 some really great organizations, including Divastead, the College Climate Coalition, World Beyond War, and Code Pink. My name is Carly Town. I'm coming to you from Los Angeles, and I am also with Code Pink. Really grateful to have everyone here so far. While we wait for everyone to join us, just a handful of minutes here, if people wanna start introducing themselves in the chat box, that would be really great. So, if people would just give us their names, where they're zooming in from, we'd love to know who's in the room and where you're calling in from. And if you wanna give us any organizational affiliation or if you're not affiliated with an organization, what are you excited to learn more about tonight? So again, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. This is the Reinvest and Adjust World webinar hosted by Divastead, the College Climate Coalition, World Beyond War and Code Pink. And we'll get started in just a minute here. Great, I see people are introducing themselves in the chat. Welcome, welcome everyone. Great to have you on the call. Remember, this is the Reinvest and Adjust World webinar hosted by Divastead, the College Climate Coalition, World Beyond War and Code Pink. And we'll get started very, very shortly here. Excellent, so I see a couple more people are joining us. So welcome, if you can see in the chat box, people are introducing themselves, telling us where they're calling in from. Looks like we have people here from around the country and also affiliated with some organizations. It looks like we have some people here from divestment movements as well. Really great to have you here. Thank you for joining us. Excellent, okay. I think we can go ahead and get started now. And just wanna welcome everyone to this wonderful webinar that I'm really looking forward to. As you can see, there are, we have quite a few people here to talk through this theme today, which is Reinvesting and Adjust World. And so I'm just gonna quickly review what we can expect to see tonight. And then what we wanna do before we actually get into everything and all of our topics is actually walk each other through, what did we discuss during our last webinar, the first installment of this two-part series where we discussed divesting from war and fossil fuels. So first, let me just walk people through our agenda for today. So we're gonna start off with just this, just a review of what it means to divest from war and fossil fuels and why it's important. Then I'm really excited because we're gonna hear from some really great panelists. We're gonna start with a case study with Abby and Yasmina from Towards a People's Endowment. We're then gonna learn a little bit more from Zahir who will be talking about the College Climate Coalition's Reinvestment Working Group. And then finally, we're gonna talk a little bit more about a just transition from the war machine with Shay from CodePink's Divest from the War Machine Campaign. After each of those wonderful panelists gives us a short introduction to their incredible work, we're gonna move into a 25-minute panel to hear more thoughts and dive a little bit deeper into some of the themes they bring up. And then at the end or during that Q&A, if you have questions for the panelists, you can always place them in the chat box, right on the right hand side of your Zoom screen. So without further ado, let's talk a little bit about divestment and reinvestment and remind ourselves a little bit of some of the themes that we got into during our last webinar together. So like I've said, in the first part of our webinar series, which was divesting from war and fossil fuels, we discussed the important intersections between the climate justice and anti-war movements, right? We also discussed how divestment campaigns can be incredibly strategic ways to build broad-based coalitions that take on some of the most powerful companies in the world. So before we jump into the topic of reinvestment, let's just review some of these key themes about divestment. And importantly, right? Think through how divestment campaigns are also opportunities to forward a positive political vision for the kind of world we want to all build together, right? A world where we're not relying on fossil fuels and a world where we are not perpetually at war. So next slide please. So any conversation I think about the connection between climate change, militarism and weapons divestment really has to start with the elephant in the room, which is the Pentagon budget. And this issue is closely related to our discussions around climate change, right? So as you can see on the slide, when we look at how much money we've spent on war over just the past two decades, we'll see that we're actually depriving our society of investing in what we really need, which is green energy, right? And through this example, we can see that militarism and the climate crisis are deeply intertwined, mutually reinforcing, right? And we can see from this, even just this example, how important it is for us to come together and draw attention to the issue that climate change and militarism are deeply interconnected. But the question still remains is, what can we actually do to address this? So next slide, please. So here is where the work of the Divestment and War Machine Coalition really comes into play. And this is what we discussed during our last webinar, right? So I wanna talk just briefly about what that looks like. So the Divestment and War Machine Coalition kicked off in 2017 with a summit in Washington, D.C. that brought together policy experts, organizers, activists to discuss how we can promote divestment as a tactic to dismantle the war economy and ship away at war profiteering. The coalition has nearly 70 member organizations, including Code Pink and World Beyond War, and our website, divestmentandwarmachine.org has a whole host of tools and resources and current campaigns that people can really learn a lot from and we'll post them in the chat for people. Next slide, please. So what I think is really important about divestment campaigns is that it can happen at really so many levels, right? So the campaign can really be tailored to nearly any context as you can see on the screen. So we can choose where we personally bank or invest our retirement funds. We can choose to also look at institutions we're part of, like universities, workplaces, unions or places of worship and where those institutions actually invest their funds, right? And then, like you see on the