 Well, we're going to get going. It's 1104 here in Chicago. I'm Deborah Schwartz, Managing Director of Impact Investments for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. And I am thrilled today to be here in conversation with a longtime friend and fantastic grantee, leader of that Green Green, Cheryl Dorsey. Cheryl, would you like to say a little bit about yourself? Hi Deborah, I'm so happy to be with you as always and really appreciate folks sort of jumping into this breakout room. I always actually like to start these sessions now that we've all been in a virtual reality for the last year and a half. I always like to start with a land acknowledgement to recognize the indigenous people of the land where I now said I saw that Margaret was joining us from Maryland. I'm not that far away. I'm here in Washington, DC. It is the land of the Nepoche tanks, which is a beautiful name derived from the word Anakwa-Shatnik, which means a town of traders. And I always say that although an acknowledgement is not enough, it is a really important social justice and decolonial practice that promotes indigenous visibility and just reminds all of us that we're on settled indigenous land. So thank you for giving me that space, Deborah. And thank you for inviting me to join you in conversation as both a friend and a grantee. And I'm really thrilled to be representing Echoing Green today in conversation with you. Would it be helpful to share a little bit more about what Echoing Green is and what we do? Absolutely. That'd be great. And I want to also thank you for the land acknowledgement. And I know that I have colleagues at the MacArthur Foundation who have been doing some incredible work to both honor and understand the Native American indigenous people who occupied our community as well. We're transforming the space inside the lobby of our building, even though we're not physically back in our building right now. And you are reminding me that I need to do more of my own learning and homework to make sure that I can share the proper land acknowledgement, but I will not try to wing it from Chicago. I will instead ask you to tell us about Echoing Green. Oh, thank you. And I'm excited to see the space when I next make it to Chicago. So for those of you who may be unfamiliar with Echoing Green, we're an early stage funder of emerging social entrepreneurs and are one of the key pillar organizations in the field of social innovation. And we really focus on launching tomorrow's global leaders in social innovation by doing three interconnected things. We find a diverse group of these leaders through an annual global search process. We then invest millions in seed and capacity building support each year into these leaders in their emerging social enterprises. And then we really focus on connecting these leaders to Echoing Green and the broader social innovation community through knowledge sharing, a real focus on the wellbeing of the leader and her journey as well as some explicit opportunities around building collective power. And when you look across our community, there now have been about 900 or so of us who have received funding from Echoing Green since the late 80s, early 90s. And specifically when you look at our portfolio over the last decade or so, about 75% of our US based fellows are folks of color, 75% globally over the last decade are proximate leaders and about half of us are women. So real focus on expanding the public square in social impact around who is represented in the leadership ranks. And I always say, and one of the reasons I'm proud to be affiliated with Echoing Green is that we've always tried to interrogate the work of social innovation at the intersection of social justice. And I think it really speaks well, Echoing Green is sort of an odd name and people always ask, well, where did you get this name from? But it actually comes from the name of a William Blake poem. William Blake was an 18th century English poet, painter and printmaker, but he was a real iconoclast. And one of his books, he has many called Jerusalem, the emanation of the giant Albion. There's a seminal quote in that work, Deborah, that has really been the animating spirit of our work over the years. And I'll just share the quote. It is, I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare my business is to create. And I think that's such a beautiful recitation on who Echoing Green is, the sort of transformational leaders, disruptive leaders that we're in the business of identifying and supporting. So hopefully that gives you a good sense of who we are and how we show up in the social innovation ecosystem. It's fantastic, Cheryl. And any panel that includes a quote from Blake is this way up there in my book. It's fantastic and very inspiring. And just reminds me and underscores why we were so pleased to fund Echoing Green a few years back through the impact investments program that I lead with a small grant to do some research, but then through our Equitable Recovery Initiative last year, and this was a special initiative that MacArthur Foundation undertook to address the twin pandemics of racial injustice and the COVID-19 pandemic itself. We issued bonds for the first time, social bonds along with some other foundations. And each of us went about using the bond proceeds in different ways. And for us, it was to make special grants to organizations that for the most part were not existing or current major grantees, but did have the capacity to really do important work on these twin issues. And it was through that process that we were very honored to be able to participate in funding the launch of the Racial Equity Philanthropic Fund at Echoing Green. We'll come to that in a minute and hear more about it from you, Cheryl. And