 We're thrilled to have Garryl Perowitz with us back after having been with us a couple of years back. Gar has over the life of SoCAP and someone who has shaped our thinking and this year he is back to introduce some of the new work that he is doing as co-chair of the next system project and introduce Gar. We have a video and then he and a group of folks who are working with him will come to this stage. So let's look at Gar's video. Society's civilizations in some sense are like our bodies. If there's something systemically wrong, it's manifesting all over the place in all our organs and that seems to be what's going on in our world at the moment. The system is failing all around us. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Our jails are full and can't hold more people. Our young people are burdened with a trillion dollars in student debt. We're in a heap of trouble. When the temperature of the earth is starting to rise, that's a very bad sign. Our earth is running fever and it's running it because it's sick in many ways. In a country like the United States, the fact that anywhere from 45 to 50 million people are hungry, this is a problem. We can't go on like this. We can't keep moving toward climate catastrophe, nuclear war, persistence of inequality, poverty, famine. There is a systems problem. These are not one-off issues. They are interconnected and we have to look at the system as a whole. It's time to talk about alternatives. It's time to talk about what's next. We need to be aspirational and be clear about the vision of the world that we want. What is the system that humanizes us? What is the system that opens up our imagination of possibilities of cooperation? Nothing is more important right now than to discuss How can we bring about this change? As systems fail, individual and community creativity explodes. And that's what we have seen. People in this country are solving the problems themselves. They're coming up with new models and strategies. And within those models and strategies are the kernels of a systemic way to move forward. Land trust, cooperatively owned businesses, sustainable energy, state-owned banks, urban gardening, urban farming. These small successes taken together are a proof of concept that this can happen on a larger scale. We're compelled to search for alternatives not just analytically but in how we live and what we do. How we organize our daily lives. And that has tremendous potential. Our actions and our imagination have to match the magnitude of this problem. We have to get out of our comfort zone. We must think with courage. All bets are off in terms of our previous thinking. Our ways of thinking about economy and our ways of thinking about politics have proven an abject and utter failure. The good news is we have no choice but to adopt revolutionary thinking. I like that. That's the exciting part about this moment. When there are no rules, then people have freedom to invent and to create new things. I have no doubt that we can create a better. If the people who cared about these things really joined together to do something about them, anything is possible. The biggest worry for me is that we don't try. Is that we don't push for what we know is right. For what we know is possible. It's time for everybody who cares about this country and the future of the planet to do something about it to get involved. We can actually do better. We can build a better system that's not impossible. It's a very American thing to do to build a new system. It's a challenge. We can do it collectively. Neighborhood by neighborhood, step by step. I think that the world that we're on the verge of is bright and beautiful and interesting one. Complex, local, interconnected. I hope we get there. It's time to talk about what's next. Please come and sign our statement at thenextsystem.org. Good morning. I'm Garry Alpervitz. I'm co-chair of The Next System Project. We've produced that film. I'm here to pose a question to you. Why would it be that Kevin asked us to start this plenary session about changing the system? What in the world does that mean? So I want to suggest to you that you let that question kind of sit in your lap like a, the friend of mine says, like a brick. Why in the world are we talking about changing the entire system over time? And then the second question is, are we up to that? Can we move from projects and strategies and new adventures to the system question? Now, there's different ways to get at that, but my favorite way of looking at it is the people who started Davos have asked the question publicly, is capitalism over? Other people are saying, is socialism over and getting a definite answer? The Academy of Management, the US Academy of Management, 10,000 management specialists, professors of business, advisors of major corporations last year held their major conference on the question, are we ending reaching an end both to capitalism and socialism? Well, that's what used to be called a heavy, heavy question. But I want to throw it to you and let it sit in your lap again. And the question then is, what does that mean for our lives? And specifically, looking down the gun barrel of the next three decades, what might be the evolution of the work each of us is doing that might move from where we are over time to larger and larger issues and scale. So just that's the question. And I think if you look at what Kevin's been doing, the whole progression of SOCAP has been moving in that direction. And I think he's going to be talking more and more, for instance, about worker owned companies and transformations of a different