 I am delighted to welcome you all here today for today's special event at the Ford School, which is also co-sponsored by the University of Michigan's Poverty Solutions. Today's event is part of the 2018 Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. symposium. First held at the University of Michigan in 1986, the two-month-long MLK symposium is one of the largest celebrations of the life and legacy of MLK sponsored by colleges and universities in the nation, and we are delighted to have as this year's theme the fierce urgency of now. There is no better time than the present to discuss innovative change, and this theme calls on us to claim ownership of the challenges we face and not leave them for others or for future generations to address. Today we have the opportunity to take a closer look at challenges facing our youth and young adults. We are honored to be joined by my colleagues, Brian Jacob, co-director of the Education Policy Initiative, Luke Schaefer, director of the University of Michigan Poverty Solutions, and our featured guest, my dear friend and a Michigan law alum who has had the distinction of serving under two U.S. presidents, Roderick Johnson. I'm going to say more about Roderick now. You all know I hope Luke and Brian can read more about them in your literature for today. Roderick is a highly respected partner in the D.C. office of Brian Cave, and he also serves as chairman of the board of my brother's Keeper Alliance, an outgrowth of the task force established by President Obama in whose administration Roderick served from 2014 to 2017 as assistant to the president and cabinet secretary. Roderick previously served as deputy assistant to the president for legislative affairs under President Clinton, and he's had a distinguished career in private practice and on Capitol Hill as well. Roderick and I first worked together more than 20 years ago on community empowerment, focusing on supporting new markets opportunities in distressed communities here in the United States, and putting Washington, D.C. on a firm financial footing after years of neglect. I have deeply appreciated over all those years and relied on Roderick's good counsel and wisdom, his D.C. savvy and collaborative spirit, and the most essential feature for surviving Washington, a healthy sense of humor. We're thrilled that this is just the first of a planned series of teaching engagements Roderick will have here at the Ford School. I'm pleased to let you know today that Roderick will be becoming a Towsley Foundation policymaker in residence. Roderick will be engaging us with us more informally this term. He will be teaching in our PPIA program this summer, and then he will be joining us again next winter to teach a course related to mass incarceration. For those of you who are students in the room who are interested in research assistant opportunities, we will be posting a research assistant for Roderick soon. As for today, Roderick will frame the conversation with opening remarks, then we'll have a panel discussion with Luke and Brian. Following the discussion, Associate Dean Paula Lance will facilitate an open Q&A. Ford School staff will be standing in the room with handheld microphones for those with questions. Please join me in welcoming Roderick, Brian, and Luke. Good afternoon. Sometimes I think kind of fancifully about moving back to Ann Arbor permanently, and then you have like weather like today, which in D.C. would have caused a whole month of shutdowns, and we may have shutdowns anyway at the end of the week, but anyway, I'm going to try not to be too deeply political. Emphasis on deeply. Can't help it being somewhat political. These are strange times. It is great to be back here in Ann Arbor because I love this place so much. It was so important, of course, to my development as a young man, as a law student, two of my dearest friends in the world. I was the best man in their wedding, but we were also here in law school together. Greg Jenkins and his better half Patricia Jenkins are here with me as well, so it's great to see you here. We've come a long way, haven't we, when we think about, we were great students, though. I remember that. You know, there's something about being a student, and I've realized this as a professor more importantly is that you kind of grade yourself by the effort that you put in, and so we worked hard, but I think in retrospect. We have an even greater appreciation for what this university has to offer, and it is reflected in really, I know for us and our children, how well they've done in college and beyond. So it's great to be here with my friends, Michael Barr. So Michael, he gave you a sanitized version of what it was like when we both worked in the Clinton White House, only in as much as I had a job in legislative affairs, and Michael was in Treasury at the time, and there was another job that then First Lady, Mrs. Clinton needed someone to do around D.C., and I talked my way out of it, and Michael talked his way into it, so I'm really grateful for you for having done that, but somebody had to do the job, and it was an important job, though, seriously in turning D.C. around. So Michael, thank you very much, and thank you for appointing me so I can be here in residence throughout this year, and to really work on mass incarceration issues, particularly from the standpoint of solutions. So thank you very much for having me back here and to my co-panelists today, Brian Jacob. Nice to meet you. I look forward to getting to know you and Luke. We've had occasion to get to know each other a bit, and I look forward to the panel today, but working with you as well. Michael, your team has done extraordinary work in making it easy for me to be here today. So thank you all. The significance of this day, so today would have been the 89th birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. to the day it is, in fact, his birthday. So it's even more compelling and symbolic to be here with all of you today, but we're also approaching the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's assassination in April of 1968, April 4th of 1968. I was an 11-year-old Catholic schoolboy growing up in Baltimore. The riots are still very vivid in my memory. My hometown of Baltimore is still, in many ways, scarred in recovering from that violence and racial discord from the wide segregation patterns in Baltimore, desperate neighborhoods and broad economic and educational disparity, police and community distrust, and of course the tragedy of Freddie Gray and the unrest that followed. My friend and I'm sure you all have read the great works of Ta-Nehisi Coates has written all about these things and has chronicled them pretty powerfully. Baltimore still, in many ways, presents the lingering and present conditions that in many respects led President Obama to direct his White House and across his administration to establish the My Brother's Keeper Initiative in February of 2014. Hard to believe it, but nearly four years ago today. I briefly want to couch my opening remarks in terms of three things regarding My Brother's Keeper. First, the motivation for President Obama to establish it. Second, what we were able to accomplish in the White House and across the United States over that three-year period. And most importantly, where we go from here. So first, the moment that really drove the President to establish My Brother's Keeper and that was the murder of Trayvon Martin, you all will recall that President Obama spoke from the rose garden of the White House. Not long after the murder of Trayvon Martin and he said this among many other things, quote, Trayvon Martin could have been my son, could have been me 35 years ago. There are a lot of kids out there who need help and who are getting a lot of negative reinforcement. Is there more we can do to give them a sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them? I had the opportunity then to speak with the President, not long after that and right after the 2012 election campaign and he talked about how he really wanted to go big to use the power and the reach of his presidency to better organize