 Hello, I'm Kat. I'm so grateful to Rosalie and to SoCAP. Rosalie has joined the advisory board for Defy Ventures. Last year was my first time ever here at SoCAP, and we got to present Defy. And what we do at Defy is we transform the hustle of people who did prison time. We transform it into legal hustle and help them to start businesses and help them to incorporate their businesses and then we incubate them. And last year, when I came here to Defy, or I'm sorry, to SoCAP, I came out from New York. We were just a New York-based organization, and I said, I have a dream that one day we will be able to serve people nationally. And you people of SoCAP heard my plea and you made this dream happen. And so I'm here to give a big, huge love bomb to SoCAP. And people in this audience, when we spoke last year, heard it, and in the audience was Google.org and the K-Pors as well, Mitch and Frida. And they provided the funding. We got $500,000 from Google.org and we got $250,000 from Mitch and Frida to be able to make the dream a reality. We have used that money. Yeah, thank you. So in the past year, we were able to use that money to establish a presence here in the Bay Area where we now serve people. And we have been able to incubate 112 businesses that have been started by men and women who serve time, who are transforming their hustle into legal businesses. Right here, this is Odwin Chambers. He's one of our legal entrepreneurs from Oakland originally, and he makes these hats. And the coolest development for Defy that has come out of the SoCAP love is that just one year into it, we are not only serving men and women who have been released from prison and equipping them, but also inside jails and prisons nationally. We're serving here inside San Francisco Jails and the California Department of Corrections and later this month, we are also working in the federal prison system with women. So I can't even express my gratitudes officially for what it has been for us to be able to come and get in front of people like yourselves. The other reason that I'm here today besides giving this love bomb to SoCAP is to get to introduce our next panel that is up to some very important work. The reason that I have devoted my life to working with people inside and outside of prisons is because I believe that they represent America's biggest underdogs and America's most overlooked talent pool. And I do this work because of my hatred for injustice. And every day, I know and love people who have suffered from economic injustice and racial injustice that is plaguing our country in a very big way. A couple of statistics for you. By the age of 23, the young age of 23, 30% of Americans already have criminal histories. 50% of black men already have criminal histories. And for people who don't know a whole lot about this sector, you may think, well, you wouldn't probably say this out loud. Maybe it's because black people are committing all the crimes. Wrong. In America, the majority of crime of drug dealing and drug-using crime is done by whites. Yet, in our jails and prisons, 75% of people who are locked up over drug-related crimes are African-American or Latino. And in San Francisco, in our great city here, only 6% of the population here is African-American. And yet, 44% of the people who are locked up in our prisons are African-American. There is so much that is going wrong in our country. And six months ago, I got to seek out and meet somebody that I admire very much. His name is Ben Jealous. He's a former president and CEO of the NAACP. And he has given his whole life to bringing justice to this sector. So Ben is on this next panel. I talked Ben into joining the advisory board recently. And Ben and a panel are now going to lead us in an amazing discussion on something that is so important in America. I'm really grateful that SoCAP has given this audience to us in this time. So we're going to welcome them up in the way that we do things at Defy. I want you to start with a little Level 1 golf clap, polite, polite, okay? This is how many people introduce up an audience, but they're better than that. So I'm going to get all the way up to 10, give them a little bit to two, three we're going to give it up for this panel, four, five, more, a little more, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Yeah. Thank you. Can you hear me? Wow, there's a lot more people. Ooh, nice. Ben, can you hear us okay? Uh-oh. Hello, Ben. We can see your mouth move. Ah, there we go. Alright, hey. My name is Dekker Gongang. I'm a senior fellow at Frontline Solutions and we're having an intimate conversation on equity, equity issues. You can call it racial equity, you can call it gender equity, but the first kind of one along with your introductions of yourselves, I would love for you to talk through what does equity mean to you? Oh, wow. I love that slide. We talk about diversity, whether it be gender diversity or racial diversity, and we kind of remain, the language remains in this vague, ambiguous space. Or it remains in this kind of like, oh, well we need more brown faces, or we need this. I would love for you all to kind of talk through what equity and inclusion means to you, and then how do you see it in your work? Yeah. Well, I'm Nikki Silvestri. