 Hey everyone, my name is Maklit Hadero. I am an Ethiopian jazz singer, songwriter and composer and chief of program at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Welcome, welcome to Alchemy of the Reset. Alchemy of the Reset, the conversation series where we think about transformation because we are in a time of transformation where the systems are ripe for evolution. We are already in the middle of it. We are being shaken, reorganized. We are doing the reprogramming, writing the future right now. What's our place in that? How do we steward it? So many questions to think about together, together, always together. We are so happy that you are here with us during this hour long conversation. You will experience three questions, three questions that are like three bells that will guide us through this exploration together. We wanna invite you to use the chat feature as a robust forum for exchange with each other. Who are the other people listening? What homes? What perspectives? What land? Are they coming from and what do you have to find together through conversation and dialogue? I also wanna prepare us, just prepare us that there may be moments of silence. And I've said this every single time we've had this conversation. So I do that to underline the fact that this is live, that this is an improvisation that comes from experience and the depth of experience. But when people encounter and when people meet and there's moments of silence, it's an opportunity to reflect and to really make space for the fact that we are on our edges. We are on our borderlands and we are searching for more. So we welcome it as we welcome the space for evolution to happen. And we run, we walk, we glide arm in arm, hand in hand towards it together. So happy you are here with us. And I will begin now by introducing our YBCA senior fellow, Brett Cook. Brett, welcome. Alchemy of the Reset was conceived of along with Brett Cook as well as our other senior fellow who I'll let Brett introduce. But to say a few words about Brett, Brett is a thought leader, an educator of all sorts. He is a maker of space for multiple voices. He is a painter. He is an artist with decades of experience, of open armed experience in bringing people together to multiply their potential. Brett, welcome. So great to be here. Thank you for that lovely introduction. I'm actually here in Oakland in my studio in the kind of upper office archives, printers. My real desk is over there. Kind of back behind me is the downstairs part where I have some projects going on people in Oakland who died before they were 30 and another project about young people and young educators here in San Francisco. So to be here at the Alchemy of Reset is really kind of the most nourishing place for me right now. The place that these kind of conversations have really given me some life. And part of that is because of the people that I'm doing it with. And now I'd like to introduce Liz Lerman, who's my also senior fellow with me. How are you, Liz? Oh, it's so good to see you both. I'm okay today. Thank you. I didn't give you an elaborate introduction to your greatness, but I just feel like. You know what? Let's just get going. We've got Liz here today. But I won't say that I'm in Tampa, Arizona, the one of the hotspots in the country. I'm sitting in my little office with my books and my coloring and by window where I am visited every morning by a bunch of hummingbirds, which makes me very happy. But I, and I just again, just to be able to be among with McLeod and Brett during this period has just been profound. But we get to bring into our midst today somebody incredible, Carlton Turner. There are so many things that I could say about him and everybody can go and read about him too, but Carlton lives so beautifully and truthfully at the intersection of art, land, social justice, vision. And he's extraordinary. And you can see all that when you read about him, but I have two quick little things I wanna say about him personally. It's a little roundabout, it was a period in my life where I spent a lot of time in Japan, they were very interested in the work I was doing with older people and I spent a lot of time dancing with a lot of older women. And there was something that began to experience with them which is, there's not a lot of space in Japan. So the way they filled space was amazing. The way they were generous with each other was amazing, but they never diminished themselves, not once. It was a way they were present with their full self. And I don't think I'd experienced that so much in America. And then I got to have time with Carlton Turner. This is a person who, whether in a dialogue with one other person or holding his face for 300 people to talk, who brings this vast mind and set of images to the room and holds it for everybody, generous, it doesn't diminish itself either. And it's that way that he stands in what he brings with it that I find so wonderful to be in relationship to him. And the other thing is what happened, you guys who are listening, we get to get together before the show starts and we chat a little bit and it's really fun, but it's also very interesting what comes up and I was struck again by what kind of storyteller Carlton is, the stories that you have, the things you bring to bear and the fearlessness of the content, whether it's death or life at its deepest. So I'm just thrilled to be able to be with you. So Carlton, come on in and tell us where you are and where you're talking to us from. Hi. Greetings, everyone. It's so wonderful to be here and thank you all for the invitation. I am coming to you today from Utica, Mississippi, which is the land of my people. My folks have been in Mississippi in this area and the learned Utica area for eight generations. And so I'm really excited to be here with you all the day. I remember getting the invitation to come and participate and I immediately, I think as soon as I got the email, I responded back, yep, I'm in. You had me at Liz and Brett and McLeet and I'm really honored to be here. So Brett, you wanna tell us a little bit about why is Valkyrie and Reset stuff? Yeah, just to give everyone a little context. Part of the title came out of the idea that the idea of Valkyrie and the Western idea was this notion of some kind of transformation of materials into something else. But for us, it really resonated that when we think about this moment and this reset, that it's