antonio about domestic violence, family violence, that it's very pervasive. You can find it in all groups, in all neighborhoods, in all faith communities, in all economic levels, in all races, everywhere. Domestic violence affects people from all walks of life. For me, I make the connection between what happens between two people and how that imbalance of power plays out between two people and ends up getting played out in the macro where people are struggling in the big picture for power. So whenever we work with people that are struggling with family violence issues, that couple, whoever they may be, are the small picture of what's happening in the large picture. And the more the victim struggles to get out from under that abuse and power, the harder the abuser comes down on the victim. And that's what's happening at the big level too, at the macro level. The harder we struggle to get out from being oppressed, being victimized, then the harder the powers that be come down on those that are struggling to no longer be oppressed. And I see it played out right now. That's what's happening. And I think people just don't understand how that fits. And we've got to acknowledge that what happens between two people has global implications. We have to understand that. And you throw in their substance abuse, you throw in their weapons, you throw in their mental health issues, you throw in their all kinds of other things that escalate it, and you've got a bomb waiting to explode. And we've got to seriously look at how this plays out both at the individual level and how harmful and damaging it is to our families. The family is the single unit of survival that makes up our fabric in this society. But if the family fails, then we're all in trouble. And so it's something that we have to seriously take a look at both individually as well as in the big picture. Thank you. Thank you. What I think maybe people don't know about the League of Women Voters is that 96 years ago, a woman named Carrie Chapman Kat worked in the Suffragette Movement to get passage of the 19th Amendment allowing women the right to vote. Once that amendment passed, she formed the League of Women Voters to help educate these newly enfranchised women. And the League continues to this day to try and educate voters. And we do that in a number of ways. Just recently, prior to this election, we did a public forum on the voter ID law and that forum is still available, I believe, on the Nowcast YouTube channel if you want to take a look at it. We hold candidate forums. We produce voter guides prior to each election. The printed guides are available in public libraries, community centers, and retirement communities. It's available on our website, lwcsanantonio.org. The information is available on vote411.org. So there are all kinds of things that we do to help educate voters. This last election, we held a candidate forum for judicial candidates. Most of the candidates were very intelligent, produced very good answers to the questions that were posed by the audience members. And again, not one Republican judge was elected. It just doesn't make sense. If you heard these judges, and again, that may still be on the YouTube, the Nowcast YouTube channel, there were several Republican judges there who were currently judges were doing excellent work in their courts. And for whatever reason, because we chose not to educate ourselves, those judges are now not working for us. And one of them was a judge in the juvenile court that developed the girls' court that works with at-risk young women. Now, probably the judge who came in after her is very capable in doing the same thing, but why are we asking somebody to start over when we have someone with 12 years experience? So those kinds of things are the things that the league works on. We are a ground-up organization. They're a local, state, and the U.S. league. And anyone can study an issue and then propose it up and propose it up. And so after study, then the league, either on a local, state, or national level, adopts a program that we then advocate for. So it's very non-partisan. We have to come to consensus. It's quite a process, and I won't take up time here, but that is one thing that you probably do not know about the League of Women Voters that might surprise you. One of the things that you might not know about Maldives is that we are founded right here in San Antonio. We are about to celebrate our 50th anniversary in a couple of years. And I think that it's important to note that, because this city is a very proud birthplace for a lot of civil rights, national civil rights organizations. So another example is the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project. And we have that in us. We have this history. We stand on very strong and broad shoulders. And so I think that that's important to celebrate as well when we're talking about what divides us. We have a history of resistance when we don't, when we see something that's wrong, we have a history of calling it out. It's not something that's a partisan issue. Maldives is a non-partisan organization. One thing that might surprise you, I think a lot of people assume that we lean toward one party or another. But if there's a party based on wanting to protect their own incumbents from, and they're trying to dilute the voting power of Latinos, it doesn't matter if you're Republican or Democrat. When we see something that we feel is in violation of the law and is principally wrong, we go after that. And I think that you see that as a San Antonio community as a whole. We should be very proud of that. Well, thank you. And so remind everyone that, you know, part of this is how do we get past dialogue and continue to look forward and help bridge some of these divisions? It's an excellent question that was just