 I'm just so delighted to welcome such a diverse and amazing group of stakeholders today. It's so rare that we have an opportunity to come together across agencies and organizations, let alone in person, to just really reflect on this question of how we center equity and well-being in the social and economic progress that we pursue. My name is Elizabeth Garlow. I am a senior fellow with the New Practice Lab, thank you, here at New America. The New Practice Lab believes that good policy design and delivery anchors in families' lived experiences and prioritizes improving family economic security and well-being. We recognize that those efforts must attend to the ways that we can make the safety net simpler, more responsive for families today, so that those critical supports really reach families. But we also acknowledge that we need to co-create a future vision with families that is more attuned to the dimensions of their well-being, of their thriving. I'd really like to thank our partners in this event today, the U.S. Department of Commerce, especially Deputy Secretary Graves, Mira Patel, Sarah Strober, the U.S. Department of Treasury, especially Janice Bowler and Anisha Stephen, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, especially Austin Clemens, and Lumina Foundation. We have Terry Taylor, Courtney Brown, Chris Mullen, and Michelle Cooper here with us today. Their work on post-secondary education attainment has been influential in many spaces, including job quality measurement, and has been influential in helping us think about the intersection of lifelong learning and well-being. As we kick off our convening today, I'm really excited to just give you a quick snapshot of our program. So this morning we will have a number of panel discussions to really help us deepen in some of the tensions that we're holding around how we use data and measurement practices to advance equity and well-being. Earlier this year, New America, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, in partnership with Deputy Secretary Graves and his team convened a conversation with many researchers and leaders in this space who have done decades of important work on this topic. And to help move some of the ideas into action, we turned to the Census Bureau's Opportunity Project Initiative, which is a sprint-based innovation program that brings together technologists, data scientists, government data stewards to really develop new digital tools powered by federal open data to help us design and implement new indicators of progress. And you will hear more from those teams today. To kick us off this morning with opening remarks, I'd like to introduce Deputy Secretary Don Graves. He's the 19th Deputy Secretary of Commerce. He brings decades of experience in the private sector, government, and non-profits to the department. He has an incredible long bio of supporting President Biden on numerous efforts initially as counselor, or most recently as counselor to the president during the 2020 presidential campaign. And prior to that, he served as executive vice president and head of corporate responsibility and community relations at Key Bank. He was previously appointed by President Barack Obama as executive director of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and led the federal government's efforts in the economic recovery of the city of Detroit. It was in that capacity that I first met the Deputy Secretary. First while I was organizing neighborhood businesses in Detroit and later as part of the Detroit federal task force team. Starting then and through now, I've been so grateful for his vision to foster equitable economic opportunity across this country and for the ways that he has helped catalyze work and collaborations that bring us here today. So Deputy Secretary, I'll turn it to you. Well, good morning, everyone. It is really wonderful to be here today with so many good friends. It's actually, it feels like a little bit like a homecoming because there are so many great people here in the room. It's also a little bit of a homecoming. I'm deviating from my prepared remarks because it's a special event for me. It's actually the first time this has ever happened. We're sitting in a room that's actually on the site of what was a hotel about 150 years ago. That hotel was owned and operated by my great, great, great grandfather. The thing about that hotel, I mean, there's lots of stories. A lot of people know about my family's history and connections to Washington. The interesting thing about that hotel is that it was patronized by all of the Hoi Ploy, the leaders of the day. Many of the senators and members of Congress who would come to town, they would actually live in the hotel. And a lot of business was done in the parlor. And about 150 years ago, give or take a few years, maybe just a little less than 150 years ago, a deal was struck between leaders of Congress in the parlor of that hotel. That deal cemented what ended up being the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as the President of the United States. That also cemented the end of reconstruction for this country. So I find it striking that a black man, a son of slaves who owned a hotel on this very site was also the owner of the hotel at which the end of reconstruction was consummated and decades and decades of systemic oppression were struck in that very site. So it hits me hard that we are here today talking about ways that we can deal with and continue to unwind those decades and decades and decades of systemic oppression, systemic inequities. So I could not be more thankful that we have this group here today. So thank you, Elizabeth, for your introduction. Thank you for your friendship, your partnership, your leadership on all of this work. Thank you, Austin and Tony and the entire team at New America and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. For your partnership, your leadership, it's this work that is absolutely essential for us to actually live up to the potential that this nation was formed, the theory, the idea that this nation was formed around. Your thought leadership, the leadership of this group and the many others who are working with you, I believe are going to create new economic paradigms that will advance individual and family well-being and that that well-being is critical to all of our goals as a nation. I want to thank you also for all the research and the support, the advocacy that you do on the place-based, excuse me, the broad-based economic growth issues that we're all working on together. It's what we do every day at the Commerce Department. So I want to take a step back from the 1870s and bring us back to today and what so many people are facing, the pandemic and the challenges that people are seeing in their lives. The challenges they face every day have just exacerbated the inequalities, the challenges that families are facing, the cost of living, etc. every day and that growing inequality is informing the decisions that we're making as policy makers and as leaders at the Department of Commerce on a daily basis and so it's the research that you and your organizations are providing, New America, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, that's crucial for our decision-making both at Commerce but also across the entire federal government. You all know these numbers and Andre, who's just here, stepped out, could probably, will probably get up and speak about a lot of this much more eloquently than me, but one data point, Federal Reserve has shown that the typical white family has eight times the wealth of the average black family in this country. Again, it goes back to the decades and decades and decades. The gap in business ownership between black and Latino households relative to white households, that counts for 25% of the overall gap, racial wealth gap between those groups. But closing that gap is not just vital to helping to grow the economy for those communities. It could actually drive more money, $6 trillion, into our economy if we helped bring minority businesses up to par with non-minority businesses. That's money that could drive human capital opportunities, that could drive long-term growth. And the President and all of us who work for him, because he won't hire anyone who doesn't believe in this, recognizes that the principles of diversity, inclusion, accessibility are absolutely core to everything that we do as a federal government in creating a more equitable economy. So I'm not going to go through everything that we've done the last two years, but I will just say that we've passed a number of bills the last two years. My part is in infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips and Science Act, the American Rescue Plan. I know there are going to be folks talking about a lot of these different things. I'm going to cut to the chase because unfortunately at the last minute I got told that I need to go and meet a certain Frenchman who is in town today and talk with him about commercial space activities. But I'll be back again a little later today. We are focused on creating a new set of tools at Commerce because we know that data is at the core of everything that we do, that we have to rely on the data, on the metrics to make better and sounder decisions. We have to use that to drive the work that we're doing. So we have a whole new set of tools and indicators. Jed Colco is here, Heather Boucher is here. Great folks from the administration. We're going to talk to you about some of the things that we're doing. But our goal is to use these digital tools, these new data assets to make them accessible and utilizable if I can use that word, if it's a word, for you all and for folks all across the country, for policy makers and practitioners so that you can actually make our lives easier by telling us what we're doing right or where we're going way wrong. So I'm eager to learn more about what you all are doing, what you're seeing, what you would have us do. And I would also like to proudly, very proudly announce that we have a new community of practice at the Commerce Department to support the use of federal data and I'd see Oliver Wise, our chief data officer who's here as well, that community of practice will support the use of federal data for the improvement of outcomes specifically for underserved communities. The equity measure subgroup of our own equity council is going to be spending a lot of time focusing on that. So we have a lot of work that we have to do at Commerce, working with our 12 or 13 different bureaus. If we're going to make meaningful progress in addressing inequality in our economy, in our system, we need your help. That's what this is about, but this is one step, one conversation of what we expect will be many. Please engage us, engage all of our bureaus. If you can't get to any of our bureaus and you want to have a conversation with our bureaus, you can come to me and I will make sure that they are engaging with you. It's our hope that this conversation today will help us refine the data tools and ideas that we need to help make much better policy decisions because we're making rules on trillions of dollars that are going out the door and we need to make sure that those are being used effectively, equitably, and building an inclusive economy. So thank you again to New America for bringing us together. Thank you for being here. I will be back in just a little bit after I go and meet with President Macron, but hopefully you all will, the much smarter folks that are still here are going to be able to come up with great ideas that we can implement. So thank you all so much. Thank you, Deputy Secretary Graves. So we will kick off our first discussion, which is really a conversation on how are we reimagining social and economic progress. So I'll invite to this stage Dr. Anita Chandra, who's the Vice President and Director of Social and Economic Well-Being for the RAND Corporation, Dr. Andre Perry is a Senior Fellow with the Brookings Institution, Sue Polis, who's the Director of Health and Wellness at the National League of Cities, and our moderator will be Dr. Shana Strahm, the Executive Director at the Center for Equitable Growth. This is an incredible lineup. We'll turn it to you all. Hi, everybody. It's so great to be here today. I'm Shana Strahm. I'm the Interim President and CEO at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and I'm really thrilled to be here with this wonderful panel today. Just to get us started out, I wanted to give a couple of framing remarks. The pandemic was a wake-up call for governments around the globe. State capacity was tested even in the richest nations, and the U.S. was not exempt. High GDP did not mean lower casualties. Economic growth is important, but if growth isn't widely shared, isn't sustainable, and doesn't help local communities build resilience, then the next crisis will catch us flat-footed again. Indeed, the next crisis might be just around the corner. We know that unless we make investments necessary to fight climate change now, we may be endangering much of our recent progress. It's in that context that communities around the globe have been exploring the idea of well-being metrics that give us insight into the many factors that make our communities more resilient in the face of crisis or structural shifts and set them on a sustainable path to a better life. Those factors could include, for example, strong community connections, a built-in natural environment that supports human health and opportunities for members of the community to thrive and prosper, among other things. I'm excited to be here today with some guests who are thinking through what well-being really means and how we can start centering well-being more in decision-making. I have here with me Dr. Anita Chandra, who's the Vice President and Director of Social and Economic Well-Being at the RAND Corporation, Dr. Andre Perry, who's a senior fellow at Brookings, and Sue Polis, who's the Director of Health and Wellness at the National League of Studies. So maybe just to start, I'd like to ask each person to share who you are by introducing one way that you're currently reimagining social or economic progress in the work that you're currently doing. Great. Well, thanks for the invitation. This is a tremendous meeting and really honored to be on this panel. So in my role at RAND, running our division on social and economic well-being, we think a lot about what we kind of call the three legs of the stool with respect to well-being. So we often start with measurement and we'll be talking about that a lot today. How do we advance well-being, measurement? How do we apply it to decision-making? But there are other legs of the stool that have to be considered and the ways that we connect the dots on that are certainly part of the work that I do. One is in thinking about how those measurement and sources of data feed into policy and resource allocation. How are we thinking about getting to outcomes that really advance people's access to the opportunity to thrive and flourish? And then how do we think about the narrative around well-being? So how do we think about the values and the messages and the communication and how it sort of seeps into the DNA of individuals and communities? And you can't kind of have one leg of the stool without the other two. And I know we'll delve into that a little more today. Thank you. Yeah, in my role as Andre Perry at the Brookings Institution, I lead a group called The Valuing Black Assets Initiative and in a nutshell, I try to highlight the strength in black communities because they're often the assets in those places are essentially penalized or devalued. My most recent effort is along with my colleague, Jonathan Rothwell at Gallup. We look for the places where black people are living the longest, where they are thriving. Too often we look at deficits, what's wrong in black communities. This effort was to explore what's right. So we combed dozens of data sets using machine learning algorithm to identify the 13 most impactful social determinants. And what we found may astound a lot of people, there are lots of places where black people are living well in their 80s, even in their 90s in some instances. And the goal is to say, hey, what's going, why are these places thriving? And let's assume that the variation in life expectancy is really a function of civic action. People are actually having an impact on their own lives. Now there are wins and there are losses. If we look at what I joke and say, if there's a Wakanda at all, it's in the DMV where places like Montgomery County, Prince George's County defy what we come to know in terms of black America. But there are also places where life expectancy is mid 60s. And so there are some places where structural racism is just heavier. And so, but my goal is to say where that structural racism is heavier or people are not dismantling it. They can look to other places where black people are thriving for solution. Thank you so much. A pleasure to be here with you all. And again, I'm Sue Polis, the Director of Health and Wellness at the National League of Cities in our Institute for Youth Education and Families. And it's just an honor to be able to talk a little bit about the work that I have the privilege of leading through our Cities of Opportunity Initiative. Cities of Opportunity was conceived when I started at the National League of Cities roughly six years ago to really put at the center of the work that city leaders do, a social determinants of health framework. We know in communities across the country, every city has concentrated disparities by zip code. And this initiative is really to aim to support city leaders to address those in a more comprehensive or holistic way. So the initiative is really structured to meet cities where they're at. Every city is in a different place, has a different political and social context plus a different state context, right? So we meet the cities where they are on their journey to more holistic health and equity and community health improvement. And I would just say our whole structure is rooted in policy and systems change. It's not just systems, right? It's the policies that align with those systems. And so our framework is really to support cities and more holistic systems and policy level efforts. Great. Just to continue on, Anita, you've been doing research on broader narratives about progress focused on individual and community wellbeing. You collaborated with grassroots organizations and tested messaging with policy influencers. How is that research pushing the boundaries of our conversation on topics of equity and wellbeing? And what important learnings can you share with us? Yeah, I'd be really happy to. So this is a body of work that Rand has been doing with an organization called Metropolitan Group, which is a social change and narrative organization. And one of the things that we were struck by and one of the reasons we kind of arrived at that three-legged stool idea was that there were a lot of places that were starting to do wellbeing indices, both in the US, but globally as well. And yet it was not kind of pushing into real sustained change fundamentally. And so we said, well, what are the, what are sort of the overriding narratives? How do we see ourselves in our communities? What are the messages and values? What are the sort of subpopulation distinctions? And what can we learn from other countries? And so we started with a real examination of other countries that have been pressing forward in these spaces, you know, places like New Zealand, the UK, and others to understand what was their approach to thinking about this. How were they getting it into policy and centering it into policy? And then to be quite honest, what is actually transferable in the context of American values and what is not? And so we started to bridge the ideas and insights outside of the US with US, what we called narrative