 First, I'd like to appreciate the National Poverty Center at the Ford School at the University of Michigan for their rigorous and very, I think, accessible scholarship and the director of that center, Dr. Sheldon Danzinger. So thank you very much. I also want to express some appreciation to Sean Pelik. I don't know where Sean went. She stepped out of the room. She approaches these events, large and small, with an almost zen-like calm. No matter what happens, she just sees it through, and she's such a joy to work with. I'd also ask you to indulge me while I acknowledge my colleagues from Mott who are here. We have Megan, Megan, Yazid, Alicia, Duane. These are my wonderful colleagues. I work in such a stimulating environment with them and others. But mostly, I'd just like to thank you for making the time to be here this afternoon, for the work that you do, for the leadership that you exercise, for caring enough to give up your time to really examine this scholarship and this data about people who long and struggle to participate so much more fully and effectively in our economy and in our democracy. The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation was established with the gift of the personal wealth of Charles Stewart Mott, who was one of the original co-founders of the General Motors Corporation in Flint. Some 80 years later, we still try to make grants, living out his vision, that each one of us is in a partnership with all of the rest of us. And so the health of our individuals, our families, and our communities matter, and it is what drives our grant making, and it is what encouraged us to sponsor this event this afternoon. So once again, thank you for being here. Welcome. And I'd now like to turn the program over to Dr. Dan Singer. I want to thank all of you for coming. I'm Sheldon Danziger, a professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and Director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. And I want to particularly thank the Mott Foundation. We've been working with them for about a year now, and this event is made possible through their generous funding. Today, we're here to talk about the results of a study we've done called the Michigan Recession and Recovery Study. We launched this study in 2009 at the very time that the economy was in free fall, jobs were being lost, houses were being foreclosed, stock prices were plummeting. And we began a study, and the findings are going to be discussed in a minute by Sarah Bergard and Kristen Seafeld. But the study focuses on how residents in the three county Detroit metropolitan area have been affected by the recession and the extent to which recovery has begun. We're going to talk today about the period from 2007 through 2011, and we hope to continue this study by going back to our respondents in 2013. So many of you may know the recession officially ended three years ago. The Great Recession, we mark recessions in this country not by the unemployment rate or their effects on workers and families. We mark the recession by a gross domestic product. And once we have two quarters of positive growth and gross domestic product per capita, then we're out of the recession. So the Great Recession officially lasted from December 2007 through June 2009, and we've been recovering since. Now, we also know that this is a slow economic recovery. Anybody who listened to the debates or read anything about the presidential campaign knows that the good news is unemployment is lower today than it was at the peak of the Great Recession. But the bad news is unemployment is very high. In the US, the unemployment rate has fallen to a little less than 8%. In the Detroit metro area, it's fallen to about 10%. And in the Detroit area, it's fallen to about 19%. Now, these numbers, 8, 10, and 19, in normal recessions would be dreadful. That would be the bottom of a normal recession. But obviously, we had an abnormal recession, which is why we call it the Great Recession. So what we want to do today, and we want to have plenty of time for interaction, you'll have a sheet here, which says that we're first going to have presentations by Kristen Sefelt and Sarah Bergard from the University of Michigan. And they're going to tell us what we've learned from our study. We also have a small report that's been distributed along with the agenda and some of their discussion will focus on findings there, and they'll have some other findings. And then our second goal is a more important one for today. And that's to engage first our panelists and then all of the participants into a conversation about what we can do in our various roles as academics, policymakers, practitioners, the public, the nonprofit sector, the university to speed up the recovery and cushion some of the negative effects that persist. What are the most promising practices that the public, private, and nonprofit sectors can pursue? How can we get politicians and the public to focus on the needs of those who have not yet recovered from the Great Recession? When we turn to our panel, we'll have three people, Rochelle Riley, columnist from the Detroit Free Press, Harvey Hollins III, the director of the State of Michigan's Office of Urban and Metropolitan Affairs, and Bill O'Brien, executive director and co-founder of Detroit's Harriet Tubman Center. We hope that the conversation today will provide new insights, and we're particularly interested because early in 2013, we're going to start planning the next wave of the study. So if you say, gee, you told us this today, but you didn't ask about this, what do you know? We may know something because we're not going to overwhelm you with results in the beginning presentation, but you may have suggestions of things that we have overlooked that we should look into. So without further introduction on my part, I'm not going to provide detailed descriptions of the many accomplishments of all of our panelists. That's on the back of the sheet, and I'm just going to turn the microphone over to Kristen Seafelt. Thank you, Sheldon. Good afternoon. So as a way to get things started, I thought I would tell a couple of stories. So when I'm in Detroit, I'm not usually in midtown. I'm usually out in the West Side or on the East Side and talking to families. And so I'd like to introduce you to two of those families. And my guess is that many of you will find a lot in their stories that are recognizable. And while their stories aren't necessarily representative of what Sarah will talk about in a moment in terms of the recession survey, I think they illustrate what families have been going through and some of the different ways they've tried to cope with the challenges faced by folks living here in Detroit during this recession and extremely slow recovery. So first, I'll talk about Tamara, who's a single mom who has two young daughters. Her kid's father has never provided child support on their behalf, but she had been able to get by working two jobs, both as a home health care aid and as a nurse's aid in a nursing facility. But in 2007, she lost one of those jobs, and the job she kept started cutting back her hours slowly. She looked for other jobs, but this was the peak of the recession, and she didn't find anything. She did, though, of course, make just enough money so that she didn't qualify for any kind of cash benefits throughout our public welfare system. She had health insurance and food stamps, but neither one of those are going to pay the bills. So without any other sources of cash, she always found herself behind issues, behind other utility payments, behind uncredit card bills, which she had long ago stopped using. And she had just started attending school in the hopes of getting a nursing degree and being able to move up the economic ladder. But of course, she was also accumulating some debt from student loans. So last summer, she hurt herself on her job. Her employer fired her, claiming that the injury couldn't have been work-related, even though she does a lot of heavy lifting, and said that she had just simply failed to show up. So she tried to apply for unemployment insurance benefits, but then her claim was disputed by her employer. She was told by the welfare office that she couldn't get cash benefits, although she couldn't understand why that was. So while she was waiting for her unemployment claim to get sorted out, she went without any real income for four months. She had variable savings. She couldn't make payments on her bills. Her car was repossessed. Again, she got very behind on her utility payments. And when she went to an agency to try to get help, with some assistance on that bill, she was told she would basically have to be near having her utility shut off before anyone would help. And every month, she worried whether or not the food that she was able to buy with her food sale benefits would last the entire month. Toward the end of talking to her, she said, it's just real difficult because I don't have any source of income coming from nowhere, and it's stressful. Very, very, very stressful. So I'm trying to remain calm because everybody keeps telling me not to worry about it because I can stress out and have a stroke. People are really worried about me because they think I'm gonna end up in a hospital, but I'm trying not to, but it's really hard. It's really, really hard. So the next family I want to introduce you to is Helen and her husband. Now, they were middle-class, both stably employed, homeowners on the west side of the city. And at their best years, they were bringing in more than $100,000 a year between their two salaries. That said, they still never had a whole lot of money left over once all the bills were paid, but they definitely were getting by. Helen taught in a charter school. She went back to school to get her master's degree in teaching in the hopes of finding a better paying position. But once she finished, all she was able to find was contract work and work at another school that paid a lower salary than she'd had before. In 2010, her husband, who was in his late 50s, was laid off from his job. Since their health insurance was through his job, they became uninsured. He looked for many, many jobs continuing to apply but never getting an offer. And they both believe that both his age and his salary history worked against him, and he was being turned down in favor of younger workers who could be paid less. They got behind on their mortgage payments, and while their lender was willing to work with them to restructure their payments, it was unclear how they were gonna be able to afford the mortgage on just her $30,000 a year salary. When I asked her how she was getting by, she said, well, I mean, I wake up every morning saying thank you because I know it's nobody but God that leaves us in this house with a roof over our head, and me being the sole income and that my daughter made it through her first year of college. Well, in fact, Helen was receiving a substantial amount of help, both financial and otherwise, from her church and from her pastor in particular. And they were extremely grateful for this support. But again, it was unclear how sustainable that kind of support would be over the long run. So these are my two stories of Detroit families and their experiences during the recession and the aftermath. Well, I'll do now is turn it over to Sarah, who's gonna give you more background on the findings of our study, the Michigan Recession Recovery Study, and put some of these stories into a broader context. Thanks, Kristen. I really am excited to be able to show you just a few of the results from our study that has been a long time in preparation and planning and data collection from our terrific respondents. Let me tell you a little bit about why we conducted the study because clearly Kristen's been working on some excellent qualitative work in the Detroit area for many years. So what was the impetus behind doing the study that we did? We conducted this survey because we really wanted to get current, very timely information of from a representative sample of the population in terms of their experiences on the fly across a wide variety of domains. We wanted to look not only at unemployment and job problems, but also into some of the material hardships that Kristen was mentioning, food