submitted on that, touches on that issue. Given that America was bound on the principles and ideals that we share, democracy rights, liberty, opportunity, equality, and which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success and upward mobility for all, opportunity, what do you advise to disrupt the frequent and consistent inequality of marginalized groups in our nation and locally remembering that SA continues to be ranked as one of the most income segregated communities in the country? What are some of the things that we need to be doing as opposed to just talking to to help us get past these issues? I'd like to take that one first, if I could. I think what we need to do is the communities we need to get to work. I think that what we need to do now is the same thing that we should have done and needed to have done after the last administration began. But I'm highly critical in holding contempt to people who think that democracy is something you do on election day or that that's what civic participation is. It's getting involved. When you look at a leader as inspirational and transformative and lofty and you assign and give up all of your agency to that person that picks everything, then you're not being a good citizen. And if you look at some elected official as some kind of a bad man and some kind of a tyrant that you just equally give up all of your agency because you can't do anything, you're also not being a good citizen. Learn about your government. It has instruments. It has offices. There are officials who have names and extensions and email addresses. It functions. It works. It's not just one person. No matter what side you prefer. And so I'd say it's time for us to get to work. We need more tools than that. Come up here. I would just add that to say that also I think as we do this work one of the biggest falsities is this either or paradigm that we get shoved into. We have to help this group and we can't help that group. Well, how are we going to help these folks if we can't help these folks? We are the greatest nation that exists and that has ever existed in the history of this earth. We are powerful and we can do. It is a both and. It is governments and countries that treat immigrants well that treat their citizens well. It's governments that treat minorities well that have strong upward mobility for the majority. It is not an either or proposition and that is what we get corralled into by politicians and businesses who want to force us to make that choice. They want to force us into that choice. The choice should be all of us together. We the people. And I don't mean to diminish what Jonathan just said. I think he's absolutely right in terms of civic engagement, civic participation is not something you do once or twice a year. So let me focus the questions. Since you picked up the mic first, Phyllis, let me focus it on that. We constantly struggle with how do we make our local government more accessible when we figure out ways of doing that. We constantly struggle with how do we get people to engage those opportunities for access and then we get struggles on the other end. How do we make sure that the people that are there who are often voted for by one out of 10 citizens in the city pay attention to the access that has been taken advantage of. All of those things working together. So from a civic engagement standpoint now, what are those things that we can talk on? Because I think that everyone in this room, regardless of the side of the debate, you may be on or the conversation you might be on would agree that it starts with participating in your community. I have a slogan in my office that I think is the cure to most every policy issue locally to internationally, which is be a better neighbor. Taking time to understand other people that we don't engage with on a regular basis so we can continue to govern to a very diverse and larger swath of the community more inclusively. So Phyllis, you're a civic engagement professional. What can we be doing better locally? Well, one thing that I'm happy to see, first of all, that you're doing town hall meetings that most of the city councilmen have district newsletters that they send out to anybody who signs up for them, not just the people in their district. So I am not Ron's district, but I do get his newsletter that he sends out. I'm not in State Representative Diego Bernal's district, but I do get his newsletter. The one thing I would encourage you to do is to sign up to receive these newsletters from the people who are representing you because even though I'm not in Diego Bernal's district, the decisions that he makes in the Texas legislature are going to affect me and our city. And I would beg you to vote in the city elections in the spring. The thing that impacts your life the most is local government. And that is the election with the least participation. So if I can start nagging you now, go to all the city councilmen's websites, sign up for their newsletters, and see what their positions are on important matters in the city. I mean, a lot of the city and the county are increasing wages. I think that's going to help because they're going to be the leader and then private industries are going to have to follow that lead, and that will help a little bit with the income and quality. I mean, that's one thing that people were so angry about in this past election, that the economy has been improving over the past eight years. So some people aren't being touched by that improvement. So I encourage you, I recently had an opportunity to attend a missionary Baptist church and an anti-atyspitalian church. And it was a wonderful experience for me. I had an opportunity to go to a Jewish temple. That's a wonderful opportunity. I've not had the opportunity to go to a mosque, but I would certainly love to