kind. That's step one. Step two is recognition a little bit of some of the reasons people are talking that way and just a few statistics. I used to be a college professor, so you have to allow me. There are a few things. And here they go. These are United States, but they're paralleled in many parts of the world. The share of income of the top 1% has gone from 10% of the income to 21.4% of income over the last 20 years. It has doubled the 1% on top. The 1% on top has something like 400 people at the top. 400 people. You could get them in the front half of this discussion, have more wealth now than the bottom 180 million people taken together. The concentration of wealth in this country is technically medieval. But I said that once and a medieval professor came up to me and said, no, you're wrong. It was never that concentrated in the medieval era. That means we're living in a system, the whole larger system, in which something is going wrong that has to be corrected by building somehow from what we're doing over time to another level. And the trick here is whether we can actually ourselves begin to see it that way rather than what I call projectism. I am strongly in favor of projects. We get nowhere without projects. And if they only stay at projects, we don't develop. So that again is another way to ask the question personally, where might we take this over time if we got serious about the next direction and moving the ball forward. So let me give you a few more statistics and not many more because I'm going to stop very quickly. Prisoners in American jails are eight times per capita more than any other country. We are more concentrated in prisoners in jails now than the Soviet Union was. And the number of blacks is six times the number of whites in those jails. Again, an indication of the depth of the problem that is a systemic problem and not simply a problem of projects or policy or politics. Those are the kinds of questions we need to scale. And of course, and I won't get deeply into this, you all know better than I do the climate challenge and what it brings to us. Where does that take us? How do we begin to think forward? There are two analogies that I'd like to suggest to you in terms of how individuals might grapple with this problem. My heroes, my real heroes are the people working in Mississippi building up the civil rights movement that became the civil rights movement in the 1930s and 40s. You don't know their names. Most people don't know their names. Those are people who risked their lives in the quiet, unknown doing projects, developing forward, laying down the groundwork upon which the great civil rights explosion occurred 25 years later. So if you can see yourself, if we can see ourselves not only as doing projects, but asking the question how we might build forward over time, laying groundwork step by step, changing ourselves as we go so that the next great explosion becomes transformative of the system that's producing those kinds of numbers. This is happening all over the world. The numbers are different, but the same question. It is a problem not only of hard work, it's a problem of self-identity. When you look in that mirror in the morning and see that brick lying in your lap about the system, how do I build and see and think through that? Another way of thinking about the system problem that gives a different handle on it. If you look at the great reforms of the civil, of the New Deal era, the things that changed social security, labor law, pensions, all those things, they did not come out of nowhere. They came out of the work of people like the people in this room, 10 and 20 years earlier, who were working in the state and local quote laboratories of democracy, building forward over time, proof of concept, one of the people in the film said, beginning to refine and developing new concept, expanding and transforming, and laying groundwork so that when the time was right, much larger change could occur. That's another way to think about how we relate to the system crisis, not just the problem that we're facing in the projects that we're doing and the exciting work that's going on. And it is, again, strange to say, a problem of self-identity, who are we in the matter? Who is the person in your seat in the matter, how do we self-identify, how do we expand, and how do we move in a way that I think is interesting that Kevin has moved both from this direction, the whole SoCAP direction, and backstage, he just told me about a large venture in which they're transforming to worker ownership, not just social investing. So there are broad, broad perspectives on all this. It also means going to scale and considering difficult things happening around the country. Our own group, the Democracy Collaborative, has been heavily involved in a big project in Cleveland, Ohio, where there are a number of worker-owned cooperatives. One has the largest urban solar installation in the country. Another one is a huge industrial-scale laundry, uses less water, less heat than any other laundry in that area. And the third one is the largest urban greenhouse in the United States, three million heads of lettuce a year. So we're taking it to scale, and also we're finding support from big universities, anchor institutions, hospitals, who are now more and more willing to come to play and begin helping develop a scaled-up direction. That's only one. We're going to hear about several other directions that are now happening from the rest of the panel. But I want to give you the sense of scaling. And tomorrow morning, there is a very interesting group going on that will be speaking