connectors, people who are working in grassroots organizations, people who are working in city government, people who are working in economic kind of focused organizations to say, how do you apply this in your community of practice? What does that look like? We've also been testing messages with business leaders and US policy leaders. And where we have found points of connection are in kind of these types of words. You know, a lot of times grassroots organizations are thinking a lot about equity and dignity in all really important areas. Business leaders are thinking about common sense and employee well-being certainly more acute during the pandemic. But the places of connection where we found people could agree on those kind of values were around the words of peace, purpose, connection and health. And as we sort of build on that thinking about how does that fit into an American sense of libertarianism and freedom but against the backdrop of people seeking connection, people wanting a sense of purpose, people understanding those intrinsic values. So, you know, Andre's point about places where people felt civically engaged being places of greater longevity. How do we, people intrinsically understand that in terms of connection and purpose? How do we build on those narratives? And so now we're trying to think about, okay, what do mayors talk about in their state of the city addresses? How do they tie not just a GDP conversation but a conversation about social progress that ties peace, purpose, connection and health. And so we're really excited about where that work can go and the grassroots organizations have really helped tie those kind of equity-centered ideas with a broader understanding of well-being and it's been really impactful. Incredibly interesting. Andre, maybe next for you. Your work on the Black Progress Index anchors in life expectancy but you really are looking at quality of life more broadly. Can you elaborate on some of the subjective and objective dimensions of your measures? Yeah, I want to just build upon what was last said. We generally look at your more traditional objective measures pulling from these larger data sets, not necessarily looking at how people see themselves, how they're doing, what is known as well-being. But one of the fascinating findings of the 13 predictors both positive and negative, one of the positive correlates with longevity was the mean distance of people's Facebook friends. And that really gets to people's social connections and places where their folks have longer, the mean distance is longer, there's greater longevity. And so for me, what that told me, it gets to this place of people want social connections and know how to use them to their benefit. Other indicators that were somewhat surprising, religiosity is measured as a membership divided by population that was a negative predictor. Now remember, it's essentially a large regression analysis. So these are correlates. It's not, you know, the different causation and correlation. And we do know there's some compositional effects. People who attend church are more likely to be obese. But there's something underneath the church going. And it can be anything from, they could be targets of discrimination. It could be people are suffering, compelling them to go to church. So I mean, there's some interesting things there. And I'll mention one other that a surprising indicator was the number one positive predictor of life expectancy was the share of immigrants in your community. Again, there's some black immigrants, I should say. Now there are some compositional effects there. Black immigrants tend to be healthier and wealthier in the main, right, depending. But I look at this question as less exposure to American racism, good for your health. You know, that there's something in places where there's a lot of interaction between your immigrant groups and your domestic groups or folks native born, life expectancy is higher. So there's a lot of things there that, for me, the next level of this analysis of the Black Progress Index is to really get into those well-being metrics. Because we know there's a big correlation between well-being and life expectancy and some of these other measures. And do what, because we fashioned this study after W.E.B. Du Bois Philadelphia Negro. And if you know that study and you should all know that study, they went door to door, asking questions about how they were doing, collecting data. And so I think for us, the next level of the Black Progress Index is to incorporate more well-being metrics. And my colleague at Gallup have a lot of those data. But to actually do more qualitative research in those places. That's great, thank you. Sue, you're working with cities across the country right now on holistic measures and are going deep on a pilot in metropolitan Atlanta. What are some of the more meaningful opportunities and challenges you're encountering as you seek to establish city level well-being data to support a mindset shift from singular economic measures to a broader understanding of all the factors that influence well-being? You have no thanks, Sheena. I think last year with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Arthur N. Blank Family Foundation out of Atlanta, we did a two-tiered structured process. We looked at how cities across the country are starting, I would say starting. It's still pretty nascent, to measure well-being in a more holistic manner. Different entry points for cities. Sometimes it's a negative impetus that starts their initiative. Or sometimes it's a calling that they want to do something different. So not one way cities enter into this space. And then we also have been going deeper in Atlanta. We have two core partners in Atlanta, the Atlanta Regional Collaborative for Health Improvement and the Georgia Municipal Association. And like Anita said, we've also been working with the Metropolitan Group, the Center for Well-Being at Oxford University that co-authors the World Happiness Report, and also Gallup. So we've taken this two-tiered approach. So across the country, as I said, it's nascent. There's different drivers. And frankly, the challenge is, how do you talk about this in a meaningful way, to bring residents into the conversation? So I think that's early work the cities have been doing to try to bring different viewpoints into informing those well-being measures. In Atlanta, they started last year really engaging a whole diverse set of stakeholders. And now they're really driving a process and six smaller municipalities within the Atlanta Metro. So it's still early. But the core pieces of the work, when we think about data, when I started at the National League of Cities, I went to different mayors, Republicans and Democrats. And I said, when you think of health, what are you working on? And they said, well, it's not just one thing, because there's multiple factors that influence health, whether it's housing or the lack of housing, transportation or the lack of transportation job or the lack of jobs. So that's why we kind of design this holistic framework. But when we asked them what they needed to begin this journey or what was meaningful to them, they all pointed to the zip code maps, whether they were Republicans or Democrats, and they might operationalize that differently. They all shared that they gleaned a lot from those zip code maps. And so I think that's been part of what has spurred these largely what they're referred to in most of the cities that we've worked with are equity indexes. Not many use subjective well-being indicators or measures. That's something that's a little different in the Atlanta work. We partnered with Gallup and Oxford last year on the Gallup Healthways Survey to really look at, because that was in 2018, that was the last one that included subjective feedback from residents. And I think consistent with what Andre I think has found, we would say in the data, sometimes things look very bleak. But in the subjective measures, when you could see how people responded to how well are they doing, those were higher in areas where there's concentrated disparities. And while we have a hypothesis and not conclusive, we would say it's because of faith and purpose. Those were the two overarching things that we're coming from in the data. So we obviously have the amazing panel here. I could ask questions forever, but I'm going to do one more round for each panelist here. So maybe Anita, you and your colleagues have written about the potential for measures to be catalytic in, quote, setting goals, reframing issues, creating common terms of debate, and shifting venues. We have a pretty diverse group gathered here today, thinking about advancing equity and well-being through data. What guidance might you offer as we think about the bigger picture of this conversation? Yeah, thanks for that question. And the choice of measures, to me, says everything about, obviously, what you prioritize, the frame that you are bringing to the conversation. And so a couple of notes. One, as we are moving towards more equity-centered design, including in data and measurement frameworks, and certainly in the context of today's conversation of equity and well-being, unless and until the measures are able to do two things. One, look at intergenerational shifts and changes. And two, look at the accumulation of stress, which gets to Andre's point in the issue of cumulative stress, particularly in historically marginalized communities. Those data and measures will not be catalytic because they won't move the conversation on social structures, political structures, systemic racism, and the like. And orienting to that is number one. A second is, I'm a big fan of data parsimony, and certainly asked Julie Rusk later on the panel about the work that we did with her and Santa Monica on this score. When we work with city leaders, and I know it's odd to say for a researcher that I'm not saying more data is better, actually, a lot of it is junk. It's not a lot of noise, not a lot of signal, nothing that's going to catalyze conversations, policy change, budget, and resource allocation. And so we've worked through processes where we've really thought through, is that getting you to the conversation of well-being? Is that getting you to understanding, thriving, and flourishing? Is this a measure where one will do as opposed to 12? Because the reason for that is twofold. One is the narrative argument. People can't get a handle on the conversation, and so the well-being discussion becomes diffuse and then useless at times. But the second is that you need clarity of signal when you're trying to signal on the intersection of equity and well-being. And so I would suggest people both at the federal level and the state and local level to really force yourself to a different conversation. And some of the terms that you reference are in an article that we did in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, so I'm happy to share that with anybody who's interested. But those are the two points I'd make. That's great. Thank you. Andre, I'm curious what data infrastructure has been critical and what has been lacking in the work that you're doing? How do you plan to continue deepening the work? Yeah, I wanted to just bring in some of the work that a lot of people know me for. My colleagues for is the housing devaluation work, where we examine the value of homes in black neighborhoods and compare them to the value of homes in white neighborhoods after controlling for education crime, walkability, all those fancy Zillow metrics. And what we found is that homes in black neighborhoods are underpriced by 23% about $156 billion nationally just lost. That $156 billion would have paid for more than 4 million black-owned, or the equivalent of 4 million black-owned startups based upon the average amount black people use to start their firms. It would have paid for 8 million college degrees, public degrees, would have replaced the pipes in Flint, Michigan 3,000 times over. I mean, it's a big number. And when I started talking about that 23% $156 billion, what it forced people to reckon with and industry leaders as well, that the assets in black communities are much more valuable than they are priced. And I say this all the time, there's nothing wrong with black people that ending racism can't solve. It is part of, and this gets to Anita's point, researchers are also locked up in these deficit narratives that we build metrics just to reinforce this hierarchy. And we don't have enough measures, and this is a problem. We really don't have enough scientific measures around structural racism. We only look at outcomes for the most part, and not predicting what will cause those outcomes, not the longstanding policies and practices. That are still, I mean, you've got to be going. I'll just, like, what drives me nuts, because what drives me nuts, I talk, interface a lot with the housing industry. They said, oh, the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1967. But we still have single-family zoning ordinances. We still appraise using the same techniques. Now, just last month, the Federal Housing Finance Agency released the unified appraisal data set, database. And it allowed us to see what comprises that 23%. So for, I mean, since they started collecting data on appraisals, it's never been public. So my, I'll get to your question. There are tons of data out there that is literally shielded from the public so that we can dismantle this architecture of inequality. And there's other data that we need to develop just using a different approach. And I agree, there's so much out there is garbage, because the people who created the metrics are invested in the structural racism. They benefit from it. So there's no incentive to break it up, none. Thank you. So interesting. Last question for Sue. How are you seeing cities wrestle with the relationship between equity and well-being? Yeah, I don't know if I'd say wrestle as much as balance. I think a lot of the city well-being measures are really framed around equity. We see equity, opportunity, dignity. The word well-being in the work that we've done with Metropolitan Group, just it means so many different things to so many different people. It's just not something that we see actually showing up in how it's framed. What where we see it is kind of in the details. When we're looking at longer term goals and objectives that municipalities are using, well-being is often buried a little bit more in the details, not necessarily in the framing. And I think just based on this excellent discussion, the two things I would point to, one is data. I can tell you, I've been at the Liga cities now for six years. We've tried all sorts of ways to Sunday on data. I mentioned the zip code maps, county health rankings and road maps was an early tool. City Health Dashboard was another tool that came a little bit later. Now we just embed data experts actually in the way that we work with cities because those North Star measures, as I would call them, when cities design an equity index or they have something that's more of a North Star, what they're trying to change, when you really get down into distinct policies or systems, you need more granular data. And Kathy Stack, who I think is here, we've been having this conversation because there's this idea that, oh, cities should just use data. But city leaders really don't run for office because they're like, oh, I want to use data, right? And policy experts don't say I really want to lean into all this granular data. So the capacity in many municipalities, small and mid-sized municipalities, isn't really in place to use the data, right? So we're trying to really harness data resources, data analysis, expertise in our cohorts to really support the cities. And then I would say just based on the last couple of years, public trust is not where it maybe has been historically. It's pretty low. And so the need for civic engagement we're trying to get to community code design, right? In our work with cities, this is another area where capacity, again, people just don't come all the time with these skill sets, right? And so really trying to build capacity with the idea that really agnostic of any issue, if we build capacity for data, for civic engagement, financing, braiding and blending, funding streams is not always something that there's city capacity to do, but these are all the things that are gonna be required to get a different result than what we are living with in a lot of the communities around the country. Wonderful. And with that, I'd love to thank our panelists for an incredibly thought-provoking discussion. Thank you all so much. While our next panel is getting ready to join us for kind of a deep dive on the policy dimensions of this work, we have a number of representatives from the Biden administration who will be joining us. I just wanted to offer three provocations for the day. The first is that it's clear that today's discussions really build on many decades of important work on these topics, but I think so much of what's drawn us here together is that the time feels really ripe to develop these shared frameworks, data and measurement practices that guide our collective efforts. History shows that new paradigms tend to be born when there's this confluence of many forces coming together, and as in discussions leading up to today, I've had so many conversations about the forces of the global pandemic arising climate crisis, persistent racial and economic inequality, among other things that have really kind of brought us to this precipice of critical choices we need to make about the kind of economy and society we seek to shape. Second is we need to center this relationship between equity and well-being in these efforts. Historically, research and policy development hasn't fully prioritized issues of equity within well-being activities, through practices like measuring differential access to opportunity, historical and systemic barriers to well-being and policies and practices that impede well-being. So we really have a lot to explore on that today. And lastly, I believe we have such an opportunity in our gathering today to cross-pollinate perspectives on well-being, and you heard that a little bit in this last panel with kind of the lens of social determinants of health, the lens of asset-based economic development or place-based development. There have been a lot, there's been a lot of work done on pursuit of these questions through the lens of health on one hand, through the lens of economy on the other, through the lens of climate, but for this modern era, we can't treat those as disconnected priorities. We need to think about our health or our wholeness as a way to craft policies that also drive economic prosperity and to think about the ways that an economy can be structured to expand all of our capacities to be healthy and well. So thank you for continuing to deepen our conversations. With that, I will invite our next panel and also welcome, I'm not sure I've yet welcomed everyone who's joining us online. This portion is being live streamed, so welcome to all of you online as well. So next I'd like to invite Dr. Heather Boucher who's with the Council of Economic Advisors at the White House. Undersecretary Jed Colco who's with the US Department of Commerce as Undersecretary. Admiral Paul Reed who's the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health with the US Department of Health and Human Services. And joining us as moderator for this panel is Ted Johnson, Senior Advisor at New America. So I believe they're getting themselves miked up and will be joining us. We're doing the fun stage and green room dance. As we wait on folks to join us up here, does anyone have any questions that you'd like to ask or of the group to transition? All right, here we are. Welcome everyone, thank you. But thank you all for being here. I'm Ted Johnson, Senior Advisor here at New America. And for