screen, right? Stailing up from there, we can actually look at our city's operating budgets, city and state pension funds, right? There are a lot of ways to plug into this campaign and look under the hood of institutions in your life and how they might be connected to war profiteering and other extractive industries including the fossil fuel industry, right? So next slide, please. So divestment is really exciting because it is incredibly tangible, right? And it's a useful tactic because it concretely allows us to withdraw, like I said, tangible monetary investments from the arms industry and to know that at least on the individual level or in the institutional level, right? Like your university or your city or even at the state level, you're not supporting war. But also it's a powerful tactic because it enables intersectional coalition building. I think this webinar is a really great example, right? Meaning that showing the cross connections between issues like we're doing today, right? Showing that war and climate change are intertwined and this enables us to build really broad coalitions, right? To come together on a campaign and to show that we have power in numbers, to show that weapons divestment isn't just something that just a handful of people here and there care about, right? When we come together in a coalition on a campaign, we can show a diversity of support on an issue all the way from environmental groups to student clubs, to faith communities, refugee rights organizations, basically you name it, right? And we can pull people together in a broad-based coalition. And the last thing that's really important about divestment is that it's a winnable tactic, right? Because contrary to popular opinion, it's not financially risky. In fact, studies show that a dollar spent on education and healthcare produces more jobs and in many cases better paying jobs than the same dollars spent in the war industry. So now I'm gonna pass it over to Greta from World Ground War to talk a little bit more about that important concept. Thanks so much, Carly, we can go to the next slide. Yeah, so my name is Greta Zaro. I'm excited to join you all today. I'm the organizing director with World Beyond War. And building off of what Carly just said, divestment from violent and extractive industries is actually very doable financially. And as you'll see on the screen, in fact, 2020 was a record year for what's called ESG Investing, which is essentially environmentally and socially responsible investing. ESG funds outperformed traditional equity funds in 2020 and experts expect continued growth. Cities are seeing this trend and jumping on board. In March of last year, the city of Philadelphia passed a resolution calling on its pension board to create an ESG investment policy to ensure that the city is prioritizing investment in sectors that will help build a resilient economy and a clean energy system. And so we're seeing cities and financial institutions prioritizing reinvestment in the type of world that we want to see. Next slide. Now, this is something interesting. In January of last year, there was a debate in Washington, DC about a so-called fair access rule, which would prevent banks from refusing to serve businesses like prisons, weapons manufacturers, fossil fuel companies, et cetera. And this debate was really interesting because it revealed that divestment campaigns and related initiatives have made such an impact that banks are indeed refusing to serve these extractive industries, weapons, fossil fuels, et cetera, and they actually cite the reputational harm of being associated with these industries so much so that Washington and the Treasury Department is getting worried and wanting to force them to serve these industries. And thankfully this rule was blocked by the Biden administration so far, it's on pause and has not taken effect. We can go to the next slide. So the as-you-so databases are a great example of this growing movement for reinvesting in the just world that we want. As-you-so has created a suite of databases, as you'll see on the screen, across a host of issues. There's weapons-free funds, fossil-free funds, gender equality funds, tobacco-free funds, deforestation-free funds, prison-free funds, et cetera, et cetera. And they have all of these databases, which you can use on the personal level to check where your investments are of you, if you're banking with a certain company. But beyond that, this can be a tool that we've used in campaigns to look up a city's investments and institutions' investments, et cetera, and to find better alternatives. And you'll see that the databases are ranked on a scale of A to F. So you can see F scores really bad, it's really highly invested in that industry, A it scores really well. So this is a great tool when talking about divestment and reinvestment. Next slide. So we can see that ESG investment is trending, and this is kind of the financial piece of what reinvestment can look like. But beyond the financial investment and the industries that we want, utilizing the as-you-so databases, as we work on divestment campaigns to change the policies of our institutions and governments, we can also simultaneously rebuild the local piece economy that we want to see through tangible actions at the individual level and the communal level. You can avoid entanglement with multinational corporations that are likely invested in destructive industries in so many different ways. A simple example is shopping local at farmers markets and keeping money circulating locally in your community. That's just one example. WOOF, which is on the screen in the bottom right, the Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, is another example. This is a database of organic farms, or actually around the world, there's WOOF USA, WOOF Canada, so many different countries. And I'm actually part of a farm Unidilla Community Farm that's one of the many thousands of farms as part of this network. And the WOOF network supports exchanges where people get to live and work on the farm and learn practical skills, like growing their own vegetables, setting up an off-grid solar panel system, building infrastructure using natural building methods, and so much more to give people the concrete ability to be more self-sufficient and sustainable and to reduce our dependency on purchased inputs and multinational corporations that are often tied to all these exploitative industries that we've been talking about. And Transition US is another great