 I want to thank you all for joining this session in SoCAP 2020. You know, I think that many of us experienced the great recession of 2008 and 2009 and felt that we had an economic growth for our lifetimes. And clearly, that isn't the way it has worked out. But the thing about the great recession is that the recovery that followed that has been known as a jobless recovery. And it has led to some of the most damaging economic inequality that has been seen in modern history. And as we sit here in 2020, we have a chance to do better. And that's what this panel is going to be about. And we have wonderful investors and capacity builders and industry leaders to talk about their work in ensuring that economic opportunity is shared more broadly in the recovery. And so before I invite them to share their thoughts, I'll just give you a little bit of an introduction to myself and where I'm coming from on this question. My name is Kate Cochran and I run a nonprofit organization called Dupaya Social Ventures. We invest in early stage companies in India for the purpose of creating jobs for the extreme poor. So I obviously have a very strong point of view on this. But when we make our investments, we don't just take the entrepreneur's word for it that they've created X number of jobs and leave it at that. You know, we follow up and we do interviews and we make sure that those job holders are actually seeing meaningful income increases and that they are seeing more reliability and stability in their jobs. And they are being able to purchase assets, they are beginning to send children to school, the kinds of things that are the hallmarks of dignity in a job. And those are the kinds of things we would like to talk about today. So for our first panelist, I'll let her introduce herself and her organization, but I have to jump in and say that Bulbul Gupta has been a friend of mine for a very long time and a friend in this industry focused on economic opportunity for a very long time. And last year she stepped into a role of Pacific Community Ventures as CEO, leading an organization that has really been, you know, leading the charge on good jobs for a long time. So Bulbul, why don't we turn things over to you. Thanks Kate, I appreciate it. And yes, it's been wonderful to be on this journey with you for 15 years now from microfinance and emerging markets to seeing how that was more and more necessary in the US, especially in the great recession time as you mentioned earlier. So my name is Bulbul Gupta. I am exactly a year into the CEO role at Pacific Community Ventures as Kate mentioned, which is a 22 year old organization CDFI Community Development Financial Institution, based in California, where we provide affordable capital to small and growing businesses throughout the state of California, but we also do a couple of other things. And one thing I should mention about PCV that for the SOCAP community is so perfect, is that one of our co-founders was one of the early co-founders of SOCAP, Nelope Douglas. So it's a really lovely, really to speak about PCV work here at SOCAP. So we are unique in the sense that both as a CDFI and as a nonprofit, because we also have two programs that really are meant to address the needs of not just small businesses largely led by entrepreneurs of color who have been rejected by the formal financial industry, which is why CDFIs like us were created 30 years ago, but also who have a time filling the access to mentorship gap. So we're really trying to play both roles, in many cases mimicking the VC industry, right, by being able to provide the right kind of capital and the right kind of mentorship network to really be able to help with the pre and post investment support that we know that under invested small business owners need. So our third line of business is our impact investing research and consulting practice that again many in the SOCAP community are probably more familiar with internally for us that team also really helps make sure that as impact investors we are not only measuring our own impact, but that they are that team is the one that really designed for us the good jobs framework a few years ago, which brings us into an ability to not only work with our own small business owners on where are they on the good jobs journey, when they come into us and how do we help them year over year, being able to get the right kind of capital, the right kind of advisor, financial advisor and others as they need them to stay on the good jobs journey with us to make impact on the journey and really help us internally measure whether our portfolio is increasingly addressing the racial and gender wealth gaps and contributing to community wealth building that we really want to be contributing to in our integrated model of how our three teams work together. And then they also work externally with other foundations and impact investors, which are in this community. We know that people of color, for example, especially women of color start more businesses in the US than any other one demographic. 600% more so in the last few years has been led by black women, small, small businesses in many cases, and by helping them create the kinds of jobs that can really lift the floor and be good quality jobs dignified jobs as Kate was saying. We really want to be part of a solution when we're thinking about investing in low wealth communities or communities of color. CDF is like us, some of you may know certified CDF is like us have a mandate to invest at least 60% of their capital or more into low and moderate income communities. And in PCBs case, I'm really proud of the fact that last year we ended with over 87% of our capital invested in low and moderate income communities and 80% of our capital into women and entrepreneurs of color specifically something we are that much more committed to advancing certainly this year, and even more so, as we see how the crisis is really particularly played out, particularly for entrepreneurs of color in the US so I will I will save a little bit more beyond the intro in that regard, but really lovely to be here and part of this conversation. Okay, I think you're muted. Meredith, do you want to kick off your intro. Okay. Yep. So, hi everyone. Good morning. Good evening. I'm Meredith Shields with the Sorenson Impact Foundation and just a bit on us so the Sorenson Impact Foundation is a family foundation based in Salt Lake City, Utah, and founded by Jim Sorenson. So we were founded by an entrepreneur. And, and for that reason, almost 100% of what we do is supporting entrepreneurs in the impact space. We invest in impact investments both through our programs dollars, so 5% of the foundation that goes out as programs program related investments