do that. But those are things that you can do to help you understand things. These organizations have events all of the time. Why not go to one of their events and listen to what it is that they do and engage in the people who attend those events? The league works with many different organizations. Nalayo, the Familia Vota, excuse me, Southwest Voter Registration. We have had speakers from Malta at state events. So we try to reach out to those communities. We try and get their input on things that we work on. And as an individual, you can do the same thing. You can join any one of these organizations and they'd be happy to have you. But just by yourself, you can follow what the city council is doing. It's online. So watch it. See what they're doing. And then get involved. Figure out what's important to you and get involved in that. Children's issues in this city are important to me. And I have been involved with that for 20 years. Voting is important to me. And I have been involved with that for 15 years. So figure out how can you make a difference? What is it that you care about? And then join an organization that works on that issue. What I wanted to say was, you know, once we put these folks in office, then we have to hold them accountable. We have to call them out when they don't do what they say they're going to do. And when they come up with ideas about cutting services that are important to you, then you need to speak up also, you know, send emails, make phone calls, write letters, and organize, organize, organize, organize. We have to be organized in the various groups that are doing the kind of work that we care about. At the base initiative, we never would have been able to move our police department to create a whole victim services unit that they now call the special victims unit that's staffed with 30 plus people to serve our community if the peace initiative hadn't gotten mobilized and gotten involved and went to visit city council members and engage city council members to vote the right way because we educated them and informed them about the needs and what was going on out in our community. That's how we were able to do that. We now have over 3,000 volunteers that work with the SAPD helping them respond to calls for domestic violence. There's no way we would have done that if we hadn't been organized and been involved in educating people, putting them through training programs, informing them. This legislative session that's coming up, you know, it's going to have serious implications for funding for family violence programming in our state. So next Tuesday at noon, the peace initiative has invited the public policy director from the Texas Council on Family Violence to come to San Antonio and educate us about how people in this city can get involved in addressing issues of family violence at the legislative level starting in January. So those are the kinds of things that we've definitely got to be involved in and be a part of and have a voice in every way we can possibly think of. Very quickly. I'm a so-called musician for one of the churches here in town. I use that word loosely. But we did a song that's a popular song. It's not a Christian song. I don't know all the lyrics to it, but it says, wake up everybody. And you've heard that. I wish you would just understand the words to that. And we're trying to get people to understand, wake up everybody. You need to be awake. First of all, there are a lot of folk in here, seniors like me, you know, no hair, gray hair, whatever the case may be, but you still have a mind that is active. Get involved. You don't have to spend... I spend a lot of days down to the NAACP office, but you don't have to be there every day. A day or a couple of hours a week, you could do quite a bit of work to help all organizations that have the same agenda that are trying to make this a better country, a better city. So I would urge all of you, get involved. Wake up everybody, get involved. Go ahead. I was going to say that when we talk about income inequality, there's a lot of factors, obviously, but one thing that I think it always comes back to is the quality of our schools. We have to keep fighting high quality neighborhood public schools, regardless of whether you live in 7-8-2-0-9 or 7-8-2-0-1. And I think this is really important, especially when we're talking about civic engagement and voting. When you talk, I think a lot of people say, well, why aren't Latinos, for example, voting at higher percentages? When you actually control, though, when you consider the voting levels and you equalize education levels of the Anglo population and the Latino population, voting turnout is actually very, very similar. What does that tell you? The higher, the more education you have, the likely you are to be engaged. That's what the numbers tell us. And I think we feel that intuitively when there's more ignorance, you know, people are less likely to feel dejected, to feel like people don't care about their community. And so that's something that we have to continue to engage in, those kinds of structural barriers. And in terms of voting, there are a lot of structural barriers that I know Maldives fights against in terms of redistricting. Even looking at our election days, why do we have so many election days? I think that there were fewer election days if the presidential election was on the same day as some of our more local elections. You would see higher turnout. So asking those types of questions, what are those structural barriers that we can address? I promise I didn't tell her the same thing. Of course I agree. Another great question was just put in, and we talk a lot about engagement and being active in your community as starting with awareness, which ultimately begs the question, are we educating our community on what