 New America would like to welcome you to our virtual event. The program will begin momentarily. While we are waiting, I want to review a few housekeeping notes. This event is being recorded and the recording will be posted to the New America events page within 48 hours after the event. Attendees will be in listen-only mode and you will not be able to be seen or heard by your fellow attendees or panelists. Therefore, we encourage you to share your comments and questions in the slide-o box located to the right of the video. Close captioning is available by hovering over the video and clicking CC at the bottom of the video. If you encounter any issues during the event, please contact events at newamerica.org. Thank you for joining us. We will begin momentarily. All right. Thank you very much. I can't top that voice. I'm Mark Schmidt. I'm the director of the political reform program here at New America. And I'm just going to welcome you and say a little bit about what we're doing here. For the last year plus, we've been part of, I think, a community of organizations and activists looking at the concept of co-governance. And really, the question is, is there a way for activists and organizers to have a relationship with government that's not always adversarial where we're kind of working together to get problems solved and make sure that the public voice is heard. And in the course of this, we found a lot of really fascinating examples of it. And we, there's really kind of a community of organizations that have been working on it. It includes New America, my colleague, Collie Russell-Dillman, who you'll hear from later, The Forge Organizing, which is a publication about organizing, one of the most fascinating publications that's come along recently and has done a special issue about co-governance, local progress, the state innovation network and other state innovation exchange, and other groups. And also, some key funders. Kevin Simowitz has really been a key driver in helping us think about these issues, along with the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Foundations, and Democracy Fund have been helpful in building this. So I think this event is part of that process of kind of building a community of shared understanding of what this concept is, what its potential is, what the pitfalls are, what people's experiences are. So we're going to just have real interaction with people who are practitioners of this kind of co-governance, starting with Ellen Gim, who's a member of the Philadelphia City Council, Gail Johnson, who's a former city commissioner in Gainesville, Florida, Jesse Ulibari, who's the co-executive director of the state innovation exchange and a former elected official himself, and Crystal Zermano, who is the strategy director of the Texas Organizing Project. In conversation with Sarah Johnson from Local Progress and Holly Ronson-Gillman, who I mentioned before, who's my colleague at New America, I encourage you to, in addition to this conversation, take a look at the issue of the Forge devoted to this and the report that we recently put out with a number of case studies of our own that I think are all really fascinating. So with that, I think I'm going to turn it over to Elizabeth Guernsey from Open Society Foundation, and thank you all for joining us. Thanks, Mark, and thanks to New America, the Forge and Local Progress for putting together this exciting event and for the important work on co-governance that is really transforming how we can test for power and empower people to make change that affects their lives. I'm Elizabeth. I'm a senior program officer at the Open Society Foundations, and part of our strategy around building a multiracial democracy focuses on moving progressive policy at the state and local level, with a focus on co-governance and changing who serves in public office. We have some of the smartest, most inspiring leaders on this call today, and I think the recent Forge publication and the New America case studies really show the brilliance of how public sector leaders are working with organizers and advocates in their community to change what we think is possible and who government is for and by. Today we're bringing together participants from the case studies and contributors to the Forge issue to talk about new frontiers and collaborative governments, what inside-outside strategy really looks like in practice, and what it takes to build real governing power. I am super, super grateful to be here and to learn from this amazing group of leaders, and now it's my distinct pleasure and honor to turn it over to Sarah Johnson of Local Progress. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. So I think Holly and I have the pleasure of co-facilitating this conversation, and I'm going to get us started off with a couple of questions for our incredible panelists. I'm Sarah Johnson. I'm the Executive Director of Local Progress, which is a network of nearly 1,300 local elected officials, city, county, school board, across the country working collectively to advance racial and economic justice, and so grateful to be joined by Helen, our board co-chair, Gail, one of our former members, Crystal, at one of our incredible partners for our work in Texas, and Jesse, who is like my, I don't know, like corollary counterpart and partner in all things at the State Innovation Exchange. So, and, you know, I'm just personally so excited for this conversation. I come out of labor organizing, moved into movement politics, and have transitioned through my work at Local Progress into really thinking about governance and governing, and really just I'm always grounded in that diversity of experiences and really trying to think about what do we actually mean when we say building the power to control our future, right, to control the largest and most impactful structures that we have for democratic participation. So I'm super personally excited to be here, and I think as we just dive into this conversation, I want to start by taking a little bit of a step back. Collaborative governance is not really a concept or practice that's widely understood. I bet many of the people joining us today are like, huh, I wonder what they mean about that. And if you look at the diversity of voices in the Forge issue and in the incredible case studies that New America pulled together, it's actually a complicated and multifaceted concept with lots of different elements to it. So there isn't one simple or really singular definition. So we want to start this conversation by grounding in the incredible experience that our panelists are bringing from Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida, Colorado and nationally. And start this conversation by just asking everybody or starting with a definition of what collaborative governance means to our panelists and sharing a story of what it looks like in action. So I'm going to ask Helen and Crystal to jump in first on this question. And then Jesse and Gail, you can kind of add in if you've got things to add from your own experience. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Helen Kim. Sorry for my voice. I'm still recovering from a little bit of a cold. But it's wonderful to join Sarah and Gail and Crystal and Jesse, of course, on a really important discussion about collaborative governance. I'm Helen Kim. I'm a city council member in Philadelphia, proud co-chair of local progress. For me, collaborative governance is so much about a process, a practice and the amount of work. For those of us who represent communities who are often on the margins of public policy or ones that are oppressed or neglected by it. Our work is to build power and to recognize that the systems that oppress, marginalize and push people out of places of self-determination and visibility are all around. And collaborative governance pulls together different forces to alter the trajectory of how people think government currently operates. It alters the mindset of people who practice government inside, as well as outside. And it needs to reallocate resources towards that. So when you think about the work that needs to go in to, say, changing an agency's mission, or expanding an agency's mission to cover an area that has not currently existed, or to drive resources towards an area that has long been neglected, you realize that actually what you need is not just simply people talking inside and outside of government. You actually need to build a strong collaborative, mission-driven force that is working both inside the government institutions and utilizing voices, stories, information and pressure externally. This is what I would say would be one example of that. You know, Philadelphia is the fourth highest evicting city in the nation. We processed almost 22,000 evictions every single year without batting an eye. When I first came in, I knew that evictions impacted 74% targeted a black tenant, 70% involved a woman, and over half involved a caregiver. But the way that evictions are traditionally seen in Philadelphia, it's a contractual disagreement when a tenant fails to pay or breaks the lease with a landlord. And that this was a contractual issue between two parties, which are outside the scope of government. It's not a public policy issue. It's sort of something that's legislated through municipal courts. And so we really needed to change the mindset of that. You know, we first started out with not having that many resources. We didn't have housing subsidies, local rent vouchers or anything like that. We started out by building out a table with, you know, an anti eviction task force. We start out by building bridges with our communities. We understand that in these task forces, we are looking for places of strength, oftentimes in local government, and especially with communities on the margins. We're told what we can't do, what we don't have the power for, and that the forces against us are overwhelming. And what we never have to have the chance to do through collaborative governance is figure out what our strengths are, the strengths that are unpredictable, the things that are untapped and relationships that are underutilized. And so through the anti eviction task force, we launched a tenant legal defense fund. Then we worked on a right to counsel mission. And when the COVID pandemic hit, we were now in full partnership with our courts, working together to see an eviction moratorium go through and then a diversion program that's seen and led to a drop off in evictions by 75% for two years in a row. None of this happens by accident. None of this happens without a purposeful force of people pulling together and altering how we look at one another. And also what the possibilities are as we face impossible circumstances. So that is just a quick window in and happy to talk about it more. I guess I can jump right in. Crystal said manual Texas organizing project and it's just really awesome to be here with these great leaders doing really innovative work and making real changes for our communities across the country. I think for us, we are community organization in Texas, in multiple cities doing work at the city level at the county level at the school district level, we're a member based organization in black and Latino communities across the state. And, you know, collaborative governance is having an authentic seat at the table where real decisions are made. So not, you know, not these sort of commissions but really like in with government sitting around and having real discussions, sharing our stories and making sure that it's not just the organization that's at the table but it's actually those folks that are membership that are directly impacted from our communities actively participating in governance. So they're informing policy Helen it was great to hear you say like telling those stories so that folks really from the get understand what those priorities are and like, and what people really everyday lives look like. And so in, and I think one of the things that has been critically important is getting tapped along the way, right. So I just, I want to give an example that judge Lena Hidalgo, who is actually not a judge but is the top county executive in Harris County, where the city of Houston is situated. When she came in in her administration, she immediately put resources behind these listening sessions to really inform her priorities to hear the stories there were sessions across the city different subject matters was very committed to reaching to all of the grassroots organizations and service organizations, and having real diversity at all of these tables, and then really taking that to to decide where she was going to resource priorities and then putting real resources behind that, behind the different organizations that needed to be formed. And I think one of the other critical things that often we are not prepared for his organizations is when we win governing power and get those progressive leaders elected, having our people in that administration. He was very committed to reaching back out figuring out who those hires could be who was willing to step away from organizations and step into the administration and take on those roles. And what's most important is that it's the everyday things that really I think make the difference in co governance. So it's not just the boards not just the commission hearings it's not just the special meetings. It's picking up the phone and asking our opinions. It's picking up the phone when we call, having real staff connections and sitting down and building strategy and priorities, having a similar power map of the dynamic. If there's a policy that we really need change from the community collaborating together on what is that strategy and pathway look like for victory for our folks. And so I think those are some real critical things that have made a difference, and