or grants. And we also invest out of the other 95%. So we are a foundation that is 100% invested in impact investments across everything from public equities to early stage entrepreneurs around the world. We are a global investor, so we're active on five continents right now we support companies that are providing, excuse me, access to healthcare access to education. And I think what's important about us for this conversation is that as an investor. Oftentimes the largest expense item when you're looking at an income statement is salaries and benefits. And for us, as an impact investor, we take a multi stakeholder approach. So we, we look at for each company that we invest in similar to what Kate described that you pay it does. We think about not just the beneficiaries of the products and services that our investments are producing, but also the types of jobs that are created the income and earning potential, as well as the development and upskilling or re skilling opportunities that are being provided by the companies. As an investor and an impact investor we believe that this yields better performing portfolio companies and much higher impact overall. So I'll save the rest for later on as well. And it looks like we have Rachel joining us. Hi there. Oh good. You can hear me. You are seeing her a little before I am. Can you all hear me. Yeah, certainly difficult. I'm sure that it was entirely my fault. No worries we were just go for it. Yeah. Great well I'll jump right in. So my name is Rachel Myers and I lead our economic opportunity and impact investing programs like Kaiser Permanente. We are the nation's largest integrated health system. We have over 12 million members who we provide health care and coverage to in California in Oregon, Washington, and Georgia in Hawaii in Colorado and then on the in the middle of Maryland for Northern Virginia and Washington DC. And we, you know, obviously our principal concern is to support the health of our members and and to provide really good quality and affordable health care. But we've learned I think, along with the rest of the health care community that a lot of what impacts on people's health happens far outside of the health care setting and so we sort of call that the upstream determinants of health or we've now come to call it social health. So as an integral part of that is, you know, economic opportunity people's ability to earn an income and and build wealth over time. Those have obviously direct impacts on housing stability and food security which are very directly related to health as well as many other factors. So it related to kind of this panel I think we do know that good jobs specifically really matter for health. We see that unemployment increases a number of adverse health outcomes increases, you know, mortality rates. And then sort of on the flip side we also just in this country, employment is often tied people's health benefits and their access to health care is often tied to employment and so unemployed people are also less likely to have, you know, safe and affordable access to health care so we see good jobs as sort of important for individuals, and just their sense of self worth and their ability to maintain their health as well as their ability to access health care so we have a number of different ways that we're working to support good jobs that hopefully will be able to share today. So thanks for having me. Thanks Rachel and I'm so happy to have you. Now I'm not distracted by trying to find where in the ether you are. That sort of lays the groundwork for the wonderful women we have on this panel and you know I should have kicked off by just saying isn't it awesome to have an all women panel. I want to move into just a conversation and ask the panelists some questions and any of you are welcome to add on. And then I promise that we will leave some time to try to grab questions from the chat box it's a little hard to separate the questions from the introductions but I promise I will do my best. Let me kick off first and have a question for bubble. You know, obviously we are all experiencing different kinds of challenges in 2020 and with COVID for the particular kind of work that you're doing describe the kinds of challenges you've experienced this year and how you've overcome them. Thanks for asking. So where to start. So work directly with small businesses throughout the state of California. As I said, many of them are minority businesses and we saw very early when the shelter in place order started, we know that the bulk of our businesses don't have more than one to two months of runway to survive right so we tried really hard to start activating capital our own, you know existing funders new funders, just trying to raise the alarm for folks who may may or may not be directly connected with small business communities. We saw, for example, with the federal stimulus package that, you know, even though it's two businesses and help keep more of them afloat. When you design a process from the top down that inherently leaves out the entire industry of CDFIs that were like created to serve that community that big banks are not good at serving and because of the systemic discrimination and redlining that we've had in the industry for many years that even when they, you know, included CDFIs in the second round, it was too late for many small businesses, and they were still disconnected from some of the larger CDFIs that were pulled in, who might be SBA lenders and have the kinds of assets under management that were allowed to participate, but may or may not have the direct connection with the small business owners, especially entrepreneurs of color, who wouldn't even qualify for SBA lending, which is the bulk, the bread and butter of our lending portfolio. So for the overall, we have kept our lending available we have connected folks with other lenders, we work a lot to connect anybody who reaches out to us with our business advising platform, so that even if they can't get an immediate, you know, yes for capital, they can work with a financial advisor maybe to refinance or a marketing advisor to pivot online reach customers directly, just to be able to keep even partial revenues going because that can be a maker break for a lot of small businesses, just being able to keep some partial revenues going also allows them to stay eligible for capital in the following month, so that we and other capital providers can say yes, easily more easily compared to if they have no revenues going. We've already seen almost 50% of black owned small businesses in California alone go under. And that is about 27%, I think, nationally, nationally, but California has the largest number of diverse owned small businesses in the country. 