insecurity, forgotten medical care, and some of those kinds of experiences. And we wanted it from working poor, middle class, Detroit and Detroit Metro residents of different ethnic backgrounds. We really wanted to be able to speak to the questions of how this set of recessionary experiences would distribute it across the population. So we took a look. We started a sample of about 900 English-speaking working age people in the Metro Detroit area. Our first interviews were conducted in late October of 2009 and we finished up in the spring of 2010. The response rate at that time was 83% of our respondents and we followed them up and talked to them again last spring into the summer with a very high response rate. We kept 94% of our respondents in the sample. And this is a sample of African-Americans and non-Hispanic whites that really represent things to rent help actually with the weights, the folks that are living in the Detroit Metro area. Just to give you a sense of who's in our study, the sample is about half female, about 26% African-American, and of our respondents who are 19 to 64 years old, the average age is about 43. So these are really prime age working people for the most part. And we have about 60% married. You can see that the educational distribution is about a third, a third, a third. So about a third had a high school or less education, but a third had at least a bachelor's degree or more. So it's distributed across the class base in the area. We started by looking at the genesis of a lot of problems for many families, which is employment instability, which often leads to a snowballing of problems like the ones Kristen told us about. And we measured a variety of employment problems at both of our interviews, as well as collecting an employment history that started in January of 2007. So month by month, we know if folks were employed, unemployed, and we later started asking about unemployment insurance receipt in each month. But we also asked about serious unemployment experiences and also experiences that might have been more temporary, layoffs, wage reductions, furloughs, as well as asking people about their perceived job security, whether they were working fewer hours than they wanted. So we can have a whole range of experiences that many middle and working class people underwent. And let me just tell you a little bit about some of the experiences of employment problems and success in our study. So this is data from our second wave of interviews in 2011, and we're considering employment history since January of 2007, what's been going on for our respondents. So you can see in the first column for the sample overall of these working age individuals, only about one in four were employed in 2011 and had had no employment problems since January 2007. So that's not a very large number. About 17% were not in the labor force. Some of them were home caring for children and doing other activities. You can also see that our unemployed are in the bottom part, the bottom panel of this distribution. So overall, of those folks we talked to in 2011 who were unemployed at the time, about 10% of them had been unemployed for at least 12 months over the period that we were following them. But another thing I wanna point out to you is we also asked about folks who had not been unemployed. So they'd avoided displacement from their job. They had one of those other problems, furlough, wage reductions, and you can see that 18% of the overall sample fell into that category. Now these distributions obviously look different when we start to look at more and less advantaged individuals. So you can see that we've split it by our black respondents and non-black respondents and only 13% of our African American respondents had avoided any employment problems and were currently employed compared to about 30% of our non-black respondents. You can see also differences by education along the lines that you might expect. So our more educated respondents fared better but still less than 40% of them had had no employment problems and were currently employed in this working age population. Long-term unemployment problems, as you can see, are relatively high and distributed along the lines that you might expect. So this is a set of employment problems that was distributed broadly across Metro Detroiters in their prime working years. What happens to most folks if they have employment issues is that financial problems soon fall or worsen when their employment is unstable. So we measured a variety of financial problems that could affect middle class and working class households. And the four at the top I'll talk about again on the next slide, but have you recently been behind on your utility bills? Have you used payday loans or are there fringe financial services? Is another area of the survey that we've invested in? Have you had a credit card canceled or have you gone through bankruptcy recently? So these are some of them fairly serious financial problems. We also have been collecting a lot of information about debt and credit and asset portfolios for many of these families and we're seeing, of course, that higher income households are more likely to hold what we would traditionally call good debts, although in the housing market that we're living in now, it's not clear for many families, whether those are assets or debts at this point. And our lower income households are consistently carrying credit card debt and many of them are having growing and consistent medical debt. That's very hard for them to deal with. So there've been a number of really important findings there. Let me tell you about just some quick findings about our financial problems index here. So this is whether you've had a financial problem, any one of those four at the top of the slide that I mentioned before, utility bills, payday loans, bankruptcy, and this is divided into four groups. On the far left are people who never had a problem over either way. So those are people that have been missing out on all of this trouble. So you can see that 73% for example, of the light blue bar on the end there, those are people that have at least a bachelor's degree or more, which means that more than one in four of them had at least one of these financial problems over the course of our survey period. And you can also see at the far end, these are individuals who chronically had financial problems. So at both interviews they reported them. And one in 10 of our bachelor's or more respondents reported a financial problem in both time periods. In the middle you can see folks whose problems have resolved or newly emerged. And of course the burden of chronic financial problems is greater as we get into our black individuals here compared to our non-black individual and our less educated in this pink bar here. So there's higher levels of financial difficulties that our families are in and they're spread across the class distribution. We also look deeply into housing problems and material hardships of many types. One of the things that's been very exciting about the survey is to be able to look at housing problems across the whole population. Instability both for those who are holding mortgages or can afford their rent and for those who are really facing serious problems like eviction or homelessness. Usually when academics study housing problems they focus on one end of the income distribution or the other and we don't have a good sense in the general population of all the kinds of experiences people are having. Moreover, we also took a look at people who haven't been displaced yet. So they're behind on their mortgage or they're maybe going into foreclosure but they haven't lost their housing yet as well as people have been displaced because folks who study stress and the health effects of stress are really interested in these folks who are waiting for the other shoe to drop. So we looked at a wide array of these as well as some other classic material hardship measures like food insecurity, not having enough food or the kinds of food you need on a monthly basis and foregoing needed medical care for cost reasons. So let me just give you a short summary of some of the things we've found with regard to these housing and other hardship. There are good news and the glass is half full in some of these respects. You can see for housing instability on the top left about 68% of our respondents had no housing instability over the course of the study but about 10% had housing problems at both interviews. Forgone medical care was also relatively common. More than 25% of people had foregone needed medical care over the survey period and about 28% reported food insecurity at least one way, 15% at both. So these levels of hardship really do show that the families are having some material consequences. And of course these are averages. So if you look at less advantaged subpopulations you'll see much higher levels of these experiences. We also took a look at program use in our study. We wanted to see what kinds of programs, private and public and what kinds of resources and transfers that our families were using. So I'm only gonna focus on a few of these bars in the interest of time. One of the things that we found was for our low income households. So people who are at 200% or less of the poverty line. These are data just from those households. And you can see here that most of these households did use at least one public program. This is way one and way two, the blue and the red bars just to give you a sense of whether things changed much over time. And you can see that about 70% of our sample accessed at least one public program was SNAP on the almost far left serving the most families and the EITC being used by many families in the low income households. But of course some of these programs like food stamps can only be used to purchase food and you're only qualified for EITC if you have a job. So even though the majority of our low income families used at least one public program from the stories that Kristen told us earlier we know that it's not always easy or fast to secure these benefits. And many families are falling into a spiral of problems and not getting the help that they might need in a timely fashion. And in fact, many of the charities that we've been studying are having their own financial difficulties these days too. So everyone is really stretched. I just wanted to give you a final sense of some of the downstream consequences. I'm sorry, yes. Can I just apartment the legislator to me? Can I turn to Sheldon on this one? I think that's true, yeah. And we can talk more about programming in a minute. One of the things, I'm a researcher, I'm a study of inequalities in health and so one of the things I've been really interested in is how both children and their parents, our respondents are affected by these changes, these stressors. And one of the things that one of our colleagues, Ariel Khalil and her collaborators have found is that parents' financial stress and distress is really strongly linked to kids' outcomes in our study. So there was a child supplement at the second wave of the MRRS and what she has found recently is that there's a large and very strong association between our respondents' subjective financial distress. So we asked them which of the following best describes how you see yourself, do you see yourself as very financially secure, somewhat secure. The category we're talking about here is people who reported they were in deep financial trouble which is a substantial number of our respondents reported that and of those people, their daughters were much more likely to report internalizing and externalizing behavior problems in the second wave of the survey. And what's interesting is that a lot of that relationship can be explained by their parents' depression. So the very financially strapped parents have higher levels of depressive symptoms and that explains some of the effect on their daughters if indeed these associations are causal. And kids' emotional problems are important on their own but they're also linked to health and academic achievement and really important downstream consequences as well. I also do a lot of work on tip of the iceberg kinds of problems. So people that are under stress and awaiting trouble but haven't yet been