 All right, everyone, well, the clock has chimed 11.30 a.m. and I see a whole bunch of folks have joined with us, one by one entered this space that we will turn into a living room for you. Here we are, we're gonna have a conversation about future of work and creative economies. We are so happy that you joined us. My name is Mutli Tadero, I am the panel moderator. I'm an Ethiopian-American, Ethiopian jazz singer songwriter and composer and cultural activist. And also chief of program at your Vibwena Center for the Arts, YBCA in San Francisco. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for being with us. As I said, this is our living room. This is our conversation space. This is a space for call and response as much as it is for dialogue and conversation. So if you have thoughts along the way, questions, please feel free to put them in the chat. We would love to be in dialogue and call and respond with you. And so as we begin our future of work session focused on creative economies, let's have our beautiful speakers introduce themselves. And I will call on y'all one by one just at this beginning stage. Let us begin with Lauren. Sure. This is one of those Socratic Method panels I see. No, it wasn't me. Don't you worry. Okay, so I'm Lauren Ruffin. I'll start with an audio description. So I'm a brown-skinned black woman with half a head of shoulder length dreadlocks. I'm wearing a black knit cap and a gray striped sweatshirt or sweater, whatever this is. I'm in a room that's kind of sparsely decorated. I've got a painting of a dark-skinned black-boy blonde bubblegum behind me and a white dresser. So I'm one of the co-founders of Crux. We are a movement of black artists working in AR, VR, primarily, we also help folks, you know, sense of pandemic design, immersive experiences that are intimate and social while being distant. I'm also one of the co-seos of Fractured Atlas, which is the largest association of artists in the U.S. And we spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, how we're working and why we're working and how we can create people-centered and human-centered organizations. So super stoked to be talking with a couple of my favorite people. And, you know, Michael, by the time this is done, we'll be super tight too. So I'm excited. Thank you. Beautiful. Thank you, Lauren. Thank you, Lauren. And how about Kamal? Oh, I'm so excited to be on this panel. My name is Kamal Sinclair, and my description is, I am mixed race, African-American, Irish-American person. So my skin is kind of, you know, pan-peachy area. I've got also a shoulder length, a little bit past my shoulders, curly hair, brown. And then I'm wearing a red shirt with a black sweater cardigan. And I'm sitting in a room with some photos of me of a show I did back in the 90s with Fraction Atlas where they became an artist services organization and they were still producing theater. And I'm delighted to be here, I have some classes on my face as well. And I am the executive director of an organization called the Guild of Future Architects. This is a membership organization of people that are really kind of creating coalitions and collaborations to boldly imagine the future from a lens of justice and from a lens of beauty. This is a home and a refuge where people that identify as understanding that in order to be radically about the present, we also have to be thinking about how we are good ancestors today. And we're providing as much support we can for people that identify in that way to connect, collaborate and create value for the commons. Formally, I had the great pleasure of being the director of a program called New Frontier Labs Programs at the Sundance Institute. We got to spend some real incredible time with over a thousand artists working with their passion for storytelling at the intersection of science and technology like Lauren. So it's innovating and creating space for the way we make meaning in the world. So that's another kind of experience that I bring to this conversation. Thank you so much Kamal. And Michael O'Brien. Hi everyone. So unfortunately I am off camera. I have some business center restrictions that keep me from being visually recorded, but I am here with you in full spirit. And I love this starting of a visual description. I've never done this before, but I love modeling accessibility. So I'm really excited to be learning this. So I am a six foot three tall guy with brown, brown skin, black man with, well I used to have locks. I was about to describe myself with these long locks that touched my back, but two months ago I cut my hair off. So I am learning to even reimagine and see myself with this shortcut. I am regrowing them for those that care for that piece of the description of my future. So a year from now I'll be relocked and regrowing. I am wearing all white actually with a white kooky on my head. And I'm in a, I'm actually in an all white room. I just looked around. That has some art on the walls and has, and the art is I love animals. So there's a whole slew of animals. I've got a cheetah, I've got a tiger, I've got an elephant up. And then I have a bunch of whiteboards around me because in true 21st century fashion you cannot be creative and not have a whiteboard somewhere near you, right? At some point. And so my work background is in the intersections of developmental science and that includes trauma theory, but also the science of human flourishing. It includes work and policy advocacy around issues of justice and equity. And more importantly, how do you operationalize that stuff? Cause we got a lot of folks writing pretty letters and pretty statements, but if you can't map those values to budget line items and to procedures, policies and operations then we just got cute words and cute, you know, exploratory pieces of writing. And so I help people think about that through consulting work and through work as a fellow at our think tank here in Philadelphia called the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation looks at Metro economies across the globe. And I'd like to say that I look at the humanity underpinning Metro economies. And again, how do you operationalize that equity world or equity life, right? And so or equitable life. And so the last area of my life is I am director of learning at a nonprofit in Philadelphia called the Village of Arts and Humanities. The village sits at the intersection of arts and culture and community economic development and doing that work for over, they have, we have been doing that work successfully for over 53 years, 30 as the village of arts and 30 plus as the village of arts and humanities with hardening back to its origins. It was founded in the late 60s as the Ile Ipe Black Humanitarian Center by a gentleman named Arthur Hall whose belief was that if black people had access to reimagine their history and their future through the lens of arts and culture that he could do two things for the neighborhood. He could help bring them to the world and help bring the world to them. And he made it on all those promises and really co-designed and co-created with a neighborhood in North Philadelphia was what was an early example of creative place making and really creative place keeping, right? Because it was not about utilizing arts and development to invite people into maybe we'll take over land. It was about keeping people in place and using that ideology to then help people really be anchored