 Okay, we're back. We're live. It's 2pm on a given Monday and we're talking about the Appleseed Foundation. We have Gavin Thornton from the Appleseed Foundation joining us. Thanks for coming around, Gavin. Hey, thanks for having me. Good to be here, virtually. Yes, I was only kidding about the coming around. Virtually. Everything is virtual now. Yeah. So, Appleseed, very important and interesting organization. Can you tell us a little about it? Sure. You know, the basic mission of Hawaii Appleseed is to do research and advocate for policies and systems change that help create a Hawaii where everyone can thrive. A focus on low income and marginalized people. But really, we want a community where everybody has the opportunity to succeed. How well you've been doing? What was that? How well have you been doing? Because, you know, Hawaii has a large portion of the Hawaii community is disadvantaged and they don't have money and they're homeless. And I mean, it's not a picture of, you know, it's not a beautiful picture. And you, in a way, you are, you have the toughest job of all to try to help them. That's right. We have yet to win that fight. And I think, in fact, with the pandemic, you know, we've seen things get a whole lot worse for a whole lot of people. The people that were on the margins have now, you know, fallen into dire straits. So I think our work is applicable to a lot more folks than it was even just two months ago, which is really frightening, frankly. It is. It is frightening. I mean, what's happening is frightening. The average person, you know, it's an interesting thing I've been observing in my own group of friends. So you stay home and you work at home and you watch the television and documentaries, national documentaries and all kinds of entertainment at home. But you, and you read the paper to the extent you can, but the paper has reduced its staff and range. And it was not clear that you really understand what's happening a mile, two, three miles away with people who are out of work or who never had good work to begin with, people who are hungry and never really full anyway. And I mean, I think we have to be very aware that you are kind of, you know, you're kind of a buffer between the people who are only semi-informed and what's really out there. So it's very important that we talk to you, find out what, you know, what is the community really doing these days. And I'm concerned with you. Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, which is why I really appreciate this opportunity to talk to you. I mean, I think, I think a lot of people feel really overloaded with information these days. But it's a certain type of information. And often it doesn't really give you a good sense of what is happening to individuals in our community, to the people that are on the ground, either working on the front lines as social service providers, or the people in need of assistance. I mean, beyond the food assistance, you know, you see the mile long waits to receive groceries. That coverage is very important. Why PEO, wasn't it why PEO was in the newspaper? At first I thought, oh, that's limited to San Antonio. Why is that happening here? It's happening here too. I mean, going into the pandemic, you know, there was a lot of attention, actually, to nearly half of the population teetering on the edge of financial calamity, not earning enough to meet their basic needs. So you're a bunch of lawyers. Am I right? Appleseed is a legal type organization. Who are your staff? And what's in their kit bag? What tools do they have to achieve these goals? Yeah, we actually have very few lawyers now and have expanded our toolkit substantially from the time that we began. So Hawaii Appleseed was formed initially under the name Lawyers for Equal Justice in 2004. And we were set up as an offshoot of Legal Aid Society of Hawaii to do class action litigation on behalf of low income residents in Hawaii. So that means hundreds or thousands of people are experiencing the same issue. For example, public housing residents getting over charged for their rents. Lawyers for Equal Justice would bring a case to stop that ill law unlawful practice and to ensure that people only pay what they're supposed to be paying so they have an opportunity to climb out of poverty. So that was the beginning of the organization, but 15, 16 years later, now we're separated into three different components or projects. So we still have Lawyers for Equal Justice headed up by an attorney named Tom Halper, who came to us out of the U.S. Attorney's Office. He was the Chief of the Civil Division, really well qualified, doing great work. Yeah, I want to get him on the show. Yeah, definitely, definitely. And I can tell you more about the work that he's doing right now in response to the pandemic. We also have a Hawaii Budget and Policy Center headed up by a woman named Beth Giesting that's really focused on doing the data-driven research around state budget and tax issues. She was involved in the health initiative a couple of years ago, right? Right, Beth has a background in health that is where her main area of expertise is, but she's really digging into just state budgets issues in general, looking at the data behind them. The state budget especially is very complex and hard to understand, just trying to provide clarity around that to make sure that our budget really represents what our community values are. We're spending our money on what we really value. I'm so happy to hear you say that. Yeah, great. And then the most recent addition to the organization was we took on what used to be a separate nonprofit called Focused with a PH, stands for Protecting Hawaii's Ohana Children Underserved, Elderly and Disabled. It's a mouthful. But basically that is more of a grassroots initiative, trying to organize social service provider organizations and connect with the populations that they're serving, really hearing the voices