displaced from their jobs or their homes. And so I've done some work on perceived job insecurity which is looking at folks who feel it's likely I'm gonna lose my job in the next year. And actually in some of our research we found that's more toxic than actually those who have to go through an unemployment spell and are able to get back into the labor market. So nearly 18% of our respondents thought their job was insecure which is a high level. And compared to those who felt their job was secure insecure workers were three times more likely to rate their health as poor, about four times more likely to report anxiety attacks and almost seven times more likely to be depressed. And this is actually after we've taken out folks who've been unemployed recently so this is just individuals where the unemployment doesn't explain this relationship. Finally we looked at housing and stability and how it's been linked to health in our respondents. And you can see here we have a number of self-rated overall health and mental health as well as negative health behavior measures. You can see that across an array of housing and stability measures that can affect a lot of people a different variety of people from homelessness which is a very serious housing and stability. To being behind on your rent or mortgage we see links net of lots of other factors with these health measures. Finally we wanted to look at the total burden of problems that our respondents were experiencing. That's why we went to the trouble of collecting data from all of these different domains of life. And so you can see here in stacked bars how many problems out of the five that I've talked about today did the respondents report over the study followup period. So those problems again were employment instability, financial problems, housing instability, food insecurity and foregone medical care. And you can see for example among perhaps our most advantaged respondents about 33% of those with a bachelor's degree or more had zero problems but that means that two thirds had at least one. But obviously you can see that the distribution for the less educated respondents only 15% escaped any problems and 12% reported all five over the study. So there's a huge amount of clustering and spiraling as Kristen illustrated with her examples. So finally I just wanna give you a few takeaways. One or more hardships in the wake of the recession is very common only one in five people avoided any problems at all. Traditionally more disadvantaged groups were more likely to experience these problems but advantaged groups were certainly not immune. There are important downstream effects on health and wellbeing of family members and respondents themselves. And we've seen some resolution of problems by our second wave of interviews but also the emergence of new ones and ongoing trouble and struggle for many families. So even though the recession is over, many Detroit and Southeast Michigan residents are still experiencing the fallout. So we're gonna talk in turn now to thinking about what are the responses to this. Thank you. We could get our panelists to come and sit at the front. So we have three panelists, Rochelle Riley from the Detroit Free Press. Bill O'Brien from the Harriet Tubman Center and Harvey Hollis III from the Office of Urban and Metropolitan Initiatives of the State of Michigan. And what we're gonna do is I'm gonna ask some questions and get their answers and we'll go through a few rounds and then we're gonna invite Kristen and Sarah to come back to the table and then we're gonna open it to everybody's discussions. So I'm gonna start and we can just go Rochelle, Bill and Harvey on this. Given that the recession affected so many families in the Detroit metropolitan region, what can be done to move forward from the perspective your position officially, your position as a citizen? What does the public need to know and what should we be doing? So we'll have a short opening statement from everybody and then I'll ask some more pointed questions. Rochelle, do you wanna start? Thank you, Sheldon and thank all of you for being here, it means you care. That was quite a list of questions so I'll start with the last one because I always like to deal with what we need to do. I think the most important thing in America in trying to do something about poverty and the people who endure it is to stop hating them. There is a great dislike, whether it's among workers who work with people who are in need or people who are trying to take people in need from one place to another. But I've seen this firsthand and I don't think that there's gonna be a great understanding of what people are going through until people see them as people. I was very interested in one of the points that Kristen made that had to do with depression and mental health and what happens when you are enduring something like this for so long. And I wanted to ask whether you had done any type of questioning or extrapolation having to do with how hard it is to get a job when you are depressed or have been through something like that for a long time. We're seeing longer periods of unemployment than in a very long time. And nobody pays attention to what that means or what type of mountain you now have that when somebody finally does get a job or is in a different place, they're not suddenly whole and it's not everything is fine. Telling that story is probably the biggest and greatest thing we could do whether it's journalists or celebrities doing PSAs so that people understand what that's really like. I'm glad to be following somebody smarter. So, Rochelle, thank you for leading off. I'm Bill O'Brien, I'm a community organizer. That's what I do. But I'm looking here, I know some of those that I do know here are, I know you're doing community organizing too. So I'd like to, you know, I hope some time during the program you get to add your own comments. But one, so in a, some people say community is an intervention. Now I worked for a while at Southwest Solutions and I was a community organizer on the staff of that place which started as a mental health, started at Southwest Detroit but predominantly doing mental health. I think, Dottie, you're on the board there, right? Okay, so the insight that they used that was coming out was that community itself is an intervention, not just, you know, counseling and one-on-one and part of a group but also being part of a community that was healthy. So here we have this horrible crisis in our lives the last couple of years and but we're also at a time in this society where community is, it's not exactly a given that people are part of community. Some people have a church or a congregation they consider that their community but by and large people are living in neighborhoods where they don't know their neighbor or the neighbor just moved in and somebody just moved out and so how do you, if you say depend on the community when there's so many examples of a lack of community or a broken community or people don't trust each other for all sorts of reasons it makes surviving in this kind of situation in this climate very difficult. So part of our task is how do you build community at the local level? That means my church, how does my church build community that's not simply a prayer community but a community that really cares about each other and knows each other's struggles. So you say, well, we have a problem this horrible last couple of years is a problem but it also forces us to grow up in ways that maybe we haven't had to over time. By grow up, I mean build community where we are. The second thing and then I'll pass it on to Harvey. Like when I was reading and I got a advance copy so when I was reading this I was thinking is this, are we talking about Detroit or are we talking about the metro region? That the expansion of the number of people who face and admit that they're facing these kinds of troubles has expanded greatly that I did a lot of work in the suburbs to organize in the suburbs probably 10 years ago but it was always seen, oh yeah, we'll organize but we'll support those people in Detroit. Well now people in the suburbs are beginning at least articulating and some of their leaders are too that we have problems that we can't solve by ourselves. When I think of the state, and Harvey will get the next shot here, but Detroit is about 8%, I'm not a good mathematician, George, so I'm not sure but I think Detroit is about 8% of the state's population so for Detroiters to have really an impact on state policy, what should happen, what has to happen to benefit our residents, 8% doesn't cut it. Maybe 50 years ago 30% or whatever Detroit was some 50 years ago but now part of what we have to do I think, Rachelle, is to really figure out how do we build partnerships with people that have like problems, same problems, same interests and to do that not only regionally but statewide so as much of the power, much of the decision making goes away from local areas into Lansing or into the state capitals in many, most states then we have to be able to think of community not only neighborhood, not only city, not only region but statewide so unfortunately what we have right now is a situation that's gonna force us to take a look at these things, at least I think those of us that are trying to do community organizing. I heard you. First of all thank you, Sheldon and also to CSMOT for actually putting this on and just to piggyback off of what Bill was saying when you're talking about strategies that really involve a state collaborative and looking at recession numbers based on GDP for example, you look at Michigan, Brookings River indicates that it was put out earlier this year that the state of Michigan has 14 metropolitan areas that's home to 82% of the state's population, 84% of the state's jobs, 85% of the state's exports and 86% of the state gross domestic product and that's really important to really focus on and then in these metropolitan areas at the center of your core cities and so for us to ignore the core city initiatives particularly in an industrial state like Michigan is I think a mistake. You can't really get to the poverty problem even though it's just as much as a rural problem as it is as an inner city initiative by ignoring your inner cities. And to Bill's point that the city of Detroit represents between seven to 8% of the state's population between 1940 and 1980, it represented 28% of the state's population and the metro area around that actually had more than 50% of the state's entire population residing and today is 7% and in the metro area it's about 40% and I'm looking at the demographers at the end of the table I'm seeing their head nods on, I'm hitting the numbers pretty right. And so the question is what can a state do? I think that's what you were asking in terms of issues. I think one thing that we need to do there are probably three things that I would recommend. The first thing is that in the legislature to Bill's point again because when you had these cities that were populated they were able to send people to the legislature to represent their interests and right now that's not happening and so one of the things we need to do is certainly create a collaborative initiative between your core cities in terms of legislative strategy. You can't get to the outcomes and in Detroit figuring that it can do it by itself. Those days are over. So the delegation from the city of Detroit who go to Lansing by themselves cannot change the conversation there. And not only that, getting them to work together to start out with would be the first hat trick, let alone getting them to really do something statewide that have an impact. So and that is important because the conversations around your urban centers have to change. The syntax in the legislature has to change. We have no way of discussing the impact of population loss in Lansing. There because there's a conversation that has not been really front and center in terms of the impact of population loss in our urban centers and that syntax actually has to change. The second thing is that we have to do better at resource allocation. I took a trip with Benny Napoleon on the west side of the city of Detroit and spent four hours in a squad car with him and probably 95% of what I saw was blight, four