in an idea of place that's on the inside. And so we continue that work and as director of learning I oversee that work for folks 26 and under and I also special manage a number of projects focused on the future of work and here to join with new friends in dialogue. Thank you so much, Michael. And thank you also to Lauren, yes indeed for modeling the modeling accessibility in a way that I hope we can all take on and replicate as we move through our now very virtual meeting worlds. So I will add to that. I am a black woman with a short afro. It's about two inches. I am in a room that is yellow. That is a, it's a sound board that comes to a gentle, gently sloped point behind me. It almost looks like I'm at the in front of the hull of a ship. I'm wearing a gray sweater with a sort of circular or oval neck and I have silver earrings on that have two little circles dangling down that my mama gave me. So thank you once again to everybody who's joined us and I see more folks have come in as we were doing our introductions. So I thought that I would start with a subject that was near and dear to my heart but also one that kind of focuses and hones arts, technology and creative economy all into one through a lens of blackness as we are for black people in this space together. And that is around Afrofuturism. I was wondering if we could talk about Afrofuturism and particularly as this like, I think of it as this creative lens that once you sort of embrace it as a world it can become a lens that informs many many practices and ways of working. And I know that all of you in very different ways are inspired by and really incorporate Afrofuturism into your work. And I want to throw that out as the first question and see where that lands with all of you. You know, go for it, go for it, come on, go for it, come on. Hey, no, no, you got to on this one. This is... Okay, well, I have to just pay respect to Allied Media Projects and particularly Adrienne Marie Brown. When I was at Sundance we did a collaboration where we were able to be in 2015 at the big Allied Media Conference and Adrienne was one of our panelists talking about this innovation space and this and that although I've always understood the power of vision and the power and particularly the... I grew up in a religious division where we understood black people to be like the people of the eye where the black is the darkest part of your eye but attracts the light for the world to see. And so this black foresight, this black insight has always been part of my kind of framework around you know, this incredible contribution that black people bring to our global society knowing that every group brings particular gifts to our global society in a way that humanity moves and changes and metamorphosizes. But there was a particular moment when Adrienne was talking that it just clicked for me when she talked about, you know, I grew up thinking a lot about multi-generational trauma and healing but the way that she framed part of that healing that I hadn't fully understood in that way before it was about when you can actually go through the process of envisioning a future that is, what does it look like when black bodies are not in trauma? What does it look like when we're fully realizing our potential because we're not having those potentials limited through systematized racism and all of the other kind of issues that come along with that. And it was a moment that I kind of, it just really clicked and quite frankly did a change in my trajectory around the work that I wanted to be supporting. And also while we were at Sundance, you know, Moira Griffin who was the head of our diversity program at the time was really clear about saying, yes, we've done very well at advocating for the injustices in different ways around black bodies and trauma, black and brown bodies and trauma. But, you know, and I understood this from when we were doing question bridge, I used to be an artist on the project question bridge black males and looking a lot at, you know the identities of black men have been framed in throughout our history in this country and all the ways in which that is agenda and politicized and how it has created implicit bias and all kinds of, you know the whole, a very deep history of a systematized social control and oppression. And it was just this moment that even at Sundance we had this conversation around how when you are, even if your intentions are good and you're only showing images of black bodies and trauma and even if you're trying to advocate for not having black bodies and trauma, it's still part of the programming of all of our brains, our neurology, our psychology that not only impact the way the world sees us but the way we see ourselves and the way we perform in our, the way we program all of our behaviors around this concept of blackness. And I, it just was a moment where I realized that this is a really critical piece of the puzzle of making sure that we are creating space for that bold imagination of what does it look like when black and brown bodies, black and brown people, black and brown minds, hearts and spirits are not only imaged in deficit identities. And that is powerful paradigm shift if we can achieve those images as normal that it has such deep impact on even our epigenetics. So that's why Afrofuturism to me is such a critical movement at this point in our history. I'm a shock outside of my health right now. So I'm just gonna- We can't hear it. Oh, you can't? Okay, good. Sorry, I've got a pretty intense mic. It picks up everything. I mean, I think yes to everything there, Kamal. The other thing that I'd add is in addition to Afrofuturism, I learned so much from indigenous communities and their stories. And in particular around, I spent a lot of time thinking about how capital flows into systems. And when we think about sort of economies and what we need to do with capitalism, I'm informed by both sort of Afrofuturism and some of the work of indigenous communities to think about how do we get to a place where scale isn't the goal? Both individually and as collectives, as organizations. How do we get to a place where we really value relational? These relationships that we're forming here that people in this room are sharing with us over the need to get ahead. How do we really start to ask ourselves because capitalism actually demands that you don't ever take a breath to pause on what is enough for you personally? Capitalism actually demands that we ask what does that person over there have and how can I get it? What does this person over there, whether it's my parents, my cousins, my teachers, what do they want me to do? And then let's go into debt generally to go get it. So once we start to center on our own personal happiness, which is radical, right? Like it is a radical idea to think that what we should do are the things that make us happy as long as it's not hurting anyone else. But really valuing the relationships over money, making sure that the economy stays circular and that we're finding ways to provide everything that our communities need without having to rely on other sort of, you know, other metrics for capitalism. So I mean, that's sort of where that question took my head. Did we lose Michael? Michael, did you want to spin on that? Or Michael, you are muted. So in true fashion of just technology 101, I just had way too many things open and like lost the screen and was like, where did