that I think we've evolved in as community organizations to really recognize we are allies and we can text, and we can call, and that's okay and that works. So that's that's what that's the approach that we've been really taking in Texas. That's great. And I think we've got a couple more minutes on this question, Jesse or Gail if either of you want to hop in and share anything. I would love to hop in. Yeah, I'm really thrilled to be here with you all today. Thank you for having this. So really simply put, I think that collaborative governance means that regular everyday folks are the front and center of making decisions about their own communities. And I think there's a really important piece of this puzzle that we need to acknowledge and that's about making sure that we are making it easy as possible and accessible as possible for people to be able to make those kinds of decisions. I think it's like community engagement 2.0 but with the added piece that whatever kind of community engagement we do, and whatever comes and stems what what comes from the community is actually being implemented in the communities. You know, and when I say meeting people where they are crystal like you mentioned about you know the listening sessions that's one really important part piece of piece of it. I think in government we've gotten really used to either having town halls, or, you know, or having a virtual town hall or having a community meeting like at a, you know, at a church or the face space, but we aren't really doing the work and the deep listening and the meeting people where they are, meaning things like, you know, getting on tiktok and getting into discord and getting into the signal chats and making and getting you know, meaning folks at the grocery store making sure that we're, you know, talking to people when they're picking up their kids from daycare like that is something that I was always pushing in in government is making sure that we are truly meeting people where they are and not checking a box. When we said that we were doing community engagement and helping and helping people to help us make decisions. A really good example of this that we implemented in Gainesville. I thought it was kind of like reverse consulting. And that to me meant like all of you all understand how much money we spend on consultants hundreds and thousands of dollars on consultants every year to pay these experts to come and extract information from our communities, and then package it, and they give it to us, you know, the officials to say this is what we came up with, you know, and we happily paid that money to do that. Well I said to myself, these this money, and these these people that are giving freely of their time and why don't we pay regular community folks, because they are the experts on their own communities to go in and do that we, you know, I call it reverse consulting we rebranded as community cultivators but we literally paid people in the community to go and to other people and get that information which one again once again this these are trusted people right so you're more likely to get the real good information that's going to help inform your policies. And then we did that, and that that that's that's a program that I'm hoping we're going to be expanding we did that without comprehensive plan update. And that was something I was really passionate about is that we were paying people, like you said Helen, the reallocation of resources right, so we reallocated resources from, you know, these consulting companies, and then put that money directly back to the hands of the communities with at the same time being able to get the information that we needed to inform our policy decisions. Thank you, Gail. So hearing themes of radical inclusion of centering decision making and kind of clarifying kind of roles and what people are really being brought into. And then, you know, also want to just like interwoven around what everybody said there was a lot that was just actually about the complexity of governing right we tend to think a lot about policy and legislative campaigns but people talked about budgets, staffing, workforce development, contracting powers of cities, among other things. And, you know, I think we like, when we think about change, it actually requires change across all of these different facets you don't just get to pick one and that is the complexity of really trying to figure out strategies that as Helen said, like unleash the strengths that different parts of coalitions bring with different experiences so just kind of wanted to lift that up. So the second question I want to ask and Jesse I'm going to warn you I'm going to go to you first on this one is really about building power so the title of this session is not just like collaboration because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside and it's a good human but it is actually about collaboration explicitly for the purpose of building power. So, you know, if we are really thinking about governing power as not just the ability to be heard, and not just the ability to move our ideas but actually control a seat at the table of the structures and processes that shape the agenda setting and decision in the institution of government. I think everybody on this panel would probably agree we are not really holding it probably almost anywhere in that fully embodied sort of like idea. So I want to talk a little bit about the how we get there. So deepening inside and outside collaboration in the ways that folks have talked about in these examples, help us build power, and what are its limitations as a power building tool. And so I'll turn it over first to Jesse, and then we can open it up for other panelists. And I want to just, again, thank the organizers of this event and I'm always inspired to hear Sarah dream out loud, which is something I get to do pretty frequently thankfully and to hear Helen and Gail and Crystal talk about their experiences. Again, my name is Jesse Ulibiri I'm the co executive director of the state innovation exchange, and we're a network of state legislators moving bold progressive policy across the country. I did this work as an organizer myself, and had the great privilege of representing the area I grew up in, including the trailer park where I spent my earliest years life. And so when we think about the path to governing power is one both in my bones as an organizer of having been on the outside organizing issue campaigns voter registration efforts, building political power, and also the exercise of power once I was elected to turn many of the policies that I fought for on the outside into law when it became a legislator. And so this is not, you know, esoteric or academic for me I think there are three essential components about the path to collaborative governance that are central to our work. And that is refocus recommit and reimagine and I really want to dig in on each of these. I