 It's a big venue if you're so inclined. Thank you for joining us. We're really excited to be on a panel here at SoCAP. It's my first SoCAP conference, so this morning was really exciting and informative. And we're really thrilled to have a chance to share our collective work on resilience with all of you today. My name is Amy Armstrong. I'm the director for relationship management at 100 Brazilian cities, which means I have the great privilege of working with cities around the world building their resilience. We'll talk more about what exactly that means. We've got a fantastic panel. I'm really excited about everybody here. And I'm excited to know a lot of you all have worked with you in the past, so this is great. I'm going to start with just about five minutes of an overview on the definition of resilience. We're thrilled to have Dr. Rudin here joining us. I'm going to start with just a quick overview of our view of resilience and of our core offerings and how we're partnering with cities around the world. And then we're going to turn it over and have a really fun conversation with this great panel. So as Dr. Rudin described this morning, 100 Resilient Cities is a $100 million initiative to build urban resilience around the world. It was launched last year in celebration of the foundation's centennial. And we selected 32 cities to begin working with in December. We've been on the ground in those cities over the past eight months and have learned just a tremendous amount. And we're in really diverse places around the world, from Ramallah to Rotterdam, from Dakar to Da Nang, and in three cities in the Bay Area, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco as well. So first off, what do we mean by resilience? It's a new track at the conference. We're thrilled that there's a track. And it's being used a lot. So I want to spend a little bit of time to share what we mean. And then we're going to have all the panelists also talk about their vision of resilience. So the concept originated in the 1970s to describe how complex natural systems transform and withstand stresses. It was adopted by engineers to also understand the evolution of complex systems and their restoration. And of course, it also has origins in psychological understanding about the ability of the human mind to recover after a trauma, particularly in children. But at 100 Resilience Cities, we've taken that we're really talking about the resilience of complex urban systems. And we define resilience as the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems to survive, adapt, and grow, no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience. So that is a unique definition. And I want to call out two pieces of it to help you really understand where we're coming from. So first of all, we're talking about resilience of many different systems of institutions, communities of businesses. We're not just thinking about city government in terms of the public sector, but really the entire ecosystem that makes up cities. And second, I want to emphasize that for us, resilience is about both a community's and city's ability to withstand shocks and stresses. If you think about the way that cities have typically organized themselves, you've got one side of the community that's focused on planning for the shocks, the earthquake, the terrorist attack, the disease epidemic. And on the other hand, you have folks who are focusing on chronic stresses, on endemic violence, on poverty, on long-term climate change and sea level rise, these things that really weaken the fabric of a city and their ability to survive long-term. But we believe that building urban resilience demands an attention to both. And that cities that are better able to handle these slower-burning chronic issues will also be better at prepared and equipped to deal with the acute shocks when they strike. We also don't think that shocks and stresses inevitably lead to failure. We've seen examples of cities who have used a shock or a stress to transform themselves and to improve their development. And that's something that we're trying to foster. So quickly, our work in cities, we provide four main types of support and partnership with the cities in our network. The first is funding to establish a new innovative position in city government called the Chief Resilience Officer. And this is a senior position, direct advisor to the mayor, with the ability to work across departments to really lead the city's resilience efforts. It's a catalytic investment in rethinking the way that cities are organizing themselves to build resilience. And we're very fortunate to have one of the first zeros in the world on the stage with us here today, Victoria Salinas. Thank you. Second, we provide support for that zero to lead diverse stakeholders in the development of a comprehensive resilience strategy, which will result in a list of actionable initiatives that improve the city's resilience. And I wanna pause, because I think this is a really important part of our work for people in this room, because the initiatives that come out of the strategy process in all of our cities are gonna be things that are fundable, are gonna be things that signal to the marketplace what the resilience building priorities and opportunities are in cities. And so we wanna be talking with you as we develop those strategies and cities around the world. Third, we're providing access to a really interesting suite of tools and research and resources to support resilience building. And again, Dr. Rodin mentioned this, we're working with partners who do big data analysis, reinsurers, energy experts, a really diverse host of partners who are gonna work with our cities and helping them implement their resilience priorities. And lastly, inclusion in the 100RC network, which is a really rich peer learning community where CROs can work with each other and receive training from our partners. So just wanna underscore that these are our four offerings in each of our individual cities, but they all represent a larger goal to facilitate the creation of a global practice of resilience that we're making a big investment in 100 cities around the world to really understand what the hard work of building urban resilience is and wanna share those lessons more broadly with cities