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Silvestri Strategies and Food Systems Economic Development. When I think about equity, I think about agency, honestly, that there's so many ways that I could define equity based on the work that I've done, but the hardest thing with economic development is to bring a group of people and a community into relationship with the resources and the people that they need to actually have agency over their own future and their own economic development work. So that's what equity means to me. And I'm Ed Duggar. I'm president of ReInventure Capital, which is a venture fund information. I have a long history as a pioneer in impact investing over 20 years, and equity, let me turn it around just a little bit because equity has to do, and this session has to do with race and diversity. And race is weird. Race is a social construct, but for most of us, it's also a social shorthand. And it's a social shorthand that begins to define privilege. If you think about privilege, opportunity is shared privilege. So, I want to share a little bit about how I experience race. Most of my life, it went by the 1% rule. In other words, if I had 1% black in me, I was black. That was most of my life. And then when Obama was elected, suddenly people turned to me, most of whom I didn't know and say, are you biracial? So my status in life went up. I'm not saying, but my status, my sense of privilege, went up. And most recently, I was talking to someone, a very nice woman, a white woman who said, and I told her my background, and she said, I said I was black. And she said, do you mean that you were adopted by a black family? And I said, no, so suddenly I became white, which was the highest status whatsoever. So race is convenient. Race changes, depending on the circumstances, race changes in terms of how people perceive you in terms of the privilege and opportunity you should have. Ben? Could you reset the question? I was so lost in what you were talking about. I could keep going on that tangent, but I want to make sure that I answer your question. Yeah, we're asking one, how do you see the complexities of nuances around equity and race? And how you, in your role in K-POR, or in your previous roles have seen it play out? Gotcha. So I'm Ben Jellis, former national president, CEO of the NAACP and a general partner at K-POR Capital. We invest in seed-stage social impact tech. You know, I guess I deal with equity and race in very concrete terms. But I think that K-POR Capital and the K-POR Center for Social Impact, for instance, is just, you know, quite simply, if we assume that genius is, you know, occurs at the same rate in every zip code, are we making sure that we're tapping into the genius in every zip code in this country? When we look at our schools, does it appear that our schools are, you know, sort of clear, powerful conduits for young geniuses onto the opportunities you know, that are there? You know, if, and as investors, what we're really concerned about is are all of the ideas that could both create high growth businesses and help close gaps in our society because we're social impact investors, are they being accessed? Or are we sending millions of geniuses headed towards prison and millions more, not even teaching them how to read? And are we simply letting lots of great ideas just wither on the vine of a country that is riddled with injustice and racism in the nation of various sorts? And so, you know, I think it's important that we can't, you know, given this crowd that we really focus on our responsibility, if you will, to be ensuring that the great ideas get to us and ensuring that our country taps into all the genius that are possibly here. I want to piggyback on one of your comments and open up a question for everybody. We come to conferences like this, we often assume that there's kind of like this boogeyman that we're here to solve a social good problem. But with this one, I think in this last year and a half we've had probably a more intense conversation as a nation than we've ever had around structural racialization. Can you talk through what beyond our intent, beyond our goodwill, what these challenges, these barriers are in society? Thinking about education, whether it be climate change, whether it be community organizations, what do those barriers look like? Not even just from an investment standpoint, but how do folks experience it? You know, I... Storytime. Storytime. Yes, yes, yes. When it comes to the kind of barriers people encounter, the word that comes up for me is relationship. That there is a pipeline. The young man who goes to jail because he didn't pay a parking ticket, but can't stop driving his car because that's the only source of transportation he has to get to his job and he as a child is in a very different situation than someone at the other end of the pipeline that may want to invest in a business that is either hiring difficult to employ individuals or who is investing in social entrepreneurship with people of color and low income people. And every step along the way, there's cultural healing work, there's soft skills training, there is... There's things as simple as how to open a bank account, how to write a check before you even get to some of these conversations about real entrepreneurship, and that's what we're talking about. The wealth gap and the economic inequality has widened so dramatically that the situation that I described is actually very normal for a large percentage of Americans and we don't have the kind of relationships along the pipeline for people to even understand what they're talking about. We can ask a