 First of all, I would like to express my gratitude. And for the invitation, I'm very honored to be here today among my other presenters as well, especially to share with you all the work that I do in the community. And hopefully I'll be able to highlight some groundwork, ongoing groundwork that reflects some of the issues around energy and equity. I was very excited when AOD sent over the invitation because when I think of energy and equity, this was one of the most first initiatives that I started working on, even during my school at Duke. I actually started a program while I was still at Duke and ACTERRA, my formal organization took me on board and helped me to implement by providing the resources and also the support because it was a very important project which I will be talking about a lot more down my presentation, but kind of resilient communities. This is a very new organization. We, as they mentioned before, we were part of ACTERRA. CRC was a program of ACTERRA since 2016. And 2019, I'm sorry, in 2020 last year, I've decided to transition out of ACTERRA because of the direct need to work directly with frontline communities here in the Bay Area. So our mission and our whole goal is to work, serve the communities, especially frontline and underrepresented communities by providing avenue to elevate their voices, which means working directly with them, supporting them and planning with them to implement priority projects that are relevant and key to their resilience. So let me move on to my next slide. So these are our three core programs at CRC. One, we have community-based adaptation program. This program works directly, as I said, directly with communities in regards to climate adaptation planning. As you may know, here in the Bay Area, we do have communities that are under resourced. There are a lot of equity issues, environmental justice issues, but the other key barriers that I found while working here, even on the projects, is the many barriers that these communities face. For example, not only they don't have access to services, services that are developed for them because of the way the information is communicated, not only that, most of the communities of color low-income families work five jobs or four and don't have the time to research or even don't have the capacity to understand most of the resources and information are communicated in a very thick, or what would say the language used. It's very technical for them to understand. And one of the things that we advocate for, information that are going out to the communities have to be at least in a level of a fifth grade reader. So under the community-based adaptation, we manage or coordinate a climate change community team in Esparla, also a team that CRC helped create and for that team to bring together community leaders, city managers and staff, faith-based organizations, community-based organizations to help coordinate climate change work, coordinate, advocate, and even build capacity of the community around climate change. Our other programs include Baylands and Coast Illustration Project. This is a very new project we see we see funding for and we're gonna start that, but the whole goal for that project not only restoring nature and bringing nature back or nature as an adaptation measure, we're also going to create opportunities and access for the community to enjoy the Cooley Landing area or the open space that they have in the community. We work in Esparla, also about Haven and then no part about Haven and no fair Oaks. And some of our project, we also coordinate the climate-ready no fair Oaks team. Now we also have the Climate Action Education Program. This is where all our education programs are developed for frontline community youths. A lot of these programs offers, we offer on hand or we offer experience when we are talking about climate change and sea level rise, we offer opportunities where we take them out to the Bay and provide that firsthand experience, even building leadership around advocating for these issues. And then lastly, one of our main program, and like I said, this is the first program that I worked on. It used to be called Green at Home to Grid Ready, but it is now called Resilient Homes because we had to do some rebranding around this program because it was formerly under ECTERA and Green at Home is an ECTERA program. So anyway, under the Energy Efficiency or the Resilient Home Program, this program was developed is to help low-income families access free solar. We actually build this program just to work with families to do an energy audit, help them to access programs like the CARE, the FERA, PG&E programs that help low-income families reduce cost of their energy use. We partner up with grid alternatives that provides free solar for low-income families. And so since the beginning of the program, we kind of like develop it and expand it because most of the families that we work with, in East Palo Alto and Valhaven, many of the homes I walk in, if you're trying to do an energy audit, it doesn't really make sense because the home is old, most of the homes are like, we're built like in the 1950s and 60s. Most of the homes don't have air conditions. Most of the homes have broken windows, broken doors. And if you're also trying to help them access free solar, the roof is too old or the roof has many leaks. So it's not safe for families to access these services. So the program became more of