they go? Okay, sorry. This is why you can't have tabs and browsers open. Sorry. So I agree with the brilliance and the wisdom that's definitely been shared. And so just to build on it and augment a bit, you know, taking a little bit of a different perspective from the end of like, I knew Afrofuturism as Octavia Butler novels, but which at one point I had never read one, right? And I think I even shared this when we were preparing for this, it was someone else that you, a colleague of ours that used the term futurist on me. And I was like, what does that even mean? This was like four years ago, right? And it's interesting because it never dawned on me that there was like a collection of people and a space of thought and research and practice and the arts and all this other, not only just in futurism, but in a space of futurism focused on black people extending forward in time in a variety of ways, right? And looking at a variety of life outcomes and, you know, I call it social alchemy, right? The ways that people can relate with and be in relationship with one another. And so for me, I approached it through the lens of great clinical work, right? In public health center, we're dealing with trauma, dealing with and research and practice in that area and looking at, again, human thriving and wellbeing. And what are the, you know, I will call it technologies, right? That and not just like digital technology, but again, back to this idea of social alchemy, relationships, design of process, design of how people interact with one another, interact with space. What is the technology for healing in the 21st century that we really need to be keyed into in places and spaces like Philadelphia? And when jobs are such a necessity, are there ways to be thinking about monetizing some of that in ways that don't extract the true value and meaning from it, but can literally put money into people's hands in legitimate ways that support them having access to create, right? Family sustaining opportunities. And so that kind of thinking, I didn't know was that for futurism, right? And so I was excited to learn that not only is there a space for that, but there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people around the globe in our country thinking like this and sort of be in relationship now with you all, you know, to think like this and wanna probe these things is very, very exciting. And I think it's opened up both in my practice and research and practice of just doing, right? I think it's opened up ways for me to think about the future of work in ways that include to Lawrenceport, include indigenous wisdom and technologies, but is completely also centered on imagining ourselves 15 minutes into the future, which for some people and groups can be very difficult because of the immediacy of now and the stressors of now and the way that we've come to learn to manage our expectations because of the things that many groups are routinely having to navigate at the policy level, at the local level, whatever. And then also imagining ourselves 200 years into the future, right? Like both are a part of futurism at varying scales, but are still a part of that world. And it's exciting to me to be in community to think about those things with folks and do, right? Not just think, but do. Absolutely. One of the... Go ahead, please. A quick quote that I think speaks to what you just shared, Michael, is by Zora Nielherson and it says the present was an egg laid by the past and had the future inside its shell. And I just think that's the perfect kind of analogy for... I mean, I would say, you know, just thinking about how time works and what our relationship is to time, like you're saying within the moment, within 15 minutes, within a hundred years or so. So yeah, I just wanted to amplify. I love that. I love that as well. And I just wanna reflect back some of the things that y'all said. Vision centered, a full vision of healed black bodies not informed by trauma, centering indigenous wisdom, being happy, social alchemy, ways of relating that prioritized relationship over outcome and a real technology for healing. I just thought that was beautiful. So many beautiful pieces came out of that discussion and also thinking about, you know, the reason that I wanted to start with the Afrofuturism question was, I'm really interested in a specific creative practice that can become a lens that focuses and directs our work no matter what it is. So creative practice that can do that for us, that can give us that kind of freedom and liberation to step forward and follow through and act. And I think Afrofuturism is one of those powerful technologies that y'all, as y'all said, but it's not only about a creative practice that can do that, but you all yourselves do that through your own work and creative practices. I was really struck when learning more about you that each of you are people who sit at an incredible breadth of intersections, right? Like, so, you know, Laura and your CEO, co-CEO Fractured Atlas and founder of Crux, but you're also a lawyer and a founder and you've done PR and fundraising and you're focused on joy. Kamal, you're a future architect, a dancer, a trans media producer, a senior consultant, executive director, Mike, you're a social practice artist, a musician, a professor, an innovation fellow, a trauma specialist focused on flourishing and development. I feel like there's a real ethos in there, a real ethos towards the polymath, towards multiple intelligences, as well as an ethos of like, make it happen, do move forward. And I was wondering how you all navigate those intersections of creative practice in multiple intelligences, ways of thinking, especially when I still feel like that's quite, well, not only are, not only something that's very, I feel natural to the artistic and creative mind, but can also pose challenges, but also which poses so many potentials for the way we need to think to step into the future. So I just wondered if you could talk about how you navigate those intersections and also how you nourished those in yourselves. And as you were saying that I was like, maybe we all have a hard time making decisions and commitments, you know, like, maybe that's a commonality that I hadn't thought about. But I mean, I think it's always struck me as like, as weird that we're taught to be like multi-taskers and multi-disciplinary. And then, you know, you, you know, you go from walking to running and sort of trying out all these other things. And then you become an adult and they tell you like, pick one major in college, you know, go to law school, pick this one type of law that you're gonna go deep with. And I guess I never accepted that because I'm really curious about learning new things and trying new things. Now, I mean, I think being brave enough to not push back on whether I'm a creative or not, which I didn't do officially yet, but it might happen before we're done. But I mean, I think the world demands that of us right now. You know, this where we are right now as capitalism reaches its apex and perhaps we'll be able to pass the apex, I think we're going to have to be multi-disciplinary, a little bit of everything. Like, you know, I feel like I've got to get better at, like I'm starting to garden more, like more intensely. You know, like, I'm like, how do I do? Like, am I gonna have some sheep at some point? You know, I feel like it requires those sort of questions