question and be having a conversation with someone and it is in one ear and out the other because you're talking like this. So one of the barriers is just being able to listen, have enough humility to deeply listen to the contextual differences with the way that we operate in the world so that when we're talking about solutions we create things that actually work. Picking up on sort of the listening and the nuances in particular what Reinventure Capital does and what we've done in the past is we invest in support of entrepreneurs of color and women because we believe firmly that access to capital has been a very difficult problem historically before, today, and whatever. And this listening piece is a really critical one because I want to share with you an example of those of us who are trying to address that problem and form funds and what have you deal with this kind of thing and here we go. I was meeting with an investment advisor and we were talking about issues around diversity and suddenly he said, oh yeah, I know about affirmative action. Now this was, by the way, a very progressive group, very progressive and so as we talked about a little bit more he said I describe my background Harvard undergraduate, Princeton successful fund and so forth and so on and he said to me you know we have similar backgrounds you went to Harvard I went to Harvard, blah blah blah and so why do we both need to be in the room at the same time? Now I don't know how that struck you, but the way it struck me was it was me that didn't need to be in the room because we were all the same. Now it was interesting about that it was, to me that was a no-win situation because it was either if I was the other, not like him then I was not worthy and I was not needed but if I was like him then I was worthy but still not needed no-win situation and that is what we often come up against in terms of trying to do what we try to do is having opportunity because it's really all about opportunity again I'll say opportunity is about shared privilege and Ben Frida K4rombel often says or corrects folks I think it's Frida Ormich says it's not under privilege, it's under opportunity and I noticed that you are now in your role have started to advise entrepreneurs and also advise entrepreneurs but also speak publicly can you talk through or give us examples of what that opportunity looks like? Sure, actually I want to go back for a second to what the problem looks like because I think it's helpful to talk about it on the sort of micro level we're talking about it on the interpersonal but in doing so we can lose track of the fact that the problem is so big you can actually see it from outer space I mean just the problem of racism and of segregation and mass incarceration of slavery before if you had a satellite 150 years ago 160, 170 years ago you would see massive plantations deforestation in the midst of forest in the south lots of dark backs been over shoulder to shoulder picking if you had a satellite 70 years ago and you were over cities you would notice that people of one hue clustered on one side of the city and people of a different hue spread out a bit more on the other side of the city you can see the ghetto from space and today what you see from space in our country if you pull back state by state it's pockmarked with prisons we are the most incarceration country on the planet why is that important? Well turns out you can also see it without a satellite you just go into any group of young people in our country and you generally are dealing with three outcomes that are driven by mass incarceration the first one is obvious if you're in a prison or a jail we got more incarcerated young people per capita than any other country on the planet the next year are kind of less obvious if you're you go from that group of 18 year olds to the ones who are in college well they're now increasingly nervous because they are part of a generation that they just joined that is the most indebted group of college students we've ever had the highest default rate so what's the connection between the two in the last 40 years as spending on prison has gone up state by state state subsidy of public higher education has gone down precipitous in California 40 years ago 11% of the state budget went to public higher education 3% went to prisons 5, 6 years ago as the last time I checked the numbers it was 11% was going to prisons 7.5% to public universities that particular year Jerry Brown had proposed that it actually 15% to prisons and 6% to public universities well unlike Harvard or Princeton or in my case Columbia and Oxford when you're at a public university when government subsidy goes down there's not like a big endowment to offset it tuition just goes up and when public university tuition goes up well then private schools feel permission to raise theirs as well and so the incarceration has been actually driving the student debt problem and then you have the third group of students who are working at Starbucks often who simply feel that they can't afford to go to college at the moment and so we need to own that because the reality is that we don't just have the most incarcerated group of black people in the country although we tend to publicly think of the incarcerated population as black we have the most incarcerated white people on the planet too and there's a dynamic there that if you will because we think of public prisons or public housing or