how the federal government established programs, made better programs, looking at the disparities that especially affect boys and young men of color. What we as a federal government could do better and he wanted to also use his power as a convener to bring people together across the public and private sectors throughout the United States. President Obama was very clear that he wanted the effort to be evidence based, to assess the problems and the solutions with the same level of rigor that he demanded in everything else he directed from the White House. So let me take you back to February 27, 2014. To the east room of the White House, that's where the President signed the Presidential Memorandum that established My Brother's Keeper. There is a compelling symbolism in the fact that he did it from the east room of the White House that day because see it was nearly 50 years ago to the day to when the President, President then Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law in that same room that President Obama signed a memorandum almost 50 years later establishing My Brother's Keeper. When you look at pictures from those two days, of course you'll see sort of the traditional gathering behind President Johnson of members of Congress taking credit, great leaders like Dr. King, a lot of adults. You look at the picture though of My Brother's Keeper in the east room of the White House, the backdrop, so to speak, the human backdrop behind President Obama that day was young men of color from Chicago and Washington, D.C. And so he chose that audience of people to get the pens that he handed out that day, for example, to show those young men in a country quite literally that this was about them, that this was a matter of presidential leadership, a national priority that was led by a President of profound moral leadership, a President who is profound in his moral character and his leadership, and dare I say not profane. So here's a summary of what we accomplished for the final three years in the Obama White House. At the federal level, first of all, we focused on a different approach. We identified six milestones or stages in the lives of all children and young adults that impact their chances for a successful life. We adopted an expansive and comprehensive approach from birth to mid-20s to examine the data. Because here's what we know. Here's what evidence tells us. First, about the word gap. Now this startled me when I heard about this, and so I did my own kind of calculus. It was actually very basic math. But the word gap, okay, by age three, children from low-income households have heard roughly 30 million fewer words than their affluent peers. 30 million. We can also talk about the quality of those words, by the way, because that's also an issue in terms of what these children hear, who oftentimes, again, are 30 million words deficient by age three. About discipline policy, here's what we know. African-American students represent 16% of the public school population, but make up more than 42% of those suspended more than once, and 34% of students expelled. While college enrollment and success, only 12% of Hispanic men and 21% of African-American men have college degrees by their late 20s compared to nearly 40% of white men. About employment. A black baby boy born 25 years ago has a one and two chance of being employed today. Now I want to, that statistic, actually this last one about employment, came from a study that was done by the President's Council on Economic Advisors, and your own Betsy Stevenson, Professor Betsy Stevenson, who I had the pleasure of seeing earlier today actually drafted that report for Jason Furman's great team. She actually talked about it in terms of baby boys, which is an interesting, folks in the African-American community especially know about the baby black boy kind of terminology. I think there was a movie made about that as a matter of fact, with Snoop Dogg. Was Snoop Dogg in that movie? Thank you very much. And Tyrese, oh yeah, how do you know that, right? Tyrese, yeah, okay, all right. But the economic point goes to what was a really important characteristic of MBK work in the White House, and that is we could make the case certainly that there is a moral obligation, a compelling moral issue around the success of work like my brother's keeper, but there is just as important an economic argument to be made about the global competitiveness of the United States and how we need to make sure we're not leaving millions of young men and young women of color off the economic field. So again, we developed a bunch of new collaborations across federal agencies. There were 20 federal agencies and White House offices that were involved in MBK. Here's some of the things specifically that we did. Second chance Pell. So the Department of Justice and the Department of Education came together, realized that the Secretary of Education had some additional authority, some special authority, experimental authority to give 12,000 Pell grants to people incarcerated across the United States. We know the route to jail and to prison is oftentimes about economic and educational deprivation. So an important way to stay out and to address recidivism is to help people get an education when they're imprisoned. We also had DOJ and offices within DOJ and across the states, new violence reduction strategies, also a commitment to ban the box. The President himself directed all federal agencies to ban the box with respect to hiring and strongly encourage local government and private sector employers to do the same. That is to make sure that that box on those employment applications that is so often at the very top about whether or not you've ever been arrested or whether you've ever been incarcerated gets in the way of especially young men of color being able to get an opportunity to get a second chance and to get a job. We also had across federal agencies investments and job programs from the Department of Labor and other federal agencies. And so there were, believe me, dozens of different programs, collaborations across the federal government. The second big approach we took though was a community-based approach. So President Obama challenged cities, local government and tribal nations across the United States to become what we called my brother's keeper communities. That meant that they adopted the same data-driven evidence-based approach and greater collaboration across the public and private sectors to do the work around my brother's keeper to in effect in many places revolutionize the collaboration that they were doing. We saw 250 communities across the United States and every state in the United States have at least one my brother's keeper community as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Some communities, of course, became exemplary communities and still are like Detroit and Boston and Houston and Albuquerque and there are exemplary statewide efforts that we saw develop in California, New York and Florida. And finally, with regard to the private sector, again, because for the President it was very important that this not be seen as a government-based or government-exclusive set of initiatives, nearly $2 billion in new private sector investments in jobs and apprenticeship programs and technology assistance and mentoring programs came out of the private sector and we can talk about that a little bit more in the panel. Then finally, a new nonprofit was started and that was the My Brother's Keeper Alliance and it was begun in May of 2015 by a group of business leaders who wanted to develop and support efforts inspired by the President's own vision. It was our hope and our expectation out of the White House that this nonprofit would be so well developed and organized when we left office that President Obama would embrace it post-presidency. President Obama was always very clear with folks about one thing and that was that the work would not end for him. The mission was not over when he left the White House. And so we hope that My Brother's Keeper Alliance, this nonprofit, would be the vehicle for that. And in fact, it has become the vehicle