hours. And we weren't, we didn't stop for very long. We probably spent maybe 30 minutes total in that time stopping looking at a neighborhood just or at a stoplight. But the rest of the time we were actually moving in these communities. And then you see a housing development in the middle of nowhere. This is a Mr. Project in the middle of nowhere, no lights, just a brand new house or three or four. You get up close to them and the siding's ripped off of them and the gutter's gone. You know the copper, the hot water heater and all the components are gone inside that house. And you ask the question, how in the world did that project get there in the first place? Maybe some nonprofit or some church who had a great idea of restoring the neighborhood decided to do that and it's a cost. And so we have to do better at allocating resources. And in terms of Mr. Funds and LIHEAP and just you name it, we have to do better of actually targeting resources and that's what the state needs to do. And the third thing that I would recommend is that we need to develop a common agenda for your urban sectors. And that agenda should drive policy and it should also drive legislation as an outcome. So those are the things. So, Rochelle, I wanna pick up on what you said because one of the things that Sarah emphasized in the presentation was how many people were affected by the Great Recession. So in 2009 and 10, I was more optimistic than I am now because I thought most middle-class people know middle-class people who have been laid off. And so wouldn't that change people's attitudes away from people who are unemployed because they're unwilling to take jobs to say, oh, my cousin, my niece, my brother, my neighbor was laid off and they were just like me but they were laid off. So what is it that even the Great Recession and the extent of issues that Sarah talked about in her presentation, how do we get people to change their views? Well, that's not the question I can answer. I can go back to the first point and try to get there. There are two things. One is we have a caste system even with the poor. So you've got educated poor. You've got educated, unemployed for a little bit, educated, unemployed for a long time, uneducated, unemployed, uneducated, unemployed for a long time and then the numbers that nobody can count and that's people who have never worked and who are part of family units and symbiotic relationships where we may never get to them. And so much of this has to do with education and I'm so glad to see my friend Kurt Metzger in the audience. I will look over there every now and again too to make sure I'm on track. A few years ago, one of the most horrific studies that I'd ever seen came out and nobody really cared. And it said that a quarter of Michiganders had college degrees and only a quarter of Michiganders felt that you needed a college degree to be successful. Now I was ready to leave Michigan when I read this and people were walking around like, oh, this is no big deal. That was like the apocalypse to me and I think a part of that is a part of the problem. We're not raising people generation to generation to be as successful as they can be because the measure of success changes and because Michigan has changed, the manufacturing industry has changed and the level of education you need to get jobs has changed. If we don't deal with that, not only do we have that education problem, but again, we have this caste system where people don't look at somebody laid off from Chrysler with disdain. They say, oh, that's somebody who's going through a rough time. Let's see if we can find something for them. But if there's some 22 year old guy who didn't go to college and who left Denby High School at 16 who has never worked and can't get a job, we don't have a system that deals with that and that gets back to what Harvey said. We're not having the right conversation. If we're not talking about those types of problems that are true in every urban center and what we do to try and build some bridges, but there's a lot of folks out there that we're not talking about, not talking to and not helping and they're a part of that population that's left while a whole lot of people are leaving. My theory is, how many people does Grand Rapids have? That's what I thought about 200,000. So I don't think anything's gonna really change in Michigan and this is gonna be terrible to say this and I'm sorry. I don't think anything is gonna change until Detroit gets to be about the size of Grand Rapids. Grand Rapids will come up to about 300,000. Detroit will go down to about 300,000 and then people will talk about what do we do for our urban centers? Because right now Detroit has been so different from every place else in the state. There is no comparison, there is no conversation that you can really have about Detroit that also applies to Grand Rapids or Pontiac or what's next, Saginaw? But anyplace else, when you've got a metropolis that at one time had 950,000 to close to a million or a little over a million people and the closest place that you get to that is 200,000 people, you can't have a conversation that includes both of those places, but as this crisis continues and it will continue and they become more and more alike, we have such an opportunity, we have such a moment here in time to do something. I just don't know that it's gonna happen. Bill, in Kristen's story she raised some issues and it comes up in the survey as well about people who have multiple needs and approach lots of public and private sector agencies that can only provide this service or that service or their innovative models of community organizations that can help people who get turned away in one place and don't know where to go the next time. Well, I'm not sure, I don't know that I'm the one to answer that question. I go to church, it's a decent sized church but I know that our church itself is strapped. So in terms of other creative things, I mean I'm aware of things around Detroit or in other urban areas of kind of creative self-help, create your own business, create your own entrepreneurial program but to be honest, somebody else would have to answer that. Okay. I'm sorry, maybe Harvey can, let me tell you, I'm putting too much on you. Let me tell you how smart some people are. I talked to a young woman, she is not without intellect and instinct and educational ability, just education level but she had to pull together a system where she would figure out how much she could work and still be able to get assistance and get her bridge card and get WIC and what she'd have to do for Michigan Works to make sure that she could stay in the, this was this elaborate sort of thing that I don't know that I could have sort of gotten that of course you do what you have to do but listening to it, I didn't know that I could do something like that and I said my God, she could be an economics major but she had figured out this whole system so that she knew what she had to do to keep her life going and keep her children fed. But the one thing that that plan didn't account for was getting any better or rising any higher or having more income or going to college. It was just maintaining this place where lights on children fed, lights on children fed. That's not the answer, that's not the solution but if somebody who has the wherewithal and the sense to do all of that could just, we find a way to get them to college so they can do, they can create a whole program to help somebody but I'm telling you, I'm talking genius, it was just all in place, all together, everything works but nothing rises and it was very sad to me. I was proud, okay, she's got it worked out but one thing happens that's wrong, like you work too many hours at Kmart or you miss a day at work and you wind up losing, you know, then all of a sudden it all falls apart. I'm talking amazing juggling. Harvey, are there things that the state is pursuing whether links to employers or links to nonprofits that are examples of promising strategies? Yeah, there are and before I go into all that, I wanna say that, you know, this problem that we have is a multi-year, multi-administration problem and so the thing that this administration can do really is to lay a foundation for moving forward and before I go too much, I gotta acknowledge two of my colleagues in the room, Brian Larkins who is the associate director for our office and Flint and then Karen Austin Easton who was in the back who was with the office of foundation liaison at the governor's office so Karen is in the back there so thank you for both. Karen, where's your hand? Oh, there she is, okay. So there is, so but again the state, there are a couple things, you know, we've talked a lot about this thing called community adventures, it sounds great and we've been figuring, trying to figure this thing out to really make it more impactful but the design of community adventures really is to begin to work with employers who will begin to employ your structurally unemployed individuals including folks who are returning residents from corrections. Currently the program is piloting about 80 people in there. We believe that we'd be able to have 1,000 people employed by the end of this next fiscal year. That's not enough in the state but it is a process. There are funds, for example, provided per employee to the company that employs them about $5,000 per person that'll help with that individual's daycare and transportation. This is not new or rocket science. One of the things our office is focused on because we have to do not only target initiatives that will touch individuals who are in need but you also have to work on the job thing. I noticed that in both the examples of Tamara and Helen and her husband that the challenge was that they had no options in terms of employment. And in your healthy cities if you look at what a healthy city is and out of about 300, about 39 healthy cities in our country right now, in what I mean by healthy they've experienced about a 1% growth each year for the last decade. Those job options in a healthy city, when Helen's husband lost his job, he would have options. He should have options in a healthy city and in a place like we're experiencing right now the options are far in a few between. So one of the things we have to do is focus on what will be job attraction strategies for cities. Midtown and downtown is doing pretty good. Your neighborhoods are struggling. So there is a need for an anchor strategy where you get your anchor institutions engaged in a way of investing. That's what is really neat about the Midtown initiative is that you have Wayne State, Henry Ford and DMC making that kind of investment to afford live by strategy for Midtown. Now you have about 98% occupancy in Midtown area. Your neighborhoods are still suffering. So for us to address that we've contracted through MISTA U3 Ventures to do nine other cities in the state of Michigan for live by strategy in their downtown areas. The other thing that we're focused on is to the neighborhood. This is a take off of the OCS Mod Lighthouse programs back in the day when they had things called community schools. And this concept has been around since the 1930s. There's nothing new about the concept. Sometimes these old models actually work if you can just employ them. So we're piloting nine schools into Detroit area. We'll be in Flint next and Muskegon subsequent to that. What we can do in terms of strategies around schools using schools as anchors. Blight control around a small radius around the schools. Services in the school. We have a program called Pathways to Potentials but we wanna also do health clinics in the schools and other services so that the parents don't have to stand in some line downtown or have their kids go to some office way away where they're struggling to get a kid to school and get to a job and then back. Seeing what we can do around the schools to keep the schools more operative longer times during the day. We know that crime is dampened when the schools are in operation, ironically in these neighborhoods. Primarily because you have DPS, in this case, actually having their own security force patrolling the neighborhoods. But if you can keep a school open past five o'clock, maybe to nine o'clock and you have workforce training, adult