of the community that are impacted by the issues that we are focused on. So we have both a top-down like think tankish aspects to our program, and then now this new grassroots, making sure that the policies that we're advocating for are informed by the community that is impacted by them. And you have the staff of, what, 6,000? Yeah. Right now we're the biggest we've ever been at 11 people, which seems huge compared to just a few years ago when, you know, it was four of us working out of what felt like a closet. You got a lot of work to do, Kevin. Yeah. In our current office, we still have problems social distancing with 11 people, so most of us are working from home now, but... Well, so what I caught out of that is litigation is always a possibility, including class action suits. Advocacy, pardon me, is a possibility. I guess you can include in that lobbying in the legislature. That's right. That's the last piece. Under the Apple seeds moniker, we are at the legislature advocating for things like earned income tax credit to increase tax fairness, minimum wage, issues like that. So, you know, one thing that occurs to me is that sometimes people have a perfectly good initiative to advocate for, but there's no bill. And some of these bills, they're hard to draft. And I wonder if you ever get involved in drafting bills, because, you know, that's the way to actually get it done and not have it lie in somebody's desk for a long time. It's to say, here's the bill. Try this. If you do that. So, we do. We assist in drafting bills. We do a lot of work on ensuring that the bills that are introduced make sense, that there aren't any unintended consequences. You know, drafting in my mind as someone who, like, this is their day to day, is such a small part of the equation, because over 3,000 bills are introduced to each session and around 300 get passed. So many die either sad or happy death, depending on where you sit. And so, a lot of our work is focused on preparing prior to the legislative session, helping just understand the concepts, the data behind the concepts, the way that those concepts might impact the community. And then drafting the bill, getting it introduced. And then there's so much work to be done during session itself to try and shepherd that bill through to the end. Session. Session is an interesting word in our time, session. We don't have a session, Gavin. So, all the best bills laid by mice and men that are not going anywhere right now, we're in this kind of perpetual recess right now. So, what do you think about that? What are you doing about that? What can you do about that? Yeah, so there is more work to be done than can possibly be done by us or others in the community. So, you know, there's a huge amount of federal funding that's coming to the state that's supposed to be used to respond to the pandemic. And we've been working very hard to try and gather input from community stakeholders, try to understand what's coming in, what can be used for, what it can be used for, to really ensure that, you know, we are maximizing the use of those resources that we're getting as much as we can, and that we're putting it to as good of use as possible. So, that's one thing that's really been occupied in a lot of our time. The other thing is legislative session is going to come back. And in fact, just over the weekend I heard that next Monday they will be opening up. Oh, really? Oh, that's hot news. Not 100% confirmed, but that is the rumor. That's my expectation. Still don't have a lot of clarity on exactly what's going to be considered then. So, right now we have folks in the office or out of the office scrambling to try and figure out, you know, what's going to be under consideration and what should we be focused on this coming week to prepare. It's an opportunity actually if they go back into a session. But I want to circle back a little on the federal benefits that should be coming to Hawaii under the CARES Act and under all the other benefits, I mean 2.3 trillion plus another 6 or 700 billion. What did Everett Dirksen say? After a while it adds up to real money. But you know, when you put that kind of money down, especially under this White House, you know there are going to be issues and problems about, you know, misdirection of funds or legislation that happened too fast and doesn't go to the people who it truly should be intended to go to. And I wonder your thoughts about that. I mean, the first question is would you have done it differently? I make you Congress. You're now Congress. Would you have done it differently? And the second thing is can this be fixed? Or is it just or we just have to all get along with the idea that a lot of it is going to fall off the side? Yeah, I think generally speaking, there's a sense that what has been done so far is generally good. But there are definitely questions about the distribution of those resources going to corporations versus people. You know, there are definitely concerns there. And honestly, things have happened so quickly. And it's just such a large volume of money and information. I don't think even the experts have really been able to sift through everything. And the consequences are going to play out over time. And we're going to see more and more as time goes on what the real issues are. Yeah. Generally speaking, the speed of the reaction is unprecedented. The volume of resources that are put in have been put in unprecedented. Those are good things from nearly everyone's perspective. There are definitely concerns about, you know, who the resources are going to. And there are fights shaping up at the federal level about what needs to be done next with the folks that we talked to a lot in D.C. and our national partners saying that so much more needs to be done to help individual people that are really struggling as a result of the pandemic. I want to ask you two questions that are come in by email. The first is