for that. So where do we go from here? Well, first it starts with the My Brother's Keeper Alliance. It is now not an independent nonprofit, so to speak, not independent from Barack Obama. It is now part of the Obama Foundation. It is one of the central components of the Obama Foundation's work going forward. I am honored to serve as the chair of the advisory group and it is made up of many of the original board members from the private sector. And here's what we'll be looking at. We'll be looking at making significant investments in a small number of MBK communities. We don't have the federal government anymore. Of course, you all know. I don't know if this new administration has realized that they have some responsibilities around the My Brother's Keeper work, although it's perhaps framed differently. But we certainly can't wait for that to happen. And yet we don't have all those resources, so we'll focus on a smaller number of communities. And we're going to bring greater attention to two major measurable outcomes. First, supporting mentoring programs to close the gap between the need and human capital. There are tens of thousands of young people of color who need mentors. There are tens of thousands of adults who want to mentor young people. But figuring out how to bring that match together is always been challenging. We're getting great help from the National Basketball Association and Mentor Inc. around that work. And the second big part of our strategy will be to support violence reduction strategies proven to work across the United States. So those will be the two big points of emphasis for the My Brother's Keeper Alliance work out of the Obama Foundation. Let me close my beginning remarks with this. So I had a whiteboard on the wall of my office in the West Wing. One of the more amusing moments was when Ryan's previous, who was about to become Chief of Staff, wandered into my office, I think, two days before I was going to leave. And he looked at the whiteboard and had these expressions, one of which I'll describe. And he said, well, what was that for? And then I knew it was time for me to get the heck out of there and pack my stuff up and leave because it was, how do you explain something like this? One of those expressions was to, quote, make exceptional, no longer the exception. Again, make exceptional, no longer the exception. Look, I continue to be personally unsettled by the fact that in many ways I'm still seen as the exception to the rule. And it's like the black guy who comes in the room who's got great education and is raising a great family and this and that. And I look around and it's just me. And we have to change that so much. My own sons and my daughter experienced some of the same stuff when they go into environments where they are the only ones and they are seen as the exception because they are exceptional. A lot of that, though, is reality, of course, but it's also a perception about boys and young men of color and girls and young women of color in terms of their exceptionalism because there are, you can call them diamond in the roughs or whatever, but there are millions of exceptional young people of color that we just don't notice for their talent. We don't invest in. So we've got to change that. And while so much of our nation has changed since 1968, believe me, an awful lot has changed since 1968, we know we've still got a long way to go to change realities, break down barriers and hold on to hope. Remember hope? Hope posters? Because for a lot of our young people, they remember President Obama is giving them great reason for a lot of hope. I dare say for us chiseled old, well anyway, professors as well. We've got to recognize that exceptionalism. We've got to bring investments to that exceptionalism and make sure that we're not continuing to leave millions of young kids behind in this society. So anyway, those are my opening remarks to frame this discussion. Again, it is great to be back here at the University of Michigan. I can't stay for the game tonight, but I will look forward to seeing the score when I get home because Go Blue is set as often in D.C. as it is here in Ann Arbor. So thank you all very much. Hello. Good afternoon. Thank you, Dean Barr and Paula and Broderick and everyone else for being here. I am honored to be included and excited to tell you about some of the work that some faculty colleagues and students and I are doing. It is going to be on a program called Grow Detroit's Young Talent, and I will tell you what that is in a moment. So this work is being done by the Youth Policy Lab. This is a kind of applied research center that a few colleagues and I started about a year ago. The idea is to create partnerships with local and state agencies and to do research that is really applied and really relevant, something that I think is not common and not particularly easy within the academy to do. We're focusing on areas, education, health care, juvenile justice, and workforce development. And we're going to be providing all sorts of kind of data focused technical assistance, including need analysis and program evaluation. So this is one of our first partnerships. This is with a program known as Grow Detroit's Young Talent. This is Detroit's version of what kind of many of you are probably familiar with summer youth employment programs. And this is run by two Detroit city agencies with a variety of funding, federal, state, private sector dollars. And youth work approximately 20 hours per week for six weeks during the summer. In addition to this work, there is a few hours of kind of training and a variety of areas ranging from workplace readiness to financial literacy. And the work experience that the youth get, you range quite a bit. And this is one of the ways that I think Detroit's program is a bit unique and kind of more interesting and innovative than other programs throughout the country. The typical summer youth employment program is one where youth have kind of jobs with community-based nonprofit organizations, often of the type that kind of I've described here, childcare, you know, kind of community beautification, community service. Detroit has that, but then when they started and started to increase the program several years ago, they made a big push to involve the private sector more. They've received a lot of private sector funding and funding in the sense that private sector companies agree to take on, you know, 10, 20, 100, you know, even more youth in some cases. There are career pathways, which are internships, quick and loans, touch point, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, and others. And there's also industry-led training, which is kind of some sort of on-the-job learning that provide youth that are interested, more tangible kind of workplace skills that may coincide with some high school career technical education that they're getting and maybe a pathway into kind of subsequent post-secondary education. So what do we know about how summer youth employment programs influence youth outcomes? So these programs have been around for many, many years. So in that way, they are not kind of new per se, but we really, as in many social programs, there's been few studies to help us understand really whether they are effective or more importantly, which types of programs are effective for which types of youth. Some recent work in New York City, Chicago and Boston has found mixed outcomes. So the, I guess the headline that I think is extremely important, but I think I hadn't been appreciated before, is that there were big effects in kind of violence reduction. And this is maybe most well-known in Chicago. There's been some rigorous evaluation that suggests that participating in this summer youth employment program in Chicago reduced violent crime arrests by 43% among young males in the city. And importantly, this was not just during the summer. So it was not kind of what the criminologist called an incapacitation effect. It wasn't just them doing something else during that summertime, but the vast majority of the effect was actually in the subsequent year following that summer