on this subject in the impact investing and what universities and hospitals are doing around the country. And hospitals are doing around the country. Pallie Norris will be there speaking as well. And I urge you to go to that afterward. And you'll get a sense of what's happening with the big institutions beginning to move in this direction is supportive. And I'm sure many of you know about that. But the issue of scaling up becomes part of it. And laying down that groundwork step-by-step, pre-New Deal, pre-Mississippi, building towards where another leap can happen. And again, it goes back to what is it we're doing. Are we doing projects? Yes. Are we doing good projects? Yes. Are we self-identifying with the sense of changing that entire system that's producing these kinds of statistics? That is the large order question. I want to take you one further step down that line. I think there is some possibility also ultimately of moving this into movement politics, movement development, politics in general. And that too is part of the larger direction that's beginning to build. And you find it this conference as well. SOCAP did not actually have movement building and politics as part of the discussions. That too was entering the range of what might be possible. At the national level, let me also remind you, and again, thinking down the line, I'm a historian and a political economist, did you happen to notice that at the last big crisis, we nationalized the big banks and we nationalized Chrysler in General Motors? Somehow very large institutions are likely to be in play. No one knows what to do with large institutions. What is it a system that has big, big institutions? And how does what we learn in the projects we are developing allow us to think forward to those moments that are going to happen? And how do we think about the prototypes that might cast the vision of a system design, something that takes us beyond the failing systems of socialism and corporate capitalism? That is the big, big set of questions that if you stand back from this kind of a gathering, pose themselves inevitably if you allow that to happen. If you would look in the mirror in the morning and say, is that what I personally am up to? Is that how we might go forward? Is that possibility real? So I ask you that both as a historian and a political economist to consider what we are doing here today and particularly this panel. Well, you will hear some very exciting work going on that takes the next step down that direction to pose it in the largest frame and to keep stretching it out and always asking the question, with that big brick sitting in your lap, the system as a whole, really? Us, maybe in our time in history, allow that to seep in. And I'm confident knowing what's happened at SOCAP and knowing the kind of people who are already in this room that that kind of a challenge is the kind of challenge that begins to move the ball forward in an exciting way, taking all of this to a whole another level so that five years and 10 years out, the meetings at SOCAP will be 10 times this big and we will in fact be a movement that's beginning to rise to that particular question. Thank you very much. I want to introduce Angela Lover Blackwell, who is CEO of PolicyLink. Thank you, Gar. Thank you all for being here. Thank you for whatever it is that made you think this is the place you need it to be. We have to begin to talk about changing the system because if we don't change the system, we'll be back at this point again no matter how much incremental progress we make as we try to redefine the way that we think about investment, the way that we think about business, the way that we think about the future. Gar mentioned a couple of things. I don't know if he mentioned the GI Bill, but something he said made me think about it if he didn't mention it. The GI Bill, when we think about Social Security, when we think about FHA and all it did to build housing in this nation, those things had many wonderful qualities. In fact, they made the middle class that made this nation and allowed it to stand on the world stage with such pride. But there was really a huge hole in all of those things because they didn't get to people of color. The GI Bill really was for white veterans. Social Security left out people who were picking vegetables and doing domestic work. The FHA actually explicitly excluded black people from being able to take advantage of it and it allowed neighborhoods to develop in middle class areas that created middle class areas in this nation and locked so many people who were black out of home ownership or out of home ownership that actually could build any value for them to pull out if they needed it. We're a nation in which racism has been baked in. Exclusion has been baked in. And if we don't have a system that changes that, whatever system we come up with is going to be flawed. It is so wonderful that you are here having this conversation because we really need for investment and business to drive the change that we need. We won't get the change without power, politics and policy. But in order to get to power politics and policy, the nation as a whole needs to change. It needs to change. Let me tell you what I mean. There is really nothing more valuable at this moment than the diversity that defines this nation. That what could be more valuable in a global economy than a world nation that has all of the diversity that is needed. But we're not valuing it. We're not using it. We're not dependent on it. We're not using it to define how well we're operating. Once we start doing that, we're going to push