our conversation today, I just wanted to sort of set it up in this way. You know, in the Declaration of Independence, it says that I often think of that second paragraph as defining what the promise of America is. And it's that we're all created equal, that we've got these unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. Now the equality aspect of that seems pretty evident in that first bit. But in the second bit there is where I really think the focus of today's conversation comes through in terms of well-being and equity. Pursuit of happiness to me connects directly to that. And so we'll explore like, so what does that mean upon implementation? So it goes without saying that these are monumental times that we live in. I think every generation probably feels that way in one way or another. But you know, there's quite a bit of political polarization out there. We are in the midst of, or at least still reckoning with a global pandemic. All sorts of inequality out there, class, racial, gender inequality. And to this question of the pursuit of happiness, we try to address these things by thinking about equity and well-being. So if we want to address these things as monumental, as large as they are, public policy is a necessary mechanism to do so. And the federal government, of course, is a primary arm to make that happen. And the Biden administration and putting out the advancing equity executive order not too long ago has sort of staked, it's put its marker in the ground to focus on equity as an aspiration for our country and not just the all men are created equal, all people are created equal aspect of our declaration. Some things we want to, you know, the word equity, sometimes people take it to mean equal outcomes and that it certainly is different from equality. And in some aspects, we do want equal outcomes. When it comes to maternal mortality, we should want equal outcomes, right? But that doesn't always, the way I think about it is equity is more about tailored policy to meet people where they are so that we can bring folks to that point of having equal opportunity in our country. So today to walk through some of these ideas, I've got our three panelists here. Their names are here. I guess I will sort of work our way across as with a set of questions. And I want to begin with a question for all of the panelists here. And it's this. So let's start with why we are convening on the topic of centering equity and well-being and what we measure, particularly at the federal level. And a few sentences, would each of you tell me what is most on your mind given the work that each of you do concerning measurement, well-being and equity? And we'll start with you, Admiral Lee. Great, thanks, Ted. I'll start by saying we didn't plan this. He just referenced the Declaration of Independence and I intended to start my comments. To retire the two Navy guys. Yeah, yeah. I was thinking it would be important to write up front a level set for the groom that in the preamble to the Constitution, it specifically calls out the role of government in promoting the general welfare. We need to be reminded of that. That's grounding for why the federal government exists in large part along with other things like the common defense. But we, I think we tend to forget about it. Or we don't necessarily put as much weight on it as we ought to. I am by no means a scholar of the Constitution or the use of the English language in the late 18th century. But I have a feeling what they meant by the common welfare is analogous to what we're talking about here in terms of well-being for all. And I'd be welcome to any arguments to that point. But so it demands that we do a little self-reflection on why the Constitution is what it is, why it's right up front says what it says, and how in 235 years or so we are letting that effectively play out or not. And I would make a strong argument that we don't effectively address the common welfare. So this represents an opportunity to come back to that. To the point though, there's a lot of semantics that have been thrown around and will continue to be thrown around like welfare, like well-being, thriving, resilience, and many more. And I think there's overlap and there's synergy with those definitions. But I firmly believe, and this is right up front in my mind to answer your question, we need to come to consensus on the definitions in order to get to adequately measuring those things. I would venture to guess that well-being does not mean the same thing to everybody in this room. I'll admit my bias, I come from a health background. I'm a pediatrician by training and a public health official. And so I have my way of looking at it. Now I have challenged myself in my role of late to think very differently and to acknowledge my bias in well-being leaning towards that H word of health and try to get away from it. I am thrilled to be in a room full of people that are not my medical and public health peers. I mean that, I mean it, I really mean it. Why would I say that? Because this demands all of us. We all in the federal space at least subscribe to the Constitution in the United States. In fact, we raised our right hand to it. So it behooves us to, one, speak a common language and two, create a framework with, within which those words like well-being and thriving can be uniformly, universally amongst us in the federal space. And I would argue universally amongst us in civil society in partnership with the federal space. Well applied. Thanks. Thanks, sir. Undersecretary Colco, the last name, am I saying that right? That's perfect. Excellent. Well done. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I also want to thank the New America folks as well as my colleagues at the Commerce Department for bringing us all together today. I think there are two important pieces of context that for me loom large when we think about measurement and equity and well-being. Part of my role is being a lead economic advisor at the Commerce Department. Part of it also is providing policy direction and oversight for two of the three main federal economic statistical agencies, the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. So much of what we are doing is still in the shadow of the pandemic, first of all. Like we may be sitting here altogether in person in a room, mostly without wearing masks, that makes it look sort of deceptively normal. But we have just come off a period that has presented some of the largest acute challenges to both equity and well-being that we've experienced in our lifetimes. Both the inequities of sickness and death during the pandemic as well as the range of threats to well-being, whether it's children's education, mental health as well as physical health. And the economic effects also were quite disparate and in ways that were different from what we've seen in just about all other recessions and downturns. Lots of economists, you know, what passed for Gallo's humor when the pandemic first started was quipping that like, know why access will be safe during this period that basically all of our series around the unemployment rate, job growth, all of these series will break all of our charts and still we didn't know what was coming. And I think that has all forced us, certainly the agencies, all of us who think about economic impact to think much more carefully because of the pandemic around equity and well-being. I think the other theme that looms large is on the measurement side. The pandemic and this conversation are all happening in the broader context of pretty fundamental changes, ongoing changes that have happened in how we measure lots of things. Most notably, that survey response rates are declining for all sorts of reasons. And at the same time, there is increasingly accessible administrative and sometimes private sector data that can help complement the rarely substitute for more official federal statistics. And that shift in measurement, both some downsides and some upsides, really changes how we think about any conversation about measurement. I think a very nice example of this has been the Census Household Pulse Survey that throughout much of the pandemic really brought in lots of measures of well-being that experimental, so necessarily less official, but at the same time, flip side, much more immediately responsive than typical official federal new statistical products. And I think that's a really great example of how thinking in innovative ways about measurement let us see more during the pandemic about well-being than we otherwise have before. And Dr. Boucher. Boucher. Boucher. I was gonna do that, but yeah. You did it perfectly. I got it now. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thank you. It's just, it's a real pleasure to be here. It's fun to be experimenting in large rooms without masks. I'm very curious to see how this December goes. So I'm gonna enjoy it while we can. And just wonderful to be here at New America and also to be able to participate in something that the Washington Center for Agroble Growth has been playing a leadership role in as well has been very exciting for me personally. So excited to see this work continue. So I wanted to take a little bit of a, and I'm really glad to follow Jed on this, a bit of a step forward. When the president was running on the campaign trail and then as we've been governing this integration of equity into everything we do is bigger than data. It's about defining the problem and is core to the motto that we had on the campaign for the president's agenda, which is to not just to build back, but to build back better. Because where we were pre-pandemic wasn't good enough. We, on the econ team at the White House, we do not talk about getting back to normal because normal isn't where we want to be because the normal we had pre-pandemic just wasn't good enough for so many Americans. And so I think as I was thinking about this question today and what we're trying to get at, one of the things I love about conversations like this is being able to be in rooms like this with so many folks who care about the equity concerns, who want to talk about well-being. And as an economist, I'm so often in different rooms where there are different kinds of people who look a little bit different and who want to talk about the things that we can measure for the economy. And these conversations, I feel like so much of my career has been let's mash these up, let's bring these together, let's not have separate conversations about what the economy is and what it means for people and families and communities because those are the same thing. We're promoting the general welfare through an economy that delivers for everyone. And so I think one of, for me personally and one of the most exciting things about being an economist in the Biden administration is setting those, is the way that the president has set these goals about delivering an economy where we're building it from the bottom up and middle out and then working with these teams across government as we are executing on this policy agenda to make sure that those questions around equity are built in from the ground up in how we're thinking about the goals and the metrics of success. And one example of this is an obsession of myself and many of my colleagues in terms of maps. How do we think about the place based strategies that so many of the president's policies have been focused on from the bipartisan infrastructure law to the chips to the inflation reduction act? All of these are about investing in the productive capacity of the United States in places all across the country and making sure that we are doing that in a way that is attending to questions of equity. So you need data on the front end about where communities are, what they need, how we can serve them. Then you need to make sure that you are tracking that as we go through and execute on these. And for that we need to be attentive to how these questions are playing out particularly across place because communities live in different places. So it's been exciting to think about as we move from the pandemic and many of the new tools and I hope we can talk about this a little bit more that Chad talked about. What we learned about data from that but also I think for me one of the big learnings of the past few years is that in order to do economic policy that reaches the goals of equity that we have, we have to set goals for our economic policy that include that from the get go. And so when you're thinking about how you're developing a manufacturing agenda, you're thinking about how you're developing a climate agenda attending to equity from the beginning I think will be really important to the success of many of these endeavors and building those metrics in. And I'd like to stay with you in thinking about COVID because it required that lots of local communities be responsive to the challenges in terms of disseminating accurate information, standing up response centers, emergency care. And so how are we prepared for another one perhaps or what's happening now that can build in resilience to prevent the next one from at least being as bad or to help us to respond more quickly to it should something like another pandemic happen or a resurgence? Well, I hope I'm not gonna steal Judd's thunder here because I wanna talk about supply chains. So that's like a commerce thing. I know, sorry, I got the ball here to take it. So here is one of the things we have learned so much over the past couple of years. And one of the things, we spent a lot of equitable growth we spent a lot of time and the organization still does so showing all the ways that inequality hampers economic growth and stability. And we have all learned some really big lessons on how just in time production and these beautiful global supply chains you could deliver all these things so quickly and so cheaply, we're so fragile. And as economists, and actually I wanted to know I'm really happy to be in a room that's not all economists so just putting on your health there. But as economists, we think of something like the lack of resiliency in the supply chain as a negative externality, right? Somebody's gotta pay the cost of that when it happens but we're not really sure who's gonna do that and we kind of like try to brush these things aside. Like I think actually the Biden administration is like let's take all those negative externalities and internalize them and figure out who's gonna pay. That's basically a lot of what we're thinking about here. But this question about resiliency is so core because one of the things we learned is that it's really easy as it turns out to turn an economy off and it's actually quite easy to make sure that people could get through that period and not have rising hunger and all the things that we were so worried about at the beginning which is not to say that didn't happen but we made a lot of progress especially at things like the child tax credit but a whole bunch of other policies and we're able to cut child poverty in ways that no one I think would have predicted at the beginning of the pandemic. But we also learned that it's really hard to turn things back on again because in large part supply chains are complicated and the government doesn't know anything about that. I'm paraphrasing because we do know a lot about that. But these are private actions. These are private businesses. These are trade secrets perhaps, where their suppliers are, how they get things from here to there, all of these things. And I think what it has really opened up is that when I think about the data and tools, analytic tools that the government has, my mind so often goes back to the 1920s and 30s and 40s when so many of these tools were created, developed, we put them in place. I think about the National Income and Product Accounts or GDP which this measure of growth that we helped ensconce in the founding of the OECD, sort of listed there in the opening preamble that we're gonna focus on growth as this metric of success. We could do that because we developed and invented National Income and Product Accounts that let us measure this thing. So then great, we can measure it across countries. But now we know that it's our failure to focus on resiliency that is actually one of the biggest equity issues, one of the biggest economic issues, and how do we wrap our hands around that? Because this is incredibly complicated and I think there's a lot of new tools that we can bring to the table in terms of web scraping and AI and all these things. But this is private data and it really brings to the fore the relationship between government and markets and what that means in an era where we have to be so much more focused on resiliency than we've had to think about for the past half century. We should have been thinking about it all along but now there's a little, both with climate and the pandemic and the challenges in the economy. I think that's gonna be the big question. Admiral, HHS is leading an interagency effort on equitable long-term recovery and resilience that has some 35 federal agencies participating in it. So can you talk about this unique imperative, this effort of this whole of government response effort has created to increase interagency collaboration and understanding? Sure. Well, I think Dr. Boucher offered us the imperative when she said our level of resilience in 2019 wasn't good enough. Again, I'd be happy to argue that point with anybody. That was the impetus behind what we now refer to as this federal plan for equitable long-term recovery and resilience. The genesis of the work was at the early onset of the pandemic response when the whole of government was coming together under the leadership of the National Response Coordination Center. There was a particular task force which is typical of large-scale national level response activities that was focused on mitigation of recovery. Although this task force was challenged with the concept of what recovery was gonna look like from what was anticipated to be, the gravest public health crisis this country's ever known. And they were also tasked with entertaining what the implications were on the federal government for building back better, although that those words weren't necessarily used. But to the point, what it was gonna take through recovery and well beyond to establish a higher level of resilience across the communities everywhere in this country and to do so equitably. Hence the name of the federal plan that now exists. What occurred in the ensuing 20 months or so was rather organic and frankly in my 30 years of service probably the most inspirational thing I've ever heard of and seen. And by the way, I take absolutely no credit for it. There's a couple of people in the room who should including Becky Payne and Aaron McDonald here. And I point them out for particular reasons which I'll come to. But when I said organic, what I meant by that is while this task force existed under the rubric of the NRCC, a very systematized approach to the government coming together and responding. The way they formulated a work group around these questions of alternative definitions of recovery and building back to a higher level of resilience was very unique. And it took on a life of its own. Now I wasn't a party to it early on. It came to me in January of 21. So there already had been a year's worth of work nearly that had been conducted. But what essentially happened was this small work group tackling these questions under the task force grew and it grew organically across the interagency as different subject matter experts, mostly senior career folks were brought to the conversation. It was a challenging set of questions and it remains a challenging set of questions. But they took it very seriously. They brought with them their perspectives on federal service and the work of the federal government from very diverse agencies. Everything from the national endowments to the arts of arts, commerce to the