employment. But there haven't been really noticeable effects yet on educational outcomes or labor market outcomes. And that really is where Detroit is kind of interested in generating some change. And so we agreed to this partnership with the Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation in City Connect. We're kind of helping them compile a variety of big administrative data sets to look at how applicants and participants compare to other youth in Detroit and then how that participation influences educational outcomes. So I'm going to present just a little bit of the work, what we've learned so far, and then in the Q&A we can talk about kind of the upcoming plans we're working to develop an evaluation for summer 2018 with some other colleagues, including Trina Shanks at the School of Social Work. I'm not sure if Trina's here, but she has been a key partner of putting together a survey to gather a lot more information about youth that participate in the program. And actually, this is a perfect time. What have we learned so far? Before I tell you what we've learned so far, I think it's very important that I tell you who the we is. And actually, I am a very small part of the we here. So the we includes the incredible partners we have, but also some of the students and staff. They're in the room, Kelly, Lovett, Jasmine, Max Gross, if he is here, who really did a lot of the analysis that's underlying the results. So thank you to all the students and staff that have helped make this project possible. So what have we learned? Well, so first, youth participants come from across Detroit. This is a heat map. The darker the area shows you the greater density of participants. Those of you who know Detroit well will recognize some of these neighborhoods. But it really is spread out across the city. And so I think that's a testament to the outreach of a variety of the city agencies and the community-based organizations. How do the applicants to the Summer Youth Employment Program compare with other Detroit youth? They're more likely to be female, slightly. You can have 56% versus 40-something percent. They come from slightly less disadvantaged, though still extremely disadvantaged neighborhoods in an absolute sense. Applicants come from neighborhoods with poverty rates of around 31% relative to other Detroit youth. And interestingly, those youth that seek to apply to the program come in with better academic preparation than other Detroit youth. So I think this is highlighting some of the successes, but also the challenges of the program. I mean, it is certainly getting some very well-prepared and motivated youth. But it still is not reaching maybe the most disadvantaged Detroit youth, which is actually a quite common problem in a variety of social policies, getting to really the most disadvantaged individuals. So this is just a quick slide in methodology. What we're doing, there's lots of fun statistics behind this, and I'll be more than happy to talk with people about this afterwards. This is one of my favorite things. But just quickly, what we're doing is we are comparing youth, trying to compare apples to apples, youth who participate same gender, same race, same grade level, same high school, and same eighth grade test scores as youth that don't participate. So if you have a young ninth grade black male who scores at the 60th percentile on the national distribution, going to Renaissance High School in Detroit, we'd have an observationally identical youth, this is what the language is, from the same high school, same year, who didn't participate, and that's who we're trying to use to draw the comparisons. So, oh my goodness, we've got technical difficulties. So, in short, I'm gonna show you, there really are some encouraging, very encouraging positive results that come out. So, chronically absent youth, youth that apply but didn't participate, this number here is 33.1%. Chronically absent means in missing roughly about 15 to 20 school days per year. So a third of the youth, even those relatively high-performing motivated youth that applied were chronically absent in the years following that summer, compared to only about 30% of youth that participated. So it's kind of improving attendance and slightly reducing chronic absenteeism among the youth. This is really the signature headline. In fact, I'm gonna, okay, we will persevere here. So, graduated high school. If we're looking at 10th and 11th graders, this is youth who apply, right, kind of going into their 10th, after their 10th and 11th grade year, and then we can follow them for two years to look at what fraction of them graduated, which would be kind of on-time graduation. So, 82% of youth that applied but didn't participate graduated on-time kind of in four years. A few percent of those are still in high school, but the majority of that 18% have dropped out. And, but 87%, a difference of five percentage points, 87% of youth that participate in the program go on to graduate, and even kind of a larger number still in high school after five years. So, this is very encouraging kind of in the world of social policy analysis. These are, you know, kind of moderate-size effects. You know, this is, and when we think about what we could have expected from a six-week, you know, summer program, it really is, I think, quite encouraging, kind of given, you know, potentials for expanding and extending the program in certain ways. So, this is what we found so far. Where are we going from here? So, we're gonna, our goal is to continue to work with the city agencies to help them use data to support their continuous program improvement. Kind of, we have like a five-step model here, and I'm gonna just go through, I'm not good with the animation. Articulate objectives, define outcomes, pilot, evaluate, refine, and then do it again. And so, this is kind of what we've started to do with them. Hopefully, our first kind of piloting and evaluation will be this summer, working to refine after that, and extending some of these, you know, preliminarily encouraging results. And that's just the randomized evaluation we're planning for summer 2018. So, that's a kind of short description of a program that I think is making an important difference in Detroit and has even more importantly some potential to be even better. Now, Luke is gonna continue to talk about related programs in Washtenaw County, and then bigger and more important themes after that. Is that yours? Yeah. Okay, we've now arrived at the least distinguished panelist in the collection. It's always a little bit daunting to speak after a dude who has former cabinet secretary after his name. I will say I got the chance to visit Broderick in his office in the White House, I think maybe a couple of times, and it did sort of, as you entered it, it did leave you with a familiar feeling to when you were entering an M-Den. I'm pretty sure there was a Michigan Lamp, a Michigan football helmet. It was like a big picture of Bo on the wall, so thank you for being an incredible ambassador to the University of Michigan. So, I was doing a little bit of time just sort of reflecting on a date, like today when we're celebrating the contributions of a giant like Martin Luther King, and just had three sort of thoughts that maybe will contextualize my comments here. The first was, I always remember going down to Atlanta to the Martin Luther King Museum and Space, and getting excited that I was gonna get to see his Bible. I knew his Bible was on display, and for some reason I imagine this very pristine sort of Bible since faith was such an important element of what he did, and when I saw it, it was like the most rag tag thing. Pages flipped over, it was beat up and stuff, and he just sort of made you think of someone who really used it, right? That's where he drew his faith from. The second thing that I've been reflecting on was that the guy was short. I think he was like five foot eight maybe, and in my mind it's just important to remember that because he's such a giant now, right? And he's made such an incredible impact on the trajectory of the country, and he was just a guy, just a person