 entertain us for lunch. Thank you. Thank you Cynthia and it's great. We're really excited to be the lunchtime entertainment and so I'm going to kick us off. We're both going to be focused on equity in Oakland and I think as we heard this morning equity is one of those things where we all get to do the work and in fact we all have to do the work. So I think this is going to be a fun conversation for me because we're going to kind of talk about how doing the work is advocates and doing the work as city staff comes together and how that really works for raising up equity in a whole community in this case Oakland. So we'll be doing a little bit of a case study and so before Jeffrey gets into the awesome work that he was involved with as the temporary Oakland DOT director I'm just going to talk a little bit about Mikey Spay as the advocates in the community and the work that we've done around equity on our side of the equation and so I've been executive director of Mikey Spay for seven years now and I think when I came into the organization it was 2011 and you know it was a pretty white organization I think you know the board was 93 and a half percent white and well we didn't have any staff then so it was just building up from there and I think but they made a good decision to bring me on and you know bring someone in with a different lens of being mixed race queer gender non-conforming and bringing a new perspective into the organization which has made you know resulted in a lot of changes over this time and even so it's been a tremendous amount of work to start to really address equity and really have equity and transportation justice or social justice be something that is at the center of what Mikey Spay is about that has taken this whole seven years to really accomplish that to get everyone on the same page and I don't think we could have done it without everyone really being willing to do the work including like I will really call out actually my white board members though we are now 75 percent white it's still it's been very slow to change on the demographics of our organization but everyone has really died in to do the work and the white board members actually self-organized to do their own education around equity and racism and white privilege and white supremacy to really be able to move the board to a place where they could say this is our this is absolutely at the core of what we're about and a top priority for our organization so I just wanted to give you a little bit of a overview of just the work of the past year in terms of us really articulating our values around equity and social justice as well as sort of what that means for us in our everyday work so this is kind of sort of setting the stage to how we would then work with our city to advance equity there and that'll you know and what after Jeffrey talks about what's happening in the city of Oakland then we're going to have a kind of conversation back and forth that really talks about this partnership of advocacy so just to go over I'm going to just this year we've adopted a statement of values around equity and social justice for Mikey's Bay and this was a very involved process of the board and staff and I'm just going to go quickly through what we came up with but at the end there's a link if you want to go I really recommend it's a little bit of a lengthy document but I recommend checking it out to skip more of the details but I think going through a statement's a pretty boring thing is to do at lunch so I mean that would not fit the bill at lunchtime entertainment so we're going to go through this fast um so just first of all as a core value we believe the transportation justice is an essential part of our work as advocates and we've broken that into three areas one is transportation justice so here we're really looking at really looking at the environment we work in and looking at the way that racism bias inequity and historical disinvestment shows up there and that and really saying that we are working to redress those inequities in our environment we're really looking for leadership from the community and sort of similar to what we heard in the CalBike statement of strategic plan this morning and this means really that we're lifting up the champions that are already in the community particularly POC leaders, POC-led partner groups and so on and making sure that the people who are affected are part of decision making and then that we see strength and diversity that we're really working to build an environment within our organization and in our work externally that is a place where everyone is welcomed, celebrated, recognized, treated effortlessly so those are the values but I think what's more interesting is to say well how is that really affecting us day to day in our work as advocates in the East Bay and I want to say you know the East Bay is a place where you know you say oh we're doing this work because we really feel it's right but it's also a reality in the East Bay that if we don't do this work we're not one of them that's just that's the reality we could have we have high minded reasons for doing it or we could have practical reasons for doing it we have both but I think we see over and over in the East Bay that if you don't do the work and really engage the community in a very authentic way it's just you're not it's things are kind of a non-starter and we've seen that a little bit at the bike share launch in the East Bay where actually there was a lot of equity built into that it wasn't made maybe communicated as well as it could have been and the outreach wasn't done so people didn't know and there's been you know a lot of backlash because of that so um so here's just a few examples of just things for the past year or so one of you know our values I said is really um finding the leadership in the community and and supporting that so last November we were working out in Richmond and Hunter Costa to