more traditional recovery folks and the assistant secretary for preparedness and response under HHS and many, many others. Long and short of it is along the way they established that there needed to be a common framework that provided the lexicon, that narrative that everybody could agree to and understand relate to frankly. And by everybody I mean all of these diverse perspectives as federal government that then could be the basis for a set of recommendations that could be developed on how the federal government could employ its existing capabilities to more meaningful outcomes. And that framework is the framework for the vital conditions for wellbeing, which has been well established and vetted. In fact, in civil society it's been employed even pre-pandemic as a way of framing, and I should point out Bobby Milstein back here. He's a big partner in all of this. The framing the way civil society can come together again for the same purpose of elevating community-based resilience. And I believe, I firmly believe, and I'm a health guy, remember, who has historically been a card-carrying member of the Social Determinants of Health Club, that it really begs this broader perspective. And that's what the vital conditions framework affords us. So now we have this federal plan. We have this common framing, and we have a common lexicon that hopefully will bring the federal government into better alignment with the outcomes being those various elements that make up the conditions of our everyday lives that contribute to yours and mine and everyone's opportunities for health and wellbeing. That's pretty big. Now, what do you do with that? It's on the shelf, we have it, it's been vetted. It's there, it's publicized. In fact, we published it online two weeks ago now, something like that, very recently. So it's accessible. Then the question is, how do we implement it? Well, my feeling is this, that it ought to just be picked up and incorporated into the normal course of business for each and every one of us in federal service to allow us to, through this lens of the vital conditions framework, look at the outcomes of the work that we do. Not change the work that we do, but change the intention of the work towards these more substantive outcomes. And I believe that those conditions, those vital conditions are the basis for how we measure wellbeing and measure resilience. And in fact, part of the interagency work group efforts today is developing a common analytic framework around resilience. And to do that, we need a consensus definition of resilience to my earlier point about the semantics of it all. And we're actually working with the White House on that definition as we speak. We're hoping that that'll get elevated to the point where it is inclusive. It is very comprehensive. It is eyes wide open and something that resonates with all of us so that we can then take on that perspective of resilience, apply these recommendations that exist in this framework and look to the outcomes of the work that we do in terms of meaningful impact in the ways that I think you all are churning on right now. Secretary Coco, designing good programs, designing equitable policy, good public policy requires good data. And lots of folks or leaders are saying that the data that they rely on to try to design these programs and policies is either outdated or incomplete. So can you talk a little bit about what the federal government's doing to address the challenges of insufficient, incomplete or not good data? And how that data can be used to unlike insights that can drive equitable outcomes. Sure. Part of what the federal government does and is doing is investing in long-term new official data products that will show us much more about the distribution of income, a fuller picture of all of our assets, work that's being done around the distribution of national accounts, incorporating environmental and other natural capital assets into accounts. These are all big, grand, long-term projects. They will be great, but in the meantime, there are other things that the federal government is and can be doing. And those who love the federal government can be helping. So the first is around user feedback. There is lots of room for the statistical agencies to continue to incorporate all kinds of user feedback from the wide range of stakeholders. There are formal channels for getting those kinds of feedback. All the agencies have advisory committees. They put out requests for comment, federal register notices. There are certainly more ways to reach users and to understand all the ways in which data are used downstream that are being produced. And the flip side of that is when the agencies seek feedback, please give it to them. If there's a federal register notice asking for feedback about how to think about questions about race and ethnicity, or on sexual orientation and gender identity status, and you would like to be heard, please respond. The statistical agencies pay attention to what they get in these calls for feedback. And often I hear from very interested users who sort of discover after the fact that they missed a comment period. So please give feedback. That's the first. The second is around compatibility. Data are as valuable, data are only as valuable as they are compatible. When we talk about the Community Resilience Index, other well-being indices, it is almost never the case that the inputs for these indices come from a single source. They are coming from data produced by the Census Bureau and HHS and BLS and possibly BEA, maybe other parts of the federal government and parts outside the federal government. Basic plumbing needs like using consistent taxonomies, coding questions or asking questions in consistent ways, publishing in consistent formats to make it easier for users to combine data from different sources is an incredibly important way that both federal agencies and other data producers can make all of these kinds of data more valuable. I think compatibility of data tends to be underrated as an investment that makes pretty much every kind of data more valuable. And I think the third is around communication about data that already exists. The number of times that a sort of researcher working quietly sort of discovers an underappreciated data set or part of a data set that has just been sitting waiting for some love and develops some insight that changes the conversation. This happens all the time. And the secret is that when it comes to big data releases, almost no one reads beyond the press release. So all of the other data that get released that might not get mentioned in the press release are an incredibly rich and largely untapped source of information, including equity and well-being because often what lies beneath the headlines in the press release are the ingredients that let us look at more geographic detail or look by detailed industry or occupation or look by race and ethnicity. With almost every major data release like Jobs Day coming out this Friday, there are ways to use other data that BLS publishes as they always do, maybe not highlighted in the press release, but can give us a sense of what is happening to employment for lower wage workers. To what extent are the headline numbers truly reflective of what people are experiencing at different parts of the wage or occupation distribution? All of those data exist. They take skills to use. They take some knowledge for sure. The agencies that produce these data could write longer press releases, highlight more of them, but it is also really on all of the data users to explore all of these other data assets that exist that have historical time series. And so there is context to take full advantage of all the really incredible data that the federal system produces. This is a question for all of you and just feel free to sort of jump in as you like, but this afternoon the group will be thinking through ways of how they can work together to advance equity and well-being through what they measure. And we know that, especially in an entity as large as the federal government, there tends to be tons of silos underappreciated, unloved data, data that needs a little bit more attention. So what can be accomplished in the next two years? And that's, the two years, not at all connected to the fact that there's a presidential election in two years, but if you have two years to do something, what can be done to sort of address some of the challenges we've been talking about? I'll jump in, I think we need to harmonize things. Certainly within the federal government, we need to harmonize our efforts. You mentioned silos. Somebody, it was the Department of Transportation made note of the fact that we do have siloed systems in the federal government and that the old adage we should be breaking down silos probably isn't appropriate, but rather we should allow those silos of subject matter expertise to exist but have better connections across the silos. And I think that metaphor resonates really well with our line of thinking. We believe this federal plan affords us an opportunity to harmonize through this common framework. You know, if we could all subscribe to the framework, we could all think about the work that we do collectively in a much easier way. But then there's some practical tools tied to it as well. We've actually developed an asset mapping of capabilities that exist across the federal government and we're on our third iteration of that asset mapping and I'm expecting it to be well over a thousand various policies, funding opportunities, et cetera that exist within the federal space. And we're not just cataloging it, we're mapping it to these vital conditions so that very intuitively you can ask if a need of a community is particularly focused around X, lifelong learning. You could go into this asset mapping and very readily see who in the federal government has work in that space, has an opportunity for resources to be applied against those requirements at the community level. No kidding, it's that simple. I mean, I can use it. I mean, what a thing. It seems rather intuitively obvious that the federal government ought to have such a cataloging of their work, but we don't. Well, now we do, but in a way that speaks to need. Need at the community level, commonly defined in the lexicon that I mentioned before. If we're all talking in the same terms, we can match need with resources much more readily and that's the basis of the harmony between the federal government and civil society but it also affords us that harmonization within the federal government as well. So I would challenge the group on a couple of things. I believe it was Anita who said this in the last session. Thank you for nodding. I'm working on memorizing names better. But she said in the last session that we need to be parsimonious and I think that one of the challenges, if I was in a room and we were in talk about data and equity, there's so many roads you can go down. And how do you decide what you're gonna do? And I mean, I really appreciate all of that as a researcher, yes, there is all this information out there but the real question is how do we make sense of it and what story are we trying to tell and who are we trying to reach? And so I would actually encourage you to spend just as much if not more time on the goal and the audience. I mean, I made the comment about I'm often in different kinds of rooms. I'm in rooms that care about equity and I'm in rooms that care about the economy and I would challenge you to ask why more of this conversation isn't in that other room and what this community can do to connect with those goals, those interests, those priorities. I feel like I'm old enough now to say that I've been in Washington for a very long time and I've been a part of a lot of these conversations about how we unpack data, how we redefine, when I first came to Washington we're all gonna redefine poverty or enter the hardships. Like all of these conversations which are so rich and important and yet the metrics of success in the economy have largely remained static and it's why I'm so excited about the work that BA is doing to disaggregate GDP so that we understand if we're gonna have growth I don't kinda care what growth is if it doesn't go to the American people and that feels like a headline number that we should be focused on because it matters for all of these other rooms and ultimately what we're trying, I think the definitions are obviously very important but part of what we're trying to deliver and we're talking about well-being is a sufficient quality of life, access to things but a lot of that does come down to income and jobs and how are we connecting those dots with that meta-nair of how well the economy is doing. I think that that is really, really important to be crisp on because if it turns out that it's just another set of things with many, many, many pages and many, many charts that disaggregate everything then we still aren't telling the story and driving action or we may not be. So I would really encourage you to take on that hard challenge. I would extend a couple things that have come up. The first, again, the compatibility and coordination across agencies, statistical agencies and other departments to bring together data from different sources so we can get closer to a full picture. Some of this coordination needs to sit in new places given that agencies have their specific missions but I think there's lots of room even within the federal government to do more of that coordination work, to bring together relevant data from different places to start seeing more clearly the whole story. I think the other, also harkens back to the last panel where we talked a bit about subjective measures of wellbeing and how useful those are both on their own terms but also to help curate and whittle down all of the other measures that we have to understand which ones are important. When we talk about income, like what aspects of income actually contribute most to economic wellbeing? Is it your annual income? Is it some longer measure over more time? Is it the volatility of your income and how predictable it is week to week if you're liquidity constrained? Like there are certain forms of income that contribute more to a subjective sense of wellbeing than others. There's a world of research questions that come out of this that end up having the very practical purpose of understanding which levers matter most to subjective wellbeing and therefore can be the focus of policy actions that come next. I think because we are at a point where there are both better tools and more people with the skills to do various kinds of modeling as well as an increased appreciation of the value of subjective measures that there is this real opportunity to combine what people say directly when asked with all the other sorts of data and measures that are sort of attempts to get at what sometimes people can just tell us directly if given the space. So that would be the other sort of aspiration within the time that we're talking. I think I've got time for one more question or one more round of discussion here. And so I'll take moderator's privilege here and ask something that wasn't discussed a little bit beforehand. So a word that I've heard around equity and wellbeing is place-based strategies. And I'm curious how place-based strategies especially around like geography communities is in tension with or works alongside group specific strategies. And so because we live in a highly segregated society those below the poverty line are segregated off specific racial ethnic communities are segregated off. Is place-based the sort of euphemism for a more politically patable version of addressing racial disparities or class disparities or is it actually place-based in the sense that there are specific geographic locations that need attention nevermind the demographic makeup of the locality. That makes sense. Yeah, I'll take a quick stab at this and then I think that Adam wants to line up. Yeah, unfortunately we own some place-based things in the SDOH framework and through Healthy People and I have a little bit of heartburn on the issue but go please, go ahead. No, I mean, I have the climate portfolio at the Council of Economic Advisers and I've often over the past 30 years I've often thought a lot about place-based strategies but I think looking forward over the next 20 years in specifically place-based will become even more important for so many different reasons. And one is that one of the biggest challenges in front of us is the changes in our climate which is literally about places and what's happening to places where humans live or what is happening to the environment. And once we come as in the paper now, almost every day, these stories about communities that are particularly in the line of damages due to the fact that they're always getting hit by hurricanes or flooding or fires or whatever, those are going to require that we think about communities and what does it mean to have communities that have these challenges and how we deal with those resiliency questions? I think at the same time, one of the things that we have, that is of course important in an American political context is that our democracy works in places. We vote in places, we live in places but this is also how we participate in civil society. And so I think our failure, and I would say that economists have definitely played a role in this over the past half century especially, our failure to think about the economics of places is important to our national economic conversation has been very detrimental to our democracy. You can't leave places behind in a democracy because we're focused on the general welfare, not just of those people that have good growth and good opportunities, but the folks that are in these other places. How do we think, we have to think about place. And I think that, and then finally, so much of what we've accomplished over the past two years in our legislative agenda, all of these pieces of legislation as I noted in my opening remarks are about investing in particular places, infrastructure. It's okay, what are we gonna do in this place to connect it to the larger economy in all the different ways that that needs, even if that's virtual through the internet. We, the investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Clean Energy Investments, these are about where across the United States are we going to be building new energy? Who is gonna get those jobs? What communities are gonna, how are we gonna think about that? And where are the places where that isn't going to happen? How do we navigate all of this? I think the biggest challenge, the political, social, and economic challenges are grounded in places. And so I actually think that we have this really just awesome opportunity right now to take place base that I think for many decades was kind of like, oh, there's maybe some places left behind and maybe we'll think about that. But actually, we've put together an agenda that's forward thinking how do we have an all of nation, a whole of government strategy for the whole of America and walk into that with our equity frame and take advantage of this moment. So I think it's an opportunity to bring place into the conversation in ways that it wasn't on the political agenda, in my view, in decades past. I would just say yes and. So my consternation over place based as a term is that it doesn't necessarily give credence to the other issues of our social circumstance. I mean, we live in a virtual world in as much as a physical world. That has substance in our lives, mine less so than my children's generation. But it has substance and we need to take that into account. And equally so, there are other aspects of our social circumstance that aren't necessarily geographically or topographically or climatically defined that we need to be very respectful of and those social circumstances can be related to our politics and the lines of