like the rest of us. So I think remembering that we can all make contributions that matter, and that his call continues to be so important. One last thing I've been thinking about is reading a book about Richard Nixon, and the two of them actually had a very sort of long standing relationship. Dr. King was sort of trying to nurture that relationship for a decade or two over the course of the time that they were in the national limelight together, and so it just reminded me that great idealists, right? People who have great visions can also be politically savvy, right? Where he was obviously trying to do the same thing with people on the other side. So for about the last year, my staff and I have been moving along with a university level initiative called Poverty Solutions, which is situated here in the Ford School, and Ford School is an incredible home for us. And the goal is to really try to bring the resources of the University of Michigan to bear on one of our most pressing problems in the United States and globally, poverty. And to try to get beyond a lot of the important work that we've done here at U of M of understanding the scope of poverty, the causes and the consequences, to really try to be in partnership and find new ways to prevent and alleviate poverty. And so we are about a year in and I'm excited that we have research projects we're helping to support across something like 13 of our 19 schools and colleges across campus. And you can really see sort of the breadth of the interest in doing really concrete work out in the community. We have a lot of work going on in the city of Detroit, which I think makes a lot of sense. Detroit is one of our nation's poorest cities, but there's obviously a lot of strength and opportunities there. And so trying to be in partnership with the city government and be in partnership with community-based stakeholders to see what kind of value added place like the University of Michigan can bring is important work. But as we started also doing this work, I started having a lot of conversations across our community. One thing that kept on coming back was that when we want to look at poverty and inequality, we don't have to go very far outside of Washtenaw County. So I think it won't be news to us. A lot of us are aware that here at U of M, a high fraction of our students, in fact, one out of every 10 U of M Ann Arbor students comes from the top 1% while that's a greater fraction than come from the bottom 40% of the income distribution. And Washtenaw County itself is among the bottom 10% of all U.S. counties in terms of recent metrics of inequality and social mobility. So getting to know folks at the United Way, getting to know some of our partners in Ypsilanti in particular, right? Ypsilanti, we're just not far away from where we are right here, has pockets of poverty that look an awful lot like places in Detroit and otherwise. And starting to hear sort of this sense and this feeling that maybe sometimes the University of Michigan jumps over problems that we have right here in our home county to try to get to places that maybe have more name recognition, right? Or sort of more universally recognized. So I think here at U of M, we're starting to address some of this stuff. And then I think President Schlissel brings on a significant commitment to trying to do better, right? Especially with this data point number one. And some of that is a result of research and ideas that have come out of the Ford School with the Go Blue Guarantee, which stemmed from the Hale Scholarship where we just significantly changed the way that we communicate with students from low income schools who we think could get into U of M who disproportionately have been opting out of applying, because we think they often think that they couldn't afford to come to a place like the University of Michigan. And so the Hale Scholarship was this experiment where they sent very simple materials. I think of it as like a coupon that said if you apply and get into U of M, we will provide free tuition, right? And the response was incredible. Now, we didn't actually add more money, is my understanding. We simply changed the way that we communicated about the availability of financial aid. And as Sue says, it has to be around this notion of guarantee, right? We're gonna assume some of the risk. And so because we did this experiment, we saw that the difference was quite striking and that's led U of M to commit to the Go Blue Guarantee, which is a program that says anybody who comes from families with incomes below $65,000 comes tuition free for four years. And again, it's this guarantee that I think Sue thinks is so incredibly important that we're assuming a lot of that risk in making a very complicated process sort of more simplified. We have another exciting program going on called Wolverine Pathways, which is a college prep program for students in low income schools starting at seventh grade, right? So it's gonna try to follow students throughout the rest of their time in school and get them into U of M at higher rates. For my own work, I knew about this research on summer youth employment programs. I knew that Brian and Trina were working in the city of Detroit. One of the things that really struck me was that in the city of Detroit for a Grow Detroit's young talent, they get something like 15 or 16,000 applications for this, right? So the idea that they're, this to me speaks to the fact that there's a lot of demand for programs like this, if they're one known about and two accessible. And in my own work, through some research qualitative and quantitative work that I've been doing, trying to understand what's going on at the very bottom of society, I had seen, you know, as we talked to families, in the case, in my case, I was talking to low income families in different parts of the country. Whenever I would ask if we came back and you were doing better in a year, what would it look like? None of them would ever tell me I want more cash assistance or I want more government aid. Although I happen to think that we should have those programs available, right? To a person, they would say, I'd like a job paying 10 to $12 an hour, that offers stable hours in a place of our own. And so I think there's something that resonates with a program like summer youth jobs with people, right? It's acceptable. It's something that meets people's needs and I think maybe enhances dignity. And so we, as my associate director, Julia Weiner says, as we're sort of launching poverty solutions, we also decided to launch a summer youth jobs program here at U of M. So in the summer, a place like U of M has basically any job available that you could think of, right? So we have jobs working in research with faculty members, office jobs, jobs and buildings and grounds, jobs providing childcare right over the course of the summer in some of our childcare centers. And so we were thinking of this as maybe a way that we could really leverage the resources of the University of Michigan to provide access to opportunity that wouldn't otherwise exist. So we partnered with Washtenaw County in Michigan Works. We partnered with Youth Policy Lab that knew a lot about the best practices on these types of programs. The Ginsburg Center was an important partner that directs sort of coordinates service learning across the U. And in the first year, we created eight week paid placements for youth ages 16 to 22 in jobs all across campus. And I think one of the nice things about this, what we thought was one of our strengths was that if you get connected to the University of Michigan, you also get connected to a lot of resources such as an M card that can get you on the bus for free. And all of our students got set up with a U of M credit union account so everybody was banked by the end. And we set up Friday enrichment sessions that covered a range of topics such as conflict management in the workplace and how to apply to college. And we're gonna be looking in year two to figure out what else is there here at U of M in terms of training opportunities that could be delivered in conjunction with a paid work