 And I'm the CEO at Agewell. I'd like to welcome you to our show, Aging Matters. I'd also like to thank our sponsor, MVP Healthcare, for making our show possible each month. As you may know, Agewell is the largest area agency on aging in the state of Vermont, and we serve anyone who is over the age of 60 or under the age of 60 with a disability on long-term care Medicaid. Our goal is to make sure that we provide wraparound services to anyone who may need them so that they can remain healthy and independent and living at home or the setting of their choice. Each month on Aging Matters, we like to explore new and interesting topics that will help to guide us to all age well. Today, I'm really excited to introduce a special guest. Today, we have Susanna Davis, who is joining us. She serves as the State of Vermont's Executive Director of Racial Equity. Governor Phil Scott appointed Susanna in 2019, and that's just about four years ago now. Wow. And we are delighted to be exploring the topic today of advancing equity and racial justice in Vermont. So welcome, Susanna. It's so nice to see you, and thank you for being here. Great to be here. Thank you for having me. Awesome. So, Susanna, as we dive into our topic, before we get into a number of questions, I wonder if you can share with our viewers a little bit about your background, your experience, and more about the role that you play. Sure. So the role of Executive Director of Racial Equity was created through an Act of Legislation. In 2018, Act number nine created the position alongside a five-member advisory panel called the Racial Equity Advisory Panel. These five people serve in an advisory capacity to the Executive Director of Racial Equity, and they have each appointee comes from a different source. So one is from the governor, one is from the Human Rights Commission, one from the House, one from the Senate, and one from the judiciary. That was done very intentionally to create a whole-of-government approach to having input to inform the work of the director. That was back in 2018. I was brought on in 2019. And since then, our office has grown to be an actual office. We now have a team of six, and our portfolio is still very, very broad. It seems as if, no matter how much we staff up, there's always more to do, but it's a really dedicated and capable and sharp and incredible team. I'm very honored to be part of it. And before being part of this great team, I was in New York. I moved to Vermont from New York very recently, and there I was working in city government after I came out of law school in a bit of a bar exam days and ended up at the city council as their director of Black Latino Asian Caucus, and then after that, at the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene doing work at the intersection of health and housing. Wow. That's incredibly broad, and you're bringing tremendous experience to Vermont, so we're excited to hear more. So thank you for that summary. Susanna, let's dive into our topic now, and I have a few questions. Maybe we can start off. Here's the first one. Can you explain what equity is and the difference between equity and equality, because I'm sure there are differences, and maybe you could also share an example of what those differences are. Sure, absolutely. So equity, I'll start with the definition of what equity is. No, I won't, actually. I'll start with the definition of what equality is, because I find that it's a lot simpler. So equality is treating everybody the same, period, regardless of circumstance, regardless of need, regardless of surrounding factors. Equality is easy because it provides a perspective that is very input-based. It's more about access to opportunity, regardless of whether that access really can actually be utilized effectively by everybody. Equity, on the other hand, is not necessarily treating everybody the same way exactly, but looking at circumstance, looking at need, and making sure that we're taking a more outcomes-based approach. That is to say, not just giving everybody the exact same thing, but really looking at where the need is most critical and focusing there. I'll give you an example, the difference between equity and equality, and this is a very simplistic example, but I think it'll do. We're all on the same team, let's call it Team Human, and everybody, of course, every good team needs a jersey, a uniform, a t-shirt. Imagine we're all on the same team and we all get the same size shirt. We all get a 3XL or we all get a medium. That's equality, everyone getting the same size jersey. Equity is saying, if you need a large, you get a large. If you need an extra small, you get an extra small. Again, it's a very simplistic example, but it's there to demonstrate that when we're talking about the enactment of policy, when we're talking about distribution of resources, when we're talking about creating an environment in a society where everybody can live and can thrive, sometimes that means that not everybody gets exactly the same thing. I once heard a school teacher describe it this way, if you have a cut on your finger and you get a bandage on that finger, but someone else has a cut maybe on the forehead and they get a bandage on the same finger and someone else has a broken foot and they get a bandage on the same finger, that's equality and that's not really going to help everybody be whole. Great examples, very clear, perfect. So