 It wasn't working before, I apologize. Okay, so I want to preface, I'm gonna give a little bit of preamble and that we can from that preamble introduce ourselves. So on the program, it says, Hillish Patel Community Organizer and I have to say I bristled at that a little bit. I have organized in the past, primarily around education and with and against Chicago Public Schools, but I'm not currently an organizer. And for me, and I was talking to someone earlier and saying that I grew up as a dancer, but I'm no longer a dancer. I don't have that daily practice anymore. And so I think about that. What does it mean to have a daily practice? And for me, not only am I thinking about what does it mean to have a daily practice, not only as an organizer and as a dancer, but also how do you split these things into two different pathways? What does it mean to be a dancer? What does it mean to dance? And so with that, I wanted to ask you who you are and what you do at Chicago United for Equity and what does it mean to have a civic practice, which is something that I see you do every day and I'm curious how you articulate it. And you might be like, well, I really don't know, but I'm putting you on the spot. Thank you. My name is Nikita Brar. I am the co-founder and executive director of Chicago United for Equity, but more importantly, I am a Civic Systems Organizer. And so what that means to me in my civic practice actually starts with stepping back a little bit and connecting to the frame of the conversation today that was laid out so beautifully about belonging to a place. So I can't tell you about what I do without telling you that if you're from Chicago, the first question you're gonna ask me is what high school did you go to? And I did not go to high school here. I have been here for about 10 years. I grew up outside of the city, lived in Oakland, lived in Michigan, and then returned here. And in returning here, right, I think my, in answering your question of what's your civic practice, it's like I came back to Chicago with this appreciation that I am a visitor here and that it is my job to pay attention to the stories of this place. And the irony of course is that the stories of this place made me feel immediately a sense of belonging because I'm a kid of the diaspora and a kid of a particular diaspora from Punjab, which was divided and given power associated with who you are and how you were seen as more or less human. And so coming to Chicago in developing a civic practice was like finding myself. It was like finding parts of my family. My, I feel a deep connection to my ancestors here because the stories of how they navigated power and they had to navigate it without language for it. I feel like my civic practice is very much rooted in this like, for a person who doesn't consider themselves deeply religious, it feels like a deeply spiritual practice to ask myself what it means to belong. And Chicago right now is grappling with that conversation about what it means to belong, who is allowed to belong here. And so my civic practice is both on a day to day basis sitting on, sitting at coalition tables where we are debating policy and people's everyday lives and what we are going to do to try to make them better. But it is also very rooted in who I am and who came before me and what I want to leave behind. And we'll treat this other dialogue so you can put me on the spot too. But one of the things, not to make a complete linear connection, but this idea of not having power and not having language, there are a lot of people that I talk to on a daily basis who will talk about engaging with quote unquote politics or civic issues in Chicago and will use that same language. I feel like I don't have power, I don't have the language. Can you talk a little bit about how you react to that and how you educate people on that and then if it's applicable, the people's budget? Yeah, I mean I think that question of how you feel about your relationship to power in Chicago is relevant no matter what power position authority you hold, right? I saw that when I served on the local school council for a school called National Teachers Academy and was really involved because my family of educators, both my grandmothers were educators, I was a teacher previously and so it felt very important to me to be rooted in place by being rooted in my local school community. And very quickly learned that the public school system had intention to close the school down and so the first sort of thing that I knew to do was to go talk to families, parents, grandparents and say, do you know this is going on? How do you wanna get involved? And in door knocking, I would have these conversations where you would meet these historians of debates about power who'd say this happened to us a generation ago. They cut the bus line, they made sure we couldn't get to school and there's this massive displacement that happened and I would say, okay, so you're ready, right? We're having our organizing meeting on Thursday, are you coming? And they'd say, I've done this before, I've fought this fight before and I don't have it in me to fight again. Now juxtapose that to in the same campaign we would have parents and family members sit down with members of the Board of Education of Chicago and we would say to them and they would, you know, here's what's going on, here's a story and at the end they would say, I feel for you, I think this is wrong that the mayor is pushing this but I don't have the power to change it. And so I think I grapple a lot with what it means to be a Chicagoan, to have the sort of experience of feeling like I'm just one of so many and how will my voice ever make a difference and also to sit in places of formal authority where you would imagine they do have power but they don't feel powerful. And I think a lot of that in terms of the people's budget and kind of like what is the goal of the organization that I have been part of for the