then I should just add as context, the MacArthur Foundation is a private charitable foundation based in Chicago that makes about $300 to $400 million a year in grants and impact investments. And in recent years, we have really deepened and broadened our efforts to advance racial justice across many areas of our work and we're committed to doing so in the years ahead. So with that, let's dive in a little bit deeper, Cheryl, if we can, and maybe to just have you talk a little bit more about this intersection of social innovation and racial justice. Tell us a little bit more about that connection and why and how do you think social innovation is so important to that fight for racial justice? Yeah, thank you for that question. And in many ways, this has sort of been the question I've been interrogating for the duration of my professional career. I mean, I came to Echoing Green, I always like to say that I was a pretty traditional social justice baby, right? So I thought my start professionally working on racial health disparities in inner city Boston almost 30 years ago at the time, black babies were dying at three times the rate of white babies, which is horrific and inequitable enough, but it was happening in the shadow of some of the world's greatest medical facilities. I was in medical school at the time. And just sort of that disconnect that those deep structural inequities were just things that folks like me and my co-founder, Dr. Nancy Oriel just couldn't abide. So we were fortunate to receive funding from Echoing Green back in the early 90s to start a mobile health unit was really sort of in the earliest days of sort of cultural competency, addressing head-on racial health disparities and recognizing that infant mortality was less a medical problem as opposed to a socioeconomic disparity problem. So grateful to Echoing Green for taking a chance on us all those years ago. And it really did invite me into this world of social innovation. And I'll just sort of take a step back. I mean, we sort of talk about the definition of social innovation as either sort of this process of developing and deploying innovative solutions, effective solutions to challenging and often systemic social and environmental issues and support of social progress. We also talk about the work of social innovation as being about the blurring of sectoral boundaries, right? How do you bring together civil society, the state and the market in a way that creates new and shared public value? And I was really intrigued by this disruption narrative, sort of the Joseph Schumpeter notion of creative destruction as well as this alliance, this notion of the blurring of sectoral boundaries because I will say a couple of things. So when you think about many forms of oppression including structural racism, when you get underneath what's actually happening, you see four things over and over. These sorts of structural inequities, especially structural racism, is all about sort of the segregation of both resources and risks. There's also this insidious and terrible creation of inherited group disadvantage of one population and advantage of another population. There's also this process that allows for the differential valuation in human life by race. And last but not least, there's this fundamental limitation of the self-determination of certain groups, groups, folks who look like me. But then when you sort of stand that, those sort of inequities, those structural headwinds, when you stand it up alongside what makes entrepreneurship such a dynamic and propulsive force, what does it do? Find new ways to address tough problems. It creates new and shared public value. It attracts support across sector. It defies constraints. And importantly, identifies opportunities. All of those things that are endemic and inherent in the work of entrepreneurship shouldn't lend themselves quite well to the work of dismantling and disrupting, destroying so many of these entrenched inequities. So that's really what brought me to the table around social innovation and could we use it as another tool in the toolkit standing alongside the critical work of community organizing right space movements, advocacy. And I believe that's sort of the journey certainly that Echoing Green has been on. And the last thing I'll say about it is, in my days wearing my social justice hat, which I think is such a powerful tool and has been such a critical part of the arc of driving social progress. It is also often mostly unfairly labeled, often in terms of an adversarial frame, right? People here, I must lose for you to win. I thought that was an unfair narrative, but it was, but often perception is reality. And what I like about social innovation is through this alliance-based frame, there's this notion that I don't have to lose for you to win. There is a win-win value proposition. Not easy, but it is potentially there to be had. So I think for all of those reasons, Deborah, I kind of hitched my wagon to this work and continue to sort of with our community work our way through the possibilities and opportunities of bringing social innovation front and center as a really important approach to driving racial equity. So powerful, so many insights packed in there, but I love the way you see the sort of intrinsic power of entrepreneurship and then hitching back to that very strong definition of social innovation around taking on trans systems and making lasting change and hooking those two things together. Of course, crossing boundaries is a big deal to everyone in the impact investing community. And so, Cap, I should acknowledge is primarily in impact investing community, at least in its origins, although very full of folks that are dedicated to that same powerful kind of social entrepreneurship