communication that we share by whatever media. So those are important and so I think place based needs to have a broader, the semantics needs to be broader. It's yes and in my opinion. And I share the sense that place based is important, perhaps without the consternation. I think so for one, it is certainly not a euphemism to begin with. Place based is not a euphemism for other concerns and priorities around equity. And one way in which we see this is even in periods where there have been some narrowing of the gap in labor market income across different racial and ethnic groups, for instance. Or other periods where other measures of inequality have narrowed. Geographic inequality in the US has continued to widen. It is relentless, it is dramatic. It is certainly about the top pulling away and also about the bottom being behind. There's a range of policies that are place based coming from the Biden-Harris administration and particularly from the Department of Commerce. Some are the ones you think of as most traditionally place based like the Build Back Better Regional Challenge where places applied. Another is the broadband investment that is not sort of explicitly a place based policy, but at its core is about bridging fundamental geographic inequality and infrastructure. And then chips investing significantly in semiconductor fabs. Also not traditionally a place based policy but with that level of investment that is going to be targeted to a particular semiconductor fab that will exist in a particular place that will be a large enough investment to be locally transformative. That in effect becomes another form of place based policy. I think one of the ways in which this administration's approach has most stood out has been this broad focus in a very expansive way around place based policies. And I think it also comes at a time where economists have shifted from being fairly skeptical and wondering like why don't people just move to places with more economic opportunity to a I think more correct and to be fair, view that people in many other disciplines had come to somewhat earlier that it is not as easy as encouraging people to move and that it's necessary to make investments in specific places. I think part of the challenge of course is defining like what a place is depending on the policy whether we're talking about housing outcomes or labor market outcomes, local government outcomes, the place could be a census tract or a zip code or a metro area, political boundaries matter too, so states factor in. So there are lots and lots of hard questions but this is clearly one where there is already an immense amount of data on places that have urgent needs, understanding already about places that have more or less capacity and place based policies also lend themselves perhaps more than other kinds of policies to evaluation and being able to track because one can compare what's happened in some places with others or what's happened on one side of a boundary with what happened on the other side of the boundary where the policy context might have been different. So I think there is really an extraordinary opportunity that the administration is taking advantage of around place based policies and I think that that challenge is thinking about these holistically and acknowledging all of the approaches that really are appropriately targeting specific places even if they might not be called as such and bring all of that information and looking at the effects holistically. Dr. Ruchet, Secretary Cocoa and Marie, thank you very much. I'd just like to acknowledge that that last question in the prior panel around place based strategies is a beautiful bridge into this next discussion which is really about local approaches. So folks that are spearheading kind of new ways, new indicators for progress for thinking about equity and well-being in places. So I'd like to invite up our moderator, Janice Bowler, who's the Counselor to the Secretary at the U.S. Department of Treasury on Racial Equity. We have Julie Rusk, the founder of Civic Well-Being Partners, Emmanuel Fremont-Boama, the U.S. Insights and Partnerships Manager at the Social Progress Imperative, and Erin Dalton, the Director of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services. Thank you so much, everyone, for being with us. Thank you. And really nice to see everyone. It's great being back in in-person conferences. So good to see you all here. I want to start out by thanking our colleagues at the Department of Commerce, Deputy Secretary Don Graves, and our colleagues here at New America. I don't see Dr. Slaughter right now, but just want to thank you guys for all of the work that you have done over the last several months on the top sprint and just really centering this need to combine the data practices with the community perspective, which is what we're going to jump into in our panel. So I really commend you for this work that has been happening so diligently over the last couple of months. So I'm really thrilled to be here with you as Treasury's first-ever Counselor for Racial Equity. And I hope it's very familiar to folks in this room how much this administration has prioritized racial equity really out the gate from day one. And for Treasury, and I assume for my colleagues at Commerce, I mean, this is a no-brainer on why we need to center this perspective. Right now, we are living in an economy that still suffers under the weight of the legacies of structural racism that have left talent and opportunity sidelined in so many of our communities. And the administration really took this to heart and the lessons of the Great Recession when administering the American Rescue Plan. It was $1.9 trillion of aid that was pumped into the economy. And for Treasury, a trillion dollars that we were responsible for administering. I see my colleague, Jed Herman, here. So I'm going to be bragging about his work and a number of our colleagues in the Office of Recovery Programs. We really took these lessons, like so often in economic recessions, we see that people of color, businesses owned by people of color, rural areas, climate affected areas were the last to recover. Our needs are not always prioritized and having the data to make the case around that is really essential. So just one example of how we did that this time around is through the state and local fiscal recovery funds where we really prioritize using funds for disproportionately impacted communities. Treasury put in place reporting requirements so that large recipients had to show how their projects were prioritizing economic and racial equity and how the planning process was incorporating feedback from local jurisdictions. So we built those requirements in and we saw the result from that. Hundreds of governments are using those funds to address disparities with key investments and high impact initiatives, like $11 billion being allocated to affordable housing programs. Overall, through the distribution of these programs, we've worked with more than 30,000 state, local, county, tribal governments, which is huge, 30,000. This has created a really unique perch for us, I think, to have this conversation, to understand how communities are trying to apply a set of dollars to center the racial equity perspective, to think about other disparities in their communities and want to administer those dollars in a way that is going to best address the disparities. In order to do that, they really need good data and they need to have it in a way that is nimble and flexible, that informs their decision making. So this brings me to our great panelists, the lineup that we have. I don't want to delay getting into this conversation any further and I'm not going to delay us or embarrass my colleagues by reading their full bios. I know you all have access to those, so I'm just going to introduce them briefly. We have Erin Dalton, the director of the Department of Human Services in Allegheny County. Emanuel, Emanuel, I'm so afraid I'm going to say your last name wrong. Frimpolm Bohm, okay, apologies that I had to suffer through that on stage. I should have clarified with you ahead of time to make sure I was saying it right. Who is the US Insights and Partnership Manager for the Social Progress Imperative and Julie Rusk, the founder and CEO of Civil Well-Being Partners. So I want to start by just an opening question for each of you and maybe a way for you to introduce the work that each of you are doing. Can you share with us one significant development in your work over the last year that illustrates some of the ways that you've been seeking to kind of advance and balance the need to center equity to define well-being in your communities or the communities you work with? And that'll give us an opportunity I think as well for each of you to give us a sense of the kind of the perch that you all are coming to this question from. So Erin, can we start with you? Sure, hi everyone, thanks for having me. I'm grateful to be here with all of you. I'm local government, which is different from perhaps all of the rest we've heard before. I run the Department of Human Services, so child protection and homeless services and mental health services. And so people are for sure at our door every day with needs for help. I thought about a lot of different things I could share. This is probably the most controversial, but gets deep into the way we think about data. So one of the things we worry about a lot is infant mortality, particularly post neonatal infant mortality. And we really haven't been bending the curve on that, particularly for people of color, families of color. And that's in part because we're not reaching the right people. And you need data to reach the right people. Even our best home visiting programs, we're reaching about 12% of high risk families. It's not very much if you want to really end this issue, bring outcomes, make them more equal. And so we took the pretty dramatic step of working with our community to risk score every baby born in Allegheny County on the likelihood of three or more adverse childhood experiences, the likelihood of mortality, the likelihood of child protection needing to have a removal. And we find that, of course, some populations are at much higher risk. 10 times as likely to suffer those three or more kind of cumulative stress, adverse childhood experiences, 10 times more likely to experience death, 23 times more likely to experience that kind of home removal. And we worked with our community to reach out to those folks in a universal model called Hello Baby. You can look at hellobabypgh.org. So it's a universal approach that really seeks to identify families at most risk and need and offer them what they need. Do whatever it takes approach to proactively reach out for those services where they weren't getting them before, they weren't getting the basic needs support, they weren't getting the housing. And we think that that's equitable in that we're really trying to reach the folks who most need government support, reach them with voluntary supports, community supports, and whatever they need. So that's one way that we think about using our data in a pretty dramatic way to advance an outcome or an equity. I definitely have questions for you on this, but we're going to keep going. I'll come back to you on this manual. Can you share as well? All right, so a social progress imperative, one of the most exciting things that I'm realizing in the past year has to do with how the SPI, which is the Social Progress Index, is being leveraged by different communities to sort of force this conversation and action around what we typically talk about in terms of the social determinant of health inequities that are structurally and systematically affecting people of color and communities of color. And that is one of the most exciting thing that I'm realizing or I'm really engaged in. One of the conversations, again, to give you just a quick background of SPI, we are that entity in 2013, we decided to take on this global challenge of thinking of our societies beyond GDP or the typical economic metrics. We've realized over the times that GDP is not a destiny for most countries. It really has to do with the extent to which your community or your country can transform its economic gains or even sometimes misfortunes in very tangible socially and equitable outcomes in your society. We've seen different countries that may not necessarily have the highest GDP but are doing very well with the very minimum they have in trying to transform their economies or their societies into socially progressive outcomes. We are seeing countries that really have high GDPs and they are doing very poor over time. We took on this challenge in trying to transform the way we think about social progress at the sub-national level and in different part of the world, like in Latin America, we've applied the SPI in thinking about issues of tourism. In the United States, we've applied the SPI in thinking about issues of digital inclusion at the sub-national or at the city level and what I really witnessed about three weeks ago, we joined our partner, Advanced OC in Orange County, California where we brought together different kinds of state and local government entities to think about what exactly do we mean by social determinant of health inequities. Now, in this conversation that we had about three weeks ago, we worked with our partner in coming up with what they call the Orange County Equity Map and then in this map, they launched the map and enforced the conversation among different kinds of local government and state government entities to talk about how exactly they operationalize the social determinant of health inequities. For me, the most exciting part of the conversation was when one person stood up and then asked this challenging question to these local government and healthcare providers. How do you use data to think about your health practices, especially when it comes to historically marginalized communities? It was very exciting for me to hear that one of the local government entities really stood up and said something that was very bold, said something to the effect that when a healthcare or a medical practitioner prescribes a drug to someone, they are really encouraging them to go back and take a look at the equity map and then see the neighborhoods where their patients are coming from and then ask themselves questions such as, do you think about your medicine or your prescription as just enough in dealing with the ailment that your patient are bringing in? Or do you have to start thinking about the neighborhoods that these individuals are living in? In other words, you may be prescribing drugs to different kinds of patients who are going back into the communities and then being affected by the same kinds of neighborhood conditions that are driving their health conditions. So there's a cyclical pattern that we are going in here. So the social determinant of health is something that we need to think carefully and operationalize in different practices. And that for me is one of the most exciting things that the SPI has engaged in over the past year. You guys are gonna make it really hard for me to make us end on time because there's so much interest. I already have like two hours worth of questions. Okay, Julie, let's get to you and then we'll get into our discussion. Yeah, well, it's exciting to be here. Seeing Biden administration, well-being, equity and data is super exciting. So I just wanna say that this is important. As someone who has twiled for many decades in local government, we need our partners at the federal level and it's really exciting and also interesting to me to hear that there are many of the same issues that we deal with in a city hall with multiple departments all trying to navigate how do we create frameworks together? How do we really understand the larger meaning of our transactions and our operations in sort of these broader outcomes? So I really appreciate the wrestling that the federal government is doing. I think what I'm gonna point to as a really exciting thing from this past year was I had the opportunity to be at one of these very cool international convenings that was in person so post COVID that's always like oh my gonna go, we're gonna go. It's in Bilbao, Spain, which is beautiful. I'd never been in Bass Country of Spain before and it was a convening called the Well-Being Summit for Social Change and really the purpose of this was to bring together artists and activists and local government folks of all kinds and researchers to really kind of lift up the issues and philanthropists and funders and I think that was also a really important part of this convening to really kind of understand how is this well-being work, this movement, how is it tied to the other movements of racial justice, racial equity, climate activists of people that are working on the very nuts and bolt issues of food insecurity and all of the things that are happening around the world and as somebody representing the US I always have a little bit of angst in an international context because it feels like we can and should be using our immense privilege in ways that are much more forward leaning but what I will say is I learned so much about the role of artists and activists in this work and I wanna just put a pin in that as someone who has also seen the power of artists and activists in my local government work but seeing it at the sort of international level and realizing I think that the real shot that we have at doing something with all of this is to connect the dots so to speak is to realize that while someone may be working on a very particular issue in their local community that it really is these issues really are tied together and I think it's incumbent upon us as policymakers and leaders and activists and people who have the opportunity to really dig into these issues to, I'm gonna say connect the dots and to really work across the silos and look at what are young people saying? What are they doing? How can they lead us? I mean, some of the work that is coming from young people across the world is so inspiring. What are the unexpected partners that we can lift up? I would say in local government, for instance, I'm thinking about our fire department. Our fire department leaders have been incredible allies in the well-being work. Now, that might not be the first you'd think of but so how can we connect the artists and the firefighters? How can we really understand that this is work that all of us have responsibility for and there's a place for all of us? So that summit in Bilbao is extremely inspiring and really reinforced for me that there indeed is a movement and we're a part of it and it's our job to really move it forward. So thank you. Our job to move it forward, does that include like maybe a pilgrimage to Bilbao's bank? Yeah. So in order to, I'm feeling like I need to go. I can highly recommend it. Okay, so panel field trip. Erin and Emanuel, I want to come back to both of you and put kind of a broad question of both of you because you both described a set of tools that you're using at the local level in Allegheny County and Orange County. And I'm wondering if you can just say a little bit more about how those tools are driving action. In your case, Erin, I'm really intrigued by this universal approach, but can you say more about how it's allowing you to get closer to the families that are experiencing the widest gaps? And Emanuel, you put this like really important question to a set of doctors, which is like think beyond the prescription. What are the action steps that doctors can take or how do they loop back into a system that can think beyond the prescriptions if they themselves as doctors are like, I just write. So I want you guys to grapple with that a little bit. Like how are these tools kind of moving to action that are really getting at the racial disparities that we see in our communities? Yeah, so