resource. The logo is in the top left. And this is a national network, Transition US, but it's also part of a global movement so you can insert transition and then your city or your town or your country and you'll probably find a transition organization in your area. And this is a network of so-called transition towns where communities are scaling up the kinds of practices that I've just mentioned. Transition US describes this work in the following way. Quote, we are reclaiming the economy, sparking entrepreneurship, re-imagining work, re-skilling ourselves, and weaving webs of connection and support. So I think that really sort of encapsulates what I'm trying to talk about when I'm talking about this transition to a local peace economy. And finally, another example of this kind of tangible change that I think needs to accompany the policy level work, the divestment work. In the top right, we see a picture of the tiny house warriors. And this is an Indigenous land defender movement in Canada and they are constructing off-grid solar powered tiny homes literally in the path of a pipeline. And this project addresses an immediate need for housing Indigenous families in the area while working to block these corporate and government extractive policies of building this pipeline. And to me, this tiny house warriors is really like the prime example of what we're talking about today. It's this example of divesting, opposing the fossil fuel industry and reinvesting building these off-grid solar panel, solar powered tiny homes. And one way to sort of think about this is the framing of resistance and regeneration and combining those two things. So these are just a few examples of ways that we can practically start to build the alternative world that we want to see. And now I will pass it over to Aiden to introduce our panelists. Thank you Greta. Hi everyone. Thank you for being here today. My name is Aiden and I'm a part of College Climate Coalition. So first, I'm going to be introducing Abby and Yasmeena. They are student organizers and they are working on the Towards the Peoples Endowment Campaign. Then after them will be Zohor and he is also from College Climate Coalition and he is more specifically working on reinvestment and he is the reinvestment coordinator. Lastly will be Shay and Shay is a national organizer and she works with a divest works with a divest from War Machine and she is a part of the Code Pink Congress campaigns as well. And then feel free to set the presentation now as well. Hi everyone. Thank you so much Aiden for introducing us. Introducing Abby and I. So yeah, let's... Abby, do you want to get started? Yeah, absolutely. So, hey everyone. My name is Abby. I use sheer pronouns and I'm a student here at Simon Fraser University and the Department of Geography. And I have a student organizer with SQ350 which is a student climate action club operating out of SFU since about fall 2018. So my first year of undergrad. Hi folks. My name is Yasmeena. I use sheer pronouns and I'm a second year student at UBC specializing in human geography and Middle Eastern studies. And I've been the communications and design coordinator at Climate Justice UBC since August of last year. Before we begin, Abby and I would really like to thank the organizers for inviting us to speak today at this webinar about our reinvestment campaign. We're super stoked. Yeah, I completely agree. I'm also very excited. And I thank you again for having us and we hope folks say come away having learned something new about community reinvestment and eager to launch community reinvestment campaigns in their own communities. Next slide please. So before we go any further, we wanna do a land acknowledgement. Yasmeena and I are calling in from traditional stone home lands of the Squamish, Slewa, Tith, Mosque, Mkhatzi, Kukwotlum, Kukkite, Kwotlum, Semi-Annuent, Wassan Nations. Today, these lands are known as Metro Vancouver where the UBC Vancouver and SFU campuses are situated. And these are the same lands in which we organize and practice our activism. Next slide please. Okay, so to briefly introduce each of our groups, CJUBC to start with, we are a student-led climate collective that organizes within and outside of UBC's Vancouver campus. And we achieved our divestment back in 2019. And since the start of our reinvestment campaign last summer, we have come to focus on collaboration and consultation. Yeah, so in the SFU 350 is a student-led climate action club operating specifically out of SFU's Burnaby campus. We started the divestment campaign at SFU over eight years ago. And we recently just won divestment in November, 2021. We're now seeking for SFU to declare a climate emergency and commit to six actions rooted in climate justice, including community reinvestment. Next slide please. Okay, great. And now to give some background on our previous and current campaigning. Back in 2013 when CJUBC was still called UBC 350, student activists in our group came together to form our divestment campaign, which succeeded in 2019, whereby UBC committed to completely divesting from fossil fuels by 2030. We have since then been continuing to hold the university accountable and pushing them to accelerate the divestment to 2025. After our divestment campaign in September of 2020, we changed our name to Mark the shift in our group to one whose values lie in the undeniable intersectionality and diversity of the climate crisis. And an acknowledgement that climate justice is inseparable from racial, economic, indigenous, and social justice. We have more recently focused on non complicit banking from supporting groups like banking on a better future, organizing on divestment day and the global day of action against RBC and defending the climate crisis. You can see the big blow up David McKay on the slide and have advocated for fossil fuel-free banking. And recently our group co-hosted and presented at a climate emergency town hall last November in light of the major flooding and governmental failure to address the climate emergency. And our speakers included Naomi Klein, Abby Lewis, Kainagata, and many other inspiring activists. Next slide please. Yeah, so SB 350 has several ongoing campaigns and we've had some major recent wins as well. We won divestment of our own undergraduate student society, the Simon Fraser Student Society which represents 25,000 students. And we also won SFU divestment. And that came after eight years of tireless organizing by student organizers in SFU 350 and by various faculty