literacy programs, a lot of these schools are free and reduced lunch and so these kids are only eating one time and that's at school during lunchtime and they go home and they go hungry. Maybe having dinner programs in the evening for schools, I mean for kids in schools. So having a school strategy for neighborhoods and making the resident or the neighborhood areas for residents more attractive for folks to live there and wanting to see their community flourish. Those are a couple of things I think we can do. Another thing is, well, I'll stop there. So you can get the questions going. Yeah, go ahead. And then Bill. I wanted to make sure, I heard Harvey write, you were talking about how the midtown, the status of midtown in Detroit is doing well, 98% occupancy, but the neighborhoods are suffering. So the state is going to take the midtown model and do that in downtowns or midtowns in eight or nine other cities. Okay, so this is being worked here for a while, I didn't touch it because it's too nice. Yeah, both of those work, so yeah. Okay, I didn't know what this thing is for. So the state has, so the midtown live by strategy. There's two components out of the midtown strategy. It was a live strategy which provided, for example, a $25,000 forgivable loan for a person who purchased a home in midtown so long as they were employees of Wayne State, DMC, or Henry Ford. And so when you're looking at who's buying property now, is a lot of those individuals who are employed by those anchor institutions downtown. So we want the folks who work in the cities to begin to live in the cities or to do things longer. The whole U3 venture strategy is how do you get an individual to spend marginally more time in the city that they're working in? That's the whole strategy. So the live and the buy strategy is also, there was an article in the paper maybe two weeks ago, Sumosi where the buy strategy has put in an additional $16 million back into the midtown area because it's a relationship between the procurement offices and those three anchors to begin to look at where they're purchasing products. One of the things we did with the midtown, we discovered that when you look at this, one of the hospitals were actually sending it to the laundry to Buffalo, New York because it was more efficient. It made sense for their budget for the volume they had to send it to Buffalo, New York. And when you discover things like that in terms of procurement, you begin to discover, hey, what if we attracted a laundry to locate near the, can we have those jobs here? And so what we find is that those big corporations rarely talk to each other in terms of where they're buying good services and products. And so in Jackson, where we are right now, with the Youth Reventure Strategy, we're talking to Consumers Energy, which is a big player in Jackson. Can those employers get their employees to buy and live downtown Jackson? And can they begin to purchase from small businesses and operations in the city of Jackson before they begin to buy in Ohio and Indiana and in California and across the world? And so that's the live buy strategy for those areas. And we're nine just to see if the midtown thing was a fluke, you know, maybe we were just lucky to hit the midtown thing right. Or if this model can actually be duplicated and replicated in these other areas. And so we're in nine cities. The key thing about the nine cities we selected is that you have to have anchor institutions there and you have to have a strong foundation community because the funds that were raised for the live strategy didn't come just from the anchors. It also came from Kaufman and Kellogg and also the, I believe NEI had something to do with that fund that went into providing the live strategy. So you have to have active foundations. You have to have active corporations that don't want to make the investment. Well, I think the original question was, or at least to me was places that are actually encouraging employment or moving towards that. So there's, and I like the way Rochelle put it, that there are stories, there are places, there's earn and learn here. So there are those kinds of things. But these numbers here and the volume, I mean we, and I think that we, community organizers, writers, we have to look at the numbers. So one of the things that I think we, as community organizers, are supposed to do is to raise people's expectations. If more people are demanding that they, that their kids or that they get to go to college, then you have, you begin to at least step on, and to those columns of people that have started college or have a BA. Now, so what are the policies that we have to push in this state so that more people have access to college, more people go to college, more people expect to go to college, and that the schools are preparing them so that they really can get there. So those are huge questions, but if we don't have young people, sophomores in high school and their parents across city and suburban lines, if we don't have people demanding that the schools prepare them, demanding that state policies actually make funds available so that children really can go to college instead of creating another, you know, apartheid for kids that don't go, are never gonna go to college, which is where we're heading, I think. So how do we, as people in the community or educators or professional people in institutions, how do we get people, ordinary people, to raise their expectations and not to dummy down or not to expect that, oh, well, this is the way it's gonna be? And that's a really difficult, that's a tough challenge, but I think the same what you would say in terms of education and therefore questioning state policies that other legislators consider, I mean, there has to be some serious questioning of these for-profit schools who do online learning, is that really gonna raise the education level and the expectations? Is it really going to? Especially when, then you have to say, so what are the ways to control or do quality control on charter or public or online? Any of these people coming in for education? Those kind of questions, how do we get people to demand quality control so that somebody just doesn't say, I think I'll start a school, get some money and do the best I can? So that's, but that's a real effort, not only looking at the legislation, but looking at people to say, you know, we've got to demand more, we can't be expecting things to just fall from the sky. I think the second thing, and maybe George will say somewhere, read his book, you could read your book, but this whole question of that, for me, my wealth or any money that I have, is a lot, I guess it's in my house, right? I mean, so homeowners have suffered massively, not just in Detroit, but in the suburbs. There was a, I don't know if some of you probably know him, David Rusk did one of his presentations. He took Hurricane Katrina and said that in three days what happened in New Orleans in terms of the loss of life, loss of property, loss of value, loss of wealth, loss of possibility, that that happened in three days to, you know, probably with hundreds of thousands of people. But if you take what happened in Detroit in terms of the sprawl, the state money, the state resources that were made available to people, to build suburbs, to build new developments out way beyond 696, way out, that whole process, he called it Hurricane Detroit, was that, you probably, so it's the same thing. So how do we say to all these people that are in your study, who are probably in the city and older suburbs for the most part? It's the full three county area. All right, but how do you say if people own a house and their housing values were cut in half? How do you reverse that process? Except now, Harvey, I liked actually what you were saying there about corporations trying to get their people to live in the city and that would raise the value of our homes in this area. But I think there's also other state policies that we've got to look at that would encourage people not to go out and eat up the wetlands, but to actually move development back in. So then you say mass transit. You have at least one thing, you have to say, Kurt, you have to say mass transit. Or let's say, we could build more freeways north of Rochester or mass transit in Detroit in the older suburbs. Now, which one do you think would benefit the people in your study? So, but we have to be looking at those kinds of things and we have to do it collectively too. We have to have groups like this look at these kinds of things. So I'm gonna invite Kristen and Sarah to come up and then I'm gonna take questions from anybody in the audience and we'll have questions can go to any of the five people. Because we're taping this so that other people can see it, it would be great if you could stand, project, say who you are and ask your question. George Galster from Wayne State. A few people I know. Thank you for the various presentations for all of you on the panel. I think we all realize that Michigan in particular and South East Michigan in particular has borne the brunt of this great recession even more than the country because we're so dependent on durable good manufacturing, which has a much more exaggerated business cycle than other cities have. And so that was the question of when and how do we diversify our state and region economies to get less dependent on manufacturing? And so my question to all of you is how can we best do that? We've talked about this for generations but we've yet to find the secret to get us as hardy good into a healthy city situation where people do have alternatives besides something that's dependent directly or indirectly on the manufacturing side. So what are we doing actually in this state to help build a more diverse economy that's more resilient to business cycle? I would say that and I hear this all the time too in terms of the manufacturing, we don't wanna lose sight of manufacturing in this state. That still is an accessible point for folks with low skills to get into employment and to develop over time. So manufacturing is critical, particularly when you have the infrastructure we have in the state of Michigan. You look at Flint and the loss of Buick City and Flint you got this big area that now, but you have three major highways that go through it and a rail system that connects Canada to the rest of the US through the Blue Water Bridge. I think trucks double stack rail through and they unload that rail in Chicago and it's no reason why we should not be able to take advantage of unloading opportunities in Flint for example. So manufacturing is critical. And when you look at some of the stuff that Brookings had put together, in the area because of the activity we get over the bridge is still the number one exporting area in the country. And out of the top 10 we have a number eight and that's in the Grand Rapids area surprisingly in terms of exports, US exports. So the infrastructure here is critical and then you have all this talent in terms of engineering and all that. So I wanna lose sight of that. So that's one of the things we have to figure out ways of attracting companies in. The question is if you're a company and you have options to locate in Charlotte, North Carolina or in Silicon Valley or in Dallas, Texas, why would you choose Michigan? And that is the question that we have to really overcome. Why would you choose Michigan? And so that's one of the things we're trying to do and the governor, it may be improperly in this conversation but getting the business tax, the single business tax corrected it was a big thing for companies. Getting the environment so that I did an event in Lansing on Friday and some of the suggestions that were coming out of there is that one guy said, look I like to secure this 10,000 square foot building but I have to deal with the county, the city, the state and do all these things to get my building built. Is there a faster process so we can just do things faster in the state of Michigan? And so the regulations here are problematic for business growth. And so there are some things that are doable within the state but we just have to get out of the way and be more attractive for businesses to choose Michigan. I would just put it out there, why would a company choose this state over another competing state that's what we'll call healthy growth state? I would ask is why would someone not choose Michigan? And I think that list is the list that we have to work on and make it a little shorter. I'll start with the state legislature. 