really gonna take an amalgamation of kind of entities or disciplines or constituents to really make this transformation positive. And so in that way, we came up with this title to think about what is the way that we can kind of assemble a whole vast array of different types of people or different kinds of agents who are causing transformation in the world. And so that's kind of the premise that has brought us to this really wide array of invitees. So, you know, Carlton having been in story circles with you and been at alternate roots in other places where we call upon personal story as a form of wisdom, a form of education, a form of learning, a form of being together. I think it's out of that, that this first question emerges, which is wondering, you know, when in your own life was there a reset, you know, what happened, what were the conditions, what made that occur? There's so many resets, right? It's just being able to pick one that I can put into context for this moment. I would pick the reset of coming back to my home community and deciding to, after 15 years of working mostly in other people's communities and helping to, you know, advance social justice, helping to advance conversations, difficult conversations, helping to build infrastructures and networks for artists and really focusing on the South and working to bridge artists and activists and policymakers. I chose to, as LeBron James said, bring my talents back to Utica, Mississippi. And what's interesting about that is a lot of people thought that I had moved away from Mississippi, but I've never not lived in Mississippi for my entire life since 1977. And when my mother and father moved back to, my mother moved back to Mississippi, my father moved here from Harlem. We were living in New York and at two years old, we moved back to Mississippi and I've been here ever since. And I think the reset for me was, you know, being at the helm of alternate routes, being, you know, coming into alternate routes in 2001 as a member, learning about the organization is deep and rich history that has touched and impacted many lives. Liz can probably tell you more stories about roots than I can. And doing that work, you know, kind of like learning about artists all across the South, expanding my knowledge about the connection between arts and social justice, being a part of a national conversation on these same issues, issues of equity, issues of, you know, philanthropy and how that shows up in our communities. It was very interesting to do that work, seed it from Utica and to have my family here, both my immediate family, my wife and our children and also our extended family, my mother, her siblings, all of my first cousins, nieces and nephews, the whole nine. And I remember when I made the decision, I think in 2000 and probably 14, when I began thinking and drafting the idea for what would become them at City Center for Cultural Production, I began reaching out to the mayor of Utica. And I got all my little credentials together, you know, this is where I would have done some articles I've written, here's some panels I've been on, here's some whatever, whatever. And I put it together in a folder and I got a friend of mine to get a meeting with the mayor. And I sat down with the mayor and I wanted him to be impressed by all the things that I had done and know that, one, that I'm serious about what I'm proposing, but also to just recognize, you know, that I've made this career in this life. And him kind of skimming through those documents and asking me a simple question, where are you from? And I was like, wow, I'm like, I'm from right up the road. I was, you know, raised here in Utica. And he said, well, who are your people? I said, well, my mother is Genevieve Turner. And that didn't ring a bell with him. I said, well, you may know her by her maiden name, which is Roberts. And he said, he looked like that. He said, Genevieve Roberts, he said, are you Sammy Roberts grandson? I said, yes, sir. And he sat back in his chair then and he put my materials away and he said, ooh, your grandma knows she can make some good biscuits. And it changed the entire tenor of the conversation. And from that point forward, I had to be reminded that the currency of my community is relationships. It's all relational. And I had to reset the way that I was thinking about the way my work showed up and the way I showed up in space, that it's about the relationship it has, nothing to do with experience. It has nothing to do with marriage or accomplishments. It's about your ability to relate to people. And that has been the focus of the way that I've approached the work that I've been doing here and resetting just the way that I think about who I am and what that means to the people in this community. They don't care anything about the Ford Foundation. They don't care anything about, you know, grant speak or, you know, social justice conversations that I've had the luxury of sitting in across the country while they're at work, while they're, you know, like these things, they don't necessarily connect and make sense in the way that we think they make sense when we've made a career of them, when we live that. And so that pulling out of that and getting back to understanding that the currency is relationships. You know, your story within story, within stories there, tells us something about what is essential, what in the reset, what is the opportunity that we can shed? Like, what of these structures that we actually wear? You actually wrap them up and put them in a thing. You brought it to him. See all this, you know, the opportunity to like strip that and get down to something else entirely of which relationship and biscuits seems to be really important, but really it is. And that's how he knew her. So, yeah. And it set off that moment, set off a chain of events in which the mayor, who I didn't really have a relationship with, began to tell me about his relationship with my grandfather and how my grandfather got him his first job working for the county, which in that time was a very coveted job because it came with health benefits. It had a pension. It was consistent work. As long as you came to work, you were always going to have work. And through that relationship, the mayor actually introduced me to several other men in the community that were in positions of power that my grandfather also got them their first job with the county. My grandfather