for policies that allow all to participate prosper and reach their full potential. Once we start doing that, we're going to recognize we need to have elected officials who are committed to the change that we need. Once we start doing that, we will be able to marshal the power that it's going to take to transform everything. We're living in a nation right now in which two things are defining the moment. One is the toxic inequality that's hollowing out the middle class, baking in poverty, and making it very hard for the mobility that this nation has prided itself upon to be able to still act. That toxic inequality threatens everything that we believe in. At the same time that we're starting to deal with that, recognize that we have to address it, we are undergoing an extraordinary demographic shift. We know that by 2043, the majority of people who live in the United States will be of color. Many people don't know that since 2012, the majority of babies being born in this country are of color. And by the end of this decade, 2019, the majority of all children under 18 will be of color. By 2030, the majority of the young workforce will be of color. As we think about the shifting demographics, as we think about the economic imperative, it's clear that the way forward is the way that we'll bring these two together, allow the shifting demographics to be the asset that they actually are, to be able to fuel a new vision for what it can be to all be in this together. But we've got to have a plan for doing that. We've got to grow good jobs, and we have to do it with every investment that we're making. It's not like we make an investment. It's not like we engage in a big thing like the transformation of the Oakland Army base in Oakland. You can't do those things without thinking about how do you create good jobs in the process. Every time we spend money, we have to figure out a way to create good jobs and make sure the people who need them are going to get them. That includes creating entrepreneurship for people who are of color, because people of color hire people of color. If we need to get people of color employed, we need to make sure that the employers are of color. We need to build capabilities. We know that we don't have the capabilities for the work that has to go forward. We have to consciously invest in it. And we have to remove barriers and expand opportunity. Remove barriers like the disadvantage that is placed on people when they come out of prison with a record. We have to remove those barriers. We have to stop people from being able to be cut off from opportunity just because we have had a scandalous criminal justice system and the scandal of incarceration and the label that we have put on people who haven't deserved that label. We have to move that barrier. We have to expand opportunity. We have to make sure that this is not true anymore where you live in America is a proxy for opportunity. You live in a poor neighborhood. Your chances are fixed before you even get started. That should not be in a nation like this. Thank you. Thank you, Angela. Brendan Martin, director of Working World. Hi, Ms. Hahn. Great, thank you. So I want to talk a little bit about, span a bit more on what this next system looks like. It doesn't look like the current system of centralized blunt answers to our global problems. The next system is local. The next system is based on people in power meeting the needs of their communities and solving our problems. Now, in the video that we watched that Gar put on, there was some examples or some stories told about people in power of their local economy. Well, these stories are real, and I've seen them over and over again. I lived in Argentina for seven years, working with factories that had been closed, not because the factories weren't working, but because the global financial system was in default. And workers didn't decided not to care about that logic, and they went and took over their factories, and they started running them again. And with the production that they were able to do in those factories, they met the needs of their communities, and they themselves solved the problems of this global financial system. It was in Argentina that I started the working world. We are an organization that finances, that brings capital to worker and community-owned enterprise. And I've met hundreds of such enterprises who worked directly with hundreds of enterprises that pragmatically functioned to control by their workers meeting their community needs. We made over a thousand investments in these enterprises. I've worked directly with tens of thousands of workers, and we've invested millions of dollars. Over 90% of the people who are owners in these enterprises are people of color. Now, one of the greatest things about people-controlled economy is that taken as a whole, it's extremely effective. 98% of those 1,000 investments we've made have paid off in full with proper sharing and interest. In Chicago, a factory that was closed, but workers used to be making minimum wage. With an investment we gave those workers, they reopened the factory. They're now helping to run that factory themselves. They're making twice what they used to make. My late dear friend Ricky Macklin, he was born picking cotton. He spent time in our nation's penitentiary system. But when he died, he died owning his own business. The year that he died, he helped sell over a million dollars worth of windows. Recently this year, we joined together with about 20 organizations around the country that represent people in the front line, people in front line communities, grassroots organizations, and we created a network to disperse investment, not just where we can reach, but where all of these front line communities can reach. Together, this peer network can scale 10 to 100 times what we've been able to do so far. But what does all this have to do with SoCAP? What does all this people control have to do with this room of impact investing? Well, if there's one thing that defines our current system more than anything else, there's one thing that governs our current system more than any other force, it's finance. In our current system, we have record corporate profits and yet a record share of those corporate profits. 