let me just start from the beginning about how we built our infrastructure. So 25 years ago or so we started to build for people. People told us they weren't the best historians of their own care at times of crisis. They wanted integrated care. You hear this over and over. We actually built that data infrastructure to allow people to have access to their own fully integrated government data. And I could show you that, it's a real thing. And social workers could as well so that we could integrate care so when they came to the doctor you could see that there had been periods of homelessness or that they were connected previously to a doctor that they had lost connection with. So when you start out by building for people you end up with just an incredible infrastructure to do other things including research and problem solving and decision making for workers as well as community data sharing. So if you go to Allegheny County Analytics you'll see a whole bunch of information including data tools that allow community members themselves to use the integrated data and say, okay, in my neighborhood or my community I wanna look at Pittsburgh Public School students and I wanna know how many of them also were involved in mental health services and then I wanna know how many of them were chronically absent. And I wanna see how many of them had an emergency department, not all. You don't wanna layer all of that but you could. And of those diagnoses, how much of those are asthma. So you can really look and start to target community solutions as well. So I think the lesson for us is if you build for people which is the place you should start that is the imperative. You end up with the kind of data that you can use for all of this kind of work. So I would touch on this and then build from that. The imperative is about the people. So in SPI we often say that we don't build data tools. We actually are building common language for conversation. And it has to be embedded in the architecture or the DNA of building the tools themselves right from the get go. So it's a very difficult process to build an SPI because we don't follow the conventional data analytics approach where we think that the machine learnings or the different kinds of statistical tools are very much obvious in telling us what exactly an index you look like. It's about the people. So we start by having a conversation with the individuals and asking what exactly is the problem that you are trying to solve? Again, we often think about we cannot solve what we can measure. But I think it's even a much bigger conversation that I think some of the previous panelists talked about. We cannot solve a problem we can't define or we can't frame properly. And in the way we frame the problems defines the kinds of data tools and in the kinds of processes that we engage in in trying to solve the problem which oftentimes misses the target when we are not involving the people in. Involving the people is very challenging because what do you do when your statistical model tells you that this particular concept that you are trying to measure the data does not support it? But your people say that we want it. What do you do? These are the kinds of challenging issues when you are trying to involve people in building some of these data-driven policy action tools. Specific in Orange County, what happened was that they came to us thinking about an Orange County equity tool. But again, the architecture or the DNA of SPI involves the people because throughout the process of building, defining the framework and in gathering the data, they start having different kinds of light bulbs about what exactly they can use the data and then the product for. So we started by building an Orange County equity map but all of a sudden we were at the height of the COVID pandemic and then they just realized that they can actually use that map to build what they call the Orange County vulnerability COVID vulnerability maps. And by involving the different kinds of stakeholders right from the get-go, what they started doing was that they were using the map, the vulnerability map to try to target different kinds of historically marginalized communities that may not necessarily be the first target when we think about different kinds of health interventions like the vaccination or where to supply the vaccines. So they were able to easily use the vulnerability map, indicate or demarcate different kinds of communities that they need to target and then send special mobility devices to these areas for the vaccination rate. So right from the get-go, they were targeting different kinds of communities with the mapping exercise and then they were tracking how they were doing over time based on these different kinds of neighborhoods that their vulnerability map is saying they should go in and try to talk to them about the vaccination and other kinds of help that they need in here. The lesson here I think for me is that building any kind of data platform or data analytic tool, you have to define what exactly you are doing here and don't try defining it from your expert knowledge. The people matter. It's a difficult process, but that really is what really requires if you are truly going to have an equity conversation and action driven by data. It's about people. And if you forget about people, then forget about the tool. To Julie, because I know you've thought a lot about the community perspective and how you bring that in. And there's the really old model of like, well, we have a community meeting and it's at 10 o'clock on a Tuesday and so you've got, like we did, we open it up to public comment and five people showed up and... Where were they? Where were the people? Okay, fine, we'll do it at 6 p.m. on a Wednesday and that's great if you have a flexible job in childcare or whatever. But those, talk to us a little bit about how we get people involved, what things you've seen that have worked really well and I'm sure you wanna echo some of the comments here and just like how vital this is to getting the data that we need and then an end product that really is going to meet our aspirations. Yes, and I think you don't lead with data with the community or you lead with what matters to people and this is echoing obviously what we've been talking about around people but what I would say is it's certainly things like the timing but it's time, place and manner. It's really how do you, who do you engage with? How do you engage? How do you get beyond the usual talky meeting kinds of approaches and really open up to really tap the wisdom of the community. And one example that I'll lift up that we've used that's been extremely successful has been through a use of these well-being micro grants and really this was just a strategy to invite creativity, to invite the wisdom of the community, to find out what people needed to make something happen in their neighborhood and then in doing so, we sort of weaved in some data collection, pre and post, we looked at things like life satisfaction sense of purpose, sense of hope and really by doing that, we've now done seven or eight rounds of these have about 70 community well-being leaders who have really shown us what it means and in doing that have created a bit of a leadership pathway and pipeline so really we're very focused on reaching younger people, reaching and engaging with communities of color. It's really been interesting to see the kinds of ideas and the kinds of creativity that people come up with. One of the most recent events which was amazing was a community sound bath in the middle of a park that somebody had pitched and was like what's this community sound bath gonna be and it was one of the most amazing community events that I've participated in and really served as an entryway and a hook if you will and the person who designed it brought together just a range of interesting resources. It was very kind of light touch but it really invited people to just sort of exhale, come together, he wants to do another one where he sort of embeds voter registration and kind of opportunities for getting people more involved in the community but the point being a community sound bath was not something that would have come out of City Hall and yet we had 55, 60 people on a Saturday morning and it was such a beautiful example of a cross section of engagement and really I think learning from what the community teaches us is really part of our role in government. So you're touching on something else that I'd love for you to expand on a little bit which is we can go down the rabbit hole on all the cross tabs on the data that lead us to the hotspots on the map to this action but really what you're talking about is a, like that's a means to an end which is a culture that we're trying to build around well-being and I'm wondering if you could just pick up right where you left off, say a little bit more on how this data translates into the way in which then a community, you're really driving well-being at the community level. You're driving it, defining it, we've talked a little bit about that and I think you're helping people to see that it's possible for our community life, the commons, to be stronger and better and I think it's a way of almost creating demand for more. And I think this is part of what we've also got to be ready for and this was a big part of what really came through to me and Bill Baal convening, people are not, people can see through things that are window dressing or sort of rhetoric without any real depth to it and I think this is where we've got to get comfortable being a little more creative, getting outside of our tried and true ways of doing things and looking at who's at the table, how do we expand who's at the table, what does the table even look like, what's it set with? You know, I mean, and where we're doing things. I mean, there's a contingent of folks here, I want to give a shout out to our public libraries. I mean, public libraries are trusted places in many communities and really are another way in and we found that in some of our work on youth wellbeing that it was folks in the library where people would come in for parent reading classes and other activities that again, that was a really trusted place. There's a lot of expertise in our libraries around data and information and convening and there's a lot of creativity there. So how can we again, think about our institutions, our leaders, our community, what our community is asking of us and bring things together in some new ways. This is a really important part of the sort of ecosystem for all of this discussion on wellbeing and equity. Please, Manu. I just wanted to touch on the point about tables. I think oftentimes what we sometimes ignore is that in some communities, the tables already exist and we often forget about them and I think about reinventing the field. What happens then is that over time, we build new structures for community engagement that oftentimes will not lead to Janice's point about the communities not coming because we ignored the tables in the first place. So one very specific example, because I live in Buffalo and many of you were familiar with Unfortunate, racially motivated mass shooting on 514, right? So what happened was that, what often was forgotten in the story is that we have had communities that have convened over time, especially within our block and other minority communities that they've been convening, building different kinds of deep-rooted coalitions in trying to solve with different kinds of problems that they face that oftentimes their local government are not helping to address. Now we have this unfortunate incident that happened and then all of a sudden, Buffalo receives this massive troop of people into the community and giving different kinds of charity cases without necessarily thinking about the tables that existed in there. So about couple of weeks ago, we had a convening where some of the local black leaders came and talked to us about what really happened. So you go to the site of the incident where some months ago, there were so many different kinds of global prices, different kinds of attention. That was turned to this black community, but today you go there, nothing really exists. But what really exists is that the community members that have already set the table keep on working and for me, one of the powerful thing they said throughout the conversation was that no one took the time in asking what people really needed. And they have been working in these communities and then it forced them to reinvent the way they think about data, creating their own instrument to ask people, what do you need? How do you feel? Which goes back to one of the conversations we were having in the previous panel about the subjective well-being. How do we think about well-being, especially during crisis moment? And in what ways do we reinvent the ways we think about data and data collection and data insight, especially during crisis? I think this is one of the most important things that we may have to think about, but more importantly to Julie's point, thinking about the table and the tables that already exist, especially in historically marginalized communities and leveraging them in any kind of interventions you are thinking about well-being and equity. So important and you're taking me now on the path that I want to go with you all, which is we've been talking about our success stories and times when we've met our aspirations, but this work is really hard. There's a lot of challenges. You're Emmanuel, you're touching on a really important one that I'd say at a big picture level is just the way that marginalization just can't get reinforced. If you're not really bringing some intentionality, you go out with this great process and the result is actually, you ignore all those tables that exist, you further disenfranchise people, they feel like this process isn't for them, they tap out, that's a real risk and probably one that you guys see all the time. I've certainly seen it in communities that I've worked in. Another barrier around cost, capacity, infrastructure in local governments and at the county level to do this work, I have to admit where I have seen really amazing, super cool mapping tools that are out there, but I also know the least resource places are also the places that might need this work the most, might also have the least amount of capacity to actually build it. So I'm wondering if you guys will reflect, I promise to bring us back up before I won't have us end on a downer note, but I wanna be real about what the challenges are in doing this work and what some of the barriers are that you all struggle with, any order? Well, I'll start with one, which is the, and we're talking a lot about these issues in terms of sort of external outcomes in our communities, but there's really the health of the systems that are doing this work and they're not very healthy. Many of our systems are just, let's be honest, not very healthy in how we work together in our practices, in our, you know, the sort of internal workings of our organizations. And so we're relying on those systems to behave differently when we're not really reflecting on how our systems themselves are doing. So I do wanna say, I think there's an inside-outside aspect to all of this and that it is very important to really look at how we're doing the work and the sort of wellbeing of our workforces. And you know, we haven't touched on that today, but I think these are, this is another way in and I do think it's easy to miss when you're very focused on the sort of service delivery, the outcomes of policies, which of course are the reason these systems exist, but they're made up of people, all of our systems. And so how we kind of think about how we're treating each other, how we're working together, how we're understanding what matters internally is another aspect because, you know, sometimes it's the resistance to change and transformation from the inside that can really be where it's at. So I just, I wanna put a pin in that. Stop for a couple of comments, maybe not precisely on point. Just to go back to the engagement on the tables, I do, you know, we certainly tried during COVID. COVID was like the good old days. People were unified around a common theme. We had daily calls, we worked together, post COVID, you know, much more challenging, including the health and lack thereof of the workforce and so on. And we use plenty of tools, online tools. We, you know, as I said, we're having daily meetings with our communities, our provider network. We allow people to comment on all of our budget priorities. I just, you know, we reach out to clients directly through SMS text messaging for opportunities. That said, I really still believe that government leaders also need to be willing to stand in front of 100 people and talk about what they're gonna do, particularly when it's controversial. And if you're not ready to do that, then you are not ready to go. And so I don't want us to hide behind some of these awesome tools that make it super easy for us not to actually engage. Cause it is not, it is not, you know, I run child protection, I run homeless. Like it is not easy, but you have to be there with people and get there. And one of the things we did on violence prevention initiatives, which may or may not, like we'll see, there are some efforts, like, I feel like this is true of the federal government and locals and us and communities. We sort of go one way or the other. We're like, here's all the money, you know what to do, go do it. Or here, we're gonna tell you exactly what to do. And I think there is middle ground there. Some of the efforts around violence prevention, we think are county-wide that they can't be done sort of at the community grassroots level with the kind of efficiency that you want. And others, not so. So we have, and we left the solicitation out for six months, working with communities to develop community quarterbacks in those areas chosen by community to be an umbrella for some of the more local, very local approaches. So I think it's also just not one or the other. And I'll think, we've plenty of failures. I'm happy to think about this. I have a question and insert just a little bit of moderator's privilege real quick on this point on the flexibility of funds. Because this is one thing that I think our recovery team is really proud of. And I've talked to dozens of communities that have been really grateful for the way that state and local fiscal recovery funds in particular were structured was to give even broader flexibility in places that had been most hard hit by COVID, which helped both prioritize spending, but also ensure responsiveness. So I think it's a good example and something that I'd love for the think tanks in the room. I think there's something that we should be looking at like what the best practices were there. Because then it is always this thing of like, well, how was the money used and how are we justified? And of course we're doing really strong data collection and we're putting out all of the expenditure reports, but that being able to get that right balance around the flexibility and accountability is important. Emmanuel, I stepped in front of you. So I'll touch on your point about flexibility in funding to make two main points. So the first point has to do with coalition building and then the necessity of coalition building in the kind of work that we do. I have been privileged in working with different communities that have been able to leverage the existing data from different federal data sources to define different kinds of problems. For instance, in some communities in Buffalo, we've seen different kinds of coalition of black, brown and other people of color to define the problem of food insecurity as a food apartheid. They don't call it food desert. They call it food apartheid for a reason. And so we've seen all these kinds of coalition that is changing the