public education as sort of a black space that we give ourselves permission to just do horrible things with all those institutions now getting back to opportunity and to actually disrupting that what can we do well you know kind of at the midterm level there's all sorts of laws that are being passed that can be passed to actually drive down incarceration it's one of the things we can have hope for as we look towards 2016 and beyond is where we have increasing consensus in both parties but then it gets down to well what can we do this school year well this school year we can do for instance what we do at the K-Port Center for Social Impact through a program called SMASH the summer math and science honors program you know we take kids 80 percent free and reduced lunch schools B and C students with promise we give them 15 weeks of extra instruction five years excuse me five weeks after the first second third years of high school and we see their trajectories bend up from heading towards college or heading to a low level state school to ultimately significant numbers of them going to Cal, Stanford, MIT and the like all of them going to college and and half of them going to top 50 schools but then again the big cluster at the top of the very top schools what we can do as investors is just simply open our doors our returns at K-Port Capital are very very good and half the companies that we invest in every year sometimes it's 48 percent sometimes it's 54 percent but just call it half are founded by blacks, Latinos or women and we don't have to try we just keep our doors open and so you know I think that's the most important thing is what does opportunity look like opportunity looks like getting a good education opportunity looks like a VC keeping their door open to the next great idea and not just doing kind of pattern matching that simply is just a fancy way of saying racism and sexism and you know finally the and for that matter excluding the overwhelming majority of the colleges in the country we tend to focus on people from like 20 schools when we have 2000 so even you said I have race and gender there's a lot of folks who are not whose great ideas we aren't we aren't hearing and then you know the last thing I would say is that what opportunity if you will sort of a mind that's bent on increasing opportunity looks like it looks like Jack Kemp the 10th anniversary of the riots in South LA preparing to speak right after he was on fire that day he kept on talking about the school kids of South Central LA and he kept saying our kids our kids our kids and this older black woman standing next to me in the wings edge of the stage said whose kids she said where is he from I said that's Jack Kemp I know who he is I said well he said I know what he did where is he from I said ma'am I don't think he's from here that you said well whose kids is he talking about and I said ma'am I think I get your point he's not from South Central LA but I want you to hear his point which is that we are all citizens of this country and so are those children and therefore they are all our children we are all people of this country and so are those kids whether they're citizens or not and therefore they are all our children and that's really what the problem of race if you will keeps us from recognizing despite the fact we'll close on this that's no more significant skin colors no more no more significant than hair color or eye color we give it all this weight that it really doesn't deserve and we shortcut the potential of our country and our country's children in the process thank you very much Ben with a short with a short amount of time left Nikki I wanted to to ask you about kind of the intersection of issues beyond race so thinking about like two defining issues of my generation it feels like structural racism and then climate change so on television and in social impact or social sector conversations those are two large conversations what is the intersection or interplay of over the root cause issues with both that is a loaded question the word that comes up for me is desperation there have been an increasing number of people in this country who are drawing the connection between the long term impacts of extreme weather events on cities and the structural inequalities that follow and one thing that happens when you destabilize a bunch of infrastructure at the same time through an extreme weather event is at the level of desperation of people to get their basic needs met increases if you think about groups of people who are desperate already having an added level of desperation because of climate change you get the perfect environment for very bad things to happen and we are seeing that we're seeing the desperation increase on all sides those who want to quote keep the peace and those who want to feed their children so climate change is making a bad situation worse and I want to end on opportunity and solutions because I do actually think that no matter how dire things are there are examples of things that are working totally unbiased my husband's organization is doing really great work we've been partnering with them this year but one of the things I want to point out is the combination of things that it takes to actually do what Ben is talking about right if so many young black men are incarcerated and then they get out of prison what do we do with them the organizations that have figured out how to get that young man from