want to like shout out the amazing work and visionary thought leadership I've heard in the abolition movement, which is this dominance over frame this punishment and dismiss frame doesn't serve any of us and unfortunately it shows up in our politics everywhere it's baked in. And what that means is that we have a view of power which is power over power to harm power to do, but not power with. And so when I say refocus there has to be a shift within our collective movements towards power with what does it look like to hold and share power together where we may have different responsibilities and access, but a common vision towards liberation. And that refocus means that we're not saying that elections are the end goal. I will say early in my career, I was taught let's do voter registration let's do turnout let's change the dynamics because in Colorado before I was elected it was super majorities of Republicans. All constitutional officers were Republican so we let's just win majorities and that will be enough. But elections actually aren't the end goal. So we need to refocus our horizon towards equitable implementation of policy and at its core it means that governance is a condition of how we engage with each other. For me that is not revolutionary or new. That is the historic aspect of governance about how neighbors treat neighbors about how communities indigenous practice see the world right like for me this is at our core. Can we do things together that improve our lives. Simple. And if we can hold that collaborative governance really and refocus towards this view that it's about what we can do together. Then we're holding the view of the power of the tools in front of us is it allocating millions of dollars towards affordable housing or making sure that folks aren't being, you know, deported out of our communities or that we don't have institutions that cause continual harm and violence. What are we doing right like that's the focus and when we continually refocus there it puts us I think on the same page and allows us to say what tactics do you have available to you what power do you have inside or outside that we should move. The second thing I said is recommit. So, for me, again I'm going to root in my own experience as an organizer turn elected official. There was a sense. Let's get people elected. They'll do the good work and I will walk away as soon as they're elected. I'm going to say this again, we have to recommit to democracy as a practice, central to the health of our communities. And it's not just democracy is voting. It is showing up and finding ways to create new pathways for our voices to be heard. That means being present in, you know, the official hearings that happen in the state legislature or in city council chambers. That means legislators really commit to democracy as a practice you're not just there to represent everyone you actually have to do the hard work of governance of showing up back in your communities I heard Gail and Helen really talk about this and crystals organizing work is paramount here right. But it looks functionally different when we are sharing power. I'll give an example I worked on driver's licenses for documented folks when I was in Colorado's legislature. One of the most difficult conversations about strategy happened at 10 30pm at a local bar, or myself and now Colorado State Senator Julie Gonzalez went to talk to the small organizing committee of immigrant rights folks who have been gathered from the state. They showed up after state legislative sessions after they put their kids to bed, and they were angry that the governor was actually pushing back on the licenses issue. We had to talk strategy you had to talk about negotiation we had to talk about policy choices. And it was heated. It's 10 30 a night in a bar like we shouldn't been fighting over the details of policy but that's where folks could be at that time. Right. That's what we had to do we had to change the conditions of how people got information. They were hearing real time updates that I was hearing inside the capital, and then there were changes in strategy. But we have to recommit to this idea that we are in relationship with each other democracy is the constant practice of struggle. And so if, if there's a standard of leadership that says let's elect people. Let's send them into chambers just to vote yes or no or just to give a good speech. That is an F that is not the passing grade of public leadership. And similarly, we can't say let's send those folks off alone into those chambers and not reimagine that there's a need for us to show up in every space that they're in to push to demand to create new conditions of success. Right, that's what we mean by collaborative governance. And I'll say this is something I hear frequently from the legislators I work in with our within our network across the country. It's to reimagine legislators especially those of us who come from the communities which representing came out of organizing step into this positions and there's a lot of hopes thrust upon our shoulders. And there's a lot of reconciliation repair that has to happen, because we are working within systems that have historically harmed caused violence within our communities. We can't just go in and say hey we're here now and everything's fine in fact we have to reimagine the systems of power and push really hard. I think for that view we need to say there's a fundamentally different way that we connect into reckoning with those systems of harm changing those systems because we now have our hands on power. Great Jesse. So I'm going to turn it over to Holly in just a minute to kick off with some more questions I'm also going to use this opportunity to remind people that you can submit your own questions using the q amp a feature. And we'll have moderators who are monitoring the q amp a and fielding questions to the speakers through Holly, but I want to ask one more sort of trying to be a little bit provocative question before we jump into Holly. I think we've talked a lot about kind of like how collaboration can help us build power. I love to hear like what are some of its limitations like where has like like this is something we're working on together it is really hard. And we are constantly trying to make strategic decisions in a complicated environment that is not neat does not foster information sharing trust relationship building a more any of the really nice things that we've just talked about so if anyone wants to step in and just share sort of reflections on limitations that would be great and then Holly maybe you can jump in and take it from there. Yeah, I'm happy to jump in and talk about a little bit and I just I was really excited about everything you said because I feel like, you know there's something really exciting that we're doing here in north central Florida which I think is going to lead to many more successes. After all this said and done you