a program that helps low-income families access services and programs that offer services that improve the living environment by the same time help reduce their energy use. So this is again, more details about the Resilient Homes program. It's really in home energy equity in low-income communities. So we support a lot of low-income families, improve quality of life for seniors, many of the home owners in communities like East Palo Alto and Belhaven are owned by seniors which have bought these homes 50 years ago. So they are house-riched, but they are living off of fixed income. So they never have enough savings to replace the broken window or put a new energy efficiency refrigerator in the home. So what CRC does under this program, we provide case management, which means we help the home owner apply for the services. So providing access to the services. We also provide trainings and workshops in the communities working with community-based organizations. And we even bring in community organizations like Happy Tech for Humanity, we building together Alconcilio who offers mostly free services to these families. So up to now, we didn't do a lot of these homes, this kind of the, we didn't do a lot of home repairs or solar installation in the past year doing COVID, but before COVID, we serve more than 200 homes. And some of our families have received, like one house will receive a new roof from Happy Tech, a solar panels from great alternatives, a furnace from another organizations, and that's how we actually bringing all these services to the community. So we really depend on the partnerships that we have built, not only with the community, but also with the partner organizations that provide the services. Many of the families who have received these services, they very little money for everything that they received under our program. The reason why I have this map up here is just to share with some of you that a lot of the policy existing policies that we have around this programming, as I mentioned before, there are a lot of help and support available for low-income families around energy, but the problem is the access to these services. And if you can see, there are a lot of policies in place as well to support low-income or frontline communities. So with the SB 535, the disadvantaged communities, a lot of funding is mainstream into serving priority communities that are highly vulnerable to climate change, but also have other disadvantaged things, like high pollution, even high poverty rates. And this is one of the tools that is used by... That is used by in here in California to identify these communities. And the reason why I'm sharing this with you all today is because sometimes the policies are in place, are not fair. For example, the cap and trade, which you see here, East Palo Alto does fit as a disadvantaged community, but it doesn't cover the whole city of East Palo Alto. So I've had families in East Palo Alto who qualified for, with the income, they qualified for the free solar program that is provided by great alternatives. But unfortunately, the home is not within the red area of East Palo Alto. So it kind of creates some unfairness as well, because there are families who really need the services, but cannot because they are not in the black area. Sometimes some of the legibility criterias that are offered with these services, like the income is very low for families to qualify. So if you look at the LIHEAP program, and this is the low income home energy assistant program, a family of four, if you're making $56,103, you qualify for this service. If you make $56,104, you automatically not qualified. And so we always feel like these incomes are low and these incomes are before taxes. So a lot of families who need the kind of service and help to improve the energy efficiency in their home, access free solors may not qualify because of the policies that are in place or the criterias for eligibility to access these services. These are some of the success stories from the work that we've done. These are two different homeowners, both ladies. We've helped them, both of them Amelia on the left. She received services from Habitat for Humanity. Her story, her mom passed away, only her. She's a caregiver living off of a caregiver salary, and she was not able to fix or even repair her home. So we went in and helped her and eventually she received solar after repairments on her roof by Habitat for Humanity. Again, you see that partnership, Habitat for Humanity with Alternatives, two different organizations working in the community to serve a homeowner like Amelia. Same story with Alvarez to the right. Her husband passed away suddenly. She had a lot of issues, needed help with her home. And so we also went in, helped her get help from Habitat for Humanity. She received new windows, new flooring and repairment of her roof. And then eventually great alternatives went in and helped her with the solar installation. Both families are now benefiting from solar systems that help save 90% of their PGIN e-bill. And of course, education and awareness is another key component to the work that we do. So we do work with them and help them to conserve energy within the home. Lastly, I want to show a couple of things that we also do on the ground around energy. Like I said, the communities need the support and the services. Unfortunately, the information does not get to them easily. So we create events