 And now we'll have a special address by Marisa Guananja. Hi, good afternoon everyone and welcome to Spectrum. My name is Marisa Guananja and I am a program officer on the Family Economic Security Team at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Before continuing, I wanna share some words of gratitude. Nadia, thank you so much for bringing us into this space with the reverence and reflection that this moment deserves and miss your generosity and spirit and love as a colleague at the Foundation. Thank you also to those of you who kicked us off this morning, Sarah Eagleheart, Julio Rivera, Julio thank you for bringing my grandmother into the space and Stacey Abrams. What a powerful way to start this morning. And thank you, Kiesha and Carrie for bringing us here today. Your efforts even over the last two weeks to make sure this conversation is grounded in the context of what is happening while continuing to push us forward to focus on long-term solutions is admirable. Thank you. And welcome to all of you. Thank you for joining us in this space and in these conversations. I wanna start with a bit of a personal reflection. Over the last week and a half, the usual greeting of how are you or how are you doing has taken on a heaviness. Personally, I have been experiencing a deep sadness and reckoning. As a light-skinned Latina who has benefited from the privilege that society bestows on lightness I have benefited from colorism, I have a responsibility to bear, to show up as an unapologetic ally, to engage in the uncomfortable conversations, to make room at the table and to ask whose voice is not here and to make sure that next time they are in the room and they are valued. The current state of affairs has exposed deep racial and equities across a number of systems that clearly devalue black lives. Black people account for 13% of the US population yet make up almost a quarter, 24% of COVID-19 deaths. Black unemployment has always tracked at twice that of white unemployment. After pandemic shutdowns, less than half of black adults are working. Unarmed black men and women are killed at the hands of police at disproportionately higher rates than whites are. And remember, while blacks make, black people make up 13% of the population, they account for 23% of those shot and killed. These inequities are systemic, built on centuries of deliberate action and policies that intentionally discriminate and held some people back, people of color. For the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and I'm sure for many of you in this room, this is not new news. People of color, immigrants, Native Americans, people in jails and prisons, poor, the ones suffering and dying in greater numbers bear the brunt of inequities in all of our systems, including the ones that will interrogate over the course of the next three days. The work before us, the work before those of us at Spectrum and before the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is to address the structural racism behind these inequities. This is why we are here. So how do we do that? Let's show up as unapologetic allies to the black and brown people that aren't in this room. To the black and brown people, a bit downstream from the capital that we are deploying or the capital we are seeking for our ventures, black and brown workers. At the foundation, I manage a portfolio that focuses on work structures. On the relationships that workers have with their employers, how they are compensated, these work structures are critical drivers of racial wealth inequality. In the portfolio, we have grantees such as United for Respect who organized Toys R Us workers for the first ever hardship fund for laid off workers. A $20 million financial assistance fund created by Toys R Us former private equity owners, KKAR and Bain Capital. Now as Toys R Us reopens, they are doing so with a mirror board comprised of three former frontline Toys R Us employees and organizers who will have access to key corporate information and who will sit alongside the board of directors. The workers have been trained by MIT Sloan School of Management. Is this a model that could be replicated? With that example as context, here are some questions for us to consider this week. Diversity and inclusion are important markers for progress, but they are not sufficient. How can we ensure that diversity and inclusion and capital flows in the C suite in board rooms translate to something meaningful for workers that are often seen as expenses and liabilities to be mitigated? The business practices and decisions that companies make are not made in a vacuum. They are made in the context of a political economy with a fraying social contract that needs to be renegotiated with people of color at the negotiating table. Perhaps it makes business sense to have a cadre of part-time workers to limit the benefits that you as an employer are providing, but then are you also lending your voice to calls for a robust public option? As more and more people talk about transitioning from a shareholder economy to a stakeholder economy, how are we all of us in this room ensuring that the voices of workers and communities help to shape and define what that means? And importantly, what are the mechanisms by which stakeholders, black and brown workers and communities can hold us to account? What you'll hear, explore and learn over the next three days and what we're excited by at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation will provide ideas necessary to move forward and to imagine and build a new future in which all children, families, and communities have the opportunity to thrive. Thank you and I'm looking forward to the conversation.