around the world. And I do wanna just note that the Bay Area is very special to us and it's not special just to me because I have the privilege of working with these folks, but the Bay Area is the only place that we have invested in several cities in one region. We're working in Berkeley, San Francisco and Oakland each and we all know that shocks and stresses don't abide by jurisdictional boundaries and we don't think that the planning for them should either and so we're thrilled that all three cities have now appointed their CROs and I'm here this week and gonna be working with all three of them and we're really thrilled to see what kind of collaborative efforts come out of the three together. So with that overview of our vision of resilience and of the work that we're doing in cities around the world, I'm gonna turn it over and we're gonna have a great conversation and try and lift up some concrete examples of the work that these folks are doing building resilience in their communities and ideally opportunities for you to collaborate with us in those efforts. So I was told we're not gonna do big grand introductions but just very quickly I'm honored to have Fred Blackwell who's the CEO for the San Francisco Foundation and formerly city administrator of the city of Oakland. We've got Daniel Homesy who's the director of Neighborhood Resilience, also the Tony Robbins of Community Resilience I'm told. So you're in for a real treat. Victoria Salinas as I mentioned is the new CRO for the city of Oakland. It's her second day on the job. So we're gonna expect her to know everything about the city of Oakland. But she comes to us from the World Bank and has done disaster risk recovery work in the global south and also in New Orleans. So she's a real expert in the fields. And then Jason Payne whose title, I'm very jealous of, he's a philanthropic engineer for Palantir Technologies and he's gonna help us understand how to better marshal data and technology to support resilience building. So let's get going. And we're gonna do I think a pretty free form conversations about some targeted questions but I'd like to try and foster a conversation if we can. So each of your organizations plays an important role in building resilience. We've made a point that resilience is new to a lot of the people in the room. So I'm wanting to just take a moment and have you each describe resilience and the kind of work that you do how it helps build resilience cities. So Fred. Sure, thank you first. It's my first sole cap meeting as well. So it's great to be here and be among a group of folks who are thinking about these issues. And I'm glad that resilience is one of the topics. I think the way I would come at this is kind of from two directions. One, wearing the hat that I have on now at the San Francisco Foundation, obviously our priority is to and our focus is on nonprofit organizations throughout the Bay Area. We provide all kinds of support from general operating support to technical assistance and capacity building on areas related to education, arts and culture, community health and the like. And so for us, I think practically we actually view these community-based organizations and nonprofits as some of the key institutions for resiliency at the neighborhood level. And that manifests itself in a variety of ways. One way is obviously through the basic services that are providing a lot of the groups that we support are providing basic social safety net type services. And we think that that is a very important part of the resiliency equation throughout the Bay Area. But I think another very important aspect of the work is the social capital component of resiliency. We know from past experience that low income communities and communities of color are the kinds of communities that get disproportionately impacted when there is a natural disaster or some other kind of earth shattering event. And so we think that we have to invest in those communities disproportionately. And so for us, this is not a one size fits all or shotgun approach. We actually think that the likelihood of disproportionate impact will require disproportionate investment in a variety of ways. And I think one of those ways is around social capital and social network. And so that's one dimension of the work. The other thing I would mention though is where in my previous hat at the city of Oakland, one of the things that struck me when we first kind of responded to the opportunity to be one of the 100 resilient cities and be a part of that cohort, was that your definition of resiliency varies dramatically based on your background and your experiences. So for example, in Oakland, when the police chief thought about resiliency, he thought about it in a very different way than the public works director or the housing director. And just to be specific, the police chief, when he thinks about resiliency is thinking about response. How is it that we have the infrastructure to respond when that disaster occurs, secure the environment, keep it a safe environment, make sure that everybody in the city has the ability to respond and to be safe. The public works people thought about this as an infrastructure issue. What is it that we need to think about from a transportation point of view to make sure that we have all of the sidewalks and the sewers and the utilities and all those things up and functioning as soon as possible after something bad may occur. Our housing people thought about this as a soft story issue. I mean, in Oakland, like San Francisco, we have a lot of single family homes that are basically vulnerable to earthquakes. And so for a long time, the housing folks have been thinking about how they respond to that. And so that creates both an opportunity and a challenge when you talk about resilience because the challenge is that you can often kind of get diffused very quickly in terms of what people are talking about and what the priorities should be. But the opportunity is that it actually impacts just about every aspect of the workings of local government. And so the notion of supplying a person like Victoria I think was a great move on the part of the Rockefeller Foundation because those folks will be the glue to pull all those disparate ideas together. So I'll stop there. I know other folks have