pass a couple of great revenue measures from the benefit transportation and you know where in the past we might have run those campaigns in our own office we partnered with a group at Richmond Rich City Rides if you all know Nezari Smith who's just doing amazing work in Richmond um we got the campaign to fund opening an office up in Richmond um getting money to Rich City Rides to pay their staff to work on this campaign that's probably work we would have all been doing anyway and um and then our staff worked out with the Richmond office for the campaign season and that actually ended up being the most valuable part of the whole thing for Pikes Bay because we were actually working side by side with the Rich City Rides staff over that campaign season and we got to really be in Richmond and just had to learn more from that than I think we could have there's no way we would have learned as much of even sitting in Oakland um so just a few pictures from the campaign season it was a lot of fun working up in Richmond and another one is uh the over if you've heard about the Oakland scraper bikes out in East Oakland doing amazing work keeping kids in school and getting them to donk their bikes and show them off and have a great time so we've helped connect the scraper bike team with funders to build a shed which is a container um bike kind of a community bike shop out in East Oakland um that's really um really helped a bit uh what the scraper bike team is doing and again we don't have much visibility as part of that it's something that we do in a purely supportive role to really make sure that they are successful because there are the best ambassadors we can have for biking in East Oakland another thing we've been been really confronting is racial bias in um in terms of bike and pedestrian stops this is a reality everywhere if you're not confronting this reality you're delusional it's um but we happen to know in Oakland for sure that um like there's a great business referencing a great article from Tampa um about bias and police stops in Tampa we see the same thing is happening in Oakland we have open data so we know that uh in terms of bike people on bikes were being ticketed 63 percent are black the population uh is about 25 28 percent black in Oakland so we know the system is broken so when it comes time to talk about things like vision zero or other enforcement we cannot get behind any enforcement as long as it's a broken system this has to be addressed before we can use enforcement as a tool the thing we've been doing is just diversifying the people who are teaching our bike ed classes and um we recently ran a free lci training this gets people trained to be instructors in our pool of instructors they make $50 an hour teaching our classes and we're committed to making sure that for every for our programs over the course of a year that at least 50 percent of all teaching slots are women and at least 50 percent of all teaching slots are poc um so we paid for a whole training to get more women and poc folks trained and so we've been actually exceeding our goals in terms of instructor hours bought for POC and for women so those are just a few of the things you know that like I just wanted to kind of give you a sense of how we're developing our values and how we're living our values and that really gives us the basis to when we're working with a partner like the city of Oakland to come with a lot of integrity in demanding that equity be addressed at the city level so I'm going to leave it there and then we'll talk a little bit more after Jeffrey talks about you know how we work together thanks for that it was central to the amazingly powerful partnership that Mikey Spade was able to establish with the city of Oakland the fact that they had done their homework in diversifying their board diversifying their membership doing community engagement in all of our neighborhoods and very importantly bringing data to us and the community of large made them very effective both by getting the larger city to move but also allowing us as staff in the Department of Transportation to work with them in order to get stuff done so I'm going to talk about this is a very nerdy presentation about getting real about equity to the point where it moves beyond being simply a slogan but it's actually a quantitative tool that we use for allocated scarce resources because if you actually want to you know have your values be made real you've got to buy one of the starting points though is pointing out that many of us don't really know what equity means it's very difficult to define and there's a lot of confusion about the difference between equity and equality equity and quality are not the same in fact they are at odds with each other we found at the city of Oakland that we were actually doing a remarkably good job of distributing our resources with equality in mind but not with equity so if this half of the room had all of the privilege you all had advanced degrees from fancy institutions and big inheritances and you own homes and you had you know the full array of privileges that are awarded to people based on gender and age and ability and ethnicity and this side of the room did not have those privileges if I were to split my resources equally between both sides of the room the gap in disparity between the two sides of the room would increase equality is not the same as equity and understanding what we mean by equity we go back a little bit and look at our history particularly in the transportation industry of exactly how we created such profound inequality through inequitable investments and a good place to start are the redlining maps that cover every city in the United States and these maps existed up through the 1970s but these policies still exist today before these these rules were made illegal in the mid 1960s in the red areas of the map in Oakland it was not possible to get a private mortgage it was also not