it is to be engaged, what it is to be an active citizen, in light of the fact that we are seventh in population and 73rd in literacy. We have all kinds of institutional and infrastructural problems in creating that pipeline of active citizenship. What can we do about that? Looking forward. One of my biggest worries all the time is getting my community fully engaged in all the processes. If you can tell me what I can do and give me a magic wand or something to wave and that will happen, I will accept it. All vigor. It's very difficult to get some people. I guess one of the problems is people are accustomed, or they have been beaten down, I should say, maybe in a sense. So much they just don't believe there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And we have to do a better job about getting them to understand their lives matter, their welfare matters. We try to look at the welfare, the quality of life of every person in the community. And until we do that, it's going to be a slow process, I guess you should say. But I would hope, and I'm trying to do this in our organization, I'm sure that we engage with the people even more so than we have in the past. In fact, we're starting our new tenure in the first of January. And one of the things that's on the agenda is we've got to be very engaged, politically engaged in all aspects of government, at the city level, at the county level, at the state level, and at the national level. That's my mantra for 2017. And I hope we can fulfill that goal. Well, the league has had a position on schools and education for many years, particularly around school finance. And we all know that that's always an issue in Texas. It always goes to a court. When we talk about literacy, I'm just going to tell you a personal story several years ago. I was a mentor for a young girl at Gates Elementary. And she was a sweet, outgoing young girl. And we would read. But when she went home, first of all, her mother was 14 years older than she was. So that leads to the problem of contraception, sex education, all of which take a back seat in this state. Second of all, most of the time she was staying with her grandmother or her aunt. And she was sleeping behind a screen in the living room. And there were various other cousins and visitors to the household. So who in her house was going to sit down with this child and work with her on her reading to help her practice? I'm venturing to guess that most of the people in that house were not great readers. We've had programs in San Antonio for years, literacy programs. But if we don't work on some of these other problems, which again goes back to wage inequality and support systems for low income people, there's a real danger of thinking that everybody is just like us. And you hear that a lot, well, I work and I did this and I put my kids through school. I wasn't laboring under some of the same problems that these people are. So I think I'm getting kind of off track here, but education certainly is important. But you have to also work on the support systems so that the education is reinforced in the home. Take your children with you when you go and vote so that that becomes something that they think is the thing to do. I know there are some children here tonight. I'm very happy to see that because the sooner they start learning about civic engagement, the more it's going to become a habit with them. So those are the things that we need to think about when we think about education and literacy, that there are other factors also involved in it. Certainly more money in Texas would help. And these textbook issues that we go through, I mean, we need to have professional educators look at these textbooks, not people with political agendas. One of the best people who have been the best folks people in the community for Equality Texas are not activists or politicians. And I think this panel tonight is rightfully named Community Conversation because I think Councilman Nuremberg and other people that are Council members or people that are elected to office would hope that you would want to get involved in the community and get engaged with an organization or talk to somebody who doesn't understand an issue and who might disagree with you without having to hold the label or the title of politician or activist. And one of the things that I think Equality Texas is an organization, the people that work for Equality Texas, the membership and the leadership has taught me, has challenged me as an individual is to sit down and have a conversation and get to know somebody who might not agree with me because I don't believe that LGBT issues are partisan either. And I know Selina talked a little bit about this with Maldiv, is at the end of the day if you talk to people about ending discrimination, protecting youth, ending violence, extending fairness and equality, getting to know people where they are, how they plug into this issue and don't come at them thinking that they understand everything about the issue, you can get really far with someone who at the very beginning of the conversation you did not think cared about the issue at all. I would say looking at the room I think I see a lot of parents, perhaps more parents than students here. Education is so much more than what's learned in the classroom and it's so much more than a lesson in a book. It's the encouragement and the words that you speak to the young people that you know. I'm sure you've said it a million times to your children, to the young people, your kids' friends that you can do anything. You can do anything you want to do. The world is in your palm. Tell the kid they can change anything. Tell the kid that they can change things. We also have to keep our kids safe. The children in Bear County have serious problems in terms of safety and it starts