Susanna, how would you describe an equitable, welcoming and inclusive community because you were alluding to this as we're thinking about how we apply these principles, what does that look like? So one of the things that we think about, and this is a more intermediate to advanced concept, but one of the things that we really strive for is intercultural adaptation. And I know a lot of these terms to so many of us seem like fluff terms that at this point don't mean much, they sound euphemistic and it's hard to keep up with all the new lingo. But when I talk about intercultural adaptation, what I mean is our ability to shift our behavior and our perspectives around people who are culturally different. And when I say culturally different, it's important to note here that a lot of times people immediately think of race and ethnicity when they think about culture. But culture takes many forms. There's the culture of people in a particular profession, there's disability culture, queer culture, gender-based or age-based culture, right? Think of new slang terms and music. So there are lots of forms of culture, religious groups, national origin, language groups. And so when we think about being able to shift our perspective and our behavior around different cultural groups, what that requires is a sense of adaptation, mutual adaptation. Now a lot of people, when we think about welcoming and inclusive communities, they assume that people who are not members of dominant groups are expected to assimilate fully and thoroughly to dominant group culture. What we're really after is a mutual adaptation where everybody is able to grow and learn from and engage with one another in ways that are not just a one-way assimilation structure. Now this is important, especially when we think about things like intergenerational transitions, transfers of knowledge and wisdom. It's important when we think about moving forward in different professions in the sciences. It's important when we think about immigration or when we think about residential patterns internally, right? How do we behave around other people? How do we behave when we enter a new space? So all of that preface is to say that I would describe welcoming and inclusive and equitable communities as being places where people mutually adapt, where we don't just say you're an outsider coming in and we expect you to leave everything and everything you are behind and adopt all of our traits and mannerisms. It's not welcoming and inclusive. It means meeting people where they are. So if we have residents and visitors who maybe their primary language is not English, are we translating our public-facing materials for them? Are we translating emergency communications? Do we know what the protocol is for something like translation? If we have a welcoming or inclusive community, it means that whether you're a resident of the state or not, you're going to be treated with respect and we don't have this insider-outsider culture where we devalue people who are not from here for however many generations. Welcoming and inclusive communities also mean that we recognize that when we think about community safety, not everybody has the same concept of what it means to be or feel safe. I mentioned earlier that I moved here from New York City and it's amazing how accustomed people can get to seeing armed, uniformed personnel standing in open with serious weaponry. Not everybody feels comforted by that thought, but to a lot of people in the U.S., they see public safety as meaning more law enforcement and more penalty, more punishment. For a lot of people in our communities, it's the exact opposite. And community means re-envisioning our spaces so that people genuinely feel safe and feel like they can thrive. Wow, that's really impressive and I love the concept of adaptability. That's at the center of it, I think. So as we think about all of those concepts, why is equity important in government and specifically in developing policies? So the Office of Racial Equity operates from a set of values and from a vision for Vermont and it's important that we do because by nature, the Office's work is mission-driven. And so we have set a set of values and a vision for ourselves and that vision is threefold. So first, we envision a Vermont where all state employees, vendors, contractors are treated equitably throughout their tenure with the state. Second, we envision a Vermont in which the state is providing equitable service and treatment to members of the public through our provision of services. And third, we envision a Vermont where our government systems are holistic, are updated and are designed so that equity is built into them and they aren't just replicating bad patterns. So I'm going to respond with that same sort of threefold vision, which is the reason that equity is important in government is because first, we want to make sure that people who work for and with and through government are being treated right. It's important because if we are underrepresented in decision-making positions, if we are not being heard on emergent issues, then in the long run everybody suffers. For example, there are just decades of research that demonstrate that organizations that have diverse decision-making teams exceed their financial targets and that they tend to experience better outcomes, better profits, higher morale, and just overall better outcomes. So we know that there