ideas, but I just wanted to kind of lay out that I think this is a very multidimensional issue. And I think it's important to understand that everybody who comes to the table to talk about, think about, and strategize around this issue will be coming at it from a different angle. I think, first of all, I wanna just acknowledge it's an honor to be here. I'm here in the stead of Patrick Otolini. I believe the world's first two resilience officer. So I just wanna thank everyone for the opportunity to come in and share a little bit. In the building on Fred's remarks, I think they're foundational. I would just put out there that, I think there's certain ways to look at resilience in the construct that we sort of take every day in San Francisco is that, certainly that the outputs, like you can look at buildings and how they'll perform in earthquake. You can look at the sewers and see how well they'll perform in earthquake. But resilience in many respects is really about a condition, a condition of an organism, right? And when we work with neighborhoods, we actually want to help them understand that they need to advocate to make sure that they have adequate access to the kind of support they'll need during times of stress. But we also tell them that resilience is about the ability to maintain that condition. So we look at the five functional elements are, can you govern yourself? Can you communicate? Can you problem so? Can you organize yourselves to get things done? And can you manage partnerships and relationships? And we believe that really the essence of resilience is a condition, it's your ability to function at a certain level. And we work with not only ourselves at City Hall around those five functional areas, but they also work with our neighborhoods. And being the director of neighborhood resilience, I was honored to actually tour the neighborhoods of New Orleans after Katrina with Mayor Lee. And Mayor Lee, you really saw that the total failure in New Orleans, everything was avoidable. No one really had to die in New Orleans. I mean, the storm had blown over for three hours before the levee started to fail. Everything that went wrong in New Orleans was an engineering failure pretty much. And when you build pump houses, but you don't have a backup generator, for example, not a good idea. Bottom line is what Mayor Lee saw was a total breakdown in the ability for residents who knew what the problems were to be able to work and trust their government to solve those problems. And that's what you saw post Katrina was that lack of trust, that lack of transparency, that lack of capacity to work together is really what drove New Orleans into that horrible spiral of five recovery plans before they could actually get back on their feet. Completely unacceptable. And I think what Mayor Lee took away from that was that this is a social justice issue, that resilience is not a condition that government should have and other folks shouldn't have or shouldn't have to worry about. Mayor Lee wants to move ownership of resilience to the neighborhood level. Anyone who knows San Francisco knows that if you aren't on the same page with the neighborhoods, you're not gonna get anything done in San Francisco. So the truth is, if they're not the same place with you, understanding why the city wants to advance its goals and priorities, you're not gonna get it done. And the Mayor has prioritized that as being a top objective for myself and Patrick and everyone else who walks in the building every day. And I just wanna honor sort of Fred's remarks there as saying, it's basically the same thing. And that is that if you don't get up every day as a resident and think you have the capacity to succeed in San Francisco, then we aren't done with our work yet. And I think resilience is all about success. Couldn't agree more with both of them. When we think about resilience, it's such a broad concept. It basically sounds like everything that needs to happen in a community at once going really well. So the question then becomes, how do we define it in a way? How do we tackle that issue? That is basically the theme of the conference as well, igniting vibrant communities, vibrant communities that are thriving our resilient communities. So one way that I try and think about the concept of resilience and that we in the international development world have started to try and break it down so that we can have actions and we can work together concretely is using kind of five pillars of action, so to speak. One understanding risk. Do we know all the risks in our community? We've talked about climate, we've talked about disaster, social, environmental, so many types of risks that face people in their day to day lives. How does that information actionable? We've got a scientific community that works on probabilistic modeling to kind of understand the trajectory of those risks, but then to really break it down so that I as a person in my house on my block can do things differently and make decisions, all that risk information has to be transmitted to me and available to me in a way that I can do something. Even this week we had the, or last week we had the Napa earthquake and folks in Oakland who are part of Code for America and other groups took risk information on soft story buildings that was available in a big document like that, mapped it, put it on the internet, now you can figure out whether the place you live is a soft story building or not. That's kind of an example of taking information and putting it in the hands of people so that they can put their personal resilience, they can be empowered to do something about it. A second big focus area is reducing risk. That gets to the infrastructure challenges that Daniel mentioned, the large scale things like the levees, like sea balls, like all those different things that no one person can really tackle on their own because they take millions of dollars oftentimes, engineering studies, all kinds of work to really address the risks the community face, but reducing risk, one ounce of prevention as everyone knows really helps in the long run and there's been plenty of studies that show putting $4 into, putting $1 into that saves you $4 down the road. And what we're seeing even globally is partnerships of people saying, okay, let's pick