40% of all profits in our country are going to finance. It is the most powerful force in the world, which makes this room perhaps one of the most powerful rooms as an agent of change, a room full of people interested in changing the nature of capital, changing the nature of finance. This room has the power to bring that tool of capital to those people. So there's no really soft way to say how the role that capital plays in our system. Essentially, people, our communities, and the planet on which we live are tools for the profit of capital. The system we're building with people on the ground, in that system, capital is the tool. It's a bright, shiny, powerful, wonderful tool, but it is a tool in the hands of those people who use it to meet their community needs and to solve the problems of a global system. In the last year alone, the working world has moved a few million dollars into the hands of grassroots organizations who are pragmatically employing it effectively to solve their problems. But this is just scratching the surface. With a room like this, we might really be able to make a dent and move toward that next system that Gar is talking about. Thank you very much. That's great. Great. Perfect. Let me introduce Aaron Tanaka, Director of the Center for Economic Democracy and the Boston Impact Initiative. Is this on? Okay. Very happy to be here with all of you. This is my first SoCAP. It's a shiny, beautiful-looking room, and to be up here with friends and colleagues is a great honor. I'm here from Boston, and over the last three years, I've been working as the first managing director for the Boston Impact Initiative, which is a place-based private impact investment fund. We started off as a small pilot, $5 million fund, and have been making equity investments and doing loans and giving grants to small businesses and cooperatives in Boston, and in particular have been interested in innovating around what we as private investors can do with this capital to really leverage and build community power, as was spoken about earlier. And one of the exciting things that we've been doing is experimenting with a strategy of making private equity investments, but then selling our shares to workers as one of our exit strategies as another way of using finance capital to build employee ownership and control. Before I started working at the Boston Impact Initiative, though, I was a community organizer. I was the executive director of the Boston Workers' Alliance for seven years, which is a grassroots movement-building organization that represents low-income residents, particularly people of color, people who are unemployed, and specifically, as Angela was speaking about, people who are coming out of prison and have barriers to employment. And in that work, I became truly dedicated to the question of how do we not only deal with broad-based inequality in this country, but specifically working with those in communities that are already marginalized, who are even at the edges of those communities themselves, people who are homeless, people coming out of prison, folks who aren't able to get a foothold in the real economy. And in that work, one of the major things that I started to learn about was the connection between global capital, the transfer and the globalization of capital, the subsequent exportation of labor, and the way in which that exportation of labor from this country has made a broad group of people, particularly black Americans, or particularly young men of color, no longer necessary for the functioning of this economy and how the criminal justice system has been built for the first time over the last 40, 50 years to maintain a system of white supremacy in this country and to control a new group of unemployed workers. And so as we were working in the Boston Workers Alliance to work against discrimination and past policies like ban the box in Massachusetts, we also started asking the question, how can we start creating jobs, worker-owned cooperatives that are run by, owned by people of color, and specifically folks coming out of prison? And we started building cooperatives. This was very, very difficult, as some of you know, and the first co-op that we built was a veggie oil recycling company that unfortunately failed after about five months of operations. But we got the bug and started believing in the possibility of entrepreneurship and capital and the need for capital. And so as I moved over to the Boston Impact Initiative, was able to make the first loan to a 2.0 version of this cooperative called Sero. We were able to give a $20,000 zero-interest loan to a business that had no collateral, people had no personal assets, and there were no sales. But because it was so mission-aligned, we decided to make this loan. And Sero worker owners, folks who are part of my former organization, then went on to raise $17,000 out of the Indiegogo campaign. They used that money, then, to pay for the legal fees to launch a direct public