that you're describing, but the blurring of boundaries of crossing over between public and private that's kind of in your DNA is also in the DNA, I think, of almost everyone that works to try to bridge capital gaps through their impact investing. So I think those two things coming together often have incredible power as well. And then you have this very asset-based positive frame, the alliance-based frame of win-win, recognizing as you do that it's not an easy path. It's not a panacea, but it's an important point that you're making about not only operating always from a deficit or a negative frame. So lots and lots of really good stuff there. We could spend the rest of the time talking about that. What I wanna shift to now is the racial equity philanthropic fund that you launched, I guess a little more than a year ago now. And as I said, we were very pleased to be able to be an early funder in that effort. Tell us a little bit about the fund, how big it has grown to be, how big you want it to be, what you're doing with the funding, most importantly, and how is it both weaning into the existing work of Echoing Green, but then also building and adding to that? So just share with us whatever you'd like along those lines. Wonderful, and thank you for sort of teeing that up for me to discuss it. I'll embarrass you for a second, Deborah, because you have been such a wonderful colleague and friend over the years and you will have, I will be a ride or die Deborah Schwartz fan for the rest of my days, because it's interesting that almost over a decade ago when Echoing Green, which is really about sort of raising up these transformational leaders who are driving change in their particular movement, when we started talking about this increased phenomenon, our applicant pool and in our fellowship pool of seeing more and more next-gen voices proposing, double bottom line, triple bottom line enterprises, and that's only continued to increase over time. And we recognize that as an organization that started off as a fellowship program, we had to sort of expand our capability to better support these new social enterprises. It was only two people really ever returned our phone call on this. It was you, Ed McArthur and Anthony Buglevine who was at Rockefeller Foundation at the time and you allowed us and gave us the capacity to build out our understanding, our smarts around better supporting these new enterprises. And I think these folks, the examples I'll use are no stranger to SoCAP. And I'm sure they've been, I know they've been part of the community over the years and you know these folks. Well, years ago when we invested in Dinelle Bayard, he was in our first class of our Black Male Achievement Fellowship Program to start his company Block Power, which just doing an incredible job. I mean, sort of the way I think about and describe Block Power is like a smart buildings platform that finances renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies to buildings and underserved market segments. They're doing incredibly well, growing quite rapidly. And then two extraordinarily women, two extraordinary women of color, Shivani Saroya and Bonnie Oliva, who co-founded TALA, which is a leading fintech company in emerging markets that has developed this really interesting smartphone app that can instantly evaluate and understand their customers using only the data that's available on their devices and really can deliver to these micro entrepreneurs, these women, customize financial services in minutes. And these are now folks that are raising, extraordinary amounts of institutional capital to build their businesses. So we really appreciate you investing in that little nugget many years ago before anybody else paid attention to what we were doing at the intersection of leadership development, impact investing, social justice and social innovation. So grateful to you for that. But I'll go back to some of the stats that I shared a couple of minutes ago that when you look at the Echoing Green community, it is much more sort of diverse than traditional social innovation communities, lots of proximate leaders, lots of folks of color, relatively speaking in the innovation and entrepreneurial space, greater gender balance than you might normally see. But we had been having conversations around racial equity and on our own racial equity journey that had been accelerated over the past decade, starting in 2012 when we instituted our Black Male Achievement Fellowship Program in partnership with Open Society Foundations. And essentially after two things happened, sort of watching sort of the disproportionate impact of COVID on communities of color over the past, almost now two years, sort of further ignited after the horrific murder in public on May 25th, 2020 of Mr. Floyd. It was a moment where we all had to sort of reflect and have a moment of reckoning about what we were gonna do in this moment to either raise our hand or shy away. And Echoing Green thought we had to sort of show up and we had to lean in to this moment and you referenced our response was sort of the launch of a pretty significant racial equity philanthropic fund to syndicate capital to do a couple of things. Sort of at, you know, Deborah at the, you know, I guess at the highest grandest level, we very publicly said that we were going to raise this fund to do two thing, to unapologetically begin to reshape the field of social innovation to make sure it was centering racial equity as well as ensuring that sort of this current heightened awareness around racial inequity was actually translated into sustained action and impact. What often happens is you've got these cracks in the universe and then there's the inevitable sort of snapback or backlash where nothing happens in