a topic, schools, safe schools. Everyone wants children to be safe. So even knowing what's the risk, are schools safe? And being able to say, this one needs to use building standards, this one doesn't, and looking for ways to start to address those things. So using that concept of reducing risk in every type of infrastructure we're involved in is definitely part of the way that we can think about looking at resilience in a way that allows us to start working together. Thirdly, preparedness. The business community thinks of it a lot in terms of business continuity. The public sector thinks about it in terms of being prepared to respond to disasters. And really investing in preparedness and really thinking through what are those things that we must have in place now that we can be doing now to make sure that we can withstand any shock that comes our way is something that is tremendously important. And I would encourage definitely whatever organization and groups that one is partnering with to have that preparedness be part of a business model to make sure that they're taking into account all the risks in their community. Financial resilience. That's another component where people can work together. And it's both insurance for business owners, agriculture earlier today. We heard about a lot of rural insurance schemes. But also for cities and countries, being able to really have contingent finance so that when something happens, you can absorb those shocks, you can keep going, you can rebuild quickly. And finally, resilient recovery. We all look to New Orleans as an example of places where after the horrible disaster and the long recovery process, there's been so much innovation. There's been creative partnerships. All those things that disaster, all those opportunities that come out of that are things that we can take from and think about now to say, okay, if we're gonna have to resiliently recover at some point, especially in this area where we know we're an earthquake country, what are those partnerships? What's the social capital? What's the neighborhood community associations that need to be vibrant now? So then when there is a disaster, we're tapping into what already exists. We're not recreating the wheel. We're not creating community in times of crisis. Those are things that are all elements of resilience and pull on different partners, different types of expertise, and create a way to plug into this broad concept that really requires all of us working together and really leveraging our various assets to truly ignite vibrant communities and make sure they're resilient regardless of the types of risks that they may face. So batting cleanup, it's always a little bit difficult to not be redundant. So let me try to give a different angle on it, and that's a very tactical angle. And to me, I define resilience as actionable insights. The ability to find where those investments are required to improve the ability of the community to recover from an acute shock as well as a chronic stress. And I think the real key to uncovering those actionable insights is collaboration. I'm a data scientist by trade and find myself looking at the world through data. And what I've found is that all of the data across the three sectors in a city is there to uncover those actionable insights to then make those investments to improve the resilience. It's just a matter of getting all three sectors to work together, share data in a secure fashion, et cetera. And looking at the three cities in the Bay Area, you're probably talking about tens of thousands of NGOs, hundreds of governmental entities, and hundreds of corporations that are involved in that equation. But coming together, you can uncover those actionable insights. One tactical example of this in the first city that Palantir's technology has deployed in Norfolk is understanding vulnerability during floods by taking boy data, weather data, rainfall data, public 311 data, other critical infrastructure reporting data, et cetera, putting it together and developing models to run scenarios that in this condition with this wind direction and this rainfall amount and this tidal situation, here would be the communities that would be cut off based on this critical infrastructure failing, et cetera. And looking at very, with those actionable insights, then being able to make targeted investments to improve the resilience of the community. Thanks for that example, Jason. I failed to mention that Palantir Technologies is one of our founding platform partners, and I actually have been working with the team in Norfolk, Virginia, to develop the kind of modeling that you're referring to, and it is gonna be transformative for the community in good times and in bad times to understand the impact of water on their resources. Those were a couple of them. I think there were some common themes. We heard a philanthropic perspective, a public sector perspective, and the private sector perspective, but a real common theme was community and social capital, and whatever you're focused on, preparedness or recovery, supporting and empowering communities and local stakeholders to be a part of that process, I really heard as a common theme. But I'm gonna pick up on the actionable insights to go to our next question, because I think, as I said, one of the key goals of 100 Resilient Cities is to develop resilient strategies that have actionable insights and initiatives and priorities that cities need in order to address underlying weaknesses and some of their key risks. And all of you have diverse experience working in municipal governments, and I'm wondering if you could help share some examples of those kinds of initiatives that maybe the market hasn't quite understood yet. We're hoping to aggregate the demand of those 100 cities and share with the marketplace, the philanthropic sector or private sector partners and others to understand the needs of communities. And we're early in those days. We know some things about the need for better data, the need for better financing, research on community cohesion, but you all have such a great diversity of experiences. I'm wondering if you can share some of the examples of resilience priorities that maybe the market hasn't quite understood yet. And if anyone can start, we don't have to go in