30% don't have college degrees. They not only think we need to not overlook manufacturing but they're still focused just on manufacturing. So will you talk about things like stem cell research or immigrant training? Not immigrant training. We have immigrants who come to this country who are brilliant. They were doctors, they were engineers and they come in because of literacy and other things. They're not doing what they could do. That's a huge talent pool that nobody wants to focus on because we've got the people who are already here who need jobs. It's a very impolitic discussion but it's one we should have. But the bigger thing for me is I have to give the governor great kudos and I'm a fan of the governors. I think that you have a plan, you make the plan work and you see if it makes a huge difference and some things have made a huge difference. Some other ones have not. But one of the things that he did do was take the adult education budget which had been drilled down to zero dollars and he put that in job training. Now they don't say it's for reading and for literacy skills. They went back and edited reports that talked about how a third of Michigan workers were not able to read at a level high enough to get a family sustaining job. That is the state term for it. They change reading to something else, skills to do that. But they know what it's for. When we deal with that issue and you've got businesses that are looking so they can find out what kind of employee base do I have? Where can I put a company? What does the education system look like for my own children? When we start dealing with those things then we'll be looking at the things that other people are looking at. And we don't like to look at those things. We don't necessarily like to even talk about some of those things in public but everybody else is talking about it so we may as well. Thank you. First try. Hi, my name is eBay Johnson. I'm from the United Health Organization. Thank you for that comment. One of my questions was about, I keep hearing that there are jobs available but there are people who are trained to close jobs. And I'm looking at what has been done on the state level to help close that gap. But one of the huge task force I think that we have available in the city that are unemployed and largely homeless are veterans who are coming back in tremendously skilled and can't get into the workforce because their job titles don't translate. And I'm looking, I wanna know, is there something that's being done to help translate those job titles to help them walk into those job areas that are available with all those great skills that they have without having to go through a million loops to prove that they're competent? I was waiting for more applause on that one. Give me all the bikes. Give me all the bikes. I don't want to. I think he only needs one. I think he only needs one. So to your point, they're about, the governor goes out and he says there's about 80,000 jobs right now state of Michigan that are unfilled. Those jobs are high skilled jobs. And so one of the things that the MEDC has been tasked out to do is that the workforce development agencies now report through the MEDC. It's difficult for us to get worker training programs up to par where you're going where the puck is heading right now because a lot of the training that occurs train for jobs that either existed or jobs that exist now, but jobs that are coming. It's very hard to get that push to train for that. There's a reluctance when you talk to some of the training centers of actually doing that because if the job doesn't materialize then they've spent, they've wasted money. But when you look at Southeast Michigan we spent about a billion dollars in workforce development training annually. One billion, federal dollars. And I don't think you see a billion dollars of return on that investment. So there has to be a better connection for training. Another thing too is that we have to do better in relating with employers because we'll know that a new company will come in and we'll be told that this company will be up at 500 jobs in the next three years. And they're starting out with 100 this year. Now the question is, where are the 400 jobs coming from? Okay, and where are you getting the supply for the 400 jobs? And if we knew that and what to train, we can train people so that by the time they get to the year five, folks could slot into those jobs. So the state, we do very poorly at actually working with the existing agencies, taking the funds that are available, a lot of it's federal, and training to where that puck is headed. And that's one of the things that the MEDC has been tasked to do. Regarding the veterans piece that you raised, that's a critical focus that the governor's focused on. We don't have a program per se that I can tell you, hey look, here's where the vets go and to get their assessments and in terms of slotting them in, but it definitely is a focus for the governor and he's actually talked on that as well. But on the point about employers saying that there aren't qualified people to take jobs, like Rochelle, my experience is, we're talking about folks here in Detroit who have a whole skill set that's just waiting to be tapped into. But while my sense is that community colleges here have done a lot and are actually strapped in trying to do more, the way we think about education in this country doesn't necessarily take into account the lives of the people that we are studying live. And so if you are just one car repair away from being able to get to your class, you might fail and then you might not be able to get your financial aid the next semester. So thinking much more holistically about what we can do, not to just support tuition dollars, but to support people's lives when they're trying to train to get, upgrade their skills. I have to ask a quick follow up before Bill's, I'm trying to understand these things, I'm not an economist. I'm a journalist because I have no math skills. But there are 80,000 jobs, it used to be 70,000 so it's gone up. And we can't train for the job, I mean these are jobs that we think are coming or I'm just trying to make sure I understood, explain it to me like I'm a six year old. Jobs that are here that are vacant in the state of Michigan right now. And we don't have the people for those jobs. Well, if we did, they probably wouldn't exist right now. So that's where it is and- And we need population to come to Michigan, well to Detroit but not to. I think part of this is training, another part would be, sometimes an employer will say there's a job vacancy but they're not ready to hire in. So there's some data coordination that we'll actually have but the governor, if you hear him talk about this, he'll talk about the 70 to 80,000 jobs. I use 80 as a round because it's greater than 75,000 jobs that are available. So how many of them are real jobs? Like jobs that you could put somebody- Most of them are real, so they- Richelle, let me give you an example, thinking about the university system. Partly, I think it's the spread of the internet. So when people at the Ford School get a new research project which brings funds in and they can hire somebody, you can be very specific because you can hire across the country these days, across the world. And so a lot of times there will be a job which has very, very specific skills and that's because somebody has in mind, oh I'd like to hire a graduate of the engineering program at Illinois because the people at Illinois train this and I might not even be hiring somebody from the University of Michigan Engineering School which is obviously a world class. So my understanding of the issue is both that the employers have gotten very, very particular and they can do that because they can get massive numbers of applications but then there are also these issues like the auto related firms need people who can run machines and do welding and that takes a certain kind of training that you might need to get 12 credits at the community college to be able to do. So it's a range of these mismatches. I get that part and I wanna go to you guys but what I'm trying to figure out is I've been hearing about these 70,000 jobs for about two and a half years now. We couldn't train somebody for some of that stuff in that. Okay, I'm gonna show you, I probably can't see this but this is the Michigan talent.org site. So if you wanna zoom into this and you can go to it yourself. Okay, on the top side it says $76,510 jobs. Now some of the featured jobs, for example, battery control engineer, okay. So there you have that, that's a high skill but then you have a cleaner, janitorial office cleaner in Lansing. I know I got it. And so. What's the website, Harvey? I'll put it down. This is www.mytalent.org, O-R-G, okay. So these jobs exist, they're not jobs that are but then again, once you're done, you're exactly right. If you go to Wayne State's job and you look at all the jobs available, I guarantee you that the schools and colleges are not, if you got all the applicants, and they're being, there are a lot of applicants who put out for those jobs, they're not hired right now but they've announced the jobs. They know that budget may be coming up in the next semester or two or grant may be available for those jobs materialized. And so that's, that's all. Yes, okay, and then. One of the things that really gets me about that is that I know that when you are in the military, you are about 30 years ahead in terms of technology with the rest of the world. The internet came out through the military about 40 years before we saw it in public. GPS systems were tested in the military about 40 years prior to them coming online, so we can have more cell phones. We just don't have people translate those skills to the employer so they understand what the skill sets are. But the skill sets that are needed for those jobs are there, and that they're way ahead of the curve. And I think some of these translate for both the veterans and the employees. And I think that would be a major improvement in terms of our employment. Over here and then back that way. Yeah. Hi, my name is Donna Sharper, and I have a couple of questions for Mr. Hollis. I like to live by strategy that comes up, and that's great, and there's an issue of, what happens to go for God's sake, if not that for anchored base or anchored institutions, and they are just forgotten because the ones that do have institutions in their communities are getting some resources and help. For example, they already, for example, 4217, for example, communities way on the east side of Detroit that there's nothing going on, so. I will just say this, that those communities are very important, but I also qualify by saying that, we can't boil the ocean when addressing certain problems. So one of the things that we do very poorly as a state government or even at the federal level is taking resources and then spreading them so thin so that everybody has access to it, but you can't get to a tipping point in any of this stuff because you spread the resources then. And it's very hard then to have a conversation with communities when you begin to make decisions where you say we're not gonna spread resources over here, or we're gonna do it over here, then the community who doesn't get it really are up in arms. And so what the state has to do a much better job at is explaining why and coming up with a sound through data, through a lot of demographics, of why it makes sense to target certain communities in certain ways. I will also say that anchors don't have to be your Wayne States or your big employers. An anchor could be a very small business. An anchor could be a church, a very active church in the community. You can develop anchor strategies around that. One of the things I like to see and we're probably a few years away from this is that if you're a faith-based operation in a neighborhood, you're anchoring that neighborhood. What can you do and what an incentive would be that you can provide folks