in the community, bringing organizations to the homeowners or to the community members. So we have revitalization events. It's one of our key projects that we do. This was our last one in 2019. We couldn't do one last year. It always happens the end of the year. We started doing this since 2016. We always change our community centers to host these community revitalization events. And during the revitalization events, we always have projects planned around it. Like on the same day, we have a solar training event. We would have a solar installation on one of the homes in East Palo Alto, or we will have a community tree planting event also happening the same time. So it's creating opportunity for the community to come together, learned about the different organizations and services and even the organizations out there to help them apply on that day. So a lot of families have received services through this kind of events. And the organization and partners have also noticed a big increase in people applying for their services. This is another photo I wanted to share what our event looks like in the community. I really missed this because it's been a year we haven't been out doing much. And so I wanna finish off with this slide about resilience and equity. Again, CRC, we work with community leaders. We work alongside them. A lot of our programming is designed to address community priorities because we believe in solutions that are generated for and by the community. So we are very flexible in that way. We also believe that community have a lot of strength, their capacity to network. Resiliency means very strong networking and we have seen that in the communities. That's why they are resilient. So we also wanna go in and help build that up and elevate the existing capacity they have. Education and awareness is a action that the community always ask us to do because a lot of these issues we work around like energy, climate change, sea level rise, these are all new things to them even though they're lived experiences, it's not the same. But we help connect those issues to the level that the community understands and build that connections. And one last thing, stronger partnerships. This is very true for us who are working in this field. We always need to help each organization and hopefully I was able to illustrate that with my past slides, how we are able to implement and support the community through partnerships, helping one another. And that's why I'm here again today is to share that story because we've climate change, not one organization can deal with it. Everyone has to work together to build a regional resiliency for our area and for the people that are highly vulnerable. So thank you again for my time and I'm looking forward to answer any questions you have. Thank you so much Violet. That was a really great presentation. As Ayoade mentioned in the chat, feel free to drop your questions in there. We're gonna save them till the end after Leslie's presentation and then hopefully we can have a really sort of engaged audience discussion as well. So welcome Leslie. Let me go ahead and share your presentation. There you go. Okay. Well, thank you so much Bianca and Ayoade for the invitation. Nice to be here with you all and thank you for helping me up the last minute with my slides and technical difficulties there. Yeah, as Bianca mentioned, I'm Leslie Aguayo. I program manager at the Green Lining Institute. We're located in Oakland, California. We're a racial equity organization and I'm excited to share with you all why we need to center race to advance climate and transportation equity. So just a little bit of background on my organization. So for 27 years, the Green Lining Institute has set out to bring economic opportunities to low-income communities of color through research, policy advocacy and leadership development. And so for this presentation today, I'm going to be talking very explicitly about race and if I do this right and if we all do this right, it might make some folks uncomfortable and that's totally okay, right? Being uncomfortable is necessary part of the process towards the collective work of advancing justice and sustainability. So with that, I'll go ahead and get started. So I just wanna go ahead and start here by sharing the definition of equity that Green Lining holds. So equity is transforming the behaviors, institutions and systems that disproportionately harm people of color. Equity means increasing access to power, redistributing and providing additional resources and eliminating the barriers to opportunity in order to empower low-income communities of color to thrive and reach their full potential. And to be clear, equity is not the same thing as equality. Equality is the assumption that the playing field is level whereas equity acknowledges that people are starting from very different places because of systemic injustices like redlining. Next slide. So, oh, there's actually, go ahead and click it three times, yeah, cool. So in order to share why race matters in policy and why we must lead with racial equity, I'm gonna tell three stories. So first, I'm gonna tell the story of the past and recount the history of race in America and how it relates to our built environment and economy. Then I'll tell the story of today and how the past currently manifests in injustices for people of color still. And finally, I'll tell the story of tomorrow and how we can all work