order. So one that I think lots of communities are struggling with, and I'm sure you guys can speak to this too, is we'll speak about the Bay Area because we're here now. And like Amy mentioned and a friend mentioned, Oakland, like the other cities in the area, are looking at what to do about affordable housing and make sure that it's not gonna fall down when there's a disaster. Because we all know that the most vulnerable people are oftentimes the ones who live in the most at risk area. So there's thousands of apartment buildings around this area that are likely to fall down in a major earthquake. So the question that the city is struggling with and looking to figure out is, how do you incentivize landlords who many are owners of run controlled buildings to make these capital improvements, to make these changes because retrofitting is not cheap. And so there's definitely those types of things where there's not a clear source of funding. It's not, there's not a program already set up. Those are types of challenges that, live challenges that we're struggling with right now of how do you finance that? How do you do it in a way that minimizes, or that on the financing side works, but also minimizes displacement of residents while their, while the work's being done. And so that's one challenge that we're looking at right now is how do you, if we wanna reduce risk, which is one of the things that is important for resilience, how do we tactically do that and finance it and make it work for everybody who's involved in the marketplace? And I don't know if you guys wanted to add to that because I know you've been more involved. It's my second day on the job, so I'm sure you guys have more to add on that one, but. Sure. You know, I would add and I would actually categorize it, I think on one level from an infrastructure point of view, I don't think that the market, so to speak, has figured out a way to make capital and debt available for the kinds of infrastructure investments that are necessary for resiliency, whether that's resiliency that is of the earthquake type or resiliency that is related to climate change. An example of climate change is sea level rise. We have not, and the market has not put together, I think, effective tools that will allow us to invest in waterfront development, infrastructure development and other things that will allow for the kind of adaptation to sea level rise that I think will be necessary. So I think that that's one category. I think Victoria's right on the other category is capital and debt available for investment in housing infrastructure is also gonna be an important thing. The second thing that I would mention, and I wanted to give an example, because I think sometimes when we mention kind of the importance of social capital, it's hard to kind of get your arms around it. For folks who are really interested in a very practical example of how social capital makes a difference in terms of resiliency, there's a book called Heat Wave that talks about the heat wave in Chicago in 1995 and studied the impact on a neighborhood level and also looked at the mortality at a neighborhood level. And what they found was that the difference between surviving that heat wave and not surviving that heat wave boiled down to a senior not being isolated in their apartment or in their home and being able to have access to people and information to let them know what to do. And in some cases, it was as simple as the instruction to go hang out in the freezer section of the deli or the grocery store where it was cool. And without that kind of social networking, you will find very disparate outcomes in terms of the response. And I think the investment in that kind of infrastructure is kind of difficult to get your arms around, but it's definitely an area where we haven't really responded at the level of scale that will make a difference in terms of resiliency. The last thing I'll say, and I'll be brief on this one, is technology is actually important when you're talking about resiliency. My mom runs an organization called PolicyLink that was very active in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. And one of the very simple things that they did was create a website for the people who got displaced so that they could have access to information around how to get back, what kinds of institutions you should go to, what kinds of city programs are available, what types of community institutions are there to help you. And that's the idea of using technology to get the information out and the armed people with the information that they need for their own resiliency and to rebuild their lives is very important. Let me jump in there. Technological and IT infrastructure investments are viewed as overhead and it's so difficult to raise money for overhead because it's not able to find the marginal utility. It's easy to say you provided 10 extra beds or 100 extra blankets or whatever the case may be. And so I think it's so important for the community to look at investments in data and IT infrastructure as a first order investment and not look at it as an overhead investment and kick it to the curb. That being said, overall resilience, I think that the under-invested area is around those chronic stresses that exist in a community. And this is primarily around nutrition and health in my opinion. And this is something that I was on the drive up here this morning was reading the report from the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and how the Ebola outbreak has affected their abilities to do program effectiveness in West Africa. And the reality is there'll probably be more people that die from malaria outbreaks because the infrastructure fails and they don't have the ability to correctly distribute bed nets and antimalarials where they're needed and actually folks that perish from Ebola. And so to me, I think it's incredibly important to look at the chronic conditions and the chronic needs of a city and especially doubly so how those are affected during the shocks and how those people that are vulnerable before the shocks have those vulnerabilities mitigated during a shock. Can you help do anything down? I just want to sort of add to Fred's point. The heat wave example is a very personal thing for me. In 1999, my aunt died in a