offering. Where then, over the course of a year, we're able to raise $350,000, selling small shares of equity to members in the community. From there now, I'm working currently with Brendan to actually structure another loan in which we'll be able to give them $300,000 more for them to fully capitalize and launch our business as an organic composting company. This speaks to me what some of the possibilities that are available to us as private investors as we start to think out of the box and ask ourselves what role we're playing in the broader ecosystem to help leverage and engage community members to help determine their own economic destiny. And at the same time, I've started to ask the question, although I see the benefits and the possibilities of what we can do with private capital, through our new organization, the Center for Economic Democracy, have been asking the question, is that enough? And this is something that I want to raise to you all. And this might not be super popular, but as one fund manager to many others, in the community organizing world, we have an ethic that says our goal and our job is to put ourselves out of work. That is, if we're doing strong leadership development, we're helping build transformative policies that the role of professional community organizers shouldn't be necessary, and in fact, communities can take that role and build their own power. I want to ask the question to us as people who are playing this role in finance capital, what is our conception of our direction? What is our ethics as people who control all the capital that Brendan is talking about? It's my belief that we have the possibility to be transformative in our terms, and this is something that many of us are talking about, but I also want to raise the question, what role are we playing in democratizing the decision-making to set those terms in the first place? Right now, I think many of us think of ourselves as benevolent, almost philanthropists who are using favorable low-interest terms that help spark economic development. However, in Boston with the Center for Economic Democracy, we're starting to raise the question, what does it look like to give everyday people the power to make decisions on the allocation of their own finance capital? We're taking this question of how do you take participatory budgeting, which has been a process that's been used across the world to allocate municipal tax dollars and instead start to apply this very same process where we say we believe in your capacity to make good decisions and believe in the truth that you know what's best for your own community, and from that standpoint, our goal and our question for ourselves is how do we devolve our power so that communities can make those same decisions? I often say that if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. I hope that together this week that we decide that we're moving towards the collective liberation of all people, and through this week in the conversations we have, we build that path together. Thank you. Great, awesome. And last is Michelle Long, who my good friend, the director of Bali, Michelle. Well, I feel so excited now. I'm not really a morning person, you know, that I just saw a poem, but you guys got me woke up, you know? I mean, I just saw a morning poem recently, and it said, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee. Everybody shut up, coffee. And I thought that was me, but now I feel good. So I'm the sum it up speaker. I'm the bring it home, what couple of points here. And we're hearing that the system's broken. I think we all know that the system's broken, a new one is being called for, a new one's being born. The thing is, systems don't change overnight. It's not like we went to bed yesterday with one system, we wake up tomorrow with the next. There's always sparks of the emerging future that are amongst us here now. At Bali, our role is to accelerate the emergence of this kind of economy that serves life. So we find those sparks, connect them with each other, because we're always fighting an old system, we're trying to create what's next, and it's really hard. We resource them, nourish them, and we tell their stories so others can see a path to follow through fellowship programs, communities of practice. There's three points I would share now. The first is what has already been highlighted. The next system, the one we're moving toward, must fundamentally recognize that the path we've been on of building big transnational corporations has done a really effective job funneling wealth into very few hands. But the data is very clear now. The best path to the most jobs and the most wealth for the most people is directly correlated to the density and diversity of local ownership per place. The second thing I would say is the public markets have done a really fine, are unhealthy. We're having unhealthy results from the public markets. There's a study done by the International Labor Organization looking at 71 countries, and they looked at what were the biggest corollaries to inequality in a society, and they looked at the offshoring of production. They looked at mechanization of jobs. They looked at the suppression of minimum wages. But what they found to be the number one corollary was how much what they called financialization, or they also called it how much Wall Street activity was in that economy. That's important to know. It doesn't have to be that way. In Quebec, for instance, they 30 years ago took their pension funds and started to invest them in local companies, in regional companies, and they have estimated that they took it out of