that are pretty far out to really help us understand that we're navigating this world that really hasn't existed and it's happening in real time now. And, you know, if nothing other than climate change is gonna push us to become experts in areas that we just never thought we would have to. Yeah. I have to second that. When I got an opportunity to do a research project called, and we ended up being called Making in the Reality for the Ford Foundation and I interviewed all these people, amazing people and Maureen, I believe you were one of those people, right? Yeah. So long ago, 2016 was one of those. But yeah, and one of the things that kept coming up over and over again was how, and this is pre, Cambridge, I don't want like a pre Facebook going on trial, you know, in front of Congress. And this was when just real people that were kind of, and it was even like at the very beginning of like Chysten Harris doing, you know, central domain technology and like kind of tech won't build that movement. And I just remember so many people saying we are designing into our silos and we're designing with these perceptual limitations and it was getting more and more and more dangerous. I interviewed one Silicon Valley executive who said, the head of one of the major set, you know, kind of branches of a major tech company didn't even know about the civil rights movement in any depth or capacity. Those kind of limited, you know, we went steam and we went STEM in a way that was, you know, we're dealing with the most abundant, complex, dynamic technical infrastructure in human history. So it does require hyper specialization, but if you're only focusing on that hyper specialization and not understanding at least in a cursory level the other aspects of the human systems, then we're definitely not designing well and not to the optimal, you know, the optimal design that could be possible, especially when you're looking at like the, we're, you know, coming to the end of capitalism in the way that we know it and really needing to be bold and understanding that we can't continue in this exploitive, nonstop growth. Pass it, there's just no more room to go anywhere. Like you've got to understand circular advantage. You've got to understand regenerative systems. And so that's why I think it's, I almost like think about it like theater directors having to, at the dawn of film, having to like get in the room with somebody who had an operating camera or an editing or edit with, you know, what an editing machine might look like. It was just completely out of there what would be the silo that they were supposed to be in but in order for these new kind of ways in which systems developed, we needed to break out of it. So I think I'm working with a lot of universities, rethinking curriculums for interdisciplinary work working a lot. We're curating in and we're finding magic kind of that alchemy that you're talking about like at the guild where we're bringing somebody who might be an ecology, the top scholar on the coastal ecologies put them in the room with somebody who is the regenerative farming expert in the room with somebody who knows about VR and AR and stuff happens when you create those mixes. But if they don't even have a language to be in the room together, we miss the opportunity for those serendipitous magic to be created. So anyway, that's my take on why intersectionality not only from, you know, kind of demographic background and identity backgrounds but also from fields and disciplinary backgrounds are important. Yeah, I just wanted to add one thing, Mal, because I think that's so spot on. In particular around this idea, you know, sort of we've made this big push on STEM and STEAM and that focus. What we're realizing now in 2020 is that, you know, things like having a specific understanding of the systems of oppression in the United States is actually a core leadership competency. And you can't lead an organization in the future if you don't understand that history. So if you don't know that the move bombing happened in Philadelphia in 1986 and you can't support employees on November 4th after this election because there's a direct line from state sanctioned violence that predates the move bombing two weeks from now. And I think that whole thread there, Kamal was really tight. Yeah, I think that's a fantastic point. And I think for me, I think we're becoming experts either silo-styled or global whole level systems complexity style about everything but our humanity which is fascinating to me and terrifying at the same time. And what I mean by that is we have not fully at a national level sat in the fact that every system essentially as we know it that has been designed to function at a macro level and by default then to influence a lot of the micro level systems and processes within our society. They've all been built on the back of dehumanization, right? Whether that's racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, I mean, we go down a list there but the fact of the matter is we are steeping ourselves and so much knowledge minus to me what's probably the most robust area of knowledge coming forward. I was excited to hear Kamal talk about epigenetics, right? Like there are so many areas of understanding and that are breaking forward in specific silos of research and academia that are forcing new sectors to emerge that are completely multidisciplinary like the science of learning, which is like at least eight different siloed areas of academic research converging into one because of how complex it is just to be a freaking human being and to do something as quote unquote simple as learning which is not simple, right? So making statements like learning is a bio-complex memory system is for many people kind of like re-centering and like, oh my God, I've never thought about it like that because it opens up a whole series of other questions. How does this complex memory system work? How is it positively influenced? How is it negatively influenced? Does it, well, how does it interact with the body stress mechanism? We've got all these things to start talking about. What is it like to have systems of oppression running a muck in a workplace and I'm expected to be learning and being up-skilled and re-skilled for a 21st century economy and nobody wants to talk about my blackness in a positive way. Nobody wants to honor the fact that I'm a mother and it's not a bad thing because if we had mothers, we wouldn't have humanity, right? Like there are so many things that people have to go through at the intersections of their identities to just accomplish the quote unquote normative things in the 21st century economy and we can now actually start to dig into these complexities and think about the real costs, right? And then so to your point around care, I use the developmental science frame for all of this not just for care, but for even classifying constructs of harm, health, well-being, cost, risk and that's to look at humans as developing and for different that have inputs and outputs, right? And outcomes connected to them. So that's the biological or the physical, the psychological or the emotional, the social or relational and the spiritual and or moral space. But that last one is not about religion, it's about the fact that human beings are meaning making creatures and we're going to make meaning when there is no meaning. That's provided for us. We will legitimately fill it up