within the family and I'm going to say something that might make some of you upset or uncomfortable but we also have to stop hitting our children because that is out of control and that does not send a proper message to our children about how to change their behavior. If what we do to our children in our homes was allowed at school, can you imagine what kind of a state we would be in? They're not allowed to be hit at school for a reason because hitting is not conducive to learning and so we really need to, as a community, start thinking about who we are as a community in terms of our children's health and well-being and safety and their capacity for learning is most available to us when they feel safe, when they feel loved, when they know who they can trust, when they know who they can talk to honestly and openly and when they're not being victimized. As you were talking, Phyllis, you said that that little girl's mom had her when she was 14. Well, that mom probably was victimized, was victimized if she had a baby at 14. That was a sexual assault but we don't want to talk about those things, we don't want to hear about those things, we don't want to bring up those things because they make all of us uncomfortable and the reality is that our children in Bear County live in danger every day and we have to be a part of creating an environment where all children are safe, all children have access to equal education and opportunities to learn and all children are surrounded by people that love them and nurture them and that the kids can trust. So that's another big challenge our community has because the numbers for child abuse in Bear County are horrific and that's the kind of work that we do to address in the field of family violence. So the question was justifiably raised when we were organizing this panel, where's the alternative perspective? You guys are agreeing with a lot of the same concepts but I challenged that in the sense that this is a conversation about our community, this is a conversation about inclusiveness. There's really not an opposing viewpoint to those principles but I'm reminded of a quote from Martin Luther King that said, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. He also said that nothing in this world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. My favorite is our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. So again, a compliment to you all for being part of a difficult dialogue and for our panelists here being front and center on that dialogue. My question now is how do we get people who are comfortable in silence or comfortable in ignorance or comfortable in not turning on the ailments of our community and get them into the tent to care enough to be part of an inclusive dialogue? This requires everybody to start associating with one another. Sunday morning is the most segregated time in our history, in our churches. When have you invited someone to your church that doesn't look like you? If you want to have a dialogue, visit other churches, visit the mosque, visit the synagogues, visit the black churches, visit the white churches, but we are comfortable where we are. And until we get out of that comfort, we're going to continue to have the problems we have. I think starting at home, right, starting within our own families, within our own communities, that's always the hardest conversation I think, because we don't want to have those hard conversations because we're so invested in what the answer is going to be because they're people we love. But I also think that when you're talking about people that you love, you're not hearing it from, oh, I'm watching MSNBC or Fox News. I'm listening to my cousin. I'm listening to my brother. And so I think starting in the home, both in terms of the family, but also in our own communities, right, including ourselves, for example, within the Latino community, what are we doing to fight, you know, religious intolerance against the Muslim community? What are we doing to make sure that when there's anti-LGBT comments made that we say something and we do something? So starting at home, I think, is a big deal. And also looking for, you know, unlikely heroes, right, I was just here on Sunday watching the movie Loving. Has anybody seen it here? Yeah, so there, when I saw the preview, I thought right away, oh, okay, Loving, I put on the law school, it had Loving vs. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that, you know, made it illegal to ban interracial marriage. And I thought, okay, Loving vs. Virginia in 1967, thinking of the civil rights implications. And I think a lot of times, you know, and what I expected in that movie, a lot of times the movies that talk about some of those landmark events, they feature the civil rights attorneys or they feature, you know, the Sager-like figures and they feature, you know, the Martin Luther King's and the work that, you know, each of those groups does is significant, but what was so beautiful about that movie, particularly, was the humility that was shown with the couple. They were just living their lives. A black woman and a white man, they were just in love. And, you know, they weren't trying to make a statement. They just loved each other. And I think looking at people, you know, next to us that don't necessarily hold the titles, those folks also, you know, have a lot to say and have a lot to contribute and, you know, often are our community's biggest heroes and we have to see them as such. There's currently a campaign out there and I believe it was started at Texas Public Radio, but I may be wrong on that, but it's called Deer to Listen. And you go to deertolisten.org and get involved that way. But as far as engaging people who are comfortable where they are, talk to them. Ask them questions. Get them involved that way