 I am here to suggest that we have to act. We are living in a time of unprecedented change and we are underestimating the power of creativity and inspiration in helping us to achieve a more hopeful and equitable future. In fact, if we do not have inspiration and we are not accessing our creativity, we cannot do the work that needs to be done. So I ask you to think about the role of creativity and inspiration in your work. In any healthy system, any healthy neighborhood, any healthy community. My organization, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, believes that culture is what precedes change. We think of culture as the stories, the values, the traditions that make up a community and culture is what enables you to act with conviction, to act compassionately and to act politically. We believe that it is culture that instigates change. In advance of any great societal stride, there has been a cultural movement. Think about it. Our mission to generate culture that moves people. We also believe that too few people have access to culture. Too few people are defining it and without agency, without the ability to define culture and what is moving us forward as a society, you cannot influence your own life. You cannot influence what's happening in your community. Our vision, we believe in inspiration for everyone, inspiration all around. Again, there are few people who can access inspiration, who are not troubled by just what is happening in their most immediate. And those that cannot see the future cannot access it. Those that don't have the ability to be inspired in their day to day will not be able to step into that future that all of us are working for. Think about it. Without dance, there isn't going to be any revolution. It's about a community that can come together and dance, that can mind, body and soul connect to themselves and to one another. And it's this kind of inspiration that we need in all of our social impact work. Creativity for change. We are living in unprecedented times. I would argue that the city of San Francisco is changing more rapidly than any other city in American history. Our diversity is declining, inequity is expanding, fewer and fewer people have access and ability to influence what's happening in their very own city. What happens? What happens is we simplify it. We become binary. We get polarized. When we are polarized, we are either helpless or hopeless. And the news media simplifies. We blame one another. The questions are not smart enough. The questions are not poetic enough. We are not asking the right questions and applying our own creativity in order to think of ourselves not on opposite sides of a line, but in it together. So what are we going to do? How do we get out of being stuck? How do we think about our own agency and our own ability to inspire each other, to go for the deep, poetic, nagging questions, the ones that will inspire breakthrough change? I think all of our arts institutions and all of our artists are an essential solution, art a home for creative citizens of all kinds. At your Babuana Center for the Arts, we do this repeatedly. We think of our institution as a citizen institution. It is our obligation to activate. It is our duty to bring people together across boundary, around the most pressing issues of our time. We do that through a thing that we call the creative ecosystem. These are a series of community think tanks. They are made up of artists, entrepreneurs, activists, professional soccer players. They're made up of all the kinds of people that live in our world today. And they are looking at those deep questions together. They're looking at questions of ecology, questions of labor, questions of ecosystems. We also believe in a culture of invitation. What happens when you create a place that is not transactional, that is much more about relationships? And I invite you to come and participate and tell us what you think about the questions that we are pursuing. And you, in turn, invite somebody else. We multiply. This is the culture of invitation. This is what arts organizations can and should do. I'll tell you a little bit about one question that we've been thinking about a lot. And it is the question of the urban future. Who is going to influence the way our cities work? And what can we do as citizen institutions and activists to change the way cities change? This is a project that we call the Market Street Prototyping Festival. This is an unprecedented collaboration between an arts center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the San Francisco Planning Department. There is no partnership like this that I am aware of anywhere. And this is about the fact that we know that our Market Street, San Francisco's grand thoroughfare, is about to undergo a once-in-a-lifetime redo. Once-in-a-lifetime will a city undertake a redo of a city, of a street of this size. We also know that our Market Street hasn't worked. It's made up of five, six different districts. They're very disconnected from each other. There's a lot of inequity. There's a lot of resentment. There's a lot of challenge. So we take the street and we say, what happens when we change the paradigm for how citizens engage in city planning? No more top-down planning. Let's do it bottoms up. Let's ask everybody, what are your best ideas? We did that. We have 250 fantastic ideas from our first open call. We put 50 of those projects down on the street over three days, 600,000 people engaged with those projects and told us what they thought. These projects were about joy, connection, empathy. They were about how we can come together in our public spaces and how our public spaces are the beginning and if they're not functioning, nothing else is going to function. They are the civic commons of the 21st century. These projects gathered kids. This is the bench go-around. If you're interested in this one, it is currently on central market. You can all go. Obviously, it encourages collaboration in public space. This one, it's really speaking to context. This is about saying there are a lot of kids in this neighborhood and nobody cares. There's nothing about the design of this street that takes these kids into account. So what if we took them into account and we made their street, especially in a neighborhood that doesn't have any parks, made their street a playground? This is the people's table. This was one of my favorites. This is also on central market right now. This was made by the people. It was a gorilla project, and they put it on the street, even though they didn't submit their proposal and we didn't choose it. And this is about collaborating. Just the other day, I wandered by the people's table. There was, I kid you not, a police officer playing a guy who is known to be a drug dealer. They were playing on the street. This is what can happen when we use our creativity and our sense of inspiration. Why can't the street change? And why can't the street be a place for people who are really different from each other? This I would love if you would play this video, if you can. If this video plays, you will all laugh. When have you ever seen so much fun on a street where people are mostly just moving to and from, looking down, not connecting with each other, hanging out on their cell phones? This little boy had so much fun, and we kind of had to ask him to move on so that other people could play. We can definitely watch it again. I highly recommend this. I do watch this at work when I get stressed out. I'm going to try to skip the slide now. So this is Yerba Juana Center for the Arts. This is the call to action. We can't do the social movement work if we do not think about the role of art and creativity. We must be inspired. Imagine a world where everyone is operating on inspiration. Everyone believes that there's a future that is different than the one that they are experiencing today. So I think that arts organizations will be much like a new sort of transit system. They will operate to cultivate movement and mobility. They will fill our streets and our sidewalks and our communities with compassion and inspiration. Empathy will be the norm. Collaboration is the essential tool. And we, the people, will be brazen about the role that art and creativity can play in changing everything. The most important thing is that we will realize we will come at last to comprehend our own strength as creative souls. Thank you.