whatever the hell comes to mind based on our experiences, the way we've been socialized, larger media narratives, family narratives, this is the convergence of things colliding in that space, but you are going to make meaning whether you want to or not. And you don't have a choice. That's the other thing about these dimensions of input around our development. They're dynamic, they're interdimensional, they impact each other, influence each other and you don't have a choice on like, okay, I'm only gonna focus on my psychological development. It don't work like that, right? And like as systems designers, holders, thinkers, architects of the future, policymakers, whatever it is, we've got to also consider that you don't just get to pick one area to impact with policy. That's not how it works either. We need to do learning spaces. So that complexity of our humanity, I just, I astonished at how far behind philanthropy is, how far behind policymaking is, how far behind like so many systems and players are, how far behind the freaking future of work folks even are. And considering this space that I'm talking about, I spend more time in rooms with people yelling about automation. I'm like, oh my God, guys, just do a lit review. We've been screaming about automation for years, right? There are so many articles and periodicals about all the jobs they're leaving. And what really tends to happen is that new jobs pop up that we were not prepared for. We didn't prepare anyone to partner with technology in these new ways. We didn't prepare, and we have this opportunity now, and I'll close out here with my long statement, we have this opportunity now, go back to the indigenous wisdom piece. We are watching indigenous wisdom become sucked up into capitalism, right? Like, we can stop that. I thought Michael talked about that. Do something that both lifts up humanity and provides real access for people to have wages connected to things that they know from a place of being, right? As opposed to having to pay to go to school to get a thing or having to figure out more complex financial instruments to get somebody educated in some way with a degree and a stamp of approval on them for us to have to then again realize that we really need to decentralize expertise, right? So anyhow. Well, Lauren, you go next, but I have something to say. No, no, no. No, no. No, no. Okay, I want to piggyback on what both of you guys have said. And particularly, as Lauren, you brought up this idea of hypercapitalism and then kind of coming to this apex, I think that circling back to what we started with in the conversation was why Black folks need to be in these conversations, why indigenous folks need to be in these conversations. And when I was doing that interview, those interviews, I was talking to a lot of people about the future of work and all the kind of swing pendulums of fear to all the things we're being expressed, but Skawa Nadi, who's an artist in Canada who runs Indigenous Futures gave a particular answer that really stuck with me. She's a Mohawk Airquai and she was saying, oh, I can't wait till there's a four hour work day, four days a week, because then I can go back to the bounds of what my cultural, what is the kind of the cultural balance that my community, my culture, has always identified as a balanced life where you're supposed to have time in work and service to your community that are creating value for all of our mutual survival and thriving and shared prosperity, but you also have to have equal time with community and family and equal time in nature and equal time in creativity. And I was like, that was such an interesting, bringing that perspective. And then when I think about artists, I interviewed a venture capitalist who was talking about when there is no more traditional work, when the current, you know, he was saying that when all of our needs can essentially get met because of, you know, automation and all these things in partnership with him, what creates this driving force? And he was saying like in my, his estimation, it was like the only people that worked and do things without giving either money or leisure were artists that worked hard for something that was intrinsically more valuable. And he was like, he said he thought would be the currency of the future. And so when I think about that with what she's talking about, and then the last piece of the puzzle, and I'm trying to weave something together here, is this idea of, you know, equatorial communities globally who have lived in abundance as a norm over the history of, you know, obviously there's been all kinds of shifts and, you know, I'm not a geological expert on the different, you know, pro-scenes box that we've had in our history. But, you know, there is a conversation where, you know, when you're in, like when I studied cultural anthropology back in my undergrad, there was a particular tribe that we studied that, you know, was a hunter gathering tribe. And in the axiological system, the value system of that tribe, the more items and objects you had imported, the poor you were considered because you had to carry those things from one place to another. And there was an environment of survival that over time, that community knew that they could shed and leave and let something decompose into the earth in one place because they knew that there would be the tools, the resources in the next place. But if you're coming from a scarcity-based mentality where, you know, hoarding exponential growth and protection of object and that need to get what the other person has, when there is a legitimate scarcity environment, that model of survival has been so dominant that it has gone to a point of extremes and a moderation that is obviously doing the opposite now where it's killing us. And so that's where marginalized voices like indigenous voices or territorial communities re-centering them in a legitimate way, not in a tokenized way of like, oh, let's let somebody come to the table. But the reality is we need them at this. We need us at this table because without those complex ideas at the table, we're gonna continue to design inter-perceptual limitations. So I just wanted to put that out there that I think artists have something to contribute because of the relationship that artists have to work that is something beyond there's a transactional relationship and that people from culturally marginalized communities have something incredibly valuable to contribute to this future of work. And does it, and to your point, Michael, I don't think it is, I hope it's not just transferring hypermanic kind of activity to new types of jobs. I really hope that we can find a balance and well-being in that future of work scenario. Yeah. That's what we're doing. I think that takes a level of boldness and intentionality. So one of the things that shocks people about what we're doing at Cruxes, we pay black artists $125 an hour for their work. And folks are always like, that's a really high wage. And I said, well, that's what I'm not showing up for less than that. And I got to build a company that I'd work for someday. So I mean, I think once you start thinking about building entrepreneurial creative businesses, we're really clear. Our sweet spot is having an artist work part-time for us. Everybody makes a wage of around $55,000 a year. And at the beginning of the year 2021, good Lord, we'll start offering benefits for folks at part-time