Wall Street, started investing in their own community, and they estimate that in that time, they have created almost 90,000 new jobs and kept 85,000 jobs, people, households, from having to move away. The Pope said something recently about we've got a lot of problems. We've got a lot of things we need to fix, but most of all, we need to fix ourselves. And so that'd be the third point I'd make. One of the people that we work with is one in our local economy fellowship program works in New Orleans, and there 52% of African American men are unemployed and for all of the reasons that Angela named related to institutional racism, historic, and current. And the number one employer of African American people in this country are other African American people. And yet she's working with lots of African American small businesses, and this is just one example. A lot of little plumbing companies, and there's going to be a big new airport coming, there's going to be some new hotels coming, she was getting them licensed and bonded and ready and able to access more investment and growth, and they had promises that they were going to be able to have these jobs. And then in the last minute, somebody inside the city had a friend he got his Harvard MBA with and outsourced that whole plumbing contract to somebody who didn't even live in that town, and that happens all the time. You know that the kind of transformation of the system that we need, somebody said to me once, when some people talk about transformation, they mean vanilla to vanilla bean, and I mean vanilla to chocolate. And she said, but what we really need is vanilla to music. You know, that's the kind of transformation that we need right now. And I've heard the past few years of people talking about quoting Einstein's maxima, no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it, that what we actually need and what's been called for is an evolution in our consciousness and how we are with each other. And the evolution that we need right now is the ability, every era has a kind of leadership that's necessary and the one today to solve the complex crises of today, like climate change and inequality, we can't do that me versus you. That's what works for all of us, including me. It's the ability to act from interdependence, to see and feel and act from interdependence, and that can be cultivated. I'm going to actually share with you guys. I had a epiphany at SoCAP two years ago, and so I appreciate that. But it was, I don't know what you're going to think of it, but I started to realize a lot of the things I've been working on for 15 years, local food systems, community energy, community investing, were becoming a bit trendy. And I started to realize people were competing with each other here to save the world. I actually saw people sort of jostling with each other, you know, I'm going to be the top of the green building pile. I'm going to crush the food market. I'm going to own the cooperative market and dominate the love economy. And I was like, wow, well, you know, we're not going to get anything different then. And the people that I've known who've been the innovators loved something. They loved people, they loved place, they loved land, they loved animals. And from that place, they innovated. And we can see what happened. And we can see what happens, you know, when microfinance or free-range chicken, you know, when it comes into the wrong hands, if you're not motivated from that place of caring, if you're just going to be the letter of the law of the free-range chicken, you can do horrific things to animals and land and people and farmers in the name of that. If you're not coming and motivated from that place of caring for each other. So you may say, well, that's all idealistic, Michelle, you know, we're not caring people. But in fact, we are. We are, in fact, we are. You know, the Greater Good Science Center has done research the past 20 years. And others have, too, that, you know, for a long time we just looked at depression. What makes people sad? But we started to look, what makes people well? And as it turns out, all people, regardless of demographic, four things make us all well. We feel well deeply inside, deep wellness. When we feel meaning in our lives and purpose. Everybody has a purpose. Everybody's here for a reason. Everybody has a gift to give. We feel well when we feel that. We feel well when we feel deeply connected in relationship with each other. We feel well when we feel an awe, some reverent connection to the larger natural world. Like, I can't believe that tomato plant gave me a tomato. How does it even work? You know, when you feel that awe, and we feel well when we've been compassionate, when we see suffering and we meet it with love, we all feel good after that. That is who we are. You know, the study, so interdependence is who we are. That's who we are deep inside. And so we want what we need, which is really awesome. They've done studies that show that little babies, oh, I'm over time. Okay, I just realized. Okay, no, I can't. I can't go over time. I will just say, join me. It is, in fact, the largest piece of land transfer that's ever happened in history, happened from Vinoba in India, who is one of Gandhi's disciples, who he just walked door to door and asked people who had a lot of land. He said, hey, brother, these people have no way to grow food. Could you give them a few acres? And they did. You know, that is actually who we are. So let's go for that. And that's all I have time to say. Thank you. So thank you all. Join us. We'll see you building the next system together. Thank you.