know you talked about getting the right people elected, you talked, you talked about collaboration and to you know to me, it's you know, the governing power absolutely happens intentionally strategically and collaboratively. Recently in, you know, north central Florida I'm a former city commissioner by the way, and I'm former because I recognize that this was much bigger than me and my like one or two dissenting, you know, one or two dissenting voices on the commission. It really has to do with our all the jurisdictions within our region right so city county school board state, you know, working together so what we're doing here is we're testing this kind of collaborative campaign model slash coalition building where we're making sure to recruit train. And like you said Jesse support the candidates once we get them elected, making sure that everybody is beholden to you know certain principles that we're all deciding together and not just signed together amongst ourselves, but as a coalition before the candidates even, you know decide what their platform is we're going to help the communities and doing issues based canvassing, and that is what our platform is going to be we're working with the organizers, we're making sure to recruit, you know, from the organizations. And not only that but the important piece of this and I want to mention is that we are absolutely working on on pre qualifying and and and pre election policy. And that's one what is affordable housing need, you know, across the city, state school board, and you know, soil and water. Does that mean that city and county are working together to make sure that we have land available for affordable housing. Does that mean that at the school board they're going to set aside some money or some land to build workforce housing. What does that mean at the state level, you know what kind of bill do you need to introduce to push forward kind of this regional. effort towards affordable housing so we're making sure that before we even elected because we're in a sunshine state so we're not going to be able to do that after we're elected that we absolutely are very aware of the policies that we need to bring forward. We're elected that worked across all the jurisdictions at one time with everybody that hopefully gets elected from the because of coalition that we're forming so this work starts. Not just when we're elected like you said Jesse but before that with the people on the ground informing that the issues and informing the policies and then getting elected and then making sure to implement that. I believe, you know, personally this is going to be the wave of coalition building and getting candidates elected in the future like we cannot continue to do the same things that we're doing and continue to lose like this absolutely needs to be collaboration absolutely needs to be coalition absolutely needs to be resource sharing and policy sharing ideas so that's what I'd like to offer to the conversation thanks. Wonderful and this is an honor. Thank you all so much Helen I was just going to bring you in and crystal as well I mean I think one of the things that's really interesting here is kind of this feedback loop mechanism that you all are talking about. Thinking through sort of before an election than the election itself and then Jesse I love your sort of equitable implementation of policy. And so I want to I want to bring Helen and crystal and Jesse and everyone in to kind of tease this out a little bit more and to think about also where are their trade offs I think kind of underscoring what Sarah was saying around these tensions of power. You know one of the things that I hear a lot is in this conversation okay co governance is great but what is in and what's out and so I think getting a real sense from all of you of places where you've seen those tensions would be great so thank you all. Sure. Thank you so much Holly. If we are doing our work right. We are running ahead of political moments that we're currently in. And that's largely because the political moment and the political realities are monstrous for many of our people. They result in massive deportations Philadelphia being the highest evicting city, one of the highest evicting cities in the nation. They result in children being taken away from their parents or schools closing down. So the political realities of the current situation are devastating. And as I said if our work is right, we're running ahead of a political moment that we're in. But there are times when we're doing that work where there's no question that there's just tremendous risk and I think Gail kind of touched on some of that there's a lot of uncertainty about what lies ahead. There are questions about what we might have politically, you know, within our corner from an outside perspective versus an inside perspective when when your fellow, you know, council members are the voting entity. Sometimes it becomes difficult when they become the target. And so you need to massage and work through some of these questions and issues. And then I think one of the hardest things to do is to, you know, pull people together. Those who are most risk within a political moment. And then those who are running as fast as they can to like, you know, pull us out of this thing to really like continually be in deep conversation about strategies approaches disagreements in particular. You know, we've had like a lot of heart to heart with our community members when we've disagreed. And there have been situations like, you know, when we were stopped in our eviction work by the municipal courts, I needed to see a change in the municipal court leadership that was terrifying to a number of our advocates who can't be out front on doing that kind of work. And so, you know, there's there's a lot that needs to be done. And then I think the second thing is, and this is also very important. There is a difference between external actors who are galvanizing for larger movements that exceed expand and are very long term. They exceed any election. And those who are in government who are, you know, for for better or worse, you know, with without any kind of like despite your best desires. You are beholden to a political, you know, like world of that of that time. And so our language is not the same and does not have to be the same. The things that we're shooting for are not the same. I will not curtail a movement that that needs to go far beyond this political moment that we're in. I'm not going to stop people from saying like that's improper or that's not what we say or behavior modifying the work of activists that are profoundly important because fundamentally we have to change the mindset of what's even possible right now. And that is so much limited by our language by a rhetoric and by the stories of what we hear by not allowing. I think Crystal said this really beautifully. The reason why we invest in town halls and listening