because that gives them the freedom to explore whatever else they want because we still haven't figured out that the gig economy has exacerbated that we decouple healthcare, basic health and wellness from a job that is actually causing a good chunk of our health and wellness issues as black and brown people. So, I just think that being brave enough and then folks like, well, if you pay people too much, you might fail. And then I'm like, well, the next year I'm looking up and I pay black people a lot of money and we didn't work. There's no downside to that. Like we fail because we pay people too much, bullshit. Like who cares? So I just think like having, again, having organizations that exist forever might not be the goal. You know, your thing might not need to last forever but you might, it might only be a year or two and I'm actually a huge fan of time-limited work because I think that keeps the energy in it. And yeah, I mean, I'm rambling now, but off the soapbox. I just want to do that. Yeah, no, I love what you just brought up and just piggybacking on that and the work. I mean, I think that's exactly right. We are, there's a project we're doing at the Village of Arts and Humanities that actually partners my consulting firm with my employer, which is a fascinating opportunity and we have a funder that stepped in to help make sure we could do that in ways that's fair to everybody but part of the goal is to make sure that we are modeling for people, the same things that we're preaching and that if we're bringing in community experts, right? And by community experts, I mean, folks that are from a demographic that we're targeting this future of work project to benefit, right? Like if they're going to come in on the project, they're not getting a $25 gift card. The goal is $125 an hour because that's what we would pay baseline any consultant. And it's a way for us to model re-centering of expertise or de-centering certain kinds of expertise because the framework in basic research projects or the framework that we're told to use and these kind of design-based initiatives is like you stipend the community, you give them a $20 gift card to Starbucks. I'm like, that is just so wild to take someone's living experience and the kind of wisdom that you don't get from reading books or doing grad-based projects. You take that wisdom, you design with it, you make with it, you bring it back to them, you get more opinion, just extraction of value one moment after the other, after the other, which we still haven't like really based in the facts of your point learning around histories of oppression, that that kind of extraction comes from a way that we've been viewed as being part and parcel, cogs and wheels to the economic system, but not worthy of benefiting from the things that it produces and creates. And I think there's an opportunity for us to be disrupting that right now as a technology, right? There is such a thing as disruptive technology. We tend to talk about it in terms of products, but I'm also like process, process, process. And that's something that artists and thinkers like us as multidisciplinary, we're able to bring that kind of framing to different things where people would never think about it. And it's not necessarily the most revolutionary idea when we bring it to those spaces. Like you said, it's not revolutionary necessary to pay someone a rate that you will wanna be paid, except maybe it's revolutionary in terms of like the practice of just doing it versus like theorizing about it and writing equations and like looking at it in this abstract way and going, well, maybe one day in 10 years. Yeah. Yeah, I feel, I really like that. I love that practice. The practice of putting the values as actually institutionalizing the values in these organizational processes that also once it's institutionalized, you don't have to be in the room to make it happen. Like it's in the DNA of the space and the structure. And I have to shout out right now, sorry, y'all, I have to shout out our YBCA Giving Circle, our Socap Artist Cohort Giving Circle that was just launched this week because I'm so proud of being a part of this. And it's one of the ways that YBCA that we're trying to do exactly that. So we just launched on Monday. I see some of the members of the Giving Circle talking in the chat right now, but we're ceding the Giving Circle with $250,000. These are artists who make direct impact on their communities, BIPOC artists from across the United States. And we're putting that money in their hands to decide what to do with that, how they want to become philanthropists, to actually put the power in their hands to make the decisions, to design the Giving Circle. That money is theirs and we're in a support role to those artists who are themselves changing systems, who are themselves every day in the trenches doing this work in communities around the country. But I just, I really appreciate what you said, Lauren, and also Mike, about the ways that y'all are turning those values into, well, one, maybe it's like making common wisdom into common practice, something like that. And then thank you for giving me the space to talk about the way that YBCA is approaching that right now. Yeah, I mean, as you're, I think part of the intentionality is understanding how the market's going to shift to the next couple of years and how labor is going to be valued and how skills are gonna be valued. We're at that tipping point with technology where we went from word processors, no, let's say typewriters to word processors to Microsoft Word. And we're still talking to black and brown kids about needing to learn how to code. Meanwhile, the no code revolution is happening. So we'll have all these kids who know how to code, but they won't be able to do anything because we've already moved on to Microsoft Word. Nobody sets print type anymore unless you're trying to be really cool. But that's what we're training these kids to do right now. And I worry about us not being intentional about how we value labor of creatives because what'll happen is certain industries will develop and have a large number of black and brown folks in creative industries and they'll consistently be undervalued. And I just, you know, the market's off to the races and I want us to keep up. And I think, you know, part of this conversation around wages is requires a level of just seeing the future, I guess, and understanding how the, how cyclical it is. Whenever we get into something, whether it's like wearing fur or coding, it's devalued. And, you know, it's a hard thing to deal with. So I want to just even complicate that more. One, I want to acknowledge that Warren did a presentation at a certain foundation event of a little over a year ago that really gave me language that if you want to talk about it so that you have a quoting you in front of you. No, you do better than I will. I'm sorry. But, you know, really looking at how, I think part of the fair wage issue is the fact that, you know, African-American families in this country are 225 years behind in the wealth gap than the average white family Latinx are 87 years behind and Asian families are 57 years behind. Now that's a couple of years old of a report on wealth gap. But when you think about a 225 year wealth gap and then you go into environments where, you know, to get a leg in the door in certain, especially creative industries, you've got to work for nothing