to live near your church, who are parishioners or members of your mosque or synagogue to live in the community where your church is operating. And if you notice in the city of Detroit and all your urban centers, and just not in just urban centers, but in any city that you go to, you see all these faith-based institutions around and then nobody around. You talk to Edgar Vann, who operates Second Air Benezer, and he tells you that his members come from five counties around his church. These folks who come to his church can't elect your school board. They can't put a person on city council. They can't even elect a member from Congress because they live in a different area. And so the community is powerless even though the anchor might be thriving because you don't have community around that anchor. And so I always tell folks about the U Street story. I get my comfort food in D.C. when I go at a place called Ben's Chili Bowl. If you've been to Ben's Chili Bowl, never been to, it was a great place to go. Five years ago, worst place in the neighborhood you can go. At night, you get out, go to Ben's, get back in a cab as soon as you leave Ben's. Today, if you don't walk U Street, you miss the entire thing that's happening in U Street. It's robust. And what's happened is that there's a lot of activity around Ben's Chili Bowl, a restaurant. But to your point, the policy challenge then is gentrification. You're exactly right. The policy challenge is gentrification. Anytime you see any city, just not U Street, look at Chicago, Cabrini, Greens, or any other big city. There is a gentrification process the more the city begins to prosper. And we have to figure, you know, we have to work. You just have to do it. And that's not on you. That's on the local jurisdiction. But that's the answer. Okay, point of all take. My next question, really, about the jobs, those 80,000 jobs. 76, 5, 10. I rounded up some of my friends. I think some of this for me goes back to people who have long-term unemployment definitely need training. We train because we have been off for two or three years. You don't know how to talk to employees, et cetera, et cetera at this point. And you need to be training and you need to figure out how to reinvent yourself. And I say that because now, because I'm a community and because I'm brown people, all the time in the community, there's people out there now that's been out of work. The unemployment has stopped. They've been out of work for five or six months. They're hustling in the community because they can't find a job. They go on there. And it's nothing there for them to pick up. And it's nothing out there that I know. That's a young lady. She's about under 20. She has two kids. She's staying with somebody who's supposed to be a friend and they're taking her money. And she's trying to get out of that situation. But all she gives is $400 a month. And then she cannot find a place to stay because it costs at least $700 in the apartment. So as a community person, it's frustrating for me to help when, as much as I know of people that I know, I still can't get out of that. Do you want to respond? It might not be for you to even answer. And maybe just at this point, you just want me to bring that out. I appreciate it. Okay, so we are talking about the recession and how we know that. Well, two things. One is if I had a billion dollars and I wanted to give that money out to job, to trainers, to train institutions that do job training, I would say, first of all, I want to have the people who are unemployed like your friends there. I want to have them choose who's not doing the job and who's keeping up with the puck. That was the right. I mean, if I was unemployed, I would prefer to take that money and spend it and give it to a job training place that's actually preparing me for jobs that really are going to be available in six months or a year, rather than to pay some training, job training places that are not thinking out there but are thinking in the past or in jobs that are currently open. Now, I'm pretty sure this was done in Texas. Close, right? Right, okay. So then you'd say, so six states. So why is it the Good Old Boys Network that's getting rewarded to do training when really they're dinosaurs and it's the ordinary people that don't have jobs who should be able to choose where they go and choose who gets money for that. That's one thing. Second thing, education, you cannot defund education. You can't reduce funding on education and expect to have, right? That's sort of insanity, right? You keep reducing money for education but then we're supposed to be having people ready to work. So those are a couple of things that I get that I want to fight for to bring back the level of money spent on education and to make sure that unemployed people get a chance to decide who is gonna get state money for those training opportunities. Okay, I have the lady over there and then Chris, here and then Rhett. Hi. I'm Vicky Kovary, I work for the Michigan Organizing Library. I want to take you to say two good things. One about the origin of tax credit. I noticed a lot of the slides that was about the slides about what colors people use and that was pretty high on the list about what colors people use. So I have to say beyond what models that work, bricks and work projects like pool cities or whatever the new iteration of that is today, the origin of tax credit is a truly cognitive item. And the copy of the connection to the state regime in the middle of the worst recession in 70 years is morally bankrupt. And that's something I want to fight for. And my friends that I've been working with in Grand Rapids, they want to fight for it too. Because it helps a lot of people across the state, not only in urban communities, but in older suburban communities. The second thing I want to say is about education. I worked on trying to do an education fund. One of the things I realized was that until we solve the quality problem, I'm not gonna do anything about education. Because when the state legislature's thinking about lifting the cap on cyber schools, when the track record of the cyber school in the state of Michigan came 12-8, which is being sued and has a poor track record, student performance lower than public schools in the city of Detroit. And we're thinking of lifting the cap on cyber schools, which gets much money as a student that sits in a physical classroom. A firm people allows us as equal to a student that physically sits in the classroom. We cannot really look at education a lot in this state until we solve the quality problem. And this is one of the three, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna throw this in here. In terms of retraining workers, we don't retrain teachers to help impart the kinds of skills and set up the end-line skills that they need to be to be qualified to rewrite a training model. We don't retrain teachers today in this situation. We will not solve that gap between the skills and workers and teachers more than any governance issue about education or than any how we try to tweak with giving vouchers or whatever, which is now a new effort. It's teachers that make the difference whether a kid burns or not. It was the same for me when I was a kid. It's the same for kids today. And unless we retrain teachers, we're not gonna solve whole host of problems that challenge the state's social fundamentalism. Thank you so much. Chris. I'd like to just, I also had a comment about the use of the EITC. First of all, I'm really glad you put it up there. But that is a tax expenditure. It's, and it's income-based, right? But the biggest tax expenditure people got benefit from in this state is gotta be the mortgage interest deduction. But that's not incontested. And so I think this gets, this rolls around to Richelle's opening comment, which is one of the problems we have is that we have to stop hating the people who are suffering and who need these programs. Because right there in your study, you lifted up who took advantage of the EITC. You did not give me numbers who took advantage of the home mortgage interest deduction, which is a way bigger tax expenditure. But it's not income-tested, so you didn't think of it that way. And so I'm not blaming you, but I think it goes down to Richelle's point about, and I think also to a lot of state programs, Harvey, I'm not gonna ask you how much, you didn't make it and so, you know, I'm not asking you to fix it. Right, it's fine. But I think it is an issue for community organizing. And that is some things we just keep, I think, biting each other in the back because of income-testing things. I had an experience years ago in Lansing where with the Diocese Lansing, we raised a huge amount of money to do a live-life work program at Sparrow Hospital. Who got in our way? Misha, we could have spread it, but everything had to be income-tested. And so you take the poor, the working poor, the working class, the lower middle class, and what you do with these programs is you create entity between them and it's not necessary. We can have more embracing policy that would lift up all of those people that are like maybe up to, you know, just below and up to the VA that we saw was really the make and break point, right? That was the make and break point. And so if we could think about policies that aren't about income-test, but are about life opportunities, about educational opportunities and so forth, but the only, so this started as a question, that's true in the lecture. It seems like the only way we're gonna get there though is to have a powering community to push for it. Because it's not gonna happen on the brains of the people that are currently in Lansing. And so I just... I'm sorry, can you say that again? So I just really wanted to sort of link, like how we did this study with some of the state programs and some of the things that we care about so much back to Rochelle's earlier point. I mean, to some of this, it's just about building community between folks that policies keep apart. And then I started with the question I forgot, it's about MSW. I'll just say that last week, my MSW students, about half of whom I think are in the community organizing part of our program, asked me, you know, if I were president, what would I do in terms of anti-poverty policy? And I said just that. I would stop doing all these different income tests and make more things universal because once everyone has a stake in the game, we can get past sort of these welfare cheats and the Cadillac driving mother and everyone who's just sponging off the system. So, but quite frankly, it does scare me a little bit to hear now discussions about means testing social security benefits, which is one of the few universal programs we have out there. Yeah, I just, the last couple of comments just make me think like the value of this kind of thing, Sheldon, right? This kind of, where you have academics, you have people that are studying, people that are writing, and people that are practitioners, people that are organizing and really need, I mean, as an organizer, I desperately need to be in regular relationship with the kind of people that are in this room. And I mean, that's a real function that the Ford School can play. I mean, it does, you know, one question that I have and why would a manufacturer move to Detroit? We've got, that's another question, right? It wasn't missing in Detroit. I mean, we've got to deal with things like crime, you know? Now, how do you deal with crime, you know, with safety, people not feeling safe? Those are huge questions that this policy school, especially if there were more regular relationship with organizers or, you know, it would just really be a tremendous contribution. And without it, then the grassroots organizing tends to be, you know, whatever in the wind, without some real direction. So I just want to encourage more of this. Thanks. The Mott Foundation gets a lot of credit. I just want to say regarding the Earn Income Tax Credit, you know, so when you talk to the governor and you ask him the question, why do you do that? He would tell you that's probably one of the things he needs to readdress. And so one of the things, you know, so, and he's told, and it's not like a one-on-one conversation that I would have with him. He's said that