possible to get federal coverage for your mortgage or really get any federal funding in order to support housing the red areas in the map on the other hand were our favorite places for demolishing neighborhoods in order to build big freeways or big industrial facilities and dump polluting loads on our neighborhoods now even i in the pattern of you see in the red and the yellow because you're going to see that pattern when we look elsewhere in our data now these um active investments in inequity not only drive a lot of the disparity gaps today but are also a source of conversation about reparations which we'll let's get into that later so our task in the city of Oakland broadly particularly under this mayor and this council and the city administrator are aligning Oakland's deeply held values with all of the mechanics of governance and i was tasked as the interim director of the department of transportation to go through all of our rules and procedures and design guidelines and signal warrants all of the dna of how day to day decisions get made in a municipality and to check to see to what degree are our own internal mechanics and alignment for values and to the extent that they weren't to fix them and probably not surprised into any of you almost everything that we do was profoundly misaligned with our supposedly deeply held uh inconsistent values so our first task was to develop uh private transportation strategic plan we got a lot of help from Bloomberg associates there's a big staff effort where we define what the heck we meant by our values and then decided what are our goals as the department for operationalizing those values what are the strategies that we would need to implement to achieve those goals who was responsible what were the resources that were needed what was the timeline for implementing those strategies how would we measure whether we knew whether we've achieved the strategies and our values like how would we quantify whether we were actually achieving our goals very importantly how would we tie our budget to our alleged values and then how are we going to report back to our council members and to the public in order to build trust particularly in a very resource constrained city like and i want to emphasize this point about budget will be coming back to again and again every city in california that i work with has beautiful statements of values almost all of them have very beautiful statements of policy that support everything that we're trying to do none of them tie their policies to the budget with perhaps the exception of oakland and i want to talk about how we did that i also want to point out that because in oakland we focused on our values and did this exercise and evaluated everything that we were doing in accordance with them we were able to get accomplished about 10 years worth of work in nine months so we completely eliminated minimum parker requirements for the urban part of the city and i want to point out actually i am not responsible for any of the things on this list this is just half what happened when i was there like as executive director all you need to do is try to remove obstacles from staff and hold some risk so we eliminated minimum park requirements the urban part of the city we eliminated use of level of service uh in environmental analysis with all california cities will be required to do in the next two years adopted our strategic plan completely rebuilt the entire organization invented equity analysis tools because nobody had ever done that before level uh restructured all of our department management passed a six hundred dollar bond six hundred million dollar bond of which 350 was four streets with 82 percent of the vote we have our construction private impact rules hired a permanent uh director of the DOT is great adopted entirely new capital and operating budgets with the new evaluation mechanisms and adopted our pedestrian master plan this is just like crazy rate of change that i i was amazed we were able to get away with it the other thing is if you send me an email or i can give the carlman presentation of your organizers here you can look at our equity analysis tools online all of those are open source the data is available play around with them and i'm going to walk through them right now so the first place where we started in trying to define what equity meant for bond was we knew we had to quantify we knew that we needed to use data um and we also realized that talking about the past or talking about issues like reparations was incredibly controversial um and was not going to give us the consensus that we needed to move forward but what we found is that there was perfect alignment in the data once we mapped it between present day disparities and terrible things that the city and state had done to our communities in the past and by focusing on the present and particularly by focusing on for example children even the most racist white people in the city of oakland when you show them a picture of a brown child suffering with asthma right they are going to get out of your way so focusing on present day disparities really really helped us and by that i mean issues like health in some neighborhoods in oakland we knock 15 years off of your lifespan because of where you grow up and largely because of the transportation investments that dump pollute loads under neighborhood that make it very difficult or unsafe to walk or bike and that make it very difficult to access jobs that provide good health care so transportation decision making is driving dramatic problems for public health in specific neighborhoods in oakland and we have all that data from the alameda county health department and we mapped it we also have great data about accessibility to all the paths out of poverty particularly access to good jobs that is something that's straightforward to map and the data is really clear again and the patterns follow the same pattern