what is Apple seed? Where does Apple seed funding come from? How are you supported? Seventy percent of our funding is from foundations, primarily local foundations, white community foundations, a big supporter. Our budget center was supported. Its creation was supported by a hui of nine local foundations. So primarily foundation supports about 10% from private donors, 10% from an annual fundraiser that we do, and then 10% just from the sky, from heaven every once in a while thing to come in. So this is a follow up to that. My own question is if I'm an ordinary person, a middle class person, and I can get along for a few months without necessarily working, and I have a few bucks that I might want to contribute to Apple seed, why should I care about Apple seed as opposed to so many other nonprofit organizations in the state of Hawaii? There are hundreds of them. Why Apple seed by now? Yeah. And let me say right now, there are so many organizations that are working on the front lines that are under resource and need people's help, need people's donations and support. We definitely need support from individuals to do our work. And the reason why we think the work that we do is so important. Why the support that people provide us is so important because we try to be the connective tissue that helps bring a lot of groups together to solve complex problems. So for example, one of the issues that we've been working on as part of our pandemic response has been on the hunger and food access issues. We're part of a hunger action network, Kauai Hunger Action Network that we helped build up. And we also have a bunch of other partners in the food systems community that we've been working with trying to pull folks together to ensure that students who were in school that relied heavily on school meals to meet their nutritional needs. And then when school then go back into session, we're left without access to those meals. DOE now has I believe over 70 schools that they're serving meals at, but it took a while to ramp up. Still have a ways to go there. So we helped coordinate group of organizations to ensure that there were feeding sites where kids can get their meals. And then so trying to be that connective tissue between organizations that are on the ground. And then also just the trying to promote smart policy and systems change. You know, private philanthropy dollars can only go so far. Government dollars have much more potential to impact the lives of our people and ensuring that those dollars are focused on helping Hawaii's residents that need it most. You know, that's that's the work that we do. Yeah, it's a leverage thing. You can bank through your buck. Yeah, exactly. Okay, by the way, just just a footnote to that, you know, a couple of years ago, we did a series of shows on the Loa United Way beneficiary charities. And we found that there are 200 or 300 of them. And we found interestingly enough over time that a lot of them were addressing homelessness, as it should be, that's got to be a major initiative in our state. But what we also found is they were kind of in silos. And what they needed was coordination. Somebody what did you use the term the glue the connective tissue connective tissue. And I think what you're doing there sounds like it meets the, you know, the problem that we saw in having various nonprofits all dealing with the same issue and not talking to each other. So the connective tissue, really important. Anyway, let me let me go to the second question that came in. Okay, what specific projects are you working on now as would address, for example, homelessness, the status of those projects, beginning, middle, end, medium and long term, and the goals of those, that's a multiple compound question. But see if you can handle it, Kevin. How long do we have? Only six hours. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. So we do work in so many different areas. And I would say the top three are hunger, food access, housing and homelessness. And then what we call economic security, which is primarily tax and wage issues. Let me just talk about some of the pandemic response efforts that we're working on now, because I think those are maybe the most relevant to our times. So through focused, which I described earlier as that network of social organizations, one thing that we're very concerned about, we saw in the Great Recession that there was a problem getting the resources that came from the federal government into the hands of the nonprofit social service providers who could then get the resources into the hands of the people that needed them most. And so we've been working to bring together a group of social service providers to identify the issues that they've experienced and make sure that just things operate much more smoothly than last go around. So we brought folks together, identified a number of key issues, things like payments not being timely processed for social service providers, so people waiting months to receive the resources that they needed to do their work. Issues about contracts that made sense two months ago, but don't make any sense now because of social distancing requirements, because they're just different needs than there were two months ago. Issues like that, raising them on mass as a group of organizations. So we had just this morning, I was working on compiling survey results from 40 plus social service provider organizations and just piecing it all together in a way that made sense. So we could say to Department of Human Services, to Department of Health, these are really the five things that we need to do now to ensure that people are able to get the resources that they need. So that's one. I talked a little bit about the hunger work and trying to open up food sites for people that were experiencing food insecurity now because of job loss or because they were experiencing food insecurity prior to the pandemic. And we do have that. We