are a lot of benefits in general to making sure that teams are inclusive. So that first part, having government be inclusive internally, is going to be reflected in the outcomes that we experience. The second reason that inclusion is important in government is because it allows us to be our full selves. So being our full selves in government means that when you come to an age-well interview, you might hear the clickety-clack of dog paws behind you in an interview and allowing people to enjoy and experience and be distracted by furry friends in interview settings. And have a good smile. It's important. The next reason that equity is important in government is because we're thinking now externally, how are we providing services to the public? Are we doing so in a way where residents and visitors are being served well? And if not, then government has a problem because we're supposed to be by-foreign of the people. And then of course, thinking about systems, the reason that equity is important in systems is because when you create systems in a biased society, your systems tend to be favoring people who are already being favored, right? People in positions of power tend to design policy that serves people in positions of power. And so moving past that isn't just about saying, let's put out a nice press release and put some more melanin in the brochure. It's really about going back and undoing and redoing things so that we're not pattern-matching. Great. Thank you for that. As a designated agency, which age well is among the other five area agencies across the state, we understand and appreciate the importance of inclusive laws, especially as we think back to the Older Americans Act of 1965 and all those reauthorizations that occur every three years, also the American Disabilities Act. So we appreciate the evolution of the work that's going on there. Over the last four years, you've been working across the state with multiple sectors and stakeholders. So what are some of the things that you think are going well and where are some of the gaps? Where do we still have work to do? Obviously, there's always work to do. You were alluding to that earlier. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I really am always inspired by in the disability rights space is the fact that so much advocacy and so much work happens slowly and incrementally. And the problem is, and we've found this also in the racial justice space, you have a lot of people who are advocating for incremental change and some of them are committed to the change and some of them are committed to the incrementality because people don't necessarily want to see reform happen in their lifetimes, either because it's inconvenient to them or because they don't care or because they somehow think of things in a zero-sum mentality, this idea that if you're getting ahead, then I'm necessarily falling behind. It's false. It's a false dichotomy and it's allowed people in this country to be pitted against one another because we think that gains for some aren't always gains for all. Many of the rights and privileges that people in this country enjoy were fought and won on the backs of civil rights leaders and were the result of racial or gender or disability rights advocacy, like the Older Americans Act, like the ADA, etc. Right. So I've completely forgotten the question, Jane. Oh, let me go back and ask it. So as you have been in your travels, you've seen things evolving. Maybe some things are going well and some things not so well. So gaps and maybe the pluses and the minuses. What are you noticing? I'd say one big plus is that people are more comfortable and more forthright having the conversation about equity and inclusion. It's happening a lot more fluidly. People are willing to engage out in the open in a way that they had not been previously. Part of that is because they've been forced to after things like watching another black person in America get murdered on camera by the government, like many people did in the summer of 2020. And yet, and I'll call that, I'll begrudgingly call it a positive that we're talking more about it and it's a tragedy that that's what it took for a lot of people. But then a negative to that is that very many people have lost the thread or have lost interest. For a lot of people it was the news of the day and they were very involved and they joined advocacy spaces and they proclaimed themselves as allies and then they lost interest because perhaps their lives are not on the line in the same way that they are for some of us. And then just like that overnight we lost hundreds of thousands of self-proclaimed allies and that does damage to a movement. The inconsistency can be really damaging. So that's one thing that has not worked well is in the organizing space. Now in the policy space, there are a few things that we can say and this is not just related to 2020 or even recent events, but there are some things that we can say have gone quite well. For example, embedding equity into everything that we do in government is important. And I said government, not state government because it really has to be a multi-jurisdictional approach. So much inequity in this country has happened at the local level. Think schools and segregation in schools, think policing, land use and zoning decisions, minimum lot sizes that exclude certain people, not wanting to upzone. All of these things happen at