way that we think about data and insight from data to redefine the problems in ways that gets to the problem. The root causes of the problem. The challenge with that is that oftentimes many of these entities are small NGOs or individuals who do not have the capacity to join this coalition. But we find instances where they are either funding agencies that are funding all these wonderful initiatives and they are putting in requirement for coalition building or collaboration. But they are not making money provisions for the coalition building. So building collaboration and coalition requires money because some of these smaller entities cannot do it if you don't make provisions for money. So that is the one thing I would just like to touch on. The second part that I would like to touch on which I think part of Dr. Andre Perry talked about that and other panelists also talked about. One of my challenges, again, I totally agree that we have data but some of the data are not really measuring the concept that we want to measure in our communities. But one of my challenge, especially as someone who does data is about the kinds of history biases, experiences that I bring to the inside from the data which we often don't talk about enough. So it's not enough for me to just crunch the numbers and come up with an index. It's very important for me to understand what kind of insight or the context, the meaning behind the data which we cannot keep on doing from a strict disciplinary solo lenses. So a practical example is that from SPI we are building this national tool. That is supposed to help us understand the social progress at the neighborhood level. I'm in Buffalo, so I just decided to take the tool and then I looked at the patterns that was generated in Buffalo. It wasn't surprising. When you take the main street of Buffalo, you get to see the spatial patterns of SPI or social progress. When we saw the pattern, the question we were asking, what are we seeing here? And we got to realize that for us to make sense of what we are seeing, we have to go back to history to understand. So we quickly overlay that particular pattern with where people of color are living in and lo and behold, it was very clear. You see the spatial correlation. So where you are living and your racial composition really corresponds to the kinds of performance along different kinds of social progress indices. Then we said, okay, let's go back even further in history. And then we went back to the 1930s redlining district. That was created. We overlay that on that and it became so powerful that the spatial concentration of redlining district correspond to 2020. So this is 1930, patents, spatially. That really shows up in terms of the spatial patterns we are seeing in 2022 in Buffalo. So the legacy of redlining still lives on to today. And we couldn't have understood that if we stuck with our own disciplinary experiences in reading the data. And again, I just want to re-emphasize the point about this kind of collaborative way of thinking about data and equity that we cannot do alone. We have to really build the coalitions and support those coalitions as well. So I spotted my five minute warning and I promised to end us on an up note not with our barriers and challenges. So I would love for each of you to reflect on who your key partners are. Who is helping you make this work possible and feel free to use this as opportunity to shout out. Anybody in the room or not? I mean, for us, it really is the community that we're serving. We do get most of our funding from state and federal government. We're only 3% county funded. I will say, because we're in a room of feds. When I think about data in the federal government, I think we submit data, we don't use the federal data. But we have a lot of data to offer. And so thinking about a better partnership with the federal government or where we think about, we talk a lot about federal statistics, but maybe we can move towards a more national statistics movement where data is in fact ground up. Giving one example, there's an annual survey of jails to know who's in jail. Everyone, like every community knows who's in jail. You only, if we standardize that data, produce it in a way that it can come up, then you will have daily measures of that, for example. So, because of course the federal data is not timely enough or useful enough for our kind of real time, actual have to make a decision. People are in front of us. So the people who are in front of us are our partners, the communities that we serve and certainly the provider and local network of people that help us to deliver those services. So for us, we are a very small nonprofit. So we've really had the pleasure of working with other community members, which we would like to elevate. They are Voices, Orange County, Advance OC. They've been really very productive partner for us. We've also had the pleasure of working with San Jose, the city of San Jose. We've had the pleasure of working with Jackson, Mississippi. Again, these are the community partners that we rely on in co-producing the kinds of data-driven insight that we've had at SPI. Those of you are familiar with SPI, you know that we work at the global at the same time national and sub-national level. We've had the pleasure of also having support from MasterCard Inclusive Growth that are supporting us to think about the ways in which our index can be operationalized at the local level. School Foundation, we've also had the pleasure of working with Deloitte and also more importantly and more recently, New America. They've really supported us in the top initiatives to think and re-imagine different kinds of data tools that we could actually put in the hands of people who need them. And that is really the kinds of support and help that I think we need to make sure that our tools and product can be scaled up and given to the people who really need them. Because at this point in time, we are working individually with communities. We want to scale up and then make sure that the tools are in the hands of the people that need but we really need the kinds of partnership and support moving forward on that. Julie, quickly. I know we have one minute, we're wrapping, it'll be lunchtime and I'll just say that partners who really understand that relationship building takes time and resources and that it matters and that it's really worth the payoff. And so I do wanna give also a shout out to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that's really been at the lead of social determinants of health, culture of health, well-being, racial equity, the tie of these things and really looking for the practices that really have been effective so that we can learn from each other. And I think the co-learning and the opportunity to work across our systems is really where it's at in this work. Thank you so much. I wanna close by just recapping some of the really important things that I heard on the table, just on the panel, just to reinforce that the way that we framed the problem really matters that we have to build for people and you can't separate those things that the way we framed the problem allows us to build for people. That in doing so, we need to make sure that we are looking for the existing tables where community intelligence already exists and find a way to bring it into the system rather than imposing a system or a framework on communities that building trust is likely to result in a demand for more. And so we need to be prepared to be responsive. That building coalitions, tapping into community wisdom requires funding and resources. And we had some good examples about how to do that. And finally this point on how much data, I'm really struck by how much data exists out there and have we really figured out the best ways to maximize that for real-time decision-making. And I feel like we're in the right room to grapple with that question. So I will leave it there for lunch. I'll encourage you to applaud our panel here that has been really amazing. Thank you. I'll invite up Gene Sperling, who's a senior advisor to the president. Anne-Marie Slaughter, who's the CEO of New America, New America. And Mira Patel, a senior advisor at the Department of Commerce to help close us out this morning. Great, welcome everybody. Thank you so much. The last panel discussion was incredibly rich and we're very excited to stay in between you and lunch. We have Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dr. Slaughter, who's the CEO of New America, and Gene Sperling, senior advisor to the president and leader of all the American Rescue Plan efforts. We wanted to have an open conversation today because both of these people have been leading lights around concepts of equity, well-being and dignity for decades. I've had the great privilege of working for both of them and seeing that leadership in action. And you have represented here over a dozen federal agency officials, academics and leading experts. And I think what I hope at the end of this is to really come to a shared understanding of what we mean when we talk about well-being, how we lift up the need to build more connections between different perspectives and visions around well-being from economic to community, educational and health. And really be able to highlight, I think the path forward, the federal government can take in partnership with academia, with civil society, with state and local officials who are trying to do this hard work every day on the ground as historic investments are going out from the president of the United States, from the White House, that are gonna transform this country for generations to come, hopefully. You know, I think as you heard resilience and we've talked about resilience among households and communities, requires much more than I think we can fairly say we track right now and that we invest in right now. The goal of the Opportunity Project Sprint and Elizabeth, thank you so much for your leadership at New America, Austin at Affordable Growth and Tony from Harvard has been critical at helping the federal government really be rigorous and honest with ourselves about how we leverage the enormous wealth of data. But most importantly, what is the point of that data if we're not getting it out to you all to use to improve people's lives every day. And I think that one area that we've particularly thought about is where the US has fallen behind to the rest of the world. In certain ways around indicators that matter for people's lives, equity, the ability to access healthcare, education, good jobs, clean communities. And it seems like as we talk about unemployment rates, GDP, the more traditional measures of economic growth and they're important to note, we also have to think about what matters most in people's lives. And Jean and Marie, you both have talked about this as said for many years in different ways and we're excited to get into this concept because I think the lack of national level federal government indicators within this space is something that is all part of the vision that you both laid out for a long time across different administrations, across agencies in the White House. And I think we have an opportunity as we look ahead to the next two years of this administration and beyond to set a new paradigm for our country's economic opportunity and dignity in communities. So I wanted to start and lay that framework in particular because we think about the US as a global leader on so many things and I think President Biden's vision for how we invest through industrial policy in our talent, in our communities directly matters. But a number of countries have pursued this well-being approach. So how can we think about a concept of well-being that is broad and holistic, that's anchored in dignity and equity? How do we give teeth to that? Those sort of really inspiring visions and statements from the president. And how do we ensure it's not conflated with wellness? And Marie, I want to turn to you first as somebody who served as a senior level diplomat, representing the United States around the world and also bringing in the concept of what US leadership looks like when we talk about well-being, equity and dignity and putting it into action. Thanks, Mir. And it's wonderful to have all of you physically here in our house, the new America house. So, and I've been looking forward to this convening for a long time. When I was the director of policy planning from 2009 to 2011 under Secretary Clinton, her goal was to elevate development to the same level of prestige and power and funding in our dreams as defense and diplomacy. And of course, defense is the 800,000 pound gorilla and then you have state and then you have USA. And she wanted to lift up development issues. So the Biden administration has just issued a national security strategy that historically says that global problems, and they start with climate and then infectious disease and then food shortages and energy shortages, the kinds of things we do think about as components of well-being, those issues, those threats are just as important as our rivalries with China and Russia and others. That's historic. We are not remotely geared to actually deliver on that, but it's a start. So what would it mean if we took that as seriously as the national security strategy does and says, all right, US leadership then has to be leadership on development because these are domestic issues. These are those issues that cannot be cordoned off into international and domestic. And this is where I think we could truly be leaders. Generally, Europe is the development leader in terms of their overall commitments and how much they give both individually and the EU but also the way they think about security. And of course, China, that's part of its great claim to fame. It has indeed lifted 400 million people out of poverty. More people than the entire United States. But imagine if the United States said, yeah, but our view of development includes equity and well-being. Equity for sure, something that honestly, when I tweeted about it, I think a year ago, people asked if I thought, if I was crazy, the idea that race, racial equity as well as other kinds of racial equity would be part of foreign policy. But just imagine if we, obviously, when we stand for that abroad, people will hold it to us at home. And that is as it should be. But also saying, look, China and many other countries measure a country's development entirely in terms of traditional economic measures. What's your GDP? Are you a lower income country or a middle income country? What if we added the layer of relationships that has to go with the economic growth, the distribution that has to go with that economic growth and said, we're doing this at home. We haven't gotten there, but we're trying to get there. We expect this globally as well. It would mean leading in a radically different way, not the world's greatest military power, but the world's leading power, yes, on hard security, but also on those issues that you need to build strength and resilience at home and in countries around the world. So I'll stop there. Wonderful, Gene. So I'm going to burden you with my overall frame on this a little, administration after being the Clinton administration as well. I really was, I really had become very focused on this issue of what is our ultimate goal for economic policy and how much particular metrics played a disproportionate role. Now, the economist Richard Taylor, others have said, Murage has said it, of course, we should focus on what matters most, not what is necessarily measurable. You all have probably heard the joke before, but it's an important concept of the inebriated man who's looking under a streetlight over and over again, good citizen comes by and says, can I help you? And he said, well, I'm looking for my keys. And he said, oh, you think you lost your keys here? He said, no, I'm sure I didn't lose them here, but this is the only place the light is shining. And that I think is profound in terms of economics. We focus more on what can be measured as opposed to what's most important. Now, maybe somebody here brilliant is going to figure out the economic measurement of having a loving life partner, but do you really need to know that's important? Do you really need like an economic metric to know that's the case? It's hard to measure, but it doesn't make it less real that that's one of the most important things in your life. Same as we're thinking on your economic life. So I stepped back and said, I think the ultimate goal should be economic dignity. And I spent a long time, really, a couple of years thinking about what the exact definition of that would be. So I had a three-part definition of economic dignity. One, can you care for family and be there in life's most precious moments? Two, can you pursue in your economic life a sense of purpose and potential? And three, can you work with respect as opposed to domination and humiliation? Those seem to me to be the most important things in people's lives. To me, that defined what people would think on their deathbed as what mattered most in their economic life. So I started with shouldn't we start with that? Now, I also realized, and in fact, it kept me from not being sure I could even write a book on this, with the fact that while it is easy to mock GDP as the ultimate goal and it's easy to show that a rising tide does not necessarily lift all boats, there is the other side. I call it the Jacob Ellis versus Ohio case. That's the case in 1964 where Potter Stewart defines pornography as you know it when you see it. So here's the tension. You focus, if you focus on metrics, you might focus on what you can measure as opposed to what's most important. If you ignore metrics, then you might have a whole world where everything is just you know it when you see it. So to me, I think our goal, our larger goal is to use metrics better when we can to reflect what matters most in people's economic lives. Which is to me this concept of, this three-part concept of economic dignity. But I refuse to go along with the idea that if you can't measure it, it's not an economic issue. Here's the economic profession for you. Ah-ha, we have, I guess the ah-ha really had emphasis. But this does define the economic profession when it comes to women's participation in the workforce. We looked at sexual harassment and paid leave and childcare. And we said, oh, you know what? It seems to affect women's labor force participation. I guess it's an economic issue. I mean, this really is what happened. When people could lodge it in a known economic metric, it became an economic issue. Is not the general well-being at work, and this is economic. You work, support your family economically. If people are miserable and feel dominated and humiliated and mistreated at work, does that only become an economic issue when somebody finds a way to link it with a specific economic metric? And let me tell you how I think, I'll just give you one example. I actually called this chapter, and by the way, Murat, thank you. You were one of the researchers on this book. I called this chapter Invisibility and Metrics. And the example I gave a little is what I called the pre-gig workers. So guess what? Before Uber was created, before you know who Aijin Poo was, there were lots of gig-like workers who had no rights, no healthcare, no childcare. Now in the late 90s, really wouldn't have come up a lot, because guess what? They were working. So lots of people in the labor force, check. Lots of hours, check. Wages were going up, check. Not an economic problem. And yet, another secret, taxicab drivers didn't have good benefits either. People, domestic workers didn't. So that entire array of issues about rights at work, prevention of sexual harassment, domination, leave so that you can be there when your child is born or your parent dies, all of those things were there. And they were invisible because we focused on the economic