staff and students alike. Further to that, SFU 350 has taken initiative on and supported several campaigns seeking to stop the construction of the trans-mountain pipeline expansion which is happening just right under our campus. We're seeking to halt this construction due to ongoing safety, environmental, and indigenous rights concerns with the pipeline project. And most recently, SFU 350 has been advocating for us to declare a climate emergency as well as meet a series of climate action demands including decarbonization, mandatory climate justice education, a climate hub for students, faculty, and staff to collaborate on climate action and of course community reinvestment. Next slide please. Okay, so moving into our reinvestment campaign, the campaign actually originated in from two climate justice UBC members, Sarah Saloon and Rachel Chang when they did a direct study program at UBC. So they had the opportunity to focus in on reinvestment over the course of a semester and imagine what it looked like at universities. These same folks then began dreaming up a joint reinvestment campaign at both SFU and UBC and later we also invited University of Victoria to join us as well. So SFU 350 Climate Justice UBC and the DivestUvic group were all in agreement that we need to use divested funds and more to invest in the local communities on and surrounding our university campuses. And so the reinvestment campaign was born. Next slide please. Okay, so now let's flush out a relationship between divestment and reinvestment. Divestment and reinvestment can be more broadly understood as fighting the bad and building the new. We cannot have one without the other and this is why we are embarking on a community reinvestment campaign. Our campaign seeks to change our university's positionalities from participants in the extractive economy to participants in a regenerative one, an economy that invests in the rights, wellbeing and wealth of both communities and the planet. Next slide please. So now we'll talk about what community reinvestment really is, but before we define it, we're really curious to hear what folks think Korean investment is and what it could look like. So what comes to mind when you think about community reinvestment? What does it look like in practice? Feel free to share your responses in the chat for one minute and then we can all talk about them after. Thanks to the folks for sharing. All of these are really right on the nose and we'll now get into what our definition of community reinvestment is. Next slide please. So we define community reinvestment as a set of investment strategies that provide financing to meet the needs of local communities in a specific geographical region that do not have access to them otherwise through the exclusionary nature of traditional financial services. And to be clear, community reinvestment is not philanthropy or green capitalism because it instead places return second to environmental and community wellbeing. Next slide please. So community reinvestment can be thought through three different action verbs, requires, emphasizes and promotes. First, community reinvestment requires financial returns within emphasis on local, social and environmental wellbeing rather than significant profits while still meeting fiduciary duties. Second, community reinvestment emphasizes community needs, agency and decision making. And third, community reinvestment promotes community ownership and developments through community financial development institutions and procurement preferences. Next slide please. Awesome. So this diagram here can be understood as the finance continuum with the latter half of the spectrum focusing on social finance. This is an umbrella term related to finance that focuses on community economic development, charity as nonprofits and cooperatives. So community investments that's on the end of the spectrum and can be seen as the most progressive form of social finance. Next slide please. So there's several pathways available for community reinvestment. And these are including but not limited to direct investments in cooperatives, public banks, credit unions or community bonds, the creation of revolving loan funds for local projects, the financing of community land trusts and additionally local procurement preferences. Next slide please. So now that we've elaborated on community reinvestment and its potential pathways, let's talk about why we're targeting universities for these investments. Firstly, universities are anchor institutions, meaning they don't move and thus serve and rely on the local. And they possess significant influence and have large impact on local, national and international communities. Next, universities don't act as neutral market actors but rather invest in order to generate large sums of profit. Furthermore, universities to an extent focus on community and civic engagement. For instance, SFU's own slogan is engaging the world. And lastly, universities have a legacy of student power and activism. As we've seen with the mentioned divestment campaigns, our universities have the potential to respond once more to calls for more responsible investments. Next slide please. So in our own groups, we've already consulted with our own club membership on what reinvestment could look like in both UBC and SFU. And folks came up with several examples and ideas beyond the ones included on this picture here. They recommended reducing use of stringent metrics in favor of thoughtful methods of quantification so that we correspond to measuring the results of reinvestment, energy efficient and community owned housing, first nation owned businesses on campus and investments to restore a broad inlet which is on the backside of SFU's Burnaby campus. So what would you envision for community reinvestments at your respective universities? And you can feel free to share in the chat. I understand some of this will translate over from the previous question but if you have something specific you wanna see at your university, please feel free to share it now for the next minute. Okay, thanks to the folks who shared. And next slide please. So yeah, thank you all for listening in. We hope you enjoyed our somewhat simplified presentation of our campaign and found it informative as well as hopeful. We just wanted to shamelessly plug our website which is a great resource on information related to our campaign and our values and the financial logistical aspects of the campaign. And it's a great way to get an idea of