because once you create a dialogue, then you learn something and they learn something. And then you get them involved. It's always going to start in your home with your friends and your relatives and your neighbors. My neighbors, most of my neighbors disagree with me both socially and politically and that's okay. They're still my neighbors. I still like them. We have conversations. I don't know that we change each other's minds at all, but it doesn't escalate. It doesn't get violent. And at some point, maybe after the fact, you think about the other person's point of view and maybe you can take some piece of it. So when you're talking to somebody and it seems to be like they're talking to a stone, maybe later they hear one part of what you said. But it's real easy to be complacent and then all of a sudden everybody's angry and everybody's afraid because we didn't have the conversation all along. Yeah, I would add another, I'm bad at quotes, but I'm continuing in the theme of your quotes and I'm not a religious leader nor am I particularly religious, but I think it's in the New Testament where Jesus says, you know, I'm here to care brother from brother, stepmother from stepdaughter, father from son. And I think it's a similar quote and it's along the same lines of what you were saying, Councilman Nuremberg, is that you have to stick to your principles and you have to have the difficult conversations. You don't just nod and smile when somebody that you love says something that's vile and hateful. You have to speak out. You are called upon to speak out. And that is an important conversation. Reconciliation is not an event or an act or a moment. It is a process. In South Africa they had truth and reconciliation. They did not just decide after apartheid, after decades of violence and separation that we're just all going to get along now. They had to go through a painful process where names were named, stories were told and truths, uncomfortable truths were exposed. It is a process. Reconciliation is not something you just decide to do out of the goodness of your heart or because it's that date. What's that? So, more specifically now, we all know we're in a different world than we were four years ago, ten years ago, certainly twenty years ago. What do you consider to be the most pressing need in the San Antonio community and how has the new context that we live in changed the way you intend to go about it? I'll be quick. I think it's important for San Antonio to be self-aware that this is a very unique place in this country, that we don't have to look to New York or Miami or Los Angeles or Seattle or Chicago or leave for an example. This is the New America. San Antonio represents what the United States will look like in twenty and thirty and forty years. I'm blue in the face when I go talking to people saying, I'm not here with the answers. I've learned since I've come here that the answers are right here around us. So, be self-aware San Antonio. This is not just some city in flyover country. We are leading the way in good and in bad. In good and in bad. But be self-aware of that. And that this is an opportunity for us to release that atone and, you know, blaze a trail and speak truth to power. And, you know, because everybody's looking at San Antonio in terms of how we handle our stuff. And, you know, this is our opportunity to shine or to wallow. I mean, it's up to us. We have to make that choice and make that decision. But, you know, we really have to start in every way possible. For me, my work is with families. My work is with survivors. My work is with perpetrators of violence that, you know, exhibit their violent behavior within the context of the family. So, we've been doing this work. I've been doing this work since 1979. And I'm going to keep doing it. Even though sometimes I feel like I take 10 steps, you know, one step forward and 10 steps backward. It always feels like that. But at the same time, I recognize and know that by now, thousands of survivors, people that have gotten out of those situations, remade their lives. Men who now are involved in working with other men, helping them change youth that are taking on this issue, even though they're 12, 13, 14, 15 years old. And that emboldens me. And that inspires me. And that keeps me going and fuels my energy to continue in this work, to address the needs of families. And, you know, today is Giving Tuesday. If you care about this work, but you don't want to do it, send us some money. We'll keep at it. Okay? Statement, that was pretty well said. Well, I really appreciate you all and your attention. We have reached the end for me to ask you now. And thank you for all those who submitted questions. We have a lot still to get to. And our panelists will stick around for some private conversations if they have time, as will I. So let me ask one final question, which is what is a, and you can wrap it up with any closing statements you want, but what is a specific example of something that has occurred here in the San Antonio community that gives you hope that this is not a dead-end conversation, that in fact we are going to reach and go through a threshold despite all the rhetoric and despite the divisiveness that we've seen in the country over the last year to get to the other side of new understanding and inclusiveness within our city. So some of the first one at the head of the table, I guess I'll go first. First of all, there's always, our organization has a very good relationship with our law enforcement people. And I think that has really helped to quell, quell some of the maybe could be violence in this city We have quarterly meetings with the police chief and his senior staff, and we discuss issues that would benefit both organizations, years and hours. I think we continue that in that vein. We will