together collectively to build a society that is just and healthy for everyone. All right, next slide. So I'm gonna go ahead and get started with the story of the past. As many of you may be familiar with this history, in the 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression, many families were struggling to make ends meet and were defaulting on their mortgages. So in response, the federal housing agencies began issuing government-backed mortgages to help post-war families build wealth through the Depression. However, not all families received the same help. Many historians credit this policy to helping families rebuild their wealth during their lives during this crisis, but there's also a really shameful side to this story that's not often talked about, right? It's one rooted in racism, and basically it instills that our government and the real estate industry is directly responsible for this past. Next slide. So this is an audit from surveyors hired by the city of Oakland in 1937. As you can see in the box in red, it includes pretty offensive language and explicitly names black and Asian folks as a detrimental influence on the community and the reason for redlining. To further illustrate how egregious this policy was, the federal housing administration had a manual which said that incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities. And for good measure, this manual also recommended using highways as a good way to separate black neighborhoods from white ones. So for all intents and purposes, this was state-sponsored systems of segregation. And on the next slide. And so redlining was instituted all over the country. As we know, home ownership is the primary way that families build intergenerational wealth and people of color were effectively locked out of this opportunity. And I wanna be clear here that redlining still exists today. It's just in much more subtle ways, right? Black home buyers are twice as likely to be turned down for a loan than white home buyers, for example. And redlining didn't just impact home ownership. It also combined with zoning and disenfranchisement and disinvestment, it concentrated pollution in polluting industries and highways in these neighborhoods. So while redlining was technically outlawed decades ago, this lack of investment is still lingering today. Next slide. So another part of this story of the past is also the story of highways and the systematic redesign of our cities for the car, for the automobile. Highways were constructed often directly through communities of color and this destroyed local neighborhood economies and locked in air pollution. These highways enabled white flight from cities to suburbs, which were often designated as white-only neighborhoods. And as a result, this shifted investments in commercial development, corporate headquarters and other businesses from cities and into wealthier and wider suburbs. Today, we actually see the inverse of white, right? Taking place as young, educated and upwardly mobile folks move into once undesirable urban cores and displace long-term residents of color. So redlining and highways were born from America's long legacy of racist public policies and today subversive versions of redlining continue taking a toll on people of color. Additionally, historically in the US, low-income individuals and folks of color have been over-policed and hyper-surveilled with transportation violations serving as one of the pretenses for disparate citations. And often those citations, as we've seen, lead to abusive power, criminalization and death, as was in the most recent case with George Floyd's murder whose murder was a year ago today. Next slide. And then also go ahead and click through these. So since the founding of this country, the genocide of native people to slavery, to Jim Crow laws, to the Chinese Exclusion Act, to Japanese internment and to the subsequent Black Lives Matter movements of today, race has always determined the winners and losers in America. The private sector and the public sector work hand-in-hand to build these structures of inequality and over time this accumulates and it compounds. So let's remember that this history was not created by just a few bad actors. These were all deliberate public policy decisions that were carried out by federal, state and local governments. Government created these injustices and so government must also play a role in solving them. So the story of the past, it's heavy and it hits hard. And I'm showing you these photos because we always have to keep this legacy in mind because while I wish that I could say racial injustice was a thing of the past, we all know it's not. So our country has never fully confronted our legacy of racial injustice in a meaningful way. Next slide. And so now I wanna talk about the story of today. If we take a look at the current COVID-19 pandemics and we start to see that it's pulling back the curtains on America's deeply rooted inequities. These maps show the environmental impacts of as a result of redlining as well as COVID-19 impacts. So the first one shows us the redlining map and there are lots of similarities between the first map and continual environmental pollutants in the second map and then COVID-19 rates as well in the last one. And as we know, people of color are the most impacted with, I guess I can go ahead and share these slides. People of color are the most impacted with Latinx communities