had a sixth grade education at best, but he was one of the richest men that I knew because his relationship bank was full all the time. Even though he had much money, but his relationship bank was deposited up to the brim. No, this little sidebar from being now in an academic setting came to me late in life. But when I listened to alumni, the thing that they love the most about the faculty they speak about are people who help them after they're in school, after they leave and they go out into the world. It's those relationships that, that's what you hear over and over again, the connections, those things that people do for each other. Yeah, I mean, I just, it makes me think it's been one of the threads of many of our conversations to the degree that, relationships are the foundations that things are made from. And I think part of the contracts of this moment is that we're being forced to reevaluate all of those. As you said, Liz, those things that we wear that are supposed to be our value beyond our relationships, that, and in some ways, our leadership continues to model a value that's not based on relationships at all by some other either quantitative metric or some random metric I can't even understand. But certainly not a metric of like human relation, which I think is part of the kinship that I certainly have with Liz is like so much our work that comes out of that place. And I think part of the resonance of McLeet at YBCA is like a real kind of physical manifestation of how that's as an institution is trying to embody community relationships and have that be part of the staff. And I guess that's one of the things I'd like to think more about in terms of your relationship, Carl. And it's like, so with that understanding of the personal and the local being so relevant, how has that, how have you been able to, or how has that learning kind of echoed into all of the cultural capital that you have? That you as someone who comes from alternate roots when I think of alternate roots, I think of it as like the repository of cultural capital in this work that we're talking about. And yet it's, I'm curious to know like then how do you disseminate that really significant learning to people who are still thinking about institutions nationally or somehow some national, I don't know. Yeah, Niche. Yeah, roots has always been ahead of the curve. It's always been leading and trying to put forth a set of values that were different and were transformative. And I think that that was the space where, I didn't get my college degree until 2014. I went to college and quit after as a senior, but going through alternate roots was a masterclass. If you wanna use that language, if you wanna think about PhD, getting your PhD in something that doctor studies, it was that level of study and listening to people who have been doing work that is centered in community, that is centered and grounded in relationships with people and honoring people's humanity and honoring all that people bring when they make themselves available and accessible to you. And I think roots has been a space that has helped me to cultivate what I'm willing to accept in terms of an organizational structure and what I'm not willing to accept. And it gives me the space to challenge structures that I know can only yield a certain type of result. I'm like, you can't expect the world to change even if you're talking about your small world within your organization. If you've structured yourself in a way that is based in capitalism, based in patriarchy, based in homophobia, based in racial dynamics that are not really upholding and uplifting the value of humanity and the value of individuals, the value of relationships. And so roots, so I take roots everywhere I go. And I would say that many, many people that have come through that institution, they carry those values with them, not as a document or a framework to duplicate, but as a way of thinking that allows you to have a clearer lens as you're looking at the way that your work interfaces with the world, whether that be within an organizational structure or whether that be in the process of you making art or whether that be in the way that you think about engaging in policy issues. And so what I think about is for me, when I came back to Utica and I use the word came back, what I mean by that is turning my work gaze from the outside community back to the community that I live in, we thought about this idea of community engaged design as a starter process for how we would design the infrastructure and framework for the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production. And after we went through about a year and a half of that, we realized that it wasn't just a structure for a process or the start of something, but that it was an iterative process that should be part of the way that we approached every aspect of our work with the community. And so what we originally thought would be just an exercise to help us get started became the principal tenant by the way that we organize ourselves in community, which is community engaged design. We don't make moves without engaging the community and thinking through how those things should show up in the public, how does it show up in larger forms outside of our community and so forth. And so those are really important. I think, is this the second question? I'm not sure, because I haven't- I mean, yeah, you can go, I mean- No, no, it's fine, it's fine. Just wanna make sure I wasn't getting ahead of myself. So I think Roots is something that I share by just my training. I've been trained in the ideology of the way that Roots manages itself. The other thing about Roots that's really important is that Roots is not looking for a destination. Like Roots is constantly iterating. It's reconfiguring itself based on the people that are in the room, based on the circumstances and the climate that they're existing in and trying to figure out how to maintain a code and whatever the environment that they've been given. And that's really different from organizations that are founded and stay sane for a 30, 50, 100 year term. It's why Roots will never go out of style because the style will always be relevant to the people that are organizing it at the moment. And when it is finding itself out of tune, it's because it hasn't adhered to the values the way that it knows it should have. It's not because it doesn't know, it's because they've