what we are demanding from our respective universities. You can also check out our socials, you can find us on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. And we want to once more thank the organizers for having us and Abby and I look forward to your questions at the end. Yeah, before we completely sign off I just wanna share a few resources on our campaign in the chat. They include the website to the Towards People's Endowment Campaign, a glossary of terms that we've developed for the campaign, some sample community investment ideas that are in so-called BC and Canada, and an offer that is prepared by myself, Michelle Marcus and Rachel, how it's time for our universities to reinvest in our communities. So I'll just send those now. Awesome, thanks y'all. We can pass it off to Zahir. And Zahir, you can feel free just to talk if you wanna share your screen you can, whatever works. Sure, thanks so much everyone. So I don't have a screen to share. I think I'll be relatively short for this one, but I just wanted to say, hey, I'm Zahir, he's here in pronouns. I'm calling in from Jojage Munian right now. Jojage being the Kanengeha word for the territory, Munian being Anishinaabe Mohen, so-called Montreal. And I am, as it mentioned earlier, the co-coord for reinvestment for CCC. So I just wanted to kind of show my face here and say that for anyone who is interested in reinvestment or has a reinvestment project or anything that's going on at the moment, I am like a resource that you can reach out to, for example, get things posted on CCC social media for things to divest at to get things up on their social media, on their site when they have it up, that kind of thing to find some other resources that have kind of popped up over the years, that sort of thing. As far as resources, the divest at website used to have a great resource page of reinvestment stuff. However, after their very exciting move to the Power Shift Network, I believe that page is no longer active, but I do still have access to their drive that are through the Google Drive folder for reinvestment. So I'm very happy to share that with anyone that wants it, please just kind of message me. And then, perfect, thanks so much, Korea. And then the other thing is that we used to have kind of monthly calls for the National Reinvestment Working Group of the CCC. So I just wanted to pop the invite link to the College Climate Coalition Slack in here because there is a reinvestment channel that I very much want to revive and have kind of some monthly calls. So I am just gonna kind of recopy some of these links in here to everyone for people who are interested in kind of further discussions about reinvestment after this webinar. That Slack, the reinvestment channel is going to be a great place, I hope. And I put together a when to meet for hopefully our first reinvestment call of this new year where like folks can kind of just give updates on what's going on, ask for support for their own campaigns, just chat about reinvestment, conceptual issues, really anything, just a space to kind of get reinvestment conversations going. So yeah, that's kind of all the sort of blurb about my role in this kind of thing, showing my face in that way. There is some cool work doing, cool work being done at my own university and elsewhere that I'm happy to shout out as well. And just to kind of give people a bit of perspective on like the forms that for one thing, reinvestment and for another thing, working with, for example, anti-war organizers and a bunch of other groups. So I'm an organizer with Diveson McGill, McGill being a university in so-called Montreal. And recently, we have been super interested in reinvestment, but the way that we've been doing it has come through the lens of actually trying to democratize the school as a whole with the idea being that if we kind of envision what a democratic university may look like, we'll also at the same time be envisioning, how should we kind of like create and control and use our endowment fund or the different working capital funds of the university? And how can we reinvest those things, those funds into the community and really making this kind of a holistic sort of view of the university and its contribution to the community in not just the economic sense, but in like the sense of the university. Employing people, being a boss, being a landlord, all these sorts of different things that are all super connected. And then the other thing that Diveson McGill is working on that I wanted to shout out is work with the Diveson Human Rights Coalition where we had kind of a large sort of motion to our student body, to our student union about divesting not only from fossil fuels, which is what we as a group are mostly kind of mobilizing against, but also, you know, divesting from a whole bunch of companies that our university is invested in that are all complicit in settler colonialism in all sorts of different ways. Some big instances being Oshkosh and Lockheed Martin, which both have kind of like big roles in the war machine, particularly in Saudi Arabian violence against Yemen, Israeli violence against Palestine, as well as just kind of all sorts of other different groups. So that kind of stuff is just kind of something that I wanted to share. I know just super informally without slides or anything, but just sort of the ways that these partnerships are happening, where I'm at, that might be inspiring for people to think about those sorts of things. Some other cool work I wanted to shout out. Really big one of them was the Towards People's Endowment Campaign. Thanks again, all of y'all, so much for presenting. I truly believe that your work is some of the most like exciting work that's happening in the reinvestment sphere worldwide at the moment, in the university reinvestment sphere, especially and especially since in so-called Canada, the work had kind of been picking up very slowly and you guys are really just kind of like pushing it out there into more of a mainstream. So I have a lot of appreciation for that. Another big one is Divest Harvard. Having gotten their big divest win recently is also doing a listening tour with a whole bunch of different constituencies, including people affected by Harvard's investments, people connected to transformative finance work, organizers within Harvard and Cambridge communities, and people with experience in university reinvestment organizing. That tour, I think is also super cool. And I think the listening sort of portion of reinvestment is super key in general to doing the work. So partly a plug for them because if you are any one of those constituencies, highly recommend messaging Divest Harvard social media and getting in touch, especially if you are on this call and interested about reinvestment. I think that is about all that I had to share. Sorry, I know that was a bit rambly, but happy to kind of like type some more out in the chat if anyone needs any more clarification, links to anything. Yeah, otherwise so happy to be here. Thanks everyone. Thank you, Zahore. And now we will have Shea speak about a just transition from the war machine. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Zahore. Thank you to everyone who's presented so far. It's really inspiring and humbling to hear about the really important work you all are doing in the material victories you're already winning. My name is Shea, I use they, them or she, her pronouns. I'm an organizer with Code Pink. I work on our Divest from the war machine campaign. I'm really excited to be talking with you all. And I am going to be talking a little bit about reinvestment and just transition away from the war machine. And I have a few slides that Carly might share in a moment. Thanks, Carly. So yeah, maybe we can start at the next one if that works. I've gotten a chance to do some research on the histories and possibilities of a just transition away from militarism. So I'm gonna be talking about that. It's a lot of material to cover in five minutes. So I might go a little quick and I'm definitely gonna miss a lot. But I'm just really happy to be talking about this and happy to discuss questions afterwards. So Greta and Carly did discuss the importance of divesting from war earlier today and at our previous webinar, which this graph summarizes as well in the economic realm. So much of our discretionary budget goes to militarism and our communities, our schools, our health systems, our infrastructure are left with nothing. The US military is funded to the gills to incite wars and atrocities abroad. The war on terror itself claimed an estimated 900,000 lives at the end of last year. That was the count. And as you all know, the US military is the biggest institutional producer of carbon emissions globally, producing around 59 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually. And finally, militarism is brought back home, excess military-grade weapons are funneled back into our local police departments via the 1033 program where the weapons are free and the 1122 program where the weapons are heavily discounted. We all agree, I think, that we need to end this cycle of destruction and violence. Next slide, please. But the tough thing is that militarism employs a lot of people. The United States Department of Defense is the largest employer in the United States with an estimated 2.91 million personnel employed and around 1.35 million people in the active duty military. And that's not accounting for the massive number of folks employed by the private defense industry. Speaking for myself, I'm rooting anti-war work and a genuine desire for all communities to be able to heal and thrive outside the bounds of militarism. And a crucial part of that is all people have access to livelihoods and that usually comes from work. So that raises a really big question about what it would look like not only to be divesting from militarism and moving the money away from our massive Pentagon budget and these grotesque defense corporations are reinvesting in defense workers and our communities. Next slide, please. Thanks. Gazmina highlighted this earlier so I don't need to spend too much time here but this is Movement Generations Graphic on Just Transition which highlights how Just Transition is a framework for how we can move from an extractive economic system to a regenerative economy while making sure that we are repairing the harms caused by the extractive economy and building a world where all people can thrive sustainably. And I view the Just Transition Framework as a strategy or kind of a roadmap for reinvesting in our communities on a large scale as we divest from extraction and harm. Next slide, please. So some really cool histories of defense Just Transition which I didn't know until recently so I'm stoked to be talking about the roots of Just Transition as a movement framework were actually developed in a peace movement context. They were developed post-Cold War as the Cold War was winding down and Clinton took office in 92. Defense sector workers became the largest group displaced from US private industry in the past decade. 1.4 million workers in the sector lost their jobs between 1987 and 1996. Bill Clinton vowed that post-Cold War the nation would use the cash that they were taking out of the defense budget and spend the savings to revamp public infrastructure and move workers from the military industry. And the peace movement pushed him on this. Obviously this wasn't just a decision coming from the upper level of the federal government and the economic conversion movement was formed which aimed to convert jobs away from the permanent war economy and into local peace jobs. The jobs with peace campaign arose from this framework which aimed to shift federal spending away from the military and towards supporting communities and creating jobs. So the federal government did respond to this pressure to a certain degree. The Department of Labor developed various programs meant to fund the transition of these displaced workers like the Defense Reinvestment and Conversion Initiative which had combined funding of around $16.5 billion between 1993 and 1997. It aimed to revamp healthcare and infrastructure with a special focus on the redeployment of the defense skill base away from militarism and towards these life-giving sectors. Unfortunately, I think largely the reason we don't know this story is that the federal government did fail in this initiative. They ultimately chose to manage defense drawdown in a way that prioritized defense company managers keeping these defense corporations afloat which is why we still have Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Boeing as the massive corporations they are today. So they prioritized shareholders, not workers but the seeds were already planted and I think we gained some really useful information and roadmaps from this movement. Next slide. So I would say that just transition as it's being practiced today is being used really vibrantly in the climate justice