seeing some of the highest numbers of COVID-19 cases and African Americans making up the highest mortality rates. The economic impact associated with COVID is similarly impacting black and brown communities most severely. And I wanna stress that COVID-19 and racism are global pandemics with very real public health consequences. So we do this work because communities of color across the country continue to be harmed by racial disparities that are largely a result of policy making. Next slide. So it's no surprise that COVID cases are disproportionately concentrated in these communities of color. And this graph you see that Latinx and black communities contain a higher percentage of cases compared to the share of the population. And this is Alameda County but it is representative of the US over the fall. And studies have also shown that women make up a majority of essential workers, unpaid caregivers and domestic laborers indicating that they are hardest hit by COVID-19, harder hit than their male counterparts. In general, black, Latinx and native communities have higher rates of preexisting conditions which lead to greater risks of COVID. And while Asian-American communities are experiencing increasing rates of xenophobia as well, add to that the compounding risks women carry and can determine that women of color are carrying and bearing the brunt of this pandemic. Next slide. So this is a graph from a study on California's cap and trade program. It shows that the biggest two indicators of people that live near polluting factories are class and race. In fact, race is the biggest predictor of living near a polluting facility in California. It has now been proven that it is also true for the rest of the country. If you are a poor person of color, you're almost guaranteed to live near facilities that have been proven to be detrimental to human life. And again, this didn't just happen. By design, people in power decided which communities could be sacrificed so that others could benefit. Next slide. And power plays a really big role here. In the story of today, a large contributor to why marginalized people are still struggling is a result of who is at the decision-making table. So on the left, the graphic shows that the racial makeup of the top transportation decision-makers in the US does not accurately represent the demographic of the communities they are making decision for on the right. And these numbers are a few years old, but we know that the proportion of people of color is growing, yet the diversity of decision-makers is not increasing at the same rate. So when we talk about equity, we also have to talk about representation. Just imagine how differently our society would look if women and people of color and everyone in between were accurately represented in these decision-making spaces. Next slide. So now I wanna talk about the story of tomorrow. I'm sure many of you have seen the consequences of climate change ravaging our country. I for one am located in Berkeley, California, and I'm sure there's a handful of you all who are also in Northern California. And I can tell you firsthand, right? We were all in the front row of California's forest fires. And summer 2020 was extremely difficult. Many people experienced not only the loss of life, but the loss of their homes and safety and have also been experiencing climate grief, which is a very real psychological response through anxiety and depression due to the impacts of climate destruction. So we can talk about mitigating climate change, but regardless of how much we lessen our greenhouse gas emissions, the climate is still going to change and will continue to impact some communities more than others. The reason we have an equities and climate impacts is because of racist policies, like I mentioned before. And communities of color, specifically black and brown neighborhoods have been and continue to be isolated into undesirable geographic areas, which makes them more susceptible to climate change impacts. And not only are they more geographically vulnerable, they often lack reliable transportation options in the event of an emergency. And because of a lack of intergenerational wealth, these frontline communities will also have a much more difficult time rebuilding their lives after natural disasters. Next slide. And so in response to these current and impending environmental issues, the Green Lightning Institute's climate equity team is made up of a few topic areas where we seek to mitigate some of these impacts. So as we've seen, the conversation, the times are changing and cities are actually raising the bar on equity and business as usual is not going to cut it anymore. So we need to really set a high standard for how climate investments and climate policy will actually benefit communities. And so because equity as a term has been becoming mainstream, there is a risk that it can turn to an empty promise, which is what we call equity washing, if there's no strategy behind the promise to achieve the outcome. Next slide. And so in order to actualize equity from this nebulous, ambiguous thing to actionable outcomes, it's important to follow consistent steps. And so at the Green Lightning Institute, we developed this making equity real framework. It was developed from one of my colleagues in climate resiliency reports. And so we hold that you can operationalize equity through four steps if you get them right. The first is making sure