these moments and in these windows of opportunity. It was how could we sort of pivot the organization, really dig in and dig down to try to make sure that this moment was not a moment, it was actually part of a broader movement. So with the support of you and MacArthur, Skoll Foundation, Comcast sort of individual donors, philanthropic, institutional funders, corporate donors said, let's build this syndicated fund to really do three things at scale. One is what we were already doing. We are very good in terms of sourcing proximate talent with their shoulder to the wheel, innovating, disrupting, coming up with innovative new ideas to make their communities better. Let's just scale that work. So we made a public commitment to identify and invest in 500 BIPOC leaders over the next three years. A new capability within that, Deborah, and you know this as well as I do, is like we've got this extraordinary community of black and brown folks who are dazzling who are doing incredible work, but they continue to confront such significant, as you said, capital gaps that we recognize that it was no longer enough simply to identify them and give them sort of a little bit of initial capital and support. We were leaving them to the whims of the pioneer gap into these inhospitable funding ecosystems and we recognize we could no longer just sort of wait for the market to fix it. We had to lean in and provide follow-on funding as well to make sure that they could continue to grow and scale their organizations. We also began to explicitly and also unapologetically talk about our work in broader movement-building terms. You know, there's a sociologist, Malucci, who talks about social movements at their core are really about building collective identity that you grow the strength and the power around movements when more people feel that they are part of that larger thing. And social innovation is increasingly that larger thing. And the recognition that where business leaders, philanthropic leaders, young folks, community folks are recognizing they are part of social innovation that we could do our part by providing additional on-ramps to more young people of color, more next gen voices into the social innovation movement that we were gonna scale that work that we had begun to do on a couple of HBCU campuses around the United States. So that's the last bit. And then the last piece was all about, you know, you hear a lot in the press and in the news about being a good ally around racial equity. It has become in some ways a little too trite and performative. So like what exactly do you mean by being an ally around racial equity? Equine Green for a long time has tried to work with our friends in corporate settings around really deep meaningful skills-based volunteering. For us, that was a direct pathway to interrogate what meaningful allyship could look like in the business sector. So we have also committed to scaling that work that we have done over the past couple of decades. And we think sort of this syndicated fund that brings philanthropic leaders like you and others to the table to go on a learning journey that we're all on together. We have real hope in our own way to do some really smart collective impact work around racial equity and social innovation. So we're a year in, we're feeling good about it, Deborah, but as you know, we just continue to make the road by walking. And it is going to be an incredible road and learning journey. And the vision is really very big, but also feels, it feels just right to me. It feels like it is gold and a big stretch and you're pushing hard, but it's not out of reach. It's terrific. Just remind us please, Cheryl, the fund overall, your fundraising goal is how much? Well, interestingly, when I came to you but I was like, Deborah, could I talk to you for a few minutes? I would love to share what we're thinking. We initially set out to raise $50 million. We feel very fortunate and blessed that we quickly not only met that goal, but exceeded it and recognized that we could actually support more leaders, do more work, as well as bolster our own internal capacity. And so we about five or six months ago raised that ceiling to 75 million. And we're at about 55 million now and we do hope over the next couple of years that we will meet that $75 million target. And I will say that it is a really big deal that we had this level of engagement and resource. I mean, number one, you're looking at a woman of color who is sort of representative of all of the structural inequities that confront folks who look like me doing fundraising in the philanthropic marketplace. The fact that we've had this level of success in an organization led by women of color, I think is telling and I hope hopeful, but also it's an indicator that social innovation is maturing as a field and is really open to this notion of applying what social innovation is good at to the work of racial equity. So I am hopeful, but we still have more work to do. There's a question in the chat that I want us to maybe take up but which is about social enterprises that are not tech. You'd give an example of a couple of tech-based social enterprises that can potentially have the ability to use impact investing capital. But we have lots of social entrepreneurs and I think this is true in the Echoing Green ecosystem community. You have lots of folks that are working in non-tech kinds of strategies. So I wondered if you wanted to speak to that and then I wanna come back to racial disparities on the philanthropic funding front because you have a lot of insight on that too. But let's take up this tech note, no tech and social entrepreneurship and sort of how do you see that when Echoing Green is out looking and prospecting for that next gen leadership and