at all. You've got to work for nothing at internships and you've got to, you know, take an entry-level job at a prestigious nonprofit in the arts for like $38,000 a year in like L.A. or New York where like people are living 9, 10, 12 people who have, you know, these tiny spaces to even survive. I mean, not that people don't need to pay their dues and they don't need to have, you know, all that part of it, but there's just a really clear, and we did a lot, you know, just really wonder. I mean, I would just say wonderful conversation, transparent conversation about this. When I was at Sundance, like why do you look around? And we're mostly white women being able to do this work, you know, and that's a big part of that is because if you're not paying a living wage for the city in which you're employing people, then people can't, they have to take a different job. They can't afford to take that, you know, that prestigious arts nonprofit gig for two years, and then that catapults them into a studio gig or something that would really catapult their career. So I just wanna, and I saw that happen over and over again, particularly in technology where, you know, and Dorn, you basically said you can't be an entrepreneur or even a nonprofit entrepreneur if you don't have the friends, family, and pools round of wealth in your ecosystem to leverage. And that's why co-ops, you were fine. Do you wanna talk about how co-ops were looking more, I don't know where they were? Yeah, I mean, well, you know, co-ops serve, they serve a number of functions. One, it's immediate input and investment from a community. And you get to grow alongside the community at the same time. But beyond that, the level of engagement and commitment people have becomes a snowball effect in a cooperative. And that's what we found because we moved really, really slowly for two years. We've picked up in service to community, but we're finding that, you know, we're able to, in particular, recognizing how many brilliant black people were laid off immediately as disposable human capital at the beginning of the pandemic. We've been able to provide a source of income for black and brown creative workers that just wasn't out there before. But it's all because we're not trying to profit on their backs, their owners. So there's an equity share that you have immediately the second you start working with us in the growth and bringing your creative projects and your brilliance into it. And that investment, what I'm thinking about right now is how do I put a value on that as an asset? Because it's not, it hasn't been marked yet. And it's not quite patronage, but it's something that has value that again isn't monetary value, it's not capital. And I think the traditional capital stack doesn't value that. So something that we said about the role for philanthropy can play here. Because we need systems of transition as much as we're concerned about the future. The question that I have to Laura's point is like while we are figuring out the next thing that we could be doing or a couple of things we could be doing, like what would it be like to underwrite co-ops being developed in local black and brown neighborhoods where there's 225 year gap is a serious thing and we don't have the friends, family and crew around the capital, et cetera. This is where philanthropy can step in. Some of these endowments are so big. So big that they could legitimately throw 5% of it away and still be here in perpetuity. And this idea that over gonna give 1% above 5% as like our stretch, I'm just kind of like guys that's just not okay in many cases, right? And I'm switching hats as someone who is on boards for local philanthropy and Philadelphia and I'm doing consulting with some national and this is a conversation that we're having like this conversation around equity and justice and we wanna be anti-racist, et cetera. But you wanna do that through the methodologies and technologies that created the trash we're in. It's not gonna work that way. The giving's gotta get bolder. It's gotta be more intentional to Laura's point and it's gotta be directed and printed in spaces and places where the risk they can absorb. There's huge risk factors that a lot of philanthropy, social impact funders, if it's not traditional philanthropy there's the philanthropic LLC is the new move in the 21st century where they can tuck billions of assets. So there are ways to be thinking about how to get capital to these places or the purpose of seeding, if you will, access to family sustaining wages and opportunities for people to generate family sustaining wages that takes into consideration issues or discrepancies in a wide range of diversity and abilities in the whole nine. But we've gotta be thoughtful about what are these systems of transition as we're maneuvering. Even the moment we're in now and the reason I keep going back to systems of transitions, prior to six, seven months ago it was by 2030 I believe that 70% of all jobs might be sucked up by automation, either 2030 or 2050 I think the stat was. Well that's sped up enormously exponentially, right? So much so that if you will an atomic bomb has gone off in our economy and we've got to wait till the dust settles to actually make sense of where we're at. So people are talking about recovery and I'm like the dust isn't even close to settling. In fact, it's only getting more complicated with fires on the East West coast and all this other. So we need real thoughtful, sometimes 18 month, two year interim solutions that are just, and I love Lauren's point, some of these ideas are not gonna need to last forever. They need to be here now to address a real transition that is happening much quicker than people ever expected. We are losing industries left and right and a bunch of these are the industries that black and brown people use just to get by and they're disappearing. So we don't have time if philanthropy's got to step up, traditional and non-traditional. Yeah, and Michael that's so on point. I just dropped a link to a book I read over the summer, Collective Courage, it's about black cooperatives in the United States, great read, if anybody's interested. But I think philanthropy hasn't yet learned, I don't think philanthropy has figured out what the value is, what their value could be to black communities. You think about CDFI funding has dried up for our businesses, banks don't lend to us, but the reality is for so many black and brown people that the only source of capital we get in our lives is the student loan that we get when we're 18 years old. They'll give you $250,000 to go to school, but won't give you $2,500 to start a business. And philanthropy hasn't yet realized the potential they have to be able to see businesses, we don't get it anywhere else. All the entire, again, the entire capital stack has failed us. And that whole sort of the 225 years behind, 285 years behind is so spot on. But I mean, to me, cooperatives are the answer for us to be able to pull wealth. And the structure, it's been there for history. So I mean, it's not a new idea at all. Yeah, but thank you for that point. To your point, let's think about resources beyond just cash, right? Like kind of those tantrums. I mean, you guys were talking about, re-skilling, upskilling, like the gap in skills, basically. And I was really struck by when I met a gentleman, Omar Wasso, who is a professor at Princeton, and he's amazing. But I met him