heat wave in her house on top of Twin Peaks and she laid there for three days and her neighbors drove by because whoever heard of anyone dying of a heat wave in the middle of summer in San Francisco, right? And I think this brings this full circle and I know our colleague here is trying to ring the bell here a little bit about this that our planet's changing. We had two heat waves this year before March. In San Francisco, it's 85 degrees, that's technically a heat wave. The truth is our homes in San Francisco don't have air conditioning and so all of a sudden, San Francisco's been thrust in this new reality where we're gonna have a growing, growing and growing number of events that are heat related and the residents are not acclimated and our homes are not ready to perform and a lot of the buildings downtown that have been built to be energy efficient are now emptying out on hot days because people can't work in them, right? And so there's a difference between resilience and sustainability, that'll be another breakout session, right? But the point is this, this March, this May I was on vacation and my father was on a diuretic and he took a claritin and he called his doctor, said, wasn't feeling well, well guess what? Even though his doctor said drink water, my dad was tired, he went and lied down, he couldn't even make to his bed, he fell face-force on the floor the first time in 90 years this man was not able to stand up on his own and he was heading towards the same terrible fate his sister had died 10 years earlier. Well guess what, you know the difference is? 8.30 in the morning, my brother who I grew up with next door, not by blood but by spirituality checked on him just to make sure he was okay, picked him off the floor and gone to the hospital and saved his life. And I wanna point that out because in the end, all this data, all this information, if it doesn't point to that moment when we can be there for each other, where we can be a mentor to a youth that's about to turn the corner and make some bad decisions and be a voice from outside that might help them make some smart decisions, if all this technology and all this investment doesn't make sure that at that moment we can contribute to each other's success then we're missing the opportunity. And I just wanna put that out there as a challenge perhaps, is how do we make sure that when our chance to move forward on our condition and be resilient as a community is before us, how can we make sure we're ready for that moment? Someone was ready for that moment for my dad. I just wanna make sure that that's the case permanently for every resident in every city moving forward. Wow, some really personal and important examples. Thank you all. I think some of the themes there again are around the intersection of social capital and investment capital, sort of how do you structure financing mechanisms that help software retrofits in vulnerable communities and ensure the building stands up but also thinks about what happens to the human beings in those homes after an earthquake. I appreciate Jason the thinking about the longer term chronic stresses, how to invest in information that will support communities to know what to do in times of crisis. So that was great. I think building on the relationship between social capital and infrastructure, let's move. Dr. Rowan this morning presented a concept of the resilience dividend, which is the idea that understanding and resilience, investing in resilience not only will mitigate damages in terms of disaster but can have other benefits in the good times. One example from one of the communities where we were committed in Columbia had suffered from severe violence and a complete lack of rule of law in the late 1980s and 1990s. The city government there made some really tremendous investments in public transportation infrastructure. They built public gondolas that had open community centers. They built public escalators. They built bus rapid transit. And so what was on its face, transportation hard infrastructure investment which did reduce mobility and reduce carbon emissions and all those other things you'd want also had the impact of connecting communities that had been warring, opening up neighborhoods, making it more transparent and safe and had a huge reduction on violence. So I'm wanting to get some examples from you all about investments that you've seen that may have been targeted on one thing, a transportation infrastructure but had some other really important benefits for social capital or other aspects of resilience. So again, anybody who would like to take that. Sure, one thing that's live right now in Oakland. So it's a project and process is that there's an area that goes through lots of different neighborhoods called International Boulevard Corridor. And when we're speaking about, and the point I wanna make with this kind of project is that the way we design our individual projects and work together and the way we partner with people can have resilience dividends way beyond one specific initiative, one specific investment. So in this area of Oakland that goes through what they call the Flatlands which is where a lot more of the underserved community is and is also very highly vulnerable to different types of risks. They're looking at integrated economic development program. So on the surface it's transit oriented development. It's looking at all these different pieces coming together but really it has an opportunity to bring in partners and work with different aspects of those communities and neighborhoods along that corridor to build resilience in a really meaningful way. Not only because it's going to be improving access to transit and connecting people but it's an area that has many more renters who also have very low incomes. And so the whole affordable housing issue has an opportunity to be tackled. There's people who only the labor market there is primarily people who have low income jobs in kind of the service industry and some other industries. And so there's a chance to really ignite and build much more energy and small businesses. There's vacant lots that have, if you get creative and you're looking, there's so many businesses wanting to come to Oakland and migrate there that you can start to get creative with this corridor