see San Antonio become the model city. I like to say, first of all, I'm a fourth generation San Antonio. My great-grandmother was born in 1865 here. So I'm going to tell you, basically, I'm getting old. But, you know, so I've lived here all my life. I refuse to go through the upward mobility process when I was working because I said, I should be able to reach my goals right here if I work hard and apply myself. And I did, and I did reach the level that I was, past the level that I was shooting for. But I love San Antonio because I think it's a place that will shine, will show the rest of the world what we as a community are all about. We don't have a lot of the processes of the, what is it, the events, you know, the bad events that we see in other cities. So I'm hopeful, and I always say I'm hopeful, that San Antonio will be the shining light for the rest of the world. Let me just give a plug. The San Antonio branch is working on bringing the National Convention of the Association of Colored People to San Antonio in 2018. The organization, the branch, will be celebrating its 100th anniversary at that time, and so we thought it would be good to bring a lot of black folk here in San Antonio to let them see just what San Antonio is about. A city, or a jewel here in Texas, in the United States. And I would like to keep it that way. Thank you so much. Well, I continue to have hope in the field of family violence, and I see it on a regular basis with people that struggle and struggle deeply. You know, we talk about relationships with the police department. You know, I've had wonderful experiences with getting help from SAPD, but I know hundreds of people that have been mistreated by SAPD. And we really have to acknowledge that and also remember that they work for us. We pay their salaries, and they are accountable to us. And so we have to continue doing that work in terms of making sure that this is a safe community for everyone, not just certain sides of town. And we have to speak truth to power when it comes to that kind of abuses of power that happen, you know, on a regular basis, unfortunately, in our community. And, you know, this thing that happened with Detective Marconi was horrible. You know, but we have to be real in terms of, you know, how we deal with an entity that has 67% of our city budget along with fire. And so, you know, again, they work for us and we have to hold them accountable and we have to keep expecting them to do well by our citizens on a regular basis. And so I'll keep talking to them. I'll take every opportunity I can to go and teach in that academy as well as in the Bear County Sheriffs Academy, which is what we've been doing as well. But we've got to stay on our toes about that and not be quiet about that because that's a lot of power that is being wielded and exerted in our community and not everybody gets treated well. One thing that is like a finger on a blackboard to me is we keep hearing San Antonio is a minority majority city. San Antonio is a Hispanic majority city. We need to just embrace that. That's who we are. That's what makes us a wonderful city. That's what makes us the jewel in Bear County, in the state of Texas, in the United States of America. We have a diverse culture and long history. And we need to be proud of that. But we also need to understand that it's us who can make the difference. We have, I think right now, a really good city council, but somebody had said, we need to throw all the bums out. Well, our representatives are like our doctors. Nobody likes them as a body, but they all like their own. And that's why we continue to have representatives who have served for 40 years because people don't take the time to educate themselves on the issues in their community and the candidates that are running. You have to figure out what's important to you, what issues, what policy is important to you, and then you have to educate yourself on which candidate most represents what you believe. Probably nobody's going to believe the same way you do 100%, but if you start going through it, you will find candidates who most agree with what you believe. But it starts with you determining what you believe. We are a great city. I hope one more time that you will all go out and vote in the city elections in May. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Ryan, for having me. Something I think is really important to remember is the election might be something that brought us here tonight, but San Antonio has experienced lots of divisive issues for many years, 34 years, that we have fought for water. We have fought to end discrimination. The list is really long, but there have been some really divisive issues that we've stood in lines with satin chairs for hours so that our voices could be heard. I think what's so great about San Antonio, I got involved with social justice work as a teenager, not because I thought it was the right thing to do, I just thought it was everybody was doing, but what I think is really great from all of these really divisive issues that I felt like at the time just ripped our community apart was that at every turn of those divisive battles, I can't think of one time where I didn't see people who were on opposite sides taking the time to talk to each other and bringing one more person over that understood their issue better. And I think, I don't know what it's like in other cities, where I'm a native San Antonio as well, but I really love that about the city that in some ways, that we are almost polite to a fault than San Antonio, right? We're much different than the East Coast or the West Coast, and I really love that about San Antonio, is that we are willing to have those community conversations with each other, even about the difficult issues, but we have to keep going. We're not done, and there's