that equity is in your goals and your mission and your values. The second is that there's an equitable process. Thirdly, there's equity in implementation. And lastly, that you measure for equity to see if you actually met those goals set in number one. Next slide. And so I just want to conclude on a note here that poor communities of color continue to suffer most from the legacy of segregation and racially motivated policies. And they've led to horrible exposure to pollution and toxins. And so as we all collectively navigate these really unprecedented times that have brought racial inequities to a head, it's really important that we center race to advance environmental equity for the protection and investment of the communities that are most burdened. And they're burdened by compounding effects of COVID-19, climate change and racial inequities. And so I just want to leave you all with that sentiment that we really need to focus racial equity at the center of everything we do. Thank you so much. Happy to answer any questions. Thank you so much, Leslie. That was fantastic. I'm going to pass it off to Adam and Sky are moderators and Blake and we can promote some critical dialogue. So Adam, over to you. Yeah, great. Thank you so much, Violet and Leslie. This was just really phenomenal. And it's great to hear from you both. So now we have some time for Q and A. So if folks have questions, we welcome folks to either raise your hand and we can call on you to ask your question or put them in the chat and we can read them aloud. And we're really just excited to open up a larger dialogue around this. And so I can get us started with the first question, which is, could you each speak about some formative experiences that have influenced you on your career path and what kind of brought you into the work and the space that you are now working on today? Let me go first, give Leslie some time to rest her voice from all that talking and presentation. Thank you very much, Adam, for the question. I think for me, a formative experience, coming from the islands, my lived experience before coming here, I was already working on climate change and sea level rise program advocating for small island states. I was already working with islands that were faced with, you know, going underwater governments like Tuvalu and Kiripas, for me to learn about their, you know, the risk to their people and their community, the threats of losing a whole country culture, something that really resonates with me. And so because of that, you know, my whole career and my whole work around climate change has always been advocating for the voiceless wherever I am. And I think coming back to now, I am surely doing the same thing. I'm working with frontline communities, communities of color, communities that are disadvantaged and are highly vulnerable to climate change and sea level rise because now, you know, we've already seen the impacts of wildfire is becoming a normal, a normal experience for us. And just by being in the community on the ground, walking inside people's homes, people who don't have the resources, it really opens your eyes like the vulnerability that they face because of their adaptive capacity to adapt. It's very low. So I think for me, my fight is always for those people that are highly vulnerable and have less resources and understanding and awareness to respond and be resilient to the impacts of climate change. Great, thank you so much, Violet. Should I answer the same question? Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, I would say that I've had a handful of formative experiences. I am originally from LA from Los Angeles and I grew up moving around a couple of times but there was a point where I got a scholarship to this fancy school on the west side of Los Angeles. So I was living in Inglewood at the time with my family and got an opportunity to go to get a better education. And so that commute was from Inglewood, which is near LAX airport if folks are familiar with the geography. And I would commute to Topanga Canyon slash Calabasas area. And that commute was only about 40 minutes, which wasn't too bad. And then we moved to Palmdale, which is in the outskirts LA County area. And that's about 60 miles out of the way. So formatively, at a young age, didn't understand why I had to go to a completely different part of town for a better education and didn't have the language to express that. And also didn't know why I was the only Latina in an entire grade. And then the 2008 recession hit. And none of my classmates talked about it. It wasn't talked about in the classroom or among kids. It just almost seemed like there was a bubble. And everyone that I went to school with was just wasn't hit by the 2008 recession. And meanwhile, everyone in the community that I came from was there was a foreclosure crisis, folks were losing their jobs. Like it was, for everyone that remembers that time, it was a really difficult time. And our family got hit with the foreclosure crisis. And from then on, I really went on this path of understanding why. And I finally got to college and took an urban studies class and learned about what I just mentioned in my presentation, which was redlining and blockbusting and restrictive covenants. And it gave me the language and the sense of validation that it's not an individual burden. It's not because you can't pull yourself up from your bootstraps. It's not because you aren't working