last seven years is really how do we shift the relationship between people and the power they perceive themselves to have and the authority that they feel they are living under. And so that changing and shifting of your relationship to power doesn't happen just because you have more information. It happens because you choose to participate and say, though I see very clearly a history of time being wasted in the civic system, I am going to choose to participate in it anyway. It is logical to sit with a history of disenfranchisement of civic trauma and to say, I do not wanna participate in this. It is courageous to say, I acknowledge that history and instead of walking away, I choose to participate in something that may take more than my lifetime to achieve. And so I think the harder part of that people's budget which we built out of the summer of 2020 and the uprisings, we had been talking about what it means to take a racial equity lens to the city budget process for years. Since the very first cohort of fellows that we hosted had raised it as a project they wanted to work on in 2017. And in 2020, we said, this is the moment. If there was a moment to talk about the city budget and to bring people's, not just anger and frustration but their hopes into this space, this is the space. And so we started to have these conversations in different neighborhoods of Chicago where you bring a budget board by and we'd say, we're not gonna talk about the budget. What we're gonna ask is very simple. What does your community need to be safe and thriving? And everyone has an answer to that. And so asking questions that invite every single person to have a place to participate and setting the table from there and then saying, okay, so now let's talk about what are the different areas of needs and where would you put your dollars with real tokens and people actually playing that game the way that I remember sitting with my grandmother and playing games around, right? Like that's the sense of community that we wanted to create was not this idea of a policy person sitting at a board with a presentation, but actually we are all policy makers and what could it look like for us to engage beauty and art in creating that space? And it was a beautiful project. I remember, in fact, I found a Post-it note the other day in a journal where my team and I had sort of laid out our goals for the project and one of them was to create beauty. And we don't talk about beauty as an act of civic service, right? But to build something beautiful that inspires people and we got into the budget and we talked about how many millions are in this and billions are in that. But the more important thing was at the end for us to be able to say, okay, we sat in a group of 10, Halesh, who do you think should represent this conversation to your alderman? And for Halesh to say, well, I think it should be so and so and to watch people say, me. I'm shocked, you want me? I'm not a leader, right? And there's like this, of all the things that I like to do, that is what I love to do is to watch people see that they have power, that a group sees them as a leader and a leader full presence. So I think that's the beauty, right? It's how do we create that? I mean, you create a lot of beauty in the work you do. How do you think about that in your civic practice? Well, I mean, I think about leadership a lot. Ways in which to define it, ways in which to subvert it and then how people, for me, how do I say this? Ambition's not a bad thing. I know that people who wanna be, I'm not negating people who wanna be leaders, but the leaders that I find often who are doing the most sustainable and productive work are the ones who didn't anticipate being leaders, are the ones who got called to do it or got pushed to the front. And then quite often in their path, I get to meet them where they say, can you tell me how to be a leader? Can I get some training? I'm like, you've been doing this for five to 20 years. And they're like, I don't know how to do this. I'm just like flying by the seat of my pants. Not only that, I have 20 young people who I'm building the capacity of and I have no pathways to give them. And what does that look like? And so there's this collective definition of leadership, this identification with this one particular individual. And then there's this subversive idea, quote unquote, subversive idea of collective leadership. But really this infusion of care gets pushed to the side. And it doesn't just push to the side in conversations, it gets pushed to the side in funding. People don't fund, like if you are a leader and you go to a funding entity and say, I'm tired, I'm exhausted, I could use a break, no one's gonna give you, you know? And I think there are vehicles and apparatus, I can think of one person in particular who, Angelique over here who very intentionally said to me, like, no, we want to do that. We want to create a vehicle to do that. And I think there are spaces to do that. And so I think in terms of my civic practice, I think about that. So I'm someone who weaves all that in, but I'm also a poet. So I try to bring beauty to, but also not just beauty for me as a poet. It's not just about bringing beauty to the table. It's about bringing discomfort, letting people sit in discomfort. And allowing, as you, you know, as we're thinking about municipal spaces, government spaces, pushing them to be in discomfort, that it's not just that you're creating opportunities and moments for people to be heard. You're like, no, I'm gonna shift the power. You're gonna be in discomfort and we're gonna push and distribute the power over here. So I think about that quite a bit. I feel like in what I'm hearing from you, this idea of discomfort I think is really, really powerful because we've been playing with this concept of just saying like leadership, because we have fellows every year who are sort of labeled as leaders and they're also uncomfortable with the