still many more to have, and I hope people would leave wanting to get engaged with people on those things they don't agree about. I just want to say thank you again for having this important forum and for inviting us all to speak. We really appreciate having the opportunity to be creating this space. So thank you very much, Councilman. Appreciate it. A lot gives me hope and individual successes and the passions of people who I've seen who, despite their own vulnerability, have chosen to fight for others. Kevin Merida is a name I'd like you to remember. Kevin left his home in Guatemala when he was 17, wasn't even able to say goodbye to his mother because some friends in the neighborhood told him that the local gang was coming and his name was next. He took off without a goodbye. He had to travel through Mexico. He was mugged. He was shaken down. He was abused. He had to band together with other kids and jump on top of a train just to be able to make the journey a cargo train, not a passenger train. Kevin was detained at our border. He went through several harsh detention centers before he got to San Antonio and got paired up with a legal advocate who finally got to hear his story and got to learn about why he had to leave. And as a result of that encounter, he was able to get into foster care and he was able to pursue his legal case. He finished high school at Roosevelt High School on the honor roll with perfect scores in all of his English. He arrived here with not one word of English. At 17, by 19, he had graduated high school in the honor roll with perfect English. He's now finishing his second year in the Marines and he's following history. That gives me hope. What also gives me hope is the fact that, and it's a despair to think that here in our backyard we have these 3,400 beds for mothers and babies to be detained for profit, for our security. That's in our backyard. And our organization is one of the few in the nation that's really fighting very strong to stop that policy. And I'm very proud of my staff who does that. The staff who works in my family detention team, over half of them are dreamers who hold DACA themselves. They go to work every day now. Not knowing, fearing, almost anticipating their imminent removal of their status. Them being left exposed and vulnerable to deportation, separation from their families, loss of everything that they work for and that you and I have invested in over their lives. Yet they come to work every day to fight for somebody who's even more vulnerable than them, who's even a worse situation than them. That kind of grit, that kind of willingness. When we fight for someone more vulnerable than us we protect ourselves. That's how community starts. That's how community stays strong and that's how communities survive. And I'm very hopeful to see that happening here in San Antonio. One specific incident that gives me hope was the day after the election. When my husband came home from work we talked about how a lot of the teachers were in shock. They didn't know how to talk to their students. But one thing he said was that the students, they demanded, they wanted to talk about what happened. They demanded to talk about what happened. The teachers were, you know, some of them were uncomfortable. But they demanded they wanted to be empowered. They wanted to have those intergenerational conversations that I think we all have to have more of. And so that really gives me hope and I think I mentioned earlier and I just wanted to echo what Jonathan said about students, young people that have DACA and I think of the organization United We Dream. These are folks that we work with as our interns, as our friends, and again they don't know literally what's going to happen to them on January 21st if things are going to drastically change. And yet they are the ones that are ensuring that we're inclusive of the queer community, of the black community, of the Muslim community and working together. And so I think we again have so much to learn from them and must continue to empower them as youth and encourage that intergenerational conversation. I would just like to say one final thing that I've noticed lately that when I'm looking at some of my Facebook posts, instead of liking stuff, I'm putting up a lot of angry faces and I never used to do that before. And I have to remind myself that if I'm angry or I feel enraged about something, that it's underneath all of that anger and all of that rage is hurt. And I would like to invite us to be very aware of whatever that is that hurts us underneath all of that anger and to address it and to do whatever we have to do to address it because our communities are also in dire need of healing. And don't let that go. Don't minimize it. Don't put it down. Don't put it aside. Look at it. Feel it. Go through it. Let it go through your body and do something about it because that festers and that's not good for you and that's not good for our community. Thank you. Great closing statement. So among all the other monikers that they throw around for San Antonio, the one that I remember most vividly is America's 21st century city. You all remember we used to be called that. I think we've had a lot to do with demographics but I like to think that because of our diversity, because of the history and heritage that we have in San Antonio, we have a remarkable opportunity to show the rest of the country how we deal with issues like this. So I want to thank you again. Our panelists, please give them a round of applause. Thank you to you all for engaging in this discussion and again the intent here is not to find places where we can vent about the things that frustrate us but to get these conversations out in the open so we can move forward together. Thank you all very much. I look forward to seeing you next month.