about the possibilities. And so the point being that in a specific place with specific people and their specific problems you can start to bring people together and partners together to really say how do we make them resilient? How are we building together? How are we achieving and igniting this vibrant community? And so I think that's one place where I'm hoping that over the next couple years and maybe even with some of the partners here in the room since Oakland is looking for partners for this project this initiative that together we really help this one area be a model for building resilient neighborhoods, vibrant neighborhoods and tackling some of these stressors that really are the hardest, some of the hardest things to do. The disaster related ones, the big shocks people don't tend to wanna invest in because they think it's gonna happen way down the road. So it's that set of challenges. But the stressors, the poverty, the low education outcomes, et cetera have a huge impact on people's ability to thrive now and recover after disasters. So those types of projects that are place based, community specific really give us this opportunity. I mean just to add to that, I mean when Harvard County School of Government noted that whatever trends are in place good and bad before disaster accelerate. So if your local economy is struggling before a disaster it's just gonna get worse, right? An example just to put out there, and again I appreciate everyone giving me a chance to share a little earlier, is that we had a neighborhood in Bernal Heights where the merchant corridor was struggling because rents were going up but the small businesses were actually seeing a lot of people leave in the neighborhood to shop at some of the competitive like large box stores in the area and they were like how can we keep our neighborhood money in our neighborhood? So they created something called Bernal Bucks, right? Which where they actually attached five dollar bills stickers that said Bernal Bucks in it and that way when you went to a store and you used one of those five dollar bills you got an extra 10% off, you got a free cookie or something like that. Now what was important about that was getting people understand that post event your world collapses. You may not be able to get on the freeway and go out to a ceremony and buy a $10 suit at Best Buy or something, whatever you have to stay local. And what it does is gets people to understand the power of a local economy and the power of influencing your local economy and frankly what a lot of people are talking about in our neighborhoods right now after disaster is how are they going to continue to shop and share resources if they can't use their electronic currency? And so this idea about creating hyper local currencies actually nurtures their beliefs that they can actually do something like that. And so the Bayview right now is actually starting to talk about Bayview Bucks as well. And what we're trying to do with our work is not actually come up with these ideas but help incubate them and then share them through our network of neighborhoods through the Neighborhood Empowerment Network. And I think that's sometimes the best thing we can do is get out of the way and let people connect with each other and maybe that's part about resilience as well. There's a big aspect, we've talked a bunch about community being a central part of resilience and anytime that you foster a community you have massive positive externalities that come out of it that getting, we were discussing backstage getting a bunch of disparate actors in the neighborhood to come together to build a resilience plan. You have a bunch of disparate actors in the neighborhood coming together possibly for the first time and I think it's incalculable how that collaborative effort in that building of community, getting NGOs and governmental entities and community leaders to work together, how much of an impact that can have on the positive aspects of the community of individuals stopping by to check on other individuals that may need someone to check in on a day or two, et cetera. So, I mean the only thing I would do is underline everything that everybody else just said and go back to one of the comments that I made early on, which is that we know based on our experience that low income communities and communities of color are gonna be disproportionately impacted. What that means to me is that investments in addressing disparities, whether they are disparities that are in the educational system or in community health issues, environmental justice issues, as well as investments in addressing the inequities in our economy are investments in resiliency. Investments that attempt to level the playing field, that attempt to create equal opportunity, no matter where you live or where you grew up or what school you went to, are investments in resiliency. And so I think that it's important to understand that frame as we think about this issue. That's helpful. I sort of posed the question as if there's gonna be some resilience investment down the line, but you all have done a really great job of reminding us that the practice of building resilience is working with your community on long-term goals, it's not waiting for the plan and the investment down at the end. I think we've got six minutes left. I wanna open it up just in case there are questions from the audience that are burning that we can share. Yes, sir. You know, I think that you're right. And I think an example of that is the, when the bottoms dropped out of the real estate market a few years ago. One of the things that is not talked about very much is that that was probably the biggest erosion of wealth in the African-American community that folks have ever seen. And the impacts of that are going to be felt possibly decades into the future. Because what you're talking about is an inability to pass down an asset that is kind of one of the fundamental assets of wealth creation in this country. And so I think that you're absolutely right to kind of focus our attention on this issue. What I will say about it is kind of similar to what I said a little bit earlier, which is the way that our economy is growing right now is growing in a way where not enough people are participating in or benefiting from it. And