placement. And I think maybe most importantly, we connected all of our youth to a success coach. Now this is something that maybe you probably can't do when you have 9,000 placements across a large city. But there's a lot of research suggesting that this sort of success coach is someone who you can connect with in a moment of crisis if you can't get to work, right? Or if you are having trouble managing a conflict with a supervisor can help you sort of figure out, sort of strategize the best ways to deal with that. And we think that that was an incredibly valuable part of the project. All right, well, as with any time that you roll through a new intervention, you learn a lot and I'm not gonna take you through this flow chart but I just wanted to highlight just a couple quick things. One, when we got 220 applications and we were pretty sure we could only place 100 kids, we felt pretty good, right? That we were gonna have way more than we needed but by the time we got to our first orientation session we were down to 64 youth. And so some of the kids we just never heard from, some were underage, some were excluded. And so I think it speaks to like how challenging sometimes this can be and how the assumption that if you build it, they will come, doesn't always work out. Because of our success coaches, right, we're out, you know, in the ground we were able to bump those numbers back up to 108 youth that were randomly assigned at U of M. We had a program and then the county had a program and once we got our students into jobs, our youth into jobs, we kept all but one of them through the course of the rest of the summer. So really it was a matter of getting to the point of the first day of work that we were having to figure out what some of the barriers were and then through the rest of the summer we had pretty good success. We only at this point because we had relatively small samples know about how they felt about the program we were pleased that they felt better equipped to do things like apply to college, right? That makes a lot of sense at U of M. And I think something that we're gonna think of as an advantage going forward. They've had better prepared to apply for jobs and 96% said they were better prepared to interview and the program had a lot of sort of experiences both doing a short interview at the beginning of the placement and building a lot of those skills over the summer. Just two notes that I wanted to say, you seem to like the program a lot but they very much did not like it being connected to something called poverty solutions, right? Makes a ton of sense, right? And a name like poverty solutions I think resonates with a certain crowd but trying to understand how we're communicating these things and what we're doing is even as an expert on poverty, this one caught me off guard. Another thing is we think of this as much sort of building knowledge for youth, right? Helping them with success and also building knowledge here at U of M. So we had a lot of youth who would come back to their sessions and say, is anybody else in placement where everybody else is white? And I think the enrichment sessions were really helpful in helping youth navigate that and it speaks to I think where we have a long way to go here at U of M to keep on going. And a final thing I just wanted to mention was we're thinking a lot about the right level of targeting. So one question is we could make this a program that strictly serves low income youth or last year because we had extra placements we increased the span of students a little higher up the economic ladder and we think maybe the targeting does a disadvantage. Maybe we shouldn't be creating programs that only serve low income youth but try to bring kids together from across the income distribution. So we learned a lot, a lot more to go and we're looking forward to next year. Thank you. Hi, I'm Paula Lance, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs here at the Ford School and it's going to be my fun to help moderate now discussion Q and A session with our amazing panelists. Let me apologize at the outset here. I doubt we're gonna have enough time to get to everyone's questions. And I also know for sure I'm not gonna be able to keep track of who raised, his or her hand and what order. So I will do my best kind of and we'll make our way around the room and please keep your questions or comments pretty succinct. So we have time to get to as many people as possible and I'm just gonna open it right up who has something they would like to ask. Sylvia. I just wanted to make a comment. Testing, testing. Okay, I just wanted to make comment about Luke's remarks that the students didn't like to be tied to the notion of poverty solutions. Many years ago now Claude Steele who was an African-American social psychologist and the author of the notion of stereotype threat. And he ran a program here at the University of Michigan in Markley Hall for gifted undergraduate minority students. And his argument was that students didn't want to receive a letter saying, you have been chosen because you are a minority student. They wanted to receive a letter that said you have been chosen because you are an excellent student. And so I think it does make a difference to students' sense of self-worth and how they enter and function in the program. Thanks. I was wondering if you guys can talk about how you go about getting funding and sponsors to work with you on these projects. Well, certainly with respect to my brother's keeper, there are still some federal resources that come but a lot of it really is coming out of the private sector either through local governments. You know, the Grove Detroit Young Talent Program, for example, is part of MBK Detroit and to see the investments that have been made by the private sector to provide apprenticeship programs and summer jobs is just critical to being able to continue this work. And in fact, there's a responsibility the private sector has. We also received some foundation money and a lot of the local MBK communities get a lot of foundation, local foundation and national foundation money as well. We need a whole lot more money though, that's for sure. And so now that President Obama can raise money for my brother's keeper, it should be a tremendous boost for the resources that we can provide. How about do either Luke or Brian have anything to say about funding and can I just put a little twist on that too? We all know that programs come and go, even programs that have really good evaluation results and they often go because there's a lack of sustainability for funding, so that's a really excellent question to think about ongoing committed resources to keep programs we know we're going. So I can speak very quickly to one thing we debated as we were starting out was whether or not poverty solutions which has a budget from the U of M should pay the wages of the youth to work in the different departments, right? Or should pay some fraction of it. And in the end, we actually said, well, let's see how many placements we get if we just ask the departments to pay the wages. And we got offers of 77 placements across the U and of course could only actually field 40 youth in the first year. So this of course I think is unusual in that doing a placement for eight weeks at $9 an hour was something like $1,800. Doesn't seem like a lot of money to U of M department. Of course, this is an affluent place but I think it does speak to the importance of thinking it's trying to be strategic about your revenue streams from the start because we could have very well, I think decided that we could have made the decision at the front end that we needed to pay for the placements and then we would have been sort of locked into that. I think we would have set up an expectation going forward that we were gonna pay for the placements and because we didn't do it, which I think was partly a matter of luck, right? From our point that that's what we decided, we saw that people were really across the departments were really to field this cost and I think it makes it at least look more sustainable to the U rather than having to