let something go. So I think Roots is a really important framework for me to carry with me in all of my work. And so I brought that to Utica and I share that and I bring other Roots members and other people who've been influenced by Roots and other people who have influenced Roots to my community because that exposure for a rural community is really important for us to grow and develop and gain a sense of understanding that is greater than just the things that we see on a daily basis. Yeah, I find, you know, many of my projects, I'm using community action research or community design principles, kind of in the same ways that you are. And it's kind of that same realization that it has to be iterative and ongoing. And it makes me think about when that as a model is not utilized. So for so much of our leadership nationally and even here in California where I'm at, you know, they're talking about making coalitions of people to address the pandemic, but they don't really have a dynamic collection of participants in those leadership coalitions, you know, which as someone who's had such a belief in that methodology and heartbreaking, you know, because I understand the limitations of how directly it addresses people's needs, you know, that if I only have a select group of people there, it limits the success of having people's voice involved in their own leadership, you know, in their own destiny. And it kind of makes me then think about how that relates to you being in Udic and how that goes out, you know, to the degree that it can be successful in a rural setting, you know, that alone is enough to make it valuable. And I'm just wondering, you know, when those opportunities that it isn't inclusive, how do you respond to those lack of inclusion of different voices and perspectives that could actually make the drive of transformation have relevant impacts? Yeah, I think that's where, you know, I think that's where artists shine, you know, because we can make those conversations that otherwise it would be super difficult, it would be awkward. Artists can help to make those conversations relatable and make them accessible to people who didn't, one, didn't know that they needed to have the conversation and didn't recognize that there was something missing that they needed to connect to. And two, those people that may have found those conversations off-putting, there's ways that art can be used to create space for people to see themselves in the issue, see themselves in the concern, see themselves in the challenge in ways that watching television doesn't always give us and, you know, reading an editorial doesn't always give us, or getting a feedback loop from a community, a faith-based community that only surrounds themselves in church-like atmospheres. And I think one of the challenges that we saw here very early on was that the lack of, we have so many communities in a rural setting that the infrastructure has been diminished, meaning the community that I live in at one time, it had factories, it had grocery stores, it had a thriving main street, it had two high schools, it had, you know, all the different things that a community needs to thrive, it had. And those things have gone away, mostly because of decisions that have been made by people who don't live here in this community. And that's one thing for us to interrogate, one, the decision-making practice that happens for communities on behalf of communities and the name of communities, and how communities can be back in a more, have more agency back in that process. But then the other part of that is the lack of those spaces that on the surface just look like businesses or educational institutions, the school or the shirt factory or the grocery store are actually social spaces. And the social function of those spaces is that they bring people together in incidental ways. They bring the community together in incidental ways in which you find yourself having a conversation with Ms. Johnson on aisle three of the grocery store about some things that wasn't on your schedule, that wasn't intended, you just bumped into her and it becomes this conversation in which you find out something about another corner of the community that you may not have known, you have some discourse so you get to know their thoughts on an issue, they get to know your thoughts on the issue and the social fabric of the community expanded in those spaces. So they don't just hold a business framework or an institutional educational framework, they are the social fabric of our communities. When you take all of those things away, what you're left with is the community that is relegated to its corner. And in our case, that corner is the church. So it's like, in a small community, you've got a hundred churches, everybody goes to their own church, those are the people they communicate with, that's where they have their social functions, those are the communities they engage with. And so the discourse is spread out and relegated to those corners as well. And so what we're trying to figure out is how do we rebuild those social structures? How do we retrofit existing spaces to hold the social fabric that it needs to in order for our community to engage in the type of discourse it needs to be involved in the decision making that allows it to take agency back. And that's been the way that we think about the work of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Productions that we're redesigning the social fabric of the community. That was gonna be, I was thinking about that as you were talking, Carlton, about the nature of the agency and how people come to believe that actually their story does matter, their voice actually means something. Oh, the thing that happened to me and my thought about that, I should bring that forward. And for so many people that's without practice or without understanding or having a place, as that dissolves, so does their capacity to say participate in design and things like that. And so finding these mechanisms and ways for people to see that. And often it's, I mean, in my own experience, sitting it with a circle, I'm thinking now the officer's wives in the ports of Naval shipyard and they told the story and I said the story back to them and one of them said, I didn't think we were anything. You know, I didn't think I was anything. You know, and it just, it was a brilliant story, beautiful. It's made the way into many of the