a very hyper-local level. And so when we talk about equity in government we've got to be including local and federal government in there too. So some things have gone well. Embedding equity into what government does means doing things like equity impact assessments. This is now a new tool that we use at the state level we have for some years now requiring the use of an equity impact assessment to make sure that we're asking ourselves the right questions when proposing a new policy. Another thing that I think has gone well is the recognition that there absolutely are disparities. That those disparities cannot just be explained away by certain factors like saying, well, the number of drivers being pulled over in Vermont is disparate because of people coming from out of state or this myth that we're told about who's contributing to the drug trade in the state. Reams of data have been discovered and surfaced that show that those narratives are not true. And so being able to make decisions that are data-informed and being able to dispel some of the myths that perpetuate this biased thinking has been really important. You alluded to policy and policy development. Can you talk about any state policies that have been rewritten to be more inclusive or equitable? Yes. So at the micro level, and I'll say micro, but for some people this is huge, there has been a years-long and somewhat piecemeal effort to update legislative or statutory language. So for example, person language in statute may be reflected so that it doesn't say he or she. It's a small thing, but it's important for a lot of people. We also have made efforts to update policies in ways that are more reflective of what family structures and other workplaces look like today. For example, one of the first things that we did was update the Equal Employment Opportunity Statement. Now, it was a big move, it was important, and yet the follow-through that's important with that is not just updating a statement so that we put on paper that we have good values. It's not enough to say, in this house we believe it's not enough. It's not enough to actually live that out, and so what does that look like? It means not just saying we're not going to discriminate in recruitment. It means we're actually intentionally hiring more people, people who aren't pattern matching and being and representing what people are accustomed to in Vermont. Now, as time goes on, that becomes trickier because of the use of things like artificial intelligence to screen applicants, for example. That's one way where people think that modernizing might remove human bias, but in reality it's introducing a new bias that looks a lot like the old one. After all, we're using machine learning, but the machines were built by biased humans. Human bias is not fully removed from the process. And so, thinking about how we're updating policies, I've given just a couple of small examples, but really what I want to highlight here is the importance not just of doing policy updates, but taking an approach to policy updates that's not willy-nilly, that's really a concerted effort to say we have a unified vision on equity, and this is how we're going to implement it. Great, thank you. Fantastic. So I'd like to read Vermont Business Magazine. And last year, you were quoted in Vermont Business Magazine as saying, and I'll quote, during the pandemic, equity work has grown massively in demand, leading to a flood of inquiries from government, organizations, and individuals. Many have suddenly become aware of systemic injustice and believe they're ready to confront it. I think you said that earlier as well. There are many more people discussing justice and equity and looking to the state for answers and assistance. End of quote. So let's go into a little bit of conversation about COVID-19 and the impact, especially my interest in health equity, if we can talk a little bit about that, especially among marginalized individuals, including older adults. How did the pandemic affect the work and issues like health equity, for example? Really badly, Jane. Yes. Really badly. I knew you were going to say that. Yeah, and we're still not done seeing the ramifications. No. Regardless of what we believe about the origins or the scale of COVID-19 or anything like that, there are a few things that are true. One of those things is that COVID-19 is a mass-disabling event. Now, ordinarily, most of us will age into disability. And so for a lot of people, they don't see themselves as caring much about disability because many of us don't identify as a person living with a disability. And so for them, it doesn't matter how inaccessible the world is because it doesn't impact them personally. A lot of us eventually age into disability, and suddenly that becomes more relevant to people's lives. But what happened with the pandemic and what is happening with the pandemic is that seemingly overnight, a lot of people, including people who didn't think they would become people living with disabilities, suddenly realized this is an inaccessible world and I'm not equipped to handle it. And the world's not equipped to handle me. So one of the things that we saw was... One of the things that we're currently seeing still is a desperate need for systems to be made more accessible. It means we're going to have to rethink things like insurance billing, what counts as a pre-existing condition. It means we're going