at, for fellowship, he was doing at the WB Du Bois Institute at Harvard years and years ago, he was advising questions for Black Males in an active media project. I learned there that he was basically the, him and his collaborators created the very first social media site. That was circular social media, not just chat rooms. And that's what literally MySpace literally copied to go forward. It was in the 90s pre-face, but pre-Frenster pre-MySpace. And it was Black Planet, right? And so when I asked him, I was like, man, that's crazy that Black people are so overrepresented on social media and you're a Black man that actually created social media. I was like, and I said, was there somewhere in the back of your head that you were calling on the African ethos of call and response? And he said, oh, absolutely. I was trying to create a call and response website in the 90s. And when I think about, where I did a compare and contrast between him and Palmer Lucky who created Oculus Rift and just in the levels of support and funding and where he was supported and where Palmer Lucky was supported in terms of, really getting resourced on an exponentially crazy scale. And I just think about that in terms of, when you're talking about the talent and also going back to this Afrofutures and this narrative shift, we're always being positioned as people that need to catch up when in actuality, I mean, he's a very specific case. He was on the cutting edge that got replicated and got appropriated and then did not get the value out of that. So how do we also think about the future of these creative economies around justice and equity around not only the return on investment because some things are not for, like even social media, I wonder if it had stayed in a place of, I mean, I don't know, it's all speculation, but his intention was a call and response website. The social media we know today is very much a capital instrument in a way that is not, where we see addiction design intentionally, like those kinds of things that were intentionally and put into this system that was to keep people in a mode of addiction. That was not the original intention of what he was doing. So I just think about where do we also think about pulling the intellectual resources, the creative resources, the capital resources and also protecting the appropriation of those resources. So I wanna just call out that we have about one minute left in this session. And we unfortunately didn't get too many of the questions that came in the chat, but if y'all wanna just, if there's any final words that you wanna give on the subject arts technology and the creative economy, we would welcome that. And just a couple of things in the chat in case it inspires some of those final comments. Darryl Ratcliffe says, what are your thoughts on artists and creatives of color navigating digital divides and using platforms that aren't built by us? Are there any suggestions? What are your thoughts on the, another Mishan Boston says, what are your thoughts on the ROI measuring impact with philanthropy or grantsmanship? And Olivia Houser says, philanthropy could be a tool for reparations, but that's not the way it traditionally functions. Just a couple of thoughts to finish if perhaps inspired by the chat. And if not, then we thank you. I'll go first. I guess Darryl, I think that's a really good question. I was a lobbyist for a certain large internet provider nationally who were made nameless, right when the digital divide started, when Verizon, sorry, I shouldn't have said it. So I think it's complicated. I think there's history. I think the system is working the way it was designed to, which was to not build out high speed internet to our communities. Those platforms are infrastructure and how we use them is up to us. And I think for me, it's mostly, are we aware of the fact of the profit that's being made on us, on our content, on our voices, on our opinions on these platforms? And how are we getting compensated? So one of the things we do at Crux is when we're approached by large tech companies for our ideas on feature requests, we make sure we're signing very, very narrow NDAs because that's a thing. And then we talk about what compensation looks like up front because I know that we work with brilliant people and that they're gonna have great ideas. I don't have platforms to suggest because they're all pretty corrupt right now, but I think we're at a point where we have to organize for things that are better. And that's my last word. It's just around how about organizing and really calling on folks to do so, moving forward. I think on that, I think community benefits agreements, which is something that has been modeled in different environments is in ways very effective for what you were talking about, Lauren, like setting some boundaries and creating some, before going into a space where you're vulnerable to that type of export. But again, that's where you have a desperation. Am I desperate for this money? Am I desperate for this gig? If I am, am I gonna negotiate away my rights? And that's part of what we need to be thinking about and maybe these co-op approaches is way to make us less vulnerable to giving away our power and our resource so for such low, low prices. And I have to say, when I was at Sundance, we had an organization we were gonna partner with and they had assigned a community benefits agreement and it was such an evolution for us as well as for the community. It was just such a great reciprocal relationship of growth around these kinds of things. Really quickly, the return on investment comment is actually our question is one that I spend a lot of time with and both my consulting work and my involvement with philanthropy, happy to talk offline with anybody about that. Feel free to hit me up, but it's a huge conversation because people tend to have the right visionary outcomes as like a place to hang up things. Like, oh, we want great jobs and money for everybody, but they have no indicators on how to actually get there that make any sense, particularly over like the 12 month, six month marks, right? Like from a public health perspective, if you're trying to tackle something like smoking cessation, you know it's gonna take three to five years worth of work before you're really gonna see the kind of outcome you're hoping for, like the large visionary outcome. But if you have the right indicators along the way, it makes a world of a difference. So as a quick example, I said earlier, if you want innovation and creativity out of your workspace or out of your workers in a workspace, if people don't trust each other, it's not gonna happen, right? Cause if you can't have free flowing ideas, you don't really have the creative thing popping off in a team. So how understanding those relationships and then reverse engineering your outcomes and the kind of return on investments you really should be looking for connected to these human centered outcomes is really important where I think philanthropy could really be making strides instead of that whole like, how do you end poverty with $50,000 in two years? That's just stupid. Thanks. Thank you guys for your time. Thank you Kamal. Thank you, Lauren. Thank you for this really inspiring panel session. And thank you to everyone who joined us. It's been great to spend this hour with you. Thank you to Socap for having us. Be well everybody and have a wonderful conference session.