what that is creating or going to create is a situation where our economic health will be in jeopardy. And so this issue around equity and this issue around investing in both the root causes and the effects of it are not things that I'm talking about that we need to do from a moral point of view, although it should be talked about in that way. It's something that we need to think about and talk about in terms of the sustainability of our economy. And so I think you're right in raising the issue and I think it should be a part of the conversation. I think it's also very important from a global context as well, looking at ethnographic and religious lines and how cities can really be tender boxes where frankly one nihilist or one anarchist can put an impetus or a shock into the community and just absolutely destroy an urban community. And I think that's something that really should be focused on. The counterpoint there that I think is very important to discuss as well is the importance of using data correctly. And we've talked about people with good intentions being able to use granular data to create all sorts of positive impact, but using that data maliciously can result in severe negative impact. An extreme case in point is if an NGO is on, that's helping a vulnerable community is on dire straits, selling that data to a paid a advanced organization may be a way to make ends meet. And the fact that that would have on that community could be very, very negative. And so I think it's very important to discuss ensuring that data is used correctly, especially in sensitive areas and vulnerable communities. I just want to go back to the whole area of economic preparedness. One of the tremendous benefits of Katrina was somehow it inspired all of the country's synagogues and churches to develop very sophisticated training programs for natural disasters in concert with local government. Nothing like that has happened in the wake of the recession. We did some brainstorming with church leaders there before the recession hit. And I don't think any of the 50 folks that we pulled together believed it was going to hit, but the Deacons Fund and a little bit of money set aside doesn't go anywhere. But they came up with ideas like a church craigslist who's got an extra room in their house, a car in their driveway. And actually started, several churches out of that started financial planning courses. Had older people teach younger people how to process food. So in terms of looking forward to resilience, if there's anything you can do to help communities create not only preparedness for natural disasters, but for the next economic downturn, because I don't see anything going on there. Just one thought on that. I think one of the distinctions between just disaster management and the concept of resilience is that as we make communities resilient, we're addressing those types of things now. We're not waiting till the Katrina happens or the next big earthquake happens to suddenly come together and do our best to work together. We're thinking through those things now, looking for those creative partnerships with the faith-based community, other communities, so that whatever adversity may come our way, we're ready for it. And in doing so today, we're actually making our community stronger and more vibrant every single step of the way. I think- It's doing a lot of work in this realm. Sorry, I wanted to jump in. So just to put it out there, greed is not good. Greed is bad. I toured neighborhoods in Christchurch, New Zealand, early this year that developers were told would dissolve into liquefaction. They sued the city and won the right to develop in 1995. They built 400 homes. They put 400 families in those homes. And three years ago, those homes sunk three feet in 20 minutes in liquefaction. And now that community looks like the ninth ward in the middle of New Zealand, one of the most socially conscious countries in the planet. I feel like we all have to take ownership for our actions and our behaviors every day. As an organism, we're all part of the organism. So if we're not behaving in a way that we think the organism should behave, then we're part of the problem. We need to be part of the solution. And I want to put out there as a- My last name is Homsie, HOMPS, H-O-M-S. Anyone who's following what's going on the Middle East right now in Syria, you know, my ancestral home has been destroyed by what's going on in the Middle East right now. And I just want to put out there that in the Bayview we have a saying for our work, which is that we want to build a neighborhood worth fighting for that we love every day. And I think we need to go back to the answer. And the answer is love. Love is the answer. Let's love each other. Let's love our communities. Let's trust each other. Let's give each other the benefit of the doubt. Let's take a risk and say hi to a stranger on the street. And as soft and maybe naive as that is, isn't that what really being a human is all about? Is feeling connected to those around you? So maybe, you know, we should look at ourselves today when we leave here and, you know, someone wants to cut in front of you and you're still here five minutes away from work. Let them cut in front of you, you know? When you're in a coffee shop, put down your phone. Say hi to the person next door because it really resumes as all about relationships. And you never know if that person might be the person one day who could see you on the street having a bad moment and could turn it around for you. So I just want to put it out there that maybe we should all leave here and start focusing on love. That is a very positive note to end on. So I'm being told to finish up. I'm gonna pose my last question but we don't have time to answer it but I want to, I like this last question so you can come up and ask them what their answers would have been. I asked them to all think about, you know, in their work in cities, what is one really hard to solve resilience challenge? Right? And what's that nut that they need to crack? And if they were to pitch it to a bunch of investors, what would it be? What would they ask for? So you can come up and talk to them and find out what their answer is. But please join me in thanking all of these wonderful, particularly resilience warriors.