talent, those visionaries, how important is it to you that they be incorporating solutions and strategies that are gonna be investable for regular finance? Is it important that they have a tech aspect or are you looking more broadly? Yeah, I mean, I appreciate Winona's question and again, you probably need to answer this one Deborah because you are the expert on this. I can just speak from sort of the talent side of the ledger. I'm fond of saying that GDP is different than SP. So GDP, which we sort of default to as an indicator of sort of societal progress is sort of a false equivalence because you can be sort of healthy and vibrant economically and still be a failing society when you leave particular populations behind and I think Echoing Green as an investor in social impact talent has always and only optimized around social return on investment. Even though we got some for-profits and hybrids we do not screen for financial return on investment only outside social return on investment. And we recognize that most of the folks that actually come across the transom are not sort of hockey stick high growth potential like the two that I mentioned and I mentioned those just because in the bridge between sort of sort of social impact and sort of institutional capital those are two who have made the leap. But I would say, Winona rightly the vast majority of the folks that we work with are working on deep structural inequity through say like the social determinants of health lens. They're looking at housing, they're looking at educational disparities, they're looking at a prison industrial complex that disproportionately impacts communities of color and they're coming up with an array of different models. And I think, you know, Deborah we've had this conversation and you talk about this far better and in a smarter way than I ever could was about how you've got to do these capital stacks and bring different forms of capital as well as sort of advisory supports to bear to create sort of a capital toolkit that allows these entrepreneurs to sort of survive the pioneer gap and that's sort of the conversation we're having now with our access to capital work. But I know this is certainly your area of expertise you've devoted your life to this. Well, it is indeed a whole big topic and it's not the one. So Carrie can invite us back to have that conversation going forward but I really appreciate your Winona's point and your follow-up Cheryl because I think it is really important as much as we are all excited about the power of impact investing bringing mission and money together. We also have to keep it real. And you know, I began my career working in hardcore social service organizations and job training programs, child welfare, working with kids whose families were in the abuse and neglect division of the courts. There's no impact investing strategy there. There's no money to be made and they might be able to issue bonds for a building but the core of their revenue has to come from grants and donations. And we need to respect and honor the fact that there's a spectrum of capital that ranges from grants to program related investments to conventional investments and a bunch of stuff in between which is all super exciting but it's all important. It's both and and and and it's not one type of enterprise. It's not one type of money. These problems are tough and they take the kind of dogged determination that you and your team and your 900 fellows bring to them. So in the time we have left and I think, I know Carrie was posting before so maybe she'll bail us out and tell us if our end time, I don't know if it's 1140 Chicago or 1145 or if anybody else who's lurking out there knows can tell us what time we end. But I thought, Cheryl, it would be great to just touch on this incredible research that you and Echoing Green, I guess co-conducted or commissioned with Bridgestand, the consulting firm last year, last spring, and it showed some things that maybe, I don't think it was a firm grasp of the obvious. I don't think everybody knew this but when you read it and then you paused and you thought about it, the level disparity is between people of color led nonprofits and white led nonprofits, the disparity is immense. It's like what we see in the venture capital world and lots of other parts, unfortunately of our society. So tell us a little bit about how you got decided to do that research, what you think were sort of the biggest takeaways and what's next. Yeah, thank you for sharing that and maybe back up and share like why we even started talking about this, how we came to this and how it's part of a larger conversation now. So I think Echoing Green has been around 30 plus years. We sort of do this annual appeal for early stage leaders to come to us. So we've got a really remarkable data set and alongside that, we have created, I do think a generous and respectful and inclusive search and selection process but it is rigorous and in some ways, it's just really tough to run the gauntlet of the Echoing Green selection process and ultimately less than about one or 2% of those who apply actually are accepted in the Echoing Green community. So people in the know know, like if you're an Echoing Green fellow, we're talking about some best in class talent in the sector and these are folks who are just really pretty extraordinary and have great potential and promise. So despite that fact and even the folks who are making it to the semifinalists rounds all extraordinary, we're just a small outfit. We can't even fund all of those who make it to the semifinalists around the finalists of our program. And what we were showing every year through our data, Deborah, was this unmovable, unshakable $20 million funding gap between our black applicants