and environmental justice movement as you all have been talking about. And something really cool is that the seeds of that and the combination of defense organizing and climate and environmental organizing around just transition were already embedded from the start. There's this really awesome organizer named Tony Mazzotti I think who was a leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union representing workers in the fossil fuel, nuclear and chemical industries. And he knew that the science emerging linking fossil fuels to climate change would lead to unemployment. And so he referencing the economic conversion movement created the idea of a super fund for workers based on the program, the federal program in the United States of rehabilitating really polluted areas. And oh, great. Some people thought that the name super fund for workers was a little negative so they changed it to Just Transition. The Just Transition Alliance formed in 1997 organizing labor and frontline communities to discuss what a Just Transition could look like. And that's kind of left us where we are today. I think we have a lot to learn from each other. There are lessons to learn from brilliant Just Transition efforts that you all have been talking about. Also for example, there's the Cayenta Solar Project which is the Navajo Nation run solar power facility that was built in 2016 in response to the closure of a local coal-fired power plant in mine. The project provided local renewable energy and jobs with community leadership. And I think stories like that provide really helpful frameworks and roadmaps for how we can be organizing locally and strategically for defense transition. Yeah, I'll like wrap it up here. There's a lot more to say but I don't wanna ramble and go too quick. Here's a little table of transferable jobs. That's the other cool part is that there's a lot of defense manufacturing that would transfer really well to the creation of renewable energy infrastructure. The political will for this sort of transition I believe is building in the next slide. There's an op-ed that was published in The Nation by David Story about how we need good green union jobs over military jobs. And that is about all I've got but I would love to talk to anyone who's interested in discussing this further and would love for any of this research to be a resource to you. So please email me. Thank you all so much. Great, thank you so much. It was awesome hearing about all of y'all's organizations. With our remaining time, we were going to move into a Q&A. If for anyone watching, welcome to drop any questions into the chat or into the Q&A feature. I'm going to try to get through as many as we can with our remaining time. So to start it off, I'm just going to throw this out generally and any of the panelists, feel free to take it if you call to. But the first one is what opportunities do you see for the reinvestment movement in the near future? What is exciting you about reinvestment work? I can jump on this one. I'm excited to see new models for affordable student housing developed with reinvestment. I think those are really big opportunity to start looking at how we can create co-op housing on campus that is energy efficient and that uses renewable energy. And I'm just excited for the continued coalition building that's going to continue happening across Canada. We already have a Divest Canada Coalition and I think there's a chance to build on that same energy for reinvestment across the country. I definitely agree. I think that reinvestment at the moment is like in a stage where there's a lot of visioning happening of like all sorts of different, all sorts of different visions and the sort of like interleaving of different ideas and different campaigns that's happening at the moment is super exciting to me. Both with everything that was discussed today with reinvestment, both from the climate side and from the war machine side is just super interesting. And I think that is whenever, like we can interleave movements, reinvestment is a really kind of good space for that to happen. Because it really is about figuring out what all of us as a community need with kind of a intersectional focus on power with a focus on just kind of who people are and what communities are and what they need. So in the university context, there's all sorts of like very cool questions that have arisen around in our democratization movement is around say like if we had community control of the endowment by students, students, professors, staff, community members, particularly indigenous folks who have been systematically deprived of resources by the community over its entire operation. If we had a body like that that's actually representative of the community and actually has ties to the community instead of corporate folks managing big funds like the endowments, what sorts of things could we do? What sorts of things could we imagine being done with that money to supporting? So like opportunities for visioning, that kind of thing are like for me, I think some of the most like exciting stuff. Yeah, I don't have too much to add that you all haven't said, but I completely agree. Visioning I think is the really exciting part. And I think it's also a really cool way that we can be building our movements and bringing folks on board, especially when we get to the point in our visioning where like you, where you all are at, where you're creating kind of this like real roadmap to the type of investments and industries and economies that you wanna be building that offer opportunities for people who maybe didn't see themselves in the work before and maybe that looks like jobs or maybe that looks like something else. My mind is just with jobs, but I think that's a really good way to be building like an actually broad movement and like a very, very broad umbrella that will allow us to get further and have those in power listen more. That's awesome, thank you all so much. And then on the flip side, what are some challenges that y'all have come up against or that you see the reinvestment movement coming up against now or in the future? A lot of the challenges that come from the reinvestment movement is kind of trying to debunk like the myths that come along with it. So for instance, like from the presentation that Shay gave, we saw that there are renewable jobs out there and that there can be renewable jobs created, but oftentimes that's not really like looked at too much or it's believed that there's not gonna be