to have to do things like look at our infrastructure. Now, infrastructure, when it comes to disability, a lot of times has to do with things like ramps, grab bars. These are some of the things that we worked on, for example, in the health department in New York. Those are the obvious parts of infrastructure that have to do with accessibility. But really dive deeper, right? Maybe it has to do with sensory sensitivity. Maybe we've got to rethink the way that we do basic things like lighting, space layout. So one of the things that we did see was that this had a disproportionate impact on older adults, certainly. But it also had a disproportionate impact on people of color, right? We know that people of color had higher rates of infection and death from COVID-19 than other groups did. And again, we were able to control for other factors to determine that that racial disparity persisted. Another thing that we saw... I'll give another concrete example of how it happened specifically in Vermont. A well-intentioned effort to provide equitable access to the treatments had a technological component where members of the public who were signing up to receive the shot were asked whether they were Black, Indigenous, Latino, or Asian, so that colloquially referred to as BIPOC, so that they could be afforded the opportunity to attend clinics that specifically had been set up for people of color in Vermont. Selecting yes to that question was intended to be a positive assistance to people, but what happened was when they were doing the shots for children, it ended up making it so that if you selected yes to that question, you could not actually advance through the sign-up to have your child signed up. And so we ended up with a problem that was a tech glitch and we're aware of the details of it and the details for purposes of this conversation at this point don't matter, but they absolutely mattered at the time because it meant that that was a problem that was uniquely affecting only children who were identified as being of color in Vermont. Those are some of the ways in which you can take a well-intended program that's designed to create equity, and if it's not meticulously cared for and shepherded and monitored, it could end up actually harming the very people we're intending to help. Wow. It's so broad. There's so many things to think about and I appreciate all your thoughts on how to try and make corrections moving forward. So, Susanna, in our last minutes of our show, I wonder if you can maybe highlight something you're really proud of, success story in terms of the work and where we're headed, where we go next. One that I reach for often is the Economic Stimulus Equity Program. It's already been a couple of years, but I remain very proud of it. It was a program that was designed to provide COVID-19 stimulus payments to people who had been excluded from CARES Act payments, either because of their or someone else's immigration status. At the time, it was huge because we didn't know there would be multiple rounds of stimulus payments to people and we were the first state to do it at the same level and at the same payment amount as what other people in this country had received from the CARES Act funding. It was a state-level fund and at the time, the federal administration was deeply hostile to the immigration question and so the state did it anyway. It was an effort between the executive and legislative branches to make it happen and we did. And again, I know that's reaching back a few years, but it was important for us and it was a way to demonstrate that the federal posture on things like immigration status cannot be what dictates Vermont's relationship with Vermonters, whether they are undocumented Vermonters or otherwise. We're here in this state, we are in this together, we're experiencing this together and we tangibly invested in that ethos. And so I reach for that example because it's important and I want to close with this is that it's about, again, more than the platitudes. It's about more than saying, well, we worked with Susanna's office and we did a community forum or something like that. That's great. Keep doing those and also invest tangibly in what we say is a value for us. That's really how we're going to move the needle because inequity in this country and injustice in this country have been perpetuated through the financial system, through the legal system, through the social system, through pop culture, arts and media. So to undo that we've got to attack it through the financial and legal and pop culture and arts and media and social systems. It can't be, we're either all in or we're fake and moves. Susanna, thank you so much for being part of our show today. Thank you. I really enjoyed talking with you. I've learned so much and I hope we can get together again another time. Oh, we will. Perfect. And to our viewers, I hope you enjoyed our show today and remember if any of you need any assistance ever, you notice family, friends, colleagues, grandparents, parents who may benefit from some help to help them stay healthy and independent, please call Agwell. We have a helpline and the number I'm sure is up on, there it is, it's 1-800-642-5119. We're also on the web, www.agwellvt.org. I thank you all for joining us today and I look forward to next time on Aging Matters when we dive into some other new and interesting topics to help us to all Agwell. Thank you.