and our white applicants. And we're like, this thing was just entrenched. And we essentially went to Bridgeban and say, look, year after year and year and year out, you've got these amazing folks and, you know, we presume if you hold education levels, we're in the world, they were content, you're just seeing racial disparities in funding. Could you help us flesh that out? And Bridgeban said, okay, let's put some of our analytical tools of the trade to work and let's see if we can really unearth this. And that led to the publication in, I think it was at May of 2020 in the Stanford social innovation review of this article called Overcoming the Racial Bias in Philanthropic Funding. And I think it touched a nerve, number one, because people recognize that if you're in the Echoing Green community, you are a best in class leader of promise and should not be experiencing these disparities. And it got all of our emotions, nerves and minds were numb and traumatized after the COVID onslaught as well as the murder of Mr. Floyd and a summer of racial reckoning. So I just think the findings were, just people were open to receiving them and also because the findings were so stark. So what did we find? When you look at the black led organizations in our portfolio and compare them to the white organizations in our portfolio, the black led organizations were raising 24% less than their white led counterparts. But then when you looked at the disparities in unrestricted net assets, the assets of the black led organizations were 76% smaller than the white led organizations. So that hurt and deeply hurt because in many ways, you can look at sort of the unrestricted net assets as sort of that unrestricted capital to dream, to grow. And it's a proxy for trust, right? And a belief in that leader. And that 76% gap was so horrifying. But then you added on top of that, Deborah, when you just sort of windowed down the sample set to looking at black leaders who were black male achievement fellows, those who were working on improving the life outcomes of men and boys of color in this country, compared them to the white black male achievement fellows. Black folks in that fellowship were raising 45% less revenue but the unrestricted net assets were 91% less. So I mean, it was so horrifying, yet like the numbers don't lie, right? This is the importance of disaggregating, not only collecting the data, but disaggregating it by race. It was just so seismic and it really helped to change the conversation. And again, none of this is new. I mean, we all, you know, we invested in digital and divided a number of years ago, Catherine Finney Shop and she's the force on Project Diane that did that research on the miniscule, the crumbs of venture capital raised by black women and Latinx women compared to others. These disparities persist in all sorts of capital pools. I mean, we just happened in terms of our timing and the disparity just to sort of showcase what we all knew. And so the question becomes, you know, like, now that we know and now that it's front and center, what do we all do about it? What is our collective responsibility? So are you gonna keep tracking these numbers to see if there's progress? Yeah, yeah, we're gonna keep tracking for sure. And we have to, cause I think that's, you know, it's like, how do we continue to make this again, not just a moment, but part of a broader change. And I do think sort of the, what we know is that, you know, it takes a long time to get to population level changes, right? That's, this is sort of the work of decades of generations. But sort of before you see population level changes, there are a whole host of behavioral changes that we can be at work at and are at work at right now. And it's, you know, all the stuff that you essentially have to do to shift power, right? Essentially Deborah, this conversation about how are we gonna shift power as we sort of tried to survive and build a multiracial democracy. I'm speaking about our country, the United States in particular, all the stuff that's gonna need to happen if we have a chance in this moment of democratic backsliding and unrest. So we gotta start shifting funding flows in significant ways. We've gotta do serious policy change work to set the conditions that these shifts can continue to happen. We've gotta think in new ways about sort of collective practice and collaborations that really sort of dial up to something larger. And there've gotta be some fundamental improvements in professional practices, especially in the philanthropic space, which is the space that I know best. Changes in how you source your deals. How do you think about grant making, onerous grant making practices that you could dispense with and bring sort of more of a shared framework around decision making. You gotta shift who's sitting in those seats. All that work that we can begin to do now has got to be a priority for all of us. So it's a big and challenging list, but it's really important for you to call out all those different dimensions in different ways. And I think we, thanks to my colleague, Josh Mitz and our friend, Bob Caruso, I know that we have three more minutes before we have another. So I first just wanna thank you, Cheryl, because I just have always found your leadership and your energy and the thoughtfulness that you bring to your work just so incredibly inspiring and energizing. It always makes me ready to run out the door and do more. And I hope that everybody who's out there in Zoom world or Hopin world or whatever video world we're in, I hope that everyone can feel that energy and passion and drive, but also just profound thoughtfulness come through. Kerry is giving us a hall pass to go to the top of the hour, but I think people probably got themselves