things I talk about and it's just to the power of what you're saying, even recreate the grocery aisle, it's really important. Yeah, and the fact that that grocery store is no longer there, there's a portion of the community's self-worth that went away when the grocery store went away. And so you will hear people in conversations saying, you know, if we ain't got a grocery store, we ain't really, you know, can we really still call ourselves a town, you know? And so, and this is for a community that 40 years ago provided 75 to 80% of its own food. So the grocery store wasn't even that important, you know, 40 years ago, but because the grocery store held that hold that social space when all the other spaces were beginning to die, when the schools were taken away, when the businesses closed, when the factory closed, the grocery store was the last thing to go. And so the grocery store, for them, they don't think about it the same way, they don't just think about it as the place where I get food. They also had a social relationship tied up in that building that they didn't realize they were losing at that moment. They thought they were just losing the place that they get food, but they also lost their ability to connect. And that's heartbreaking. And how do you feel that? I'm just, I'm compelled to ask how COVID has ramped that up or multiplied that or what you feel the effects have been around that. Yeah, I think COVID has, it's crazy, you know? You all in California and things are going crazy out there with COVID, it's going crazy here in Mississippi, where I think last week we had one of our highest days, where it was like a thousand new cases. And we only have less than 2.1 million people. So you're talking about the rate of infection in our communities is skyrocketing. Again, going back to what I began with, our relationships are the foundation of our social capital. It's like, without the ability to connect, without the ability to talk face to face, to put your hand on someone's shoulder, to feel their visible and physical presence. It means that people are living in a type of isolation that they've never experienced here in the rural community. And the reason why I say it's different than in urban spaces is because in many spaces, and I can walk through New York City surrounded by more people than I will see in one day more than, more people than I will see in a year in Mississippi. And I'm anonymous in that space. I don't have connection to other people. People they're not concerned with me, they're just concerned with themselves. There's a level of anonymity and isolation that exists in urban spaces that is completely different from rural spaces where everybody knows everybody and everybody is connected to everybody else in some type of way. And so for us to be experiencing this moment in which we're being asked to not connect, to stay in your homes, to not speak, to not this idea of social distancing, that the whole idea of social distancing is the wrong idea from the beginning. It's not even a medical term. What we're talking about is physical distancing. You should be physically distant from someone, but socially we should never be distancing ourselves. And so people have taken this idea of social distancing and we're not sure how people are responding. What we are seeing is that people are going out and they're being together in public spaces, which is why we're seeing the increase in the infection rate. And I ask for ourselves to lend a little grace to that because these are the same people that we wanna chastise these people because they're not obeying the rules and they're not helping to keep everybody safe. But if we think about the jobs that those people hold, they're being asked to put their lives in the line for someone else for a business every day, for some institution that doesn't look at their self-worth, only needs them as a body to move forward their business practices. And then they, but they are not being allowed to do that on behalf of their own personal self. So there's a disconnect between the way that they're being asked to engage in the world, they're considered an essential worker, they're working in the grocery stores, they're working in warehouses, they're working in assembly lines, they're working in the meat houses. But when you come home, we ask that you be safe and don't be around other people. And that's just a kind of distance that people are not willing to hold. And that's, I attribute a lot of that to why people continue to be in social spaces with each other, despite the clear safety and health ramifications. No, I'd like to go more into that. And I want to be sensitive as a time. And I really want to ask you like, so where do you see evidence of, our second question is really about, what's something in your experience or field of experience that you see as a symptom of this reset or you wish could be reset? And I wonder related to, whether it's the social milieus or whether it's collective leadership or whatever the model is, what are some of the things that you're actually witnessing or wish you could witness right now? I think the way that I thought about this question, emailed you earlier this morning, I was like, I just want to be clear, I understand what you're trying to get at with this. The way that I understand it is, there's two really like apparent infrastructure holes that are right for intervention and innovation in this moment. And I see those, one is food, because our work is in food. Our work is about, we feel like food is the foundational principle of culture, of civilization that we gather in spaces, our ability to feed ourselves. It uplifts our ability to engage in, when we can eat, like Fannie Lou Hamer says, when we can feed ourselves, then other people can't tell us what to do so readily. And so we think about food as a foundational practice of liberation. If we have food, then we have some space to move. And the other space is education. In our communities, like I'm sure in many communities across the country, our children didn't go back to school after spring break, right? So they've been at home since March. And the idea immediately, the response from the school district was that, okay, we're asking the teachers to overnight develop an infrastructure to maintain the same type of engagement for young people in these spaces at home and online, as they would be if they were coming to school every