hard enough. It's really just the system is ranked. And I think from there on, it just kind of led me down to take more planning classes and eventually studying affordable housing development and now transportation. So I would say the formidable experiences were pretty personal, yeah. Yeah, thanks so much for sharing, Leslie. Very inspiring. I'll pass it to Skye to ask her next question. Yeah, so it can obviously be difficult to be constantly dealing with heavy issues like injustice and equity. So how do you guys stay energized in your work and practice self-care? Yeah, I think for me, again, I would say the experience of working with families. Currently, I'm working with two elderly homeowners. One lady, she lives in Baohaven of Menlo Park. It's been three years. She didn't have a furnace. And this is an elderly grandmother who lives with her unemployed daughter and a granddaughter. And depending on the programs that we offer, we will be able to provide her a furnace for the first time in three years. Been working as well with another homeowner. Her mom left her the house. She's on dialysis. When I went in for the first time, about two years ago to do an energy audit and an assessment, I couldn't breathe in that home. The home was very toxic to me because it's an old house. She looks like she was on dialysis for a while. She's not able to do any maintenance or any improvements. Happy to have full humanity went in, helped her. It's almost a brand new house now. And she is able to enjoy all the benefits from this program. And her house is one of the biggest projects that we've done so far in East Palo Alto. Cost almost $25,000 to repair the home. So imagine how bad the house was. But that's the benefits, the service that we offer. I think the gratitude that we get from homeowners and the families that are not able to afford really gives me going and doing this work that I do. Yeah, self-care is a hard one to answer. I think everyone has their own form of self-care. I think this year has been hard, as I'm sure all of you are aware and have experienced it. So I think it's really just about being able to show up in the space from a place of a full cup. Because otherwise, I have started to notice when I feel overworked, even if the work itself is for a good cause and a good purpose. And I feel like I have purpose and I contribute to the field. This space is also not diverse. And so being one of the few women in the electric vehicle spaces, being a woman of color, it can be really intimidating to even speak up. And so it almost feels like just the mental preparation for getting to a meeting and then feeling self-conscious about what I'm saying. And then in the aftermath, having an anxiety hangover of, did I say the right things? Are they going to take me seriously? All of that is energy expended that I'm sure my white male counterparts do not have to expend. And that's not quantifiable labor. Like I don't get paid extra because I went through that whole emotional labor thing. So I think it's just like being aware of that one. And two, doing things like understanding how much energy I have left so that there are times where I'm just like, I'm going to turn my camera off. I will show up. I will say something. Maybe my commentary will actually be written and it won't be verbal, and just kind of keeping a really tuned in way of knowing when you're tapped out. And I guess that applies to pretty much anything, really. Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Leslie and Violet. And Adam, back to you. Yeah, so our next question was around community engagement. Could you both talk a little bit more about your approach to community engagement and how this has changed over time and I know you both also touched on this, but also in context with the pandemic, how has this evolved and what sort of strategies have you had to adapt with these changes? Yeah, so for my programs, it has changed a lot. As I said, back in 2016, when I first started off in East Palo Alto with the Green at Home to Grid Ready project, it's me going into a whole new community, a community of color, a community who has a history of not trusting outsiders. And the service that I was offering as well makes it really hard for me was because the program that I was promoting is energy audit, opportunity for a free solar on your roof if you're a homeowner and qualified. And so a lot of people really didn't trust that that was a program. They always ask me, I'm sure there's a catch. That thing is for free in this world. But what I learned fast was that I have to walk alongside community leaders that the community trusts. So immediately, I connected with some key community leaders in East Palo Alto, people like Mama D, Sharifa Wilson, Fomo Mayor of East Palo Alto, even Pastor Father Goody, who the whole Catholic community trusts. So I started talking and connecting and working with them to reach the community. At the same time, I was walking the street, knocking on doors, leaving flyers, start a conversation with a homeowner that's there watering her plants if I was walking at the right time. But overall, I think what really changed was the outcome of the work that we were doing. Because we were not only preaching or sharing the information, families started getting free solar. And so then myself and my partner, who is from great alternatives, we started hosting events where we would invite families who have received the