as much in terms of a group like this size and he's been asked that question a couple of times. He knows that this is one of those policy decisions as well as Brownfield tax credits that you have to, we have to revisit. And he came into office, he had a $1.5 billion deficit and he focused on getting rid of that. And as any CPA, he went through the process of making sure he balanced the books. But the people impact of it, there was some people impact as a result. And so Earn Income Tax Credit, I'm going to tell you that, this administration will definitely have to revisit that and he's committed to doing that in the near future. I'm not talking about in the second term or anything like that. In the near future, we're gonna, we have to do something about that and he's committed to doing that. There's other questions I'd like to talk in a minute. You identify yourself and speak a little. I live in the mall here and I have a small, not private, I started out here for a community center in Colby's and I went to high school mostly on the school. And I figure I have a student in the school that I can teach with him, so. You remember something that I loved very well. I liked some of these, the shoes sets for a strategy. Well, I ask you a question. I've read a lot about living by and living communities. Now, these people got these homes that they purchased and bought by the crisis. Are they required to stay there for a certain amount of time or are they smart enough to stay out of this house now for $2,000? So it was $100,000, five years ago in the summer. Because then number two, I think it was great with these businesses or households that they're employed here and they wanted to stay. Why wasn't it helping us to make a little more people who could buy also, they didn't work for those three businesses? And number three, the address of the latest that I'll teach, most of the teachers that they trust on the schools have to continue their education all the time as a man made. Most teachers to continue teaching the truck of the school can't go back and become highly qualified teacher. A standard that the federal government said from no childhood behind. A lot of those teachers were laid off and tired or whatever. And now you're kids, people come in here for a marathon or some type of organization that don't have degrees in education who do not have a master's degree but not highly qualified. We got a teacher laid off who teaches here and impaired children. No, blind children. And he's sitting at home by someone who's got a degree in social studies or something. It's even with children. So if you're talking about education, you're talking about the biggest care system in Detroit, the biggest care system in Detroit is the education system. When I first started teaching in the system, I applied so much that I wasn't gonna have to work there because I cannot believe that we have leaders in this city that will create a two tiered system. The kids over here, they're not worthy. So they can over here and try to struggle with radicals that are outdated. No paper, no textbooks, no papers for the teachers, no computers for the kids. And over here, y'all read us, when everything's teleported, made with a computer, I mean the desk and everything. And you cannot have that if you're really truly trying to look for people. And what we got now in the school system, is I don't know, I'm not at the policy-making issue. I wish I would work because you have a whole group of people that's been discounted from the education system in this city and that show black males 14 to 25. They're not even counted. All they're looking to do is go from school to prison and nothing in between. And I know these boys wanna work, I would work with them. But they have overcome a whole lot of things. And I can't believe you said the boys were impacted by their mother's depression. Don't you think that's what you said? I don't know, I mean, I've seen the boys at the time, me and the 13. I'm not proof of that. They're stupid, crazy, wanna play. And I'm seeing something is really wrong in a state, in a country, where you got people making 50 billion dollars. And you gonna have a bloodshed kid, a fool, a bloodshed kid's education, a rush to work in your housing, all these houses in each one. My neighbor lived out in it just in shambles. You're gonna be easy to keep in those houses. Easily. North is the aggravated. And all these big houses, all these big churches, the one they pay for those buildings they took about the whole neighborhood between 2000 and 2000, they took about the whole neighborhood with the two million dollars, probably. So I'm just saying, it's good, but you need to recognize some of the little people and me and other little people who wanna make a difference and stop blocking us by, you don't wanna talk to us, you don't wanna give us a voice, you don't wanna help us in our organization. Where is the government stand on that? Because the little people who down here are seeing this firsthand, we wanna make a difference, but we're getting blocked. Okay. No, no, no, no, no, no. So you had three questions, three questions. The first one was on the corporations and why we just didn't open up to others. It's because those corporations, so those three entities put money in to that. They were concerned about their employers. I'm pretty sure if there was another group that came in and said, look, we wanna ante into the pot for our employers, employees rather as well, that could have been welcomed as well. It wasn't spread out to everyone because the monies that were raised in the Midtown Initiative was limited. And so, and it went real quick. They ran out of money, I think six months in their first year initiative, and that's how fast it went. The folks who move into these homes have a commitment of five years, met bare minimum. And so there's a forgivable loan of $25,000, but you're committed for that period of time. And the philosophy and the strategy is that you get people to live in the city. You find that this city is a great place to live. And it's a great place to live, work, and play. And so, getting them here for five years commits them to the city. So that's the first two. I'm gonna kind of open it up for other folks who wanna engage the teacher issue because that's a big initiative. It's locally driven. Detroit, as you know, isn't an emergency manager or was, depending on how you look at the law. We're still on the public at 72. So it's an emergency financial manager until that's challenged by court. But there is a lot of discussion around teachers, their talent, bumping, the union activity and education. I mean, we can't just talk about education from the finance point. If you're gonna have a discussion on education, we have to talk about it holistically. And there are some real challenges when you can bump a math teacher for an art teacher based on seniority, or you can't incentivize teachers who are performing extremely well through differential pay. So there are a lot of different discussions on education, and we can really absorb this whole thing on the education piece. Well, that's the point I would just lay out to you. The governor is critically important. He has an initiative called K20. You know, we're talking about education, and people are scared to even say K16. They're saying K14, because people may not want to go to school for four years, that while that might be true, the K20 initiative is a lifelong learning initiative. You should begin learning from pre-K20, or actually before you get into kindergarten, K college is where I, I got my donation slip. I've been thinking I can't give money this year. Anyway. You can always give money. No, not right now from K. But anyway, long story short, for friends of those who are watching K college, I will give. Just not this year, this calendar year, next year. Let me just, oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, but go ahead, jump in please. I'm talking about. There were several things, and I just want to do this quickly so I don't hog the mic. First, crime. The crime myth, we have to fight that ourselves. Well, you can't call the police chief now because he resigned in a sex scandal. But there are ways to look at where the crime is. And the crime is in the neighborhoods. The homicides are people who know people and are mad over, you know. So this whole idea that some business in Florida that might want to look at Detroit as a place to relocate and they think, oh, we'll crime. That's not necessarily something for them to worry about. And that's what we've got to get people to understand. Yes, there is a crime problem, but it is not a random crime problem against businessmen and women who are coming to give people jobs. Peter Carmanos has never been assaulted. The whole time that my daughter and I lived in Detroit, not one, I mean, we walked the dog. I let her walk the dog by herself. We've never been carjacked. It depends on where you are. And there has to be a concerted effort to make things better where the crime is. So that's one thing. The second thing is teachers. I love teachers, they know it. I tell them all the time, I can't stand bad teachers. And if we are not going to be clear about the difference between the two, we are not going to fix the schools. And there's a lot that needs to be fixed, but that's one of them. Even though they do have all the required training that they need, we all know there's training and then there's training. And some teachers weren't evaluated for six to 10 years. So nobody knew how they were teaching. These are all things we have to fix. Last thing is this focused rebuilding, and I won't mention his name, but a friend of mine who I won't name. We got into a lot of trouble with people because I wrote a column talking about focused rebuilding, how you can't take a million dollars and spend it 100 places and make a huge difference, how you need to rebuild a place at a time. And of course, some people thought, oh, so that means you don't care about what I'm doing over here. No, that's just like somebody building that little house or little housing development someplace where there's no school, no lights, no cops, and expect something good to happen. What you have to do is find a place and focus on that place and make that place great and then go to the next place. I'm not dismissing any effort that somebody is doing every place in Detroit needs some help, but if we don't start sort of, that's one of the greatest things about council by district elections so that the people in a particular area can find their assets, find their anchor, figure out what they need to do. It's why Philadelphia works. I love Philadelphia because they took a bunch of towns and made them one city, but that means each one of those little towns still have identity and pride and they fight for what they need. You gotta make that happen in Detroit. Then you won't have places that get forgotten. So yeah, I'm used to getting in trouble, but I will tell you, I'm so glad to hear that the governor's gonna revisit earned income credit. I'll give him a call. But there are things that we can do to pay attention to those things so we don't feel like nothing can happen until the governor does it or until the community organizers all get together and figure out how to make us work together. There are things we can do on our street or in our little piece of neighborhood, but if we don't start having some pride in what that is and where that is, and if kids at your school that's down the street aren't learning and you don't have any kids, it's still your job. So yes, against bad teachers, for good teachers, I'm still trying to fight for teachers who did get laid off who are excellent just because principals didn't like them. Oh, you'll be reading about that soon. And I think that we really have to focus on our neighborhoods and have some point of pride where they are. I wanna thank everybody for coming. It's 3.30, maybe our panelists, if you have some urgent unanswered questions, can stay a few minutes. But again, on behalf of the Ford School at the University of Michigan and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, I wanna thank everybody for spending the afternoon with us and please join me in thanking our panelists. Thank you.