budgeted. So we'll do the following. I've got a last question for you. I saw another question from Winona around DE and I hiring in the philanthropic sector. I would encourage folks, that we're getting permission to keep going. I don't know, Cheryl, if you can keep going for a few extra minutes. If you wanna put questions into the chat, we can use the remaining time that Kerry, the free time Kerry is giving us for that. But Cheryl, as you think about this, we have about a hundred people on the call at the peak today. You've laid out some big picture ambitious ways in which we can think about driving this long-term systems change to, as you say, build a genuine and solid multiracial democracy, which now feels both more urgent and more difficult than ever. You've talked about policy change, shifting funding, collaboration, professional practice. Do you have a sort of top two or three things that would be on your list? Let's say you were meeting with some of the folks that you're working within that on-ramp, through the HBCU partnerships. People would say, just, Cheryl, just give me two, three things that I could be thinking about. Or maybe it's just one thing that I can do that's really actionable now and that's workable for me to do as an individual that will matter. What would your advice be? Yeah, thank you. I know there's so much we all have to do. And again, I think, you know, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And I think there's something about sort of the mind shift that needs to happen for all of us. I think we've gotten, you know, especially the work that I do in sort of mostly sitting in the philanthropic space, it is more of an art than a science, right? We are in the business of innovating and trying to think differently about how to solve problems. And sort of this, the professionalization that in many ways has led to sort of the weaponization of how you talk about risk. Sort of the folks who are doing the work that don't look like the communities who are experiencing these issues and who have solutions because they're proximate. All of that stuff has to change. But if we shift the work that we're all doing to going on a learning journey together, I think that frees us up in a really powerful way than just start learning. And you can start learning by just starting to write some checks. And if you don't know who to write checks to, email me, email Deborah, email a whole bunch of folks on this call. We can tell you right now today, extraordinary folks to invest in who are doing the work, who we're very familiar with and who can support that. And I will say, you know, at a meta level, there's been a lot of work and discussion recently around sort of collective impact, right? Sort of the FSG framework about how organizations are coming together to solve a particular structural issue in a community. That's just one example of collective action strategies that are starting to percolate up. There is collective impact. There are a whole host of other place-based initiatives, networks like Catalyst 2030, a group that Echoing Green is involved in that has brought together 1,000 social innovators from around the world to help accelerate the progress of the SDGs. And increasingly, looking at sort of critical infrastructure within philanthropy, represented by intermediaries like the Echoing Greens of the world, there's something about sort of the pipes, the infrastructure, the arteries, the roadways of our sector that have to be capitalized because when you recognize the chasm between the rooftops and the grassroots, Deborah, it's pretty significant because of just the way that power sort of works across our society. And again, I will forever appreciate you and MacArthur for recognizing sort of the important layer that intermediaries play to be that connective tissue and that can be a really important bridge in beginning to shift power resources in a way that is meaningful to these organizations that are in community every day, all day doing the work. And those shifts need to happen. And I'll just leave you with one stat. And I think I'm sure it applies across the sector. We got about 900 folks in our community, about 400 of us are either folks of color and or doing racial equity work. All of us are under capitalized. If you were simply to upsize the budgets of those groups within our network, they could absorb one and a half billion dollars annually. That's the absorptive capacity. And that is happening all across the sector in black and brown organization, proximate organizations happening across the globe. So the absorptive capacity is there. We gotta start moving this money. So being very intentional about if you don't feel comfortable of how you can move it directly, which I think you can easily do, start to work with connective tissue organizations that can start opening up the roadways, the capital roadways to, as you said, bridging these capital gaps, because we've just got to do it. Because again, I think there's a direct correlation between organizational health capacity and the ability to drive impact. These groups are phenomenal. The leadership out there is phenomenal. We just have to support them. Yeah. Well, there are not a lot of people that frame the funding of intermediaries as a way to shift power to the organizations closer to the ground, because I think a lot of people resist funding intermediaries because they think they're taking power away and creating overhead. And what you're talking about is really that ability to make it workable for the donor to reach much smaller organizations by being able to write a check to an intermediary and then have that broken down and given out and write size and where there's other kinds of capacity and development that's happening along