sessions and building out collaborative tables is because. The number of options before us are determined by the number of people that we bring to that table. If you have only a certain set of individuals at the table, all of whom are beholden to existing systems. Your options are extraordinarily limited. And when we massively expand the table, we massively expand those options. But at the same time, we have to recognize our worlds are different and elected officials cannot get hung up on, you know, wanting to behavior modify immigrant activists who abolish ice or defund the police. There is profoundly important work that is done at that level that cannot be seen as a threat within. But those of us who are in government have to figure out how to navigate that internally as well. And so I think that's some of the areas, you know, that make it a challenge because we are here to change this political reality. We're not here to keep it fixed. Yeah, and I mean, I wanted to speak a little bit to this question and the prior one in that. I think one of the limitations and some of the work that we still need to do together that really helps mitigate some of them those tensions is we have to do more work on power mapping our local governance institutions and understanding the opportunities and the systems changes that we can make. I mean, that is something that I think we are starting to uncover at different levels like within the bail system and judicial system in Texas. And it's been eye opening what we can do at different points and intersections. But I think we need to do that together with our leaders in and their staff right in governance. We need to have that shared vision because then we know where we're headed together, you know, two years, five years, 10 years down the line, the things that we need to shift and change and because we would be operating off of the same map then we understand the roles we have to play and when decisions need to get made and and why right and so I think that's a critical part and and then there just has to be full transparency and authentic relationships along the way. And that's from both sides and I think those are those are new things that we're learning to do together. When our executive director walks in to city council and we, you know, we just, we say it we're, we're going to go after you in this way. And, and it's okay right like this is what we need to do. And we're going to have your back on the next thing or you're going to have to have our back on you know we just, we have to be willing to just be upfront. It isn't a game, even though it feels like it sometimes it really is all about transparency and relationships. And so I think that is something that we just have to keep remembering. And again, I think, starting from a place of a real shared vision of where we need to go is a is a strong foundation for that. I want to give some context to some examples of what we mean, especially the tensions between governance and protesting and like when you're pulled in and pulled out what does that look like. For me, there were some very specific things I presumed as an organizer that I felt very different about when I was elected official. I thought that any kind of disagreement on policy was a lack of values alignment. And then I got to be an elected official and realize sometimes there are disagreements and policy that are super technical that I didn't fully comprehend, and it wasn't for lack of values alignment, it was actually some technical limitations of bureaucracy. I'll give an example, modernize Colorado's election system. It was a huge undertaking now we have one of the highest motor participation rates in the country. Wonderful. And then the DMV was using DOS operating systems green screens like we had no technology, right to even do motor voter registry it was just madness. And when I started, I was telling some of the election advocates like we can't do the thing you want yet, and they're like, Oh, you must be terrible you don't support the vision it's like, I support the vision. We're just working with computers from 1984 right like there's a little bit of that that we have to acknowledge and so the limitations of bureaucracy really do matter when you're governing. Literally the computer system sometimes or the amount of staff on the floor to process housing applications or you know the kinds of things that actually make government work. And so when there's disagreements and policy there needs to be that level of trust that crystal was talking about both directions. And it is, you know, organizers saying we're going to push you hard on X because we don't think you're there on the issue. That's totally true, and legislators sometimes have to communicate the real honest information about the vulnerabilities of our systems, or the limitations of bureaucracy and how they may not fully achieve the vision of our movements. I'm really proud of some of the work that happened in Nevada this year with our state director really looking at full range of access for indigenous folks in Nevada around voting. We had a statewide res tour with four different affiliated sovereign tribes to talk about the kinds of access issues in rural communities, lack of broadband, it was lack of connection to post office service, a whole host of real technical limitations of government that were keeping native communities from full voter participation. Without that kind of deep and collaborative view, the election administrators were unclear about what kind of policy changes were even needed because they didn't have the lived experience. So that's a little bit of what we have to do. I think the other part here is protesting can and should happen it should always continue it has got baked into our organizing ethos across the board. At the same time, it has to be done with a level of trust and this is why what Gail said about before people are even running you're building these relationships of trust you, you know, established during the time they run and then afterwards, because sometimes there's information inside that needs to inform the outside strategies. I remember there was a Republican leader blocking a bunch of legislation I was working on was privately communicating that to the governor. I knew the inside dynamics outside groups I had shared Hey, this is the person who's blocking some of the work that we want to move. And the outside groups decided to protest the governor who was actually in line with us pissed off the governor instead of actually going after our target was the real barrier. I when I was serving in the minority. Those kinds of things that really can limit our strategy and our potential. And I totally understand there's a lack of trust sometimes when we don't have the full view of information. But this is where we need to do something that I want to echo a mentor a friend of mine, though Mitchell he's the head of the working families party. He