metrics. So what I wanna say is, the things we do like the supplemental poverty rate, doing U6 and UI, doing things that do broader, we could do more measurement on basic rights at work, we should do all those things. But before we get all the metrics, we shouldn't assume it's a non-economic issue, that it doesn't matter just because there's not a metric light shining on it at that moment. I mean, so I'm gonna present a different paradigm. One that is, I probably, it's more radical and it's further in the future than I hope Jean's paradigm is. In other words, I love the framework. I love the sort of the being there, being able to care for those you love, being there for life's important moments, purpose and meaning and non-domination. I really love that. But that is still a deeply individual focused view of the economy. And I wanna suggest a relationship view of the economy. So I'm a network theorist and I've studied networks since 1994. And when you think of a network, you think of nodes and the formal term is edges, the links between the nodes. If you need to, you can just look at what's etched into the glass at New America when you come in. Those are networks. There are those nodes and the edges. We think about the nodes because all of us are nodes. And in the United States in particular, we are the most individualist society probably the world has ever known. So we think almost entirely about individual achievement and what it takes for individuals to accomplish things. And your framework is based on individuals. And again, realistically, politically, that's probably where we have to start. But actually the edges, the links, the relationships are every bit as important as the individuals. And indeed, and I am no quantum physicist, but I've been reading enough quantum physics to make this point, quantum physics says it's the relationships that define the nodes, not the nodes that get to choose the relationships. What would that look like in an economy? Well, it would mean that we assigned value to the quality of relationships. We would look at those domestic workers, particularly where they are health, health aides, care workers of every description. Care is not a bundle of services. Care is the quality of a relationship. A robot can bathe my child, but that is not care. That's right. And a robot can bathe an elder and in Japan already is. But care is when I bathe that child, yeah, I put water all over them and soap, but what I really do is I talk to them and I ask questions and we look at the water and we engage. That is, it should be valued. We have no way in economics for valuing the quality of the relationship. So that's care and we can think about care very broadly, but now think about very fast-growing categories of jobs. Coaches, I don't know if you've noticed, but five to 10 years ago, a coach meant somebody who was on a field yelling at athletes. Not anymore, health and well-being coaches across the country make an average of $62,000 a year. I just looked it up. And of course, health and well-being coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, work coaches, every program I know of trying to get people into better jobs has an employer coach. But then think about navigators, mentors, advisors, all of those categories are exploding and I put to you, those are all care plus. Those are all relationships that enable others to succeed. So I would say if we really want to get to equity and well-being, we have to find a way to measure the value of connections between people, healthy, strong connections between people, which would then put families at the center of much of our economy, in addition to individuals. This is not gonna replace individuals any more than links replace hubs, but it is a far more radical way of thinking about what is valuable in the world. And I have a question about that. So Jean, I think rightly notes the individual experience I think especially post-pandemic, we all thought about quite a bit, right? What does it mean to just be rigorous about the things that matter most in life and the time we all got to spend, hopefully with loved ones in a very challenging moment? And the Kellogg Foundation, right, has numbers out that are, there could be $8 billion more in GDP a year if we just fully allowed people of color and women to participate in the economy equitably as white straights, et cetera, men are paid. But I'm particularly curious about how we bridge from what Jean said, which is the reality of people's lies and how a lot of people think about their experience with the economy and what you're saying and building salience around the concept of interconnection. And I'd like to bring in an equity question to you, which is how do you make people care? How do you bring in the fact that improving wellbeing for some has a positive benefit for all? Because I think we're at this tension point now two years following George Floyd after the pandemic where people are saying, well, does equity mean equity for me or does it mean it for other people who have been left behind that aren't me? Because I don't feel like I can care for my kids. I don't feel like I'm able to get adequate healthcare. And I do think there's a national conversation and tension point around this and I'm curious what you would say to people that don't, who think individualistically for the reasons they have, which are their families or the things that they're trying to care for and don't necessarily see the connection to community and how government supports that kind of community connectedness or could. You haven't ever, hello little Jean, go ahead and talk for a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I don't really agree with your description of what I described as individualistic. It is about really us as a country believing in a certain fabric, a certain universal moral value that every person should have. That we are a capitalist country and some people have nicer vacations and nicer cars, et cetera, but that there should be a basic level of economic dignity that we feel everybody in this community, I did not try to write internationally, should have. So I think it is extremely collective and it goes to the relationships. The notion that we judge your economic, not by whether what you produced or spent, but your ability to participate in kind of the things that matter most in life which are not necessarily having the most hours and the most income if you can't be there at the kitchen table or the bedside. And I wrote about the fact that when we that what happened over the pandemic was a lot of middle class people experience what lower income people experience all the time. They can't travel to not work and sit by their parent's side in their final days. They couldn't be there for life's most precious moments. And people said, oh my God, this is the pandemic. And it was like, no, this is what lots of poor people go through all the time. This was just affecting a broader group. So I think that it is a very collective view but I'm not going to deny that it is linked and what it is that makes us as people because that's what we are most precious, that matters most and what everybody could have. I can't create a society where everybody gets to be Steph Curry. I would love to be Steph Curry or Roger Federer but you can't do that but what I can say is that everybody could be in a economy where they worked and had purpose and didn't have humiliation that they could be there and care for their family. That they would be given second and third chances to pursue potential. So I think it is a collective view. The one thing I did want to say and this will be my moment taking it to the American Rescue Plan is that I am just, and also if anybody, I'm not trying to sell my book, but I talk quite a bit about the whole navigators and coach view and I think that this was a very tangible lesson for us because as much as we got, is it matter to have? Do all the things to make technology more accessible and what we did with Code for America to make sure that we had Spanish and mobile friendly, all those things. The thing we all learned together repeatedly was that for all of that, all I learn over and over again is don't want to sound like Barbara Streisand but people need other people. And I remember somebody telling us in the child tax credit, boy I thought it would be just more here's how you do the form and people were scared of the IRS. They were scared of the INS. They didn't know if they gave their data whether somehow that could mean their grandma who was illegally here could be there or they were shamed that they hadn't paid taxes or they thought because they'd been in the economy or somebody's brother-in-law had taken a credit for their child when they weren't eligible and they thought if they applied, their brother-in-law might go to jail. All of these things required a coach, a navigator in the emergency rental assistance. I mean, everybody kept saying, oh, you gotta advertise things better. Are you kidding me? There was a crush of things. There were 15 different programs. The thing that would have helped more than anything was real life people, trusted people in trusted places. And so we have to have a world I think where we focus on the best, most accessible, easy technology and not think that is the silver bullet. You need the coaches, the navigators. And actually, I think you look at college completion, well, who does well, community college, all those things are who goes to college and stuff. I think you can actually use data and metrics to show that that matters most, particularly for people who are not like myself, blessed with just coming up with a family where the expectation of going to college and the knowledge of how to do it and all those things were just, as ingrained as rooting for Michigan football. I grew up in Ann Arbor, so sorry. I mean, I wanna ask you a question though, because I didn't mean that you were individualists and I'm offering collectivists. I didn't mean that at all. What I meant was, how, so we agree that you want an economy where people are there for those they love. What I'm trying to get at is how do we value the relationship between, I mean, either paid or unpaid, so you might be a child or a parent who is investing all of that in your child or your parent, or you might be paid and your relationship with that other human being is enabling that other human being to flourish or to spend their final days as best they can. Or even when you talk about the navigators and the advisors, how do we make those jobs really well paid because without those relationships we can't flourish? And so that's what I mean is that we have no way of valuing something that is not a service. It's a relationship. It's the quality of that relationship that determines how it is. Well, let me say how real this is right now and how current this is on the economic front. So it's funny, I agree completely. We have to as a government decide that there's more value there. I mean, I tried to, I took these bunch of jobs and called them double dignity jobs that they are jobs where people get dignity by giving other people dignity. But we always knew that the market didn't always value them correctly. It didn't value it in terms of the things that matter most that might be difficult to measure but there are lots of cases and I don't wanna give up on measurement. I think like in healthcare and preventive healthcare we've been able to measure. You look at community health workers. The whole, there are lots of studies that show, guess what, if you go help make sure older people and their families know how they're not gonna trip and break their hip, you actually save money. And if you have more racial equity and reaching people earlier you save money. So part of is I think is figuring out how to value and do the accounting for that kind of longer term type of value. But the reason why this is so incredibly relevant right now is that we are, what's happening with the tight labor market. We all thought tight labor market was a good thing. I still think it's a good thing and we can do another session on why I do not think that is why there's global inflation. But the thing that we have seen though is that in a tight labor market the private sector wages go up higher than the double dignity job wages. So if you're me and you're working on all the American rescue plan you're hearing a familiar frame when you talk to a superintendent, a childcare provider or a care provider. I lost that person to Starbucks. I lost them to Amazon because they're pricing up and people are leaving down. And the example I used in the book was heartbreaking example but this is a per example where you could have actually measured value. You know, a woman's testifying about her adult brother who has pretty, who has autism and has a blanking on the exact phrase for the people who work with them but somebody who works with him. What's that? No, that's not the phrase. But anyways, the, no, but the person gets incredible meaning and for the kid and for her brother this was life saving in terms of him living independently. And he regretfully leaves to be an assistant manager at a fast food restaurant. And he's heartbroken. He doesn't think that's as much value. The young man with autism is heartbroken but what happens? The mother who is a professor has to quit her job and come back and take care and the sister herself has to work less. Now that is measurably bad for dignity and actually bad economically and that was before what we've seen now. So Starbucks goes up, Amazon goes up and you have to have an act of a state legislator or Congress for a care worker, a long-term care worker, a childcare worker or a teacher to go up. And so we're seeing that happen in real time right now. And there are shortages in these areas everywhere right now because the private sector adjust and we don't have a way of adjusting even though we all agree there's value and probably even documentable metric value in those jobs. Absolutely, well I think especially given the Senate just passed a marriage equality bill right, there's a clear example of certain kinds of family structures that have either been incentivized or not economically or been able to protect or give, we think about inheritance right. And if you think about structural inequity right, the ability to pass what you have earned and grown to your partner, to your children over generations has resulted in in the large inequity we've had in our lifetime. And so I guess we've one more minute left and you two are too smart so I don't think any of my, these questions are. I just thought too much, forgive it Dan, Marie. But I've learned so much from you and getting to work for both of you. And so I suppose I just wanted to ask you both, if you could charge people in this room to do one thing, to think about one thing or to challenge you individually on these kinds of visions that you're leading, what would it be? I think as we talk about equity and putting it into action, we have two more years of this administration, hopefully we'll have more. But this concept of well-being is one that has been so championed by Elizabeth and others, you all in this room around well-being. And I think we're getting very close to the idea of what does that mean in terms of putting it into action tangibly with trillions of dollars going to communities across the country. And the tools that were built through the sprint are helping communities put shape to those investments and hopefully being able to advocate for themselves, right? We'll have leaders across the country, governors in certain places, who may not have the same vision for equity that local communities are. And so by giving them tools where they can surface, these are actually the needs in our community. This is what matters most to us. We're helping to get closer to that. But that was, it was, I get too excited when I talk to both of you and I'm so inspired by you both because you've been doing this for a long time. So what should we do? What do you wanna do? What haven't you done yet? So I would just say, I think in all of our work and indeed in our work here in New American, Elizabeth and I are thinking very hard about this question. It is, what are the ways, and maybe they're proxies, maybe they're not direct measurement, maybe they're indirect measurement, but how do we measure the value of relationships? Gene started by saying, you know, it's obvious that a loving life partner is very important to your ability to live, work, participate in society. We have no way of valuing that and I don't wanna commodify everything. I started at the University of Chicago with law and economics and anti-commodification. So that's not the idea. The idea is to say, look, particularly in an age of automation, what is absolutely essential to our flourishing are strong, healthy relationships with other people. They could be family members, they could be mentors, advisors, managers, but focus on those connections and the quality of those connections. How do we measure those? I would say, I'll make three quick points. One, this is my third administration and boy, I think Bill Clinton and Barack Obama cared so deeply about equity and fighting poverty, but I will say that Biden put out an executive order on day one that said when you're implementing, think of equity from day one, you know, it mattered, it matters. It does matter to put something out. Now, can you put it exactly? Well, no, but just a tangible example, we're doing the childcare regs and somebody comes in and makes a very powerful case for only allowing people to get this emergency childcare if they've already registered with their state, if they already are a certain size. That is going to reduce fraud, it is. It's going to reduce improper payments. It's going to have a disproportionately negative impact on black and Hispanic women childcare owners. So, now you can hope, you're supposed to think of equity and implementation from the start, it matters. So I think what you decide matters, even if it's, again, has maybe a slightly more qualitative side, will affect your mindset. Second, I think, you know, going back, you don't have to be, you know, mushy and soft, but you don't also have to limit everything to what has a metric at this moment. If, if we didn't have the ADA, if we didn't, and you like people with wheelchairs couldn't get into your building to get benefits, would you need an economic analysis to know that like maybe you should measure access or something? So one, you don't have to limit, but three, I do think as much as I've said all that, that we can do better. You know, the Atlantic, I mean, the Federal Reserve did, how many people have over $400 of extra savings at a given moment? That was a metric. That was a metric that opened people's eyes to economic insecurity. Again, the U6, the broader view of unemployment gives people a broader sense. The supplemental poverty index gives more of a sense of how the benefit programs affect poverty. So I do think in the metric area, we can do better and you can think in your own area what metric would matter. You know, when we did our summer EBT feeding program, you know, that was great. It was also like a little bit like, oh, that's right. If kids aren't in a physical school, they couldn't get fed over the summer. This is my third administration. Like, I'm glad we did this, but don't remember it coming up in the last 20, 30 years. Maybe if there was a metric that had said summer food insufficiency. Maybe if there'd been a metric on that, this would have risen before you had a pandemic and kids couldn't go to school. So I do think it is worth, while you can't measure everything and it shouldn't limit everything, we can do better. And these are some metrics that I've seen that really have affected the public consciousness. So. Thank you both for your service to the country and for your vision. And we are so excited to partner together. Thank you. Thanks.