with the money. So I think hearing intermediaries framed that way is pretty groundbreaking just in itself, Cheryl. There's lots of big ideas that you put out there, but that one definitely takes my breath away. We've got some great suggestions in the chat and some links to some Echoing Greens and requests for your email address so that they can follow up on your suggestion of asking you for specific orgs. That's up to you. One question is whether there are any recommendations to support networks, communities and podcasts for black women who are new to philanthropy? So I would, yeah. And again, I would start with Give Black. It's a new organization. Started by a wonderful social entrepreneur, Christina Lewis, the founder of All Star Code. Give Black is trying to build a showcase that really shows the wonderful black founded nonprofits that are out there. I would try that. There are also a number of new storytelling initiatives. The Ford Foundation is a part of, the Skoll Foundation is a part of, what is the name of this? Let me tell you in a second. And then looking at intermediaries like Grant Makers for Girls of Color, I run by Dr. Monique, what's Monique's last name? I wanna say Monique Miller. I may have her last name wrong, but Grant Makers for Girls of Color, an extraordinary group. And Monique is an amazing leader looking at that. And then this new storytelling initiative, which is really focused on storytelling in the global South and for folks of color is called IRIS, International Resource for Impact. And storytelling, and it's backed by the Ford, Skoll, and Compton foundations. Maybe starting there is not a bad thing to try, but start there. Fantastic. And Cheryl, there was a question earlier about DE&I practices and high Iranian side philanthropy. Do you have a perspective you wanna share on just kind of how can organizations, as you pointed out, they need to change who's in what seats? Do you have a view on what works, what doesn't for that kind of transformation? I mean, it's a little, I'm not necessary Deborah, you're probably better at this because I run a nonprofit. So I don't actually am not always privy to what happens inside the doors of these philanthropic outfits, but I would say the misalignment is substantial. I mean, again, we all know this research. So organizations led by black and Latino leaders receive only about 4% of the dollars in the sector. During COVID, I saw a stat recently that about 50%, maybe 46% of black led nonprofits all decline in their grant funding. When you think about the US population, 36% of our population is comprised of people of color and 60% of nonprofits serve people of color, but only about 7%, 8% of nonprofit CEOs or people of color. That is such a stunning disconnect that there's no wonder we're out of alignment in terms of optimizing around impact. So I would say in the way that we've seen affinity groups within the corporate sector really start to organize and mobilize saying corporate practices, business practices need to change. I think creating that same sort of energy and momentum within these philanthropic institutions, organizing, advocating for this change has got to be really important. And I think about groups like EPIP, Merging Practitioners in Philanthropy and other groups who are like, look, the face of this needs to change. And I just think that ongoing drum beat around advocacy and change, next generation voices, we need you, we appreciate you, and we just have to keep pushing and holding folks to account. And I do think sort of transparency and accountability really important, really forcing organizations to publish what does your workforce look like? What are you doing? Bringing in groups, we just hired a new vice president of program, an extraordinary woman of color who were thrilled to have joined our team. And we worked with a really a terrific search firm run by women of color called the O4 group who like, for example, really put us through our paces. I mean, really requiring radical transparency of looking at warts and all of the difficult journey, the stumbles, the triumphs, the difficulties of going along this racial equity journey and saying, that's all part of the process. So starting to invest in Deborah, I know you've been on the frontline of talking about how you need to increase the number of fund managers of color, right? Again, the critical infrastructure needs to start looking different in terms of who we're going to as vendors, as partners in this work. And that's all part of it. And we all have to do that work every single day. And it's sort of a long-term lifetime commitment. And we can't backslide on any of this if we're gonna get to the other side one of these days. That is a really important, incredible note for us all to take with us. I wonder, Cheryl, if you would grace us with Mr. Blake's little excerpt once again as we wrap up because I thought it was really quite perfect for the day and the job. Yes, I'm gonna, I guess it's so perfect about it again, comes from his book, Jerusalem, The Emination of the Giant Albion. I'm gonna see if I can chat it because I look at it every day to remind myself, I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare my business is to create. I just chatted it and I'll send folks my email address. I just put that in the chat. But it's so much fun to be with you, Deborah, and everybody, I appreciate you so much. You're an incredible leader and I appreciate everything you do to create space for groups like Echoing Green. Well, we really appreciate you. This was a wonderful conversation and thank you so much for everything that you're doing and for your whole team and your whole community of fellows. It's making a huge difference in our world. Thank you, Cheryl. Thanks, Deborah.