title, right? Of being a leader as a singular practice. And we've been sitting with like, how do we help describe the types of folks that we see as leaders? And one phrase that we keep coming back to is the idea of courage over comfort. That they're practicing courage despite the fact that it is uncomfortable. Is it brave if it's hard or is it brave because it's uncomfortable and you choose to participate anyway? If it doesn't feel like it's difficult, then I'm not sure it's courage, right? And I say that because I think it's incumbent on all of us to actually practice being uncomfortable, practice being in spaces where our voice doesn't carry the same way and we still participate in raising it. Yeah, I wanna add to that that in addition to the discomfort and this was mentioned earlier with what you know, what one of our speakers was saying that this deliberate shift away from the binary that people that we're in order to and I don't know if this is gonna make sense or that come out the way I want it to, you'll probably do a better job of this than I will, that you want leaders, you want civic practitioners to sit with multiple things at once and that to quote a colleague and an old friend that you want to queer the civic space, you wanna disrupt the binary because power exists in the binary. People, governments, entities really love the binary. They love it when it's like, here's good, here's bad. Go out and do with it what you will. But disrupting that is where that discomfort lies as well. Yeah, and I think that can get super tangible when we start to look at where Chicago is right now. We are in a space of sort of saying like we have this incredibly progressive mayor, we've got a city council that is different in realignment, we have all these things in place so shouldn't we just be happy with what we've got? And there's a remarkable, and maybe just remarkably predictable path to sort of saying like, well, any resistance to the idea that this is enough is you're just asking for too much. And I think it's part of our job to say, yes, we can celebrate what we have and in fact we must be audacious in pushing ourselves further. That it's quite important that we hold true to the idea that it is not our job to protect leaders from critique, it is actually our job to create critique. That critique is what sharpens us. And I think part of the culture that we sit in and the culture that we have to challenge and to disrupt is this idea that because I'm on your team that I'm always gonna be your biggest cheerleader. Yeah, and you have to agree with everything that I say. Of course, of course, right? And so like part of, I mean, I sit and I reflect on that and I think, wow, it must be hard to be friends with me. Because like the people I love. You have no idea. Because the people I love the most are the people who are gonna hear it from me the most because I care enough about them to challenge them. If I don't really care about you and we're not really in relationship like that, I'll let it go. I don't want to invest my time. Well, and then when we do our hour long talk, whenever we do our next hour long talk, we can talk about the South Asian-ness of that, but we'll come back to that. Max, I wanted to do a time check. Three minutes, okay. What do we want to talk about for three minutes? Well, the one thing that, and I don't know how to incorporate this in, but this came up this morning super early when I was on a phone call. There's this constant idea and maybe this isn't the direction to go, but that there are people, and again, when I say there are people in power, it's a little bit of a nebulous, but there's this constant regurgitated idea that you just need to know your place. And it could be when we're talking about civics or racial equity or when we're talking about any sort of power that what are you doing? You don't know your place. You don't know your place in the system of things. You don't know your place in this system that I've created, et cetera. So that's one thing I wanted to bring up. I only have like two minutes to talk about that, but yeah, we need to sit with that idea because that's such a racialized concept, right? It's such a power, it's power enforcing itself to protect against critique again. You just need to know your place. Who's told to know their place? I remember when I worked at the governor's office, I was one of two women of color and I'm barely melanated. So the idea that, like, and I was told that, you gotta know your place. And so, you know, I sat with that a lot, the folks that were peers to me, but we weren't really peers because in that hierarchy, right? It was, they were never told to know their place. They were invited to lead conversations. And so, I rebel against that idea, but I also, I think it's important that we envision what it looks like when we are in leadership. And to envision what it is that I will build differently in order for the realization of the younger me to be able to thrive. And I say that because I think in many ways, I think it feels like enough to just be in power and to use the structure that existed to drive a different outcome. And that feels like quite enough for a lot of people. And it takes a lot more imagination to say, I'm not just gonna be in authority, I'm gonna restructure authority so that no one here could ever be told to know their place. And it takes quite a bit of confidence actually, quite a bit of confidence in your own leadership in order to be willing to do that. So I think that's what I invite us to do in this conversation throughout the rest of today and tomorrow is, you know, how do I cultivate a quiet sense of confidence that allows me to challenge and disrupt power structures and to say we deserve better? I think that's great. I think that's a great way to end it because I know Max has been giving us time, time's up. Also kudos to Max for keeping on the grammar with all the time stuff. Thank you all. Thank you.