say we're gonna dedicate a hundred thousand a year chunk. And with growing Detroit's young talent, this is an interesting thing of like who does play the placements and of course then you have to look at the evidence to see what that means about if a private employer is paying the placement, who are they surveying as well, right? Right, I mean I think the youth policy lab gets funding from foundations and some kind of research grants. Yeah, and I think there are trade-offs, and it's exactly true in the employer-sponsored internships and growing Detroit's young talent. They are kind of very selective and they have kind of minimum academic criteria and then they do interviews in kind of a career fair where they select the youth that they would like to work for them. And I think that, again, like many things, there's trade-offs in some ways that really is a nice simulation of the job search and it's a realistic setting and it helps youth get prepared for that sort of market but it may not be serving some youth that kind of aren't as prepared at the beginning. Right, now the other quick thing was, well, I'll stop there. Go ahead. Yeah, go. I actually have a program, I'm going to start with a question for you, Brian. For the restart evaluation for how the program has worked, sorry, can you hear me? Is that better? Okay. For the research results that you showed for the program for Detroit youth, how long was that research evaluated? Was it just a one year and then people asked their questions because I actually participated in that program when I was in high school, which was several years ago when it was the Detroit youth program or whatever it was. So what were your results in terms of timeline? So, I mean, the results I presented were just for youth who participated in summer of 2015 and summer of 2016 and they were kind of impacts after two years. So, in either 16 or 17. Now I forget who mentioned it, but he talked about having a gap between those who want to mentor and those who are in need of mentors. So Boshi and I worked for big brothers, big sisters of Washtenor County and we have an extremely hard time to get violins here as in bigs as we call them. So with their having so much need or want to be a mentor, we're trying to find out how can we get to those people who are wanting to be those individuals. So that, are you familiar with Mentors Inc? Yes. That organization. So they're putting a lot more resources into exactly this issue of helping to identify people and setting the expectations of people who could be mentors. But look, I don't know how many of you saw the Seth Curry video with President Obama. It was last year during the NBA finals. That got, and it was about being a mentor and it was kind of funny because it shows President Obama helping Seth Curry learn how to shoot better. But the number, but there were several million people who viewed that video over and over again and we saw an uptick in the number. So we have to use influencers who can help and in this area, whether it be Michigan athletes and also another leaders here or be like the Detroit Pistons, we can draw more attention to the great need, but it is a great need. There's no question about that. And let's make sure we have you connected to the Ginsburg Center. Is Sarah still here somewhere? Okay, Sarah, I think in, yeah. Oh, okay, already connected, great. Great, thanks. Oh, okay. We have a question over here. Oh. Hi. I run a youth program in Detroit called Mosaic Youth Theater of Detroit and what we experience and many other youth programs in Detroit experience is that the greatest barrier for low income youth is transportation. I'm just wondering a lot of the transportation innovation that's going on nationally and in Detroit seems to be based on 18 and older. Any thoughts about what is happening in terms of addressing the transportation gap? So I don't have any specific ones that I'm aware of. I'm sure in some of these MBK communities they are addressing the transportation issues and I understand that Detroit historically anyway has had some very unique problems that are getting, that are on a better path to getting fixed now, but specific to other ones in other communities I'm not sure about. Is Detroit fixing its transportation issues? Well. Well, you know what? President Obama used to always say so better is good. So let me start with that. Is it better? Okay, all right. For large groups of young. For large groups of young people there's no discernible impact positive. Yeah, so I'm hoping that we're gonna start to see some change there. So we just seeded some money for some folks at the engineering school that's working with the new mobility director in the city around looking at some alternative models to really serve better. Folks at the engineering school think that we can tighten up our bus routes and connect people to bus routes with personalized shuttles and reduce costs and commute times. So I think we're trying to be our own getting pigs on this. So we've been rolling it out in the U of M system which actually has a ridership that rivals the city of Detroit, I guess. And so we've just provided some additional funds to do the research they need to figure out how they set up those systems. So we definitely think it's a critical issue. You see it for school, you see it for work. And so we're investing some in it and we'd like to do more. So we'd welcome ideas. Thanks, Jeff. Hi, so my question is more for Mr. Johnson. So I actually had the fortune of taking Professor Lance's program evaluation course and one of the things that we talked about was the ban the box movement and how there are some people who are concerned that despite the best of intentions there might be unintended consequences where men of color potentially have lower employment rates in places where the box is banned due to concerns that, because they're no longer able to filter out who potentially did have a felony or was incarcerated, they use color then as a proxy. So I was wondering what your evidence has found in how you can potentially try to get more to the foundation of the problem if ban the box maybe doesn't get the whole solution. Yeah, I know there was some research that someone that either, I think it was at Brookings did some report addressing this particular problem about ban the box. And I guess I would say we've seen studies, we've seen evidence of the opposite, quite frankly. And sure, I mean, it's a, so it's against the law to use race as a factor here. So if it's being violated by employers then they are exposing themselves to civil rights violations. I don't know if you all saw the New York Times story yesterday though about, because we're in an almost full employment economic situation that so many employers are now hiring people who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated. And so the dynamic has changed considerably and so, and therefore ban the box issues I think from certainly from a corporate perspective not forced by government, although I think it should be certainly dictated by government and many local governments do that. But we're coming to a different place because of the unemployment rate. Now we're not gonna stay at this rate of unemployment and we're gonna certainly see at some point a downturn in the economy. So the importance of ban the box doesn't go away. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you guys so much for telling about the wonderful work that you're working on. My name is Camille Tynes. I'm a Youth and Community Development Consultant born and raised in Detroit and so this type of work is my love. My question is, we've been hearing so much about the new innovative approaches that are taking place in these amazing programs and even seeing some of the statistics and the reports that are like, oh, this is great. My only caveat or concern is how much community collaboration of all participants of the process are included. So not just say certain funders or key stakeholders or amazing U of M, but actually the people that are being served. Because I know oftentimes, like I've worked in roles from being a youth specialist to program evaluation and even doing some contracts and grants management. So that's allowed me to see that. Oftentimes the numbers paint a pretty story but then when you get to the, on the groundwork or you actually see like your local or national outcomes, there's a disconnect. So my question to you guys is, so you're talking about how you're recruiting so many youth but sometimes there are issues of retainment or things of that sort or like what are those barriers? If say youth or whoever you're serving is included not just in the survey but in the long-term process, say maybe not just in the focus group but more like, I don't know, like a board of directors or whatever, however you would term it for what you're doing but in the long-term a collaborative approach to see where can we problem solve and how can we implement better and is that something in the works right now? So we insisted in the development of these local action plans that communities would send us to the White House to say they wanted to be an MBK community that part of us recognizing, we didn't give awards for it, although that phase may come later. Again, it was more self-identification but we said from the start, if you're gonna submit basically a request that you'd be an MBK community and tout yourself that way that you have to demonstrate that you have youth involved in your efforts from a leadership perspective as well. So MBK Boston, for example, of their board of directors of I think 15, two of them are youth who started when they were high school students. So any effort of calling yourself MBK that does not involve youth, not just as sort of the specimens, right? To measure the impact but also to help develop the effective programs isn't worth it's salt. Yeah, we're trying to approach this in a number of different ways and figure out what the best ways to engage across a number of levels. So I think with our summer youth program and the U of M, we're getting feedback from and very close partnerships at a lot of different levels with the county, with the county government, with nonprofits and with youth in particular. I think we'd like to start drawing success coaches from previous participants, right? Is a way to really connect the experience. In the city of Detroit, I would say we're hiring an outreach director who can be on the ground. I think being more connected. But another thing I'm super excited about is the work by Liz Gerber and Jeff Mornoff on the Detroit Metropolitan Area Community Study. You guys could mention to them that the name's a little long and they should maybe tighten it up if you wouldn't mind. But they just received a grant from the Knight Foundation and the model is that we're gonna, we've constructed sort of a random sample clustered in communities. And we're hiring Detroit residents who will then canvas those communities to get us on the ground sort of representative information of how people are seeing investments in the city. We think that the community members who are gonna be part of the outreach group can help tailoring the questions, right? So we piloted this last summer and a lot of language that made a lot of sense to nerdy professors like me where they were like, yeah, you know, maybe we can change that a little bit. And so we'd like to institutionalize that. And I think it gets out a lot of what you just said. One of the things that I think about a lot in the first wave of that survey, they found something like 60% of Detroiters knew someone who'd been evicted recently. So, you know, I think getting a sense of like the magnitude of the hardship is key and getting a sense of how people are perceiving what's going on in the city really can help develop policy. So, I think we have to do it at a couple different levels. Thanks. Thank you. This is kind of a follow-up question to the transportation question that was asked earlier. And it's inspired because I think a lot of the times under resourced youth feel the need to sort of escape from their communities because they think there's no hope in getting any help from their local communities. And I was just wondering if there's any efforts being made by any of these programs that were talked about earlier in perhaps the segregating school systems or finding more quality to disperse the resources to all schools instead of a certain number of advantaged youth. You know, I think there's, there are not a lot of kind of formal efforts toward school integration these days. In fact, kind of recent research suggests it's kind of, it's been going in the opposite direction. A lot of districts that had been under federal consent decrees to actively desegregate in some way, those consent decrees which are 2030, some even 40 years old or being kind of lifted. I mean, I think the primary way public school districts think about integration now is through open enrollment systems or schools of choice, which is partly maybe charter schools but also partly any other public school in the district. Most kind of big urban, big city urban school districts have fairly well-developed choice systems that allow students to kind of go to any number of schools within the district. The downside there is transportation. And it's often, you know, the freedom to go somewhere isn't very useful if you can't get there. And the other issue is that it is only within the district and a lot of kind of residential segregation over the last 30 years has taken a place, you know, across districts. And so even if you would perfectly integrate the Detroit Public Schools Community District, it wouldn't be nearly as integrated on race or socioeconomic status as you would want now because of residential segregation. So I mean, it's a big, it's not a very easy, there's no easy solutions. A minute left. Quickly, thanks. So can I say something about what I've found deeply troubling about the school system in my hometown of Baltimore? You probably saw some of the national reports of what happened there over the last couple of weeks because of the incredible cold that we had on the east coast. That 60 of the Baltimore schools didn't have heat for a period of three or four days and yet the enemies were elementary through high schools. And this meant that six and seven year olds were in 40 degree temperatures in classrooms for days. And you could see icicles forming outside the building and 86% of those children had turned out also received free and reduced or reduced lunches or meals. So they needed to be in school. But you had this really unacceptable, I think kind of blame game that was going around where you had administrators of the school system saying that there were all sorts of infrastructure issues that were legacy issues that they inherited. And then you had other folks, other adults saying, it's kind of not our fault, we'll fix it. But for the children and their parents going to your issue about self-esteem. I mean, it just seems like adults shouldn't be given excuses for that ever happening and if it does fix it immediately rather than four or five days of children being subjected to that, it does make a big difference. And yet so much then of the work that President Obama has directed goes to alleviating those institutional issues that get in the way oftentimes of children having even the most basic options. So at least they can have after school related programs where they can feel like someone cares about them or they have a mentor they can turn to. Great. Thank you. Let me wrap up by doing three thank yous. First of all, Mr. Johnson, thank you for coming today and coming to the Frostbite Falls of Michigan and taking time out of your busy schedule. But also thank you for being willing to come back and be a Towsley policymaker in residence. We are all beyond thrilled. So that's fantastic. Thank you to Brian and Luke for also sharing their experiences and expertise. And also I wanna thank all of you for coming and I also wanna thank all of you in this room. I know many of you in this room are engaged in doing work to make the exceptional no longer the exception. So thanks for coming today. Happy Martin Luther King Day and thank you all very much.