day. Well, that's impossible. Number one, the school system as it existed when students were traveling to school every day is completely broken. So the thing that you can remake that thing and make it work online in a virtual space, you couldn't get kids to pay attention and sit down in your class when you had them for 90 minutes. What you think they're gonna do, if they can turn, all they gotta do is turn the device off, right? So that's a broken system that we already know that we're going into the fall with that system completely broken and they're not being real efforts to reimagine that. And so we see that as a space that is right for intervention, innovation, re-imagination. And that's where I think, backing up a little bit, I think part of the challenge that we're seeing in our country, writ large, is due to the systemic failure of education over generations, right? And so this opportunity to reset is not just about the current moment but could have ramifications for our country, our nation, our communities, for generations to come if we can seize this opportunity to rethink the way, the first, the fundamental purpose of education, which up until this point has been to move people into the workforce, to the field roles that we assume are gonna be 20 years down the line, you start here at kindergarten, in 20 years you're gonna have this opportunity to fill this gap that is needed. But most of those gaps are based on you working for someone else, or you working towards a capitalist structure that we're also seeing collapsing. So if we're reframing the purpose and intention of education as to create the best world possible, then what does that open up in terms of possibilities about what young people can be learning on a daily basis that does not at all resemble the current educational 16 year curriculum of K through college. That that is an opportunity that we have right now in this moment when everything is up in the air. So how do we get to that from, part of why we started with your own personal story because in some ways, how we handle our own resets are great compasses for the way that we reset in a larger societal landscape. And so when you think about redirecting your focus to where you're from, like that was a choice. Like there was some part of you in your person that was clear about this redirection. And when I hear you talk about the condition of education, our country, I haven't really seen anyone, very few people are making that same committed choice. They haven't making that ability to redirect through these values that you're talking about. And so as someone who's a leader that way, how, what are the ways in which we can inspire that? Yeah, well, I wouldn't say, I would just add one amendment to your statement. I think that there's the number of teachers who've actually been trying to do that for generations and have been stymied by the actual system that only wants them to function in a particular type of way. Teachers don't necessarily go into teaching to not teach kids and for kids to not come out on the other end, better quality human beings. That's usually why people go into teaching is because they have a love and desire to instill and impart something into a generation so that they can be better prepared to engage the world. And I think if we can redirect that energy right now when teachers will have more leeway over what happens on a daily basis in their classrooms because they're not tied to the standard curriculum for many years, definitely since the Bush administration have been about teaching to an exam. So this is the first year that they've already said that the testing, that mandatory standardized testing that would usually happen in the beginning of the year for certain grades and at the end of the year for other grades, that that's canceled, that's all for 2020, 2021 school year. It means that the teachers don't have to reload and upload, stop their curriculum so that they can teach to this test. And so there's already this wonderful gap that exists in which teachers can actually have a year-long curriculum to take students from A to B without being interrupted by this federal standards and state standards for testing. So that is a beautiful window and opportunity. And I think if challenged the right ways, teachers can move into that space and create something that's beautiful and open and engaging. So that's one side. I wanna talk about a couple of different parts of it. I think the second part is there's also an opportunity because children are at home to create other educational opportunities for them in their own home spaces that is based on them coming more full and whole human beings. And I think that that's both the responsibility of parent, first and foremost, always, but also that relationship between parent and teacher to create that space for some innovation to happen in that relationship. Here's the challenge. Here's why that part of the challenge is more relevant to my community than maybe another urban community that most of the teaching that's gonna happen in the fall will rely on broadband access, just like it has whenever they're saying, hey, we want you to be online on this thing or whatever, whatever, for this time and we're gonna send you your materials, you get onto this module and you work this module. The reality is that we don't have internet connection so that every student can actually attend classes in that way. And the young people who will be most disproportionately impacted will be poor black kids that are living in the most remote parts of the rural community, right? So if we know that you're not gonna have access, we can do a couple of things. We can put our attention in trying to build out the broadband infrastructure and create device accessibility so that these young people can participate highly unlikely, just to be real, they haven't been able to do that in the time that we've had. But the other space is that there's an opportunity to create an infrastructure and to fill that gap that's gonna be left, to build curriculum that takes young people out of that space of waiting for a device or waiting for your internet connection and saying there's a world around you that you could be learning from that will actually enrich your ability to live in this place and we can help you do that. And I think that's about us building and furthering our coalition with teachers, with retired teachers, with educators, with