have that right now in Hawaii, people can't get food. They get on food bank lines and spend all day and they're unsatisfied and that leads to bad places. Right. It leads to terrible places. I mean, these are people's most basic needs. And so the immediate work that we did was just trying to ensure that the food was there for them to get the work that we're doing now is more midterm focused, trying to get all those folks who are suddenly without income to purchase food and can't rely on the food pantry all the time because the food pantry doesn't have enough resources to go around. Getting those people informed about their ability to get on the SNAP program, supplemental nutrition assistance program. Most people know it as food stamps. Getting people onto that program. Education. That's another thing in your kit bag. Right. That's right. And so working with those boots on the ground that's getting the food out there and just including the information about signing up for SNAP so that people can't just get food now from the food pantries, but will be able to get it a week from now, a month from now, as long as we're facing this crisis. You know, the problem, we have a few minutes left. I want to throw this problem at you. The problem is that at the end of the day, I mean, we're not even talking about therapeutics or vaccines or anything. We're talking about living right now. We're talking about staving off disaster for a lot of people. That costs money. The state has virtually, well, it has very little tax returns coming in, tax income coming in. The state, as a balanced budget, constitutional requirements, hard for them to print money. The federal government is not giving the states any money for Donald Trump's own special reasons. We won't go into that now. But the state may not be a great source to solve these problems. Individual philanthropists may help. Foundations, nonprofit foundations may help. But at the end of the day, it's money. And I'll just give you the example that comes to my mind. So in yesterday's news or the day before, there are rent strikes going on. In St. New York, where thousands of tenants of rental properties have decided they're not going to pay the rent. They can't afford it. Or maybe some of them can, but they're not saying, they're just not paying. And the landlords may be ordinary people who have an investment in a condo, who knows what. They may not be able to afford the fixed expenses while the tenant stays there. So you have a real economic discombobulation here. And if you ask these small-time landlords to absorb that expense, they may be out of business right there. You have a chain of disaster is what happens. And ultimately it's banks, I suppose. But how do you balance that? Who bears the brunt of taking care of the disadvantage? If the state has no money, the Fed is cooperating, but only to a limited degree, in my opinion anyway. Philanthropists can only go so far. And if you tell them not to pay the rent, then you have a possibility of a general collapse on your hands of the money system, the banking system. So who bears the cost? And how do you, I mean, Hawaii, Apple Street, how do you crank that whole dilemma into your policy? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, great question. And this is the stuff that we've been thinking about, every day. The rent situation that you described, it is an ecosystem. And you can't just tell tenants like stop paying your rent and then you're done. That does not solve the problem, because you're absolutely right. Landlords need to be able to pay their mortgage. And if they're not able to pay their mortgage and they get foreclosed on, that's not helpful. And, you know, I do not have a three-sentence answer for that problem. I never promised you a rose garden, Gavin. But here's what we hear the main themes that we are trying to put out there, the main values. Number one, we are all in this together. And our solutions need to be solutions that where we're, it's not just small subsets of the population that's bearing the brunt. Like we need to spread it out evenly and equitably. So that's number one. Related to that is there's no genius, no white knight that's gonna save us from this problem. Like it is a community problem. And there's very much a pull, I think, towards this idea that we can get smart legislators, smart leaders to pull us out of this. I think there are some folks, some leaders right now that feel that responsibility. And the more that we can get away from that and focus on how do we engage the entire community to solve this problem together, the smartest person in the world is not gonna know what is happening in Kalihi if they're not in Kalihi experiencing what's happening to them. They're not gonna know what's happening in Hawaii if they're not in Hawaii knowing what's like experiencing that. We need to engage everybody in the solving of these problems. Yeah. And the question that flows out of that, which we can never answer, is what can, what are you telling me I should do? And the answer is in Thomas Jefferson's words. He said, find a way to make yourself useful. That's what he said. And there are things that can be done that will help us with that if our government is communicating well with folks, is telling them, you know, here's the timeline of what's happening and the decisions that we're making, which there's room for improvement there right now. That's what we're really hoping to see in the very near future. I know everybody's scrambling right now to get their heads around this, but the more communication with government folks that are ultimately making the decisions, the easier it is for people to follow Thomas Jefferson's advice and find those ways that they can contribute. Okay. Thank you, Gavin Thornton. Great to talk with you. I hope we can do it again. Want to stay in touch with Hawaii, Appleseed and follow your path. Thank you so much, Aloha. Thank you.