services to be our advocate. And that's why we had that idea of creating revitalization events around installation so that we can invite the neighborhood to see for themselves what we are doing on the ground. And even I think having them seeing this partnership grow over time, it also really helped. So now, even during COVID, I'm not doing any outreach because of COVID, but people are calling my phone. Like, I have five families on my list, new families. They called last week because the people that we've helped have shared the word. So now, those people are telling me I co-violent, and then I get a co-violent, can you help us? We want to get the solar. We've heard about it. How can we access that services? And then, of course, I will just have to send an email to my partner organization, giving them the contact and the name of the people who are interested. And if I have to come back in to help with the application, then CRC will be there to support the community. So for us now, things are getting easier with our outreach. I think the challenge now is that we're expanding to new communities. We are rebranding, and we hope to expand our service to no fair oaks, another new community that we just started serving last year. And I have a great graduate from Stanford who's helping me with the rebranding, Valaria Recon, who so far have done a lot of work. And the work that she's doing now will help CRC to expand our reach. Oh, Adam, I know we're at time. Do we have time for me to answer, or would you like to wrap it up? Yeah, we'd love to hear from you two, Leslie, if you have just a few final words for us as we close out. Sure, yeah. I think that for me, what's changed during the pandemic, so in comparison to Violet, I don't have the on-the-ground, boots-on-the-ground community organizing experience. We call ourselves a grass-top organization, which is where we work with policy makers. And one thing that I've definitely seen a lot more during the pandemic is folks throwing around the word equity. Like, it seems like every RFP, RFQ bidding process, they have to have some kind of equity component for the money to be awarded, or for the funding to go through, which is great. And also, it can lead to this whole equity-washing thing, where people just kind of say, we held a community meeting, checked the box, but that community meeting was in the middle of the day. They didn't offer child care. They didn't compensate any of the community members. They didn't translate any of the material to languages that were needed to be translated to. And so they're checking these boxes off, but not actually doing the work. And I think that during the pandemic, we've seen a rise again of this equity term. But we've also seen a big influx of money, right? Like the state budget actually has a $75 billion surplus. And how did we get that money if we're in the middle of a pandemic? And it's mainly because of the folks that are in the top 10 1% of the economy in California. It's all income tax. So it's all the inequities of having certain people benefit from a pandemic and profit from it, or then tax, and that taxing increased the budget surplus for the state, which I can go down that rabbit hole. But now what do we do with this money? And it means that we have to actually codify equity and hold people accountable to those standards and make sure that if we're saying, all right, you got like X billion dollars to invest in housing or in transportation or wherever it might be, at least we're advocating for 50%, so at least half of that money has to be in disadvantaged communities and in low income communities. And you have to look at the census tracks, you have to make sure it's accessible. Otherwise, we're just gonna repeat these inequities. And so yeah, I guess I would just leave with accountability I think is something that I'm really trying to push for and figure out how to do better because it's great that we're shifting the conversation but we really need to make sure that people are walking the walk and not just talking the talk. Great, thank you so much, Leslie. It's been great hearing from you both. You both have such a wealth of knowledge and we're super grateful for your time. And I will pass it back to Bianca and Ayahuasca to close this out. Yeah, thank you so much. Adam's got those awesome questions. Echoing a huge thanks again to our panelists, Leslie and Violet for sharing their time with us today. We did have a couple of questions come through and acknowledging the time. I'll go ahead and share those over email and we'll stay corresponding there. But on that note, just to close, thank you all to coming. Thank you all for coming and for joining us. Please do stay in touch. I'll put in a quick plug for both my and Bianca's programs and some of the background behind our co-hosting today is really wanting to connect students to work that is happening in the community, work that is happening right next door to our institution that is deeply engaged with the community, the very necessary community aspects of equity and justice in the pursuit of climate change adaptation and mitigation. And these are just two examples that Leslie and Violet have so generously shared with us today. So please feel free again to stay in touch and to let us know how you like today. And I wanna wish you all the very best. I've been wrapping up a difficult time of the quarter and to thank you again for your time and for joining us.