says we need to pull the sum of our parts into the strength of a fist, and know that in fact someone inside might have really important information that can shape a protest strategy that will be much more impactful. It's not always going to be right but the more we can do that the better refined our options are and we get to the right kind of power outcomes. Well this is such a rich conversation I wish you know we could chat all day but we are all everyone is doing such amazing work on the ground. So I'm just going to share a few kind of things I'm hearing and then we're going to open it up to the Q&A and thank you all for putting your questions in the slide out. They're really amazing. I mean I think, you know, for me it's sort of like a pyramid thinking about how do we start centering with people place and power and creating those mechanisms, particularly for traditionally marginalized communities to have a voice and to have a say. But then understanding all the machinery the bureaucratic limitations Jesse that you mentioned I think that was really illustrating. Crystal your point about sort of the power mapping that the ecosystem analysis understanding where all of these relationships fit. And then Helen and Gail you've provided these really rich examples of this on the ground so I'm going to turn it over and just share a few questions that we're hearing from the audience. For example, can the panel leader share moving beyond urban focus successes of co governance to heavily rural less dense population centers. And this idea of community cultivators which was such a great thing so I love that girl flipping the consultancy model on its head. Maybe you can speak a little bit more about the kind of government benefits to the community as well and maybe some of the tools out there so why don't we start with those and there's there's so many rich things here thank you all so much. I know I'm technically a facilitator but I can't help myself to jump in on the first one so I'm just going to do it to open us up. I think you know like I grew up in New York City politics, and like many people that grew up in a professional world predominantly shaped by like the, you know, beautiful ego centrism of New York I spent my first several years at local Congress like unlearning everything I learned about New York City being the center of the universe. So I want to share an example from our local progress chapter in New York which is you know, 175 around elected officials from municipalities large small medium sized rural suburban, all across the state, who work together collectively. And that work has been really transformative for me because coming in with this very like New York centric New York City centric thing. It was like a huge shock to me when I first started to do that work to see how changes that we were fighting for for like decades in New York City could pass in Albany up and down the Hudson Valley in New Berg New York in small towns and smaller communities so you know for example some of the most controversial police reform bills that were being debated in New York City in 2013-14-15 passed in Albany and in Kingston, New York before they passed and passed in stronger form in those places than they did in New York City. The work to move just cause protections for evictions has now moved in like half a dozen municipalities across New York State. And you know I think when we talk a little bit about I think we're all like, as kind of organizers and people who want to build power were often thinking about scale and the scale of our impact. And I think examples like this really show the kind of promise of innovating policy and smaller jurisdictions and when we go back to the complexity of the bureaucracy, the workforce challenges, like those actually look really different in smaller cities right than municipalities where you're not talking about 5000 workers you might be talking about 50 or 10. And so, you know you really can experiment with bureaucratic change in ways that I think often is outside of the grasp of bigger cities where there's more contentious politics and there can be greater barriers to experimentation. You know we have seen like the cities of Brooklyn Center Minnesota and Ithaca New York pilot some of the most pro like sort of comprehensive strategies around reimagining public safety and delivering policing. Those are not big cities right those are 40,000 people 50,000 people really trying to think about what is that what is innovation that is in line with our values look like at that scale so you know I think that just is a couple examples from kind of our broader work at local progress. And I think that's something that I think is important to you from a rural perspective with state legislators, and maybe to challenge an assumption that folks might be working with for this conversation. You don't have to be in a political majority to move policy or resource and collaborative governance doesn't just happen when you have, you know, all of the political power. You can actually engage in these key components and move policies or resource. So this year, the state innovation exchange the organization I'm co executive posted a strategy session on the justice for black farmers act that was being introduced in the US Senate and worked with black legislators all across the country to introduce policies including in states where there were no governing majorities. I want to highlight in Georgia, Senator Kim Jackson was able to work by organizing black farmers and rural areas and connected them to the policy ideas that were central there including land reparations and really investing in communities by doing the front end work of organizing across rural communities to talk about the specific and historical impacts of racism on black farmers. That kind of organizing work then built a clear sense of what the needs were. So when the ARP funding came down by state, Senator Kim Jackson was ready to actually deploy resources aligned with that vision connected to rural communities, based on a vision of the operation in Georgia. Right, like so this is what we mean like you can actually lead and be prepared for moments, even if you're not in a governing majority, you can be bold in your advocacy as legislators and movement actors alike. And it's because you're cultivating the relations of trust. So when the moments arise, you can move. If you have political power is a lot easier to move a lot of things a lot of things more quickly, but we shouldn't have the idea that you can be in a proactive forward stance, when you're serving in a political minority in fact, that's some of the ways that we see a lot of states innovating in policy and moving great stuff. Without, you know, full political majority. That's great. Others want to jump in on this question. Okay, well, there was another question that I thought would be really interesting for this group and maybe Helen, Gail, Crystal, if