I walked out of prison today to being an entrepreneur have a few things in common one is that they know they need to invest in cultural healing it's something that I mentioned before but I want to explain a little bit about what that means the level of rage and utter just this pain and grief that it is to live in survival mode and to watch your people crack before your eyes is indescribable it's just indescribable that requires investment to deal with that it requires time it requires real resources it is not something intangible that can't be measured it is actually just as necessary as the hard skills mentorship is necessary the things that keep us human in the midst of surviving things that are in human is actually a part of our responsibility and that's a collective responsibility everyone can provide the resources in the environment to make sure that our human selves thrive so that when we create economic development when we create communities we're creating it from a place of wholeness and not from a place of deficit because it's when we create from a place of deficit that things end up cracking apart because of interpersonal issues or because the business just didn't work out but what it takes to actually create the conditions for wholeness requires again humility and listening because everybody is missing pieces when it comes to do that that is graduate calculus level stuff that I'm talking about right there and it's going to require all of us Ed Grace Gooddogs who recently passed away said that the next American Revolution will be about reinventing institutions and thinking through your path and your experience and your story that you shared with us can you talk through like what is as we look ahead what is the reinvention what is the reinvention of not only these spaces but the space that you use out of it Yes, well first of all I keep bringing this down to a personal level because I want you'll find that what I have to say is very personal and represents a challenge to each of us on a personal level so the first thing that I think in terms of reinvention we need to reinvent the whole notion of race it is so destructive in the way in which we use it so that's one level of reinvention another level of reinvention is what I would call sort of a personal revolution because these things begin with how people think about things and unless people start to think about them differently for instance the whole notion I talked about opportunity race privilege and so forth so how would we redefine race we might or just abolish the notion altogether and I think the king said it sort of very well and I can't think of a better way to say it just by the content of your character so that when someone goes with a deal or this or that we don't ask about whether we belong to the club or whether we cycle together or we have all these other things that are sort of indications that we are like them that we can really get to the base of and say content of the color content of the character what are our shared values and those two things if we can get that far we begin to have a very different conversation about where opportunity is so reinvent ourselves and before we wrap this up I wanted to well as we wrap this up I wanted to leave you all with an opportunity to provide closing thoughts and I'll start right back with you closing thoughts I would invite everyone I think here as we sort of begin to leave this space to embrace a couple of the things that I said and I think that think about it this way if you were to invite someone to your home what would they have to be or say or do to sort of feel make you comfortable doing that and if there is something different that would be required of a person of color to come into your home sort of check that check that and see what that suggests in terms of the way you perhaps ought to rethink how you're thinking I put it at that level because as we try to do all the things we do here as I try to go out and raise money others try to make an impact in all the kinds of ways you do I think it's important because these are really tough issues that have to do fundamentally with the history of our country and the way in which we've divided ourselves up we have to really re-examine that and reinvent it I'll re-emphasize my three keywords humility relationship and listening that we have to we have to value the human element just as much as we value profit and more importantly understand that the two are so interrelated they can't actually be detangled it's a myth to think that you cannot focus on emotional intelligence and relationship and have a very successful business Ben you know just in the interest of brevity I'll close on this you know the Italians have a saying you cannot be rich and stupid for more than one generation and the reality is that our prisons have been eating the lunch of our universities for a generation and we will no longer be able to lead the world in innovation and job creation if we continue to indent our college students and the way that we are and shift so many of them from a pathway towards opportunity and truly giving back to our country and towards business so let's go get smart on crime and start shifting that savings back into our public universities so that we can actually continue to lead this world in the way that we do thank you thank you all for attending Socap and I will pass it to the organizers for the closing thank you all very much