administrators that have a vision and have wanted to participate at a high level but haven't been an opportunity. Yeah, it's interesting even as you speak, Carl, and thinking about what I've noticed here, like it just seems to me such a remarkable opportunity for the university. It's gonna have half the students, I mean, so many things are, why not go for like a million experiments? And it's gonna, and see what is possible. And I would just say that here in Phoenix, what you just said is true in my anecdotal evidence of my own students, students of color, first generation students, when we went remote, the not good internet, less skills, they might have only gotten a computer when they got to college in homes where they couldn't have space by themselves who suddenly be online, they were in rooms with many, many people. So the notion that this is the only way to go. But the other thing too is, and this, I mean, this has felt lifelong to me and probably all of us on this round is, you know, in some ways, I feel like my art making is an ongoing educational experience. Like I am constantly in learning mode while I'm making, whatever I'm making. I mean, it's one of the great joys actually. And I think too how, you know, how artists not necessarily teaching chemistry through dance, although I can do that, but more, what's the thing that you wanna know about? Go outside, you know, what's the theme? Oh, that bird, oh, this or that. And then go make stuff around it. And, you know, which is actually what Charles Darwin did with his children. It's wonderful to read about how he educated his kids. They were outside the whole time. He just followed their noses. So, so much opportunity, whether we can do it. Yeah, no, it makes me think of, I don't know if you know this, Carlton, but one of my degrees is in education. So I taught elementary, junior high school, college, lots of different things. And then when my first child, I made it a point that up through sixth grade, I spent every Friday in a school, so the entire day. You know, and initially I thought they're so new teachers of color, so a few men teachers, this will be a gift that I can give these communities. But then it ended up being such a great thing for me as a parent, like to be that intimate to the institutions and know all the players, know all the kids, you know, like those are my nieces and nephews now. You know, now they're in high school, but what I could really see, what'd you say? Relationships. Exactly, exactly. And in that same way, I could really see them, the masterful teachers would be the ones that would find a way to create their curriculum outside of Common Core or outside of, you know, somehow they would still fulfill those requirements, but their curriculum were these flee flooring things that addressed the things that they were interested in and they integrated student-driven learning and all these things and part of their mastery wasn't just that they did that in the front of the classroom, they could navigate the institution to do that. We're like a new teacher, they're still so consumed with Common Core, what we're supposed to do on the lesson plan and the pacing guide, like they aren't able to weave that in, you know. And that was such a great lesson for me that I think what you're talking about is also still a challenge for teachers and those administrators, you know, is that they're still real thinking of restarting schools through a framework that's based on a tradition that they're using as a protocol, you know. And what I hear you saying, Liz, is what I find myself saying all the time that we as artists, we create the protocol all the time. We just make a new one all the time. We're committed to learning and so we'll just make it up as we go and we don't wanna repeat it. Like if we did it one time, we did it already. We know it needs to be iterative, you know. And that's the kind of absence that I think is missing in a creative kind of leader positions, not just in schools, but all over. Yes. Yeah. I keep being struck by the, you know, Carlton's, something you said at the very beginning of this conversation is just like sitting over here, like, or maybe more like here, like right above my right shoulder, which is the, first of all, the story of your grandmother and knowing your grandfather, you know, and the mayor. But also this, there's a sense in everything you're saying for me that is about relearning what we've forgotten. I keep coming back to that, that we have an ability now to, like, you know, when you're really busy and you're really consumed and your head is down and you're just trying to get it done. And then now we're in this place where suddenly we're like, we can look up and we can say, what are we forgetting that we already knew? And then further from that, how do we put it into place and make those inherited wisdoms equal to and systematized, systematize them so that we can all benefit. So that we can all benefit. And I just, there's something about what you're saying that keeps bringing that up for me. What can we implement that we already knew that we have forgotten? Yes, I did a talk, I don't know how many years ago it was, but it's the phrase that I use that sums up exactly what you're getting, which is for me, coming from the community that I come from, innovation is an act of remembrance. It's an act of remembrance is not about creating something new that didn't exist. It's about remembering that you actually already overcame this. You already, your forefathers actually, they already solved this issue. So much of the indigenous knowledge that we have that has been buried in our country has already solved climate change. Sorry, solve the issues around energy and issues around how to sustain groups of people on the land that you stand on. Those issues ain't really issues. The issue of capitalism has erased that knowledge because it only can thrive when it has you trying to figure out things that you've already figured out, like constantly giving you the same puzzle over and over again, but we actually solved that puzzle. We just need to keep the solution in the minds of the generations as we move through. So I think this is a possibility to do and resurface this information, the way that we're approaching it here at CIP Culture is that our work is about food and story and the ability for us to tell those stories, the ability for us to engage our community and both