enough like that people are a lot of people are gonna be jobless but it's like if we focus our time and energy on like reinvesting in different resources and going towards the future, people will have jobs and people will be able to still work but the environment also won't be damaged and such. Oh, sorry, Abby, do you wanna go? No, go ahead. Okay, thanks. Yeah, Aiden just like building on what you are saying. I think like we know that the jobs are there and if they're not there already, they can be built. I think like in the defense world, one of the biggest barriers, if not the biggest is that these defense contractors have a massive monopoly over the job market largely because of the amount of federal money, taxpayer money that they're given. So they can distort the labor market. They can offer a more lucrative and compelling pay than other civilian jobs. And I think that makes it easier for folks to take these jobs even though in their heart of hearts they know that like they're producing bombs or missiles. And like the federal government, I don't think it's either like the corporations that's not in their interest to be ushering their workers into green jobs and the way the money is moving right now like we don't have the funds to be creating the type of green jobs that we need to be creating. Our priorities are off. So I think that is like the biggest barrier but I also think that there's a lot of space for creative visioning in ways to be pushing on all levels on the local level, on the federal level by naming and shaming these evil contractors to say that people don't want this dirty money and don't wanna be working for these companies and can see what's happening and how those jobs are being created. But the corporate interest, I think, is a really significant barrier to this type of reinvestment and transition. Yeah, to take a more of like a university lens on this, I think there's gonna be some of the same issues and challenges we saw when we approached divestment at universities, then our university financial administration and try to review divesting as risky. And in the same grant, I think they're gonna view community reinvestment as being risky again. So just to try to tell them, you know, that community reinvestments are not inherently risky. We want to invest in local communities, surrounding universities and honoring universities and that there is the financial case that these types of investments can perform better during economic downturns. We saw after the 2008 financial crisis that that was definitely the case in the US and in Canada. And I don't think it'll be only universities that view this as risky. I think the donors that donate to these huge endowments our universities have are gonna view them as risky as well. So trying to make sure we get the narrative in there that that is not what these are before that they take that and run with it. Thanks, y'all. Obviously we have a lot of student groups and student organizers on the call and this may mention, I used to give an interest in jobs. So wondering if you or anyone could really talk about how you see student groups being able to connect with the labor movement in so-called Canada or in so-called United States and where can those groups really work together aside from this webinar? So this is somewhere where maybe I could join in as well with kind of what's been happening with my campaign and kind of the focuses that we're taking. So kind of the main stage where we're at is kind of a hesitant to say consultative stage but a stage where we're really wanting to listen to people's grievances with the university and with their whole experience with the university and kind of imagine better alternatives as well. And like what's really important to do there and I think this comes in like the challenges as well and something that I mentioned earlier is like really going out with constituencies and really listening. Then the way that we're doing that at the moment is with kind of like community assemblies for students, professors. And what we're planning to do soon is like a community assembly that specifically hears the concerns of staff, of labor, of folks that are unionized and not and there are a lot of cool unionization initiatives that are going on right now. And then kind of involving them kind of directly into the work and listening to how their experience with the university could be improved, how it could be better, what sorts of barriers that are institutional at the moment exist and how those sorts of things could be changed. So this is with a sort of broad lens. Coming back to reinvestment, I think the same sort of work can and should and I think will happen because there's just very, very important voices. And I think, yeah, like I keep coming back to this point but I really do think that the most important and difficult stage of reinvestment is really doing that kind of like outreach and listening work to constituencies that as campaigns we just very often have never really discussed with never really talked to. They're just kind of like outside of the realm of like who we influence on social media in person, all of that. And I think part of the real beauty of reinvestment is how you're forced to actually meet with those constituencies like labor, like so many others and actually kind of like do the work together. This was again kind of rambly as an answer but just kind of my perspective from the own work that we're doing. We do see that we are approaching the hour. I am gonna take just a quick moment too to also plug some of the work that Divest Ed does in this area. We do a coach and mentor on a tactic called recruitment disruption. So looking at how companies show up on college campuses that can be through like sponsoring classes, recruitment fairs, a lot of other insidious ways and look at how we can remove them from our campuses. Totally welcome to reach out to us if you want more information on that. I do see that we're at the top of the hour. We don't wanna hold people all night to say really thank you to everyone who showed up tonight. Thank you to all our panelists. I learned so much and really feel really like configurated around this work. And thank you all like the links that were dropped in the chat. We are gonna send a follow-up email with the recording and every, yeah, like linking contact information that we put, but just wanna say again, thank you, thank you, thank you. This is just the beginning of the work and so excited to see where it all goes.