you want to jump in research shows recent voters feeling decreases in their agency the ability to make positive change in their community through engagement. What do you suggest Helen you want to start us off. You know, I don't think there's any question that part of the work, especially being a local elected official is to really get on the ground and showed that if you participate if you can engage and if you persist through things change. It's not that you just say it or you're shoring people up but you have to prove it. And I think that's one of the biggest tasks. When we, when I first came into city council. We had closed down almost 30 public schools and lost thousands of educators including most of our nurses and counselors out of schools. We held a series of town halls with more than 2500 Philadelphians. When we were under a state takeover and didn't control, you know, a school board, we didn't have a local school board. And, you know, there were no resources, but an overwhelming turnout of Philadelphians demanding nurses and counselors meant that nurses and counselors actually came back into our schools the following September. With not a significant change in resources with the same leadership of the school district. The thing that had changed was not them the thing that had changed was us. It was our belief that we could not let the intolerable last one day longer. It was committing ourselves to a process that would take time and recognizing that while it doesn't have to happen overnight. It does have to happen within a timeframe that you can count that can make a difference in a child's life, you know, and so, you know, that only launched more things through. We have school board meetings that that can last for hours on end now, because there's so many people engaged. And now I think one of the things that we have to remind ourselves of is that as we get better systems get better at refuting us. And so our processes need to change. Our strategies need to get smarter. The people who show up need to diversify. And that what we're really conscious of is that the things that threaten us from coming together are not so much the forces that are external. They are forces that are internal within movements. It can be patriarchy, misogyny, anti-trans hate, anti-blackness, you know, a language that alienates pushes away or tries to once again centralize power within movements whose only power is more people. And so, you know, I think that part of this work is to really show that something can be done and not to talk about it. And that is why I'm so committed to groups like local progress to the people on this call. Because we're trying to show every day that in the face of the most dangerous thing in the world, which is the idea that nothing ever changes, that when we take bold action together, systems topple. And sometimes we can be there to watch it all happen and be part of it. And so I hope that that gives people some courage and some faith. I'll jump in here for a minute. Thanks, Helen. Just to piggyback off of what you said is that the reason why people feel like their voices aren't being heard and that their input is not being considered is because many times it is not. And I think at the very outside, like with that feedback loop, we're missing an important piece of that, that we as anybody that can influence this need to be committed to. And that means telling people at the beginning what their feedback will do and how it's going to impact the outcome. So if you have a panel with someone we need to follow up or we invite people to the table to talk about, you know, how what the how their voices will impact, you know, policy, we need to be incredibly intentional from the outset to say, this is how it's going to impact the outcome, and then come back to the people to say, this is how your feedback impacted the outcome. And that is what is missing most of the time. So if we as people that are, you know, have the ability to impact that can do that from the outset, I think that that will give people continued kind of energy and hope to continue to to take part in the process and be a part of the civic engagement that we need. And I wanted to lift up, we lift up some of the examples that Gail gave earlier around organizing work that they're doing and really going out there and capturing people's voices. I mean, I think the pandemic has taught us, you know, to, we've been forced to restructure how we organize and how we engage and I think that's opened the door to many more opportunities of meeting people where they are in this challenging time to have the conversations with them about what their needs are what their priorities are how they can tap into government and into these decisions. And so I think we need to be thinking about TikTok and all of the different, you know, all of those different technical resources that we have now and how we convert that into real energy and feedback. And then I think just for for those that are already in government, and even elected officials who sit in safe districts that sit on resources that they don't really use, give that back into community organizations to have conversations the vaccine money has been given to organizations in Harris County to talk to folks about the vaccine but to also talk to them and ask them, ask community members questions about what's happening to your family right now what are your priorities what are the things that you need. And so we need to think about that reallocation of resources so that we've got money in the community to knock on doors and have those conversations. Just want to remind us all in the folks listening that we've survived a pandemic or surviving a pandemic and insurrection, a lot of isolation and so despair and hopelessness are designed outcomes of our current reality is up to us to inspire hope and to encourage a view of what's possible. And I think it's incredibly important that for folks who are feeling disillusionment with their power to remind them that all of the things that we aspire to are possible and especially possible at the local and state level. We've been talking about free college states have been implementing if we're talking about protecting immigrant families cities are innovating. If we're looking at the big changes happening at the federal government. Most of those come out of state and local policy first. Right. So the ways that we change the world happen in our closest proximity of power and influence. That's our neighborhoods. That's our people. That's where it starts. Well, what a perfect way to end I am so grateful to all of you Sarah it has been so fun co moderating. A big thank you to all of our panelists such an inspiration. Thank you for the collaboration local progress the forge the new America events team and a reminder that there are links to the forge publication on co governance and our recent new America political reform publication as well.