exhuming the collective memory that our community has and bringing it back to the forefront of our public discourse allows us to both, you know, at one point we were talking about who is growing, what, where's food, you can get this. Oh, Mr. Such and Such grows the best this. You can get that over there. Oh, you looking for that? Ms. Such and Such, she got the best greens, blah, blah, oh, you want this? The person over there, they're the carpenter. They, you know, like all of the things, the community was a production factory. It produced all the things that it needed. Now what we're talking about is how can we get a big box grocery store to locate itself in our community? So that's a completely disconnected framework for how we engage with our land, with the place that we live in. And so what we're trying to do is not, this isn't about nostalgia, it's about learning. It's about collective memories, it's about remembering that we've solved this issue and we know this problem and we can figure this out again if we work together and we can use these stories as a place to jump off, to develop those new solutions. We had, and it relates to education, the earliest schools in my community, the schools that my mother attended were community schools. They were part of the public school system, but the teacher was from down the street. She went to church with you. She knew your mama, she knew your grandmama, she knew your big mama, she knew everybody. She was a part of the fabric of your life, not just the person you see for an hour and a half here on B-Day in school. This person was part of your extended community. And that's a different way of learning, not just teaching, but of learning when you're in a room with someone you respect that knows how to garner your attention, how to engage you in a relational conversation about how this thing that we're trying to learn is actually related to the life that you're living. It's not an abstract idea that is based here in left field. It's actually part of the thing that you need to survive. And I think that that shifts our ability to function and remake our community in the shape and format that we need to survive and thrive. Carlson, hearing this, the analogy is a poor one, but it makes me think back to how people feel about not having a grocery store in your town and that they might feel better if they had a box store or the issues here again at the university, it's like the reward system so screwed up and the mechanisms by which people think things are good have to be entirely, well, either you step outside of the system and you develop your own and you are assured by each other and by the nature of what's happening that you know this is the thing that you want. So that's, yeah, if you're totally outside and or we just keep trying to change the way people, we measure what we value. And I feel it here too at the school, I keep saying we're gonna need stunt groups, we need to step outside the system, we really want to change this, then we have to, you know, we can't, because it's just driving itself, even in the reset, it's driving itself. Yeah. So the third question, I feel like we've touched on it a lot already, but just to make sure we ask it, the third kind of guiding question was now, you know, in the wake of current social crisis, what is possible in the reset? Is there anything you'd like to add? I have a very short answer, that I'm sure I'll make longer than it's necessary, but the answer to that question is anything is possible. And that's on both ends of the spectrum. You know, it's possible that we can utilize this moment as a multi-generational point of transformation, that, you know, so many things are at play right now that allow us to rethink healthcare, to rethink education, to rethink the finance and the banking industry, to rethink transportation, to rethink, you know, communications infrastructure, to rethink all of these different things. And in the absence of those things functioning properly, we also have this opportunity for power brokers to completely demolish the scales to where there's no balance, and there's very little possibility for balance to be regained in the future. So we're, you know, it could go either way. Hey, and I think movements that we've seen in the streets are pushing the world, not just our communities, but it's pushing the world to make some fundamental recognitions. It's polarizing, but it's also, you know, making some statements and it's creating a sense of, of like, you know, we've had, we've tried to do it the Colin Kaepernick way that is peaceful, you know, silent, that is solemn and powerful, and that's not acceptable. So now we can, we can ramp it up because we have, you know, nobody's working, you know, we're, all the social conditions are right for that to do its own thing as well. So, yeah, anything is possible. It's telling my son, you know, he was asking me early on in this pandemic, you know, is this the end of the world? Like, yes and no, yeah, it's the end of a world. It's coming to, we're seeing, we won't see the return of the world, the way that it was before, but what comes on the other side, we have to be, be complicit in what happens there. We can't allow that to be shaped without our input, you know, so we got work to do. I think that's a wonderful recap, not only Carlton of our time with you in this last hour, but also of the last four sessions that we had. Anything is possible, but it's up to us to participate, to be part of defining what that is and that relationships, that are pouring our energy into relationships and our collective wisdom is going to be a deeply important part, an essential part, perhaps the essential part of how that unfolds. This has been a thread for us throughout the past for conversations that we've had. We really wanna thank you so much for sharing your time with us and the powerful work that you do. We are so appreciative of everything that you are doing, not just in Mississippi, but also that you are, you are modeling a new way that is an ancient way that we need so badly right now. Thank you, Carlton, for your time. Thank you. And Liz, as always. And thank you to our audience, people who have joined with us for this past hour, for these past four conversations of Alchemy of the Reset. This is just our first iteration, so please look out for more from us around this topic and we will see you next time. Be well, be well, be well.