33% of Latin XO and small businesses in California have already gone under, according to the June NBER reports and so if you know if we don't see additional federal support, and much more capital through what we call the capillary system of smaller banks, community banks, CDFIs reaching these communities soon, they're not the rounds of PPP and idle support they got weren't enough to last to this extent. We've seen spikes in our lending capital of over 2020 x in the spring, when the shelter in place order started over five x on our business advising team, and we were really lucky this summer to be able to work with Kaiser and Rachel's to be able to scale up the business advising platform, to be able to offer that to more black and entrepreneurs of color nationwide, because that is such an important piece of mentorship to be able to keep more of these small businesses, whether it's financing or marketing or whatever support we can get them. And they often find other lending or capital providers through those advisors as well as usually our biggest source of referrals in many cases. We've also worked really hard in the state of California with the governor's office and a group of other CDFIs, Kiva, some capital providers to be able to come together. And I think the governor's meant to launch this next week or in a couple of weeks, the California Small Business Rebuilding Fund, which is meant to provide some capital to the entrepreneurs who may or may not have gotten PPP support but could really use some capital to stay afloat. And similar to the New York and Chicago funds that launched earlier this spring, late spring, we expect that fun to be over subscribed within two days. That's what they experienced. So we're really trying to raise as much affordable capital into CDFIs as possible to be able to keep our doors and other CDFIs doors open for the entrepreneurs we know need us, especially as we anticipate in our hearing more and more about some additional COVID spikes coming this winter, which will only hurt our small business community and the jobs and the workers that they support, families that those workers support and that ripple effect through our communities. These are the culture keepers in our community, right? Think of your favorite local restaurant, your favorite local shops. Once you get this straight down, the ripple effect that has in our local communities and the culture of our local communities, that is, it's really, really hard to come back. Once you close a business, most businesses never reopen. And lastly, I will just say that, you know, we already saw half of generational black wealth wiped out in the great recession. We are very much on the brink of that right now. We cannot see more capital, affordable capital provided through CDFIs who are best positioned to be able to reach these communities. We're really seeing how that impact is going to play out all over again. And frankly, a lot of foundations corporates are still on the sidelines. They're still trying to reassess or figure out, you know, is more government support coming, whereas my support needed, some of them may have acted in the immediate crisis. Some of them returned calls after the George Floyd murder happened, but many of them honestly have not still gotten off the sidelines and we need people to get off the sidelines and help, whether it is grant capital, whether it's affordable capital, lending PRIs. There's a big effort to engage like half my daff that folks have launched. But it's really all hands on deck. And I think for many of us, the conversations we have with many foundations and impact investors, I hear over and over again like, wow, I had no idea it was that that when I quote like the NDR statistics I was sharing earlier, which, or that people still felt like it was in crisis mode and felt like, oh, the unemployment numbers are getting better. So maybe there is a little bit more of a recovery happening. We don't see that yet. We're still in crisis mode, and many of these businesses are about to be an even worse crisis mode this winter if what we anticipate plays out. So that's, that's where we're trying to get as much capital out the door as fast as we can with this great California fund set up that we've done with the California iBank that allows us to really leverage capital 10X and be able to evolve loans faster and faster. So we're working really hard to be able to get that out the door as best we can. Thank you, Bulbul. I think that this theme of getting capital out the door, trying to provide a bridge to our businesses and I love that phrase of culture keepers. I'm going to use that. The businesses that are providing our community jobs I think is going to be a topic for the next few days here at SoCAP. Unless Meredith or Rachel has anything they want to add specifically to that, I'd like to ask Meredith, you know, I know the Sorenson Impact Foundation moved very quickly at the beginning of the crisis to bring together other managers and to look to provide capital to these kinds of companies that were, you know, fostering economic opportunity. What was your thinking beyond that? And how are you thinking about when we move beyond crisis and into recovery? This is my favorite topic, so thank you for asking. So the context for where we came from when the crisis broke out this year is that for a couple years now we've been trying to explore how we can use the resources and assets that we have beyond our financial assets to bring more people into impact investing. So for example, we have people that fly around the world sourcing potential investments and grantees. And then we have an amazing team at the Sorenson Impact Center that performs robust due diligence. And I get to see those reports and that research and that information, but nobody outside of our organization has historically benefited from that and I think that's typical within the financial and investment communities. And we felt like that was a terrible loss. So when COVID broke out, the conversation turned from this would be really nice to this has to happen, like right now in order for people to move quickly and to have a faster, more efficient impact and do as much as we can. So on top of deploying capital to our own portfolio companies to keep them going, as Bobo mentioned it sounds like we were aligned in the way we're thinking there and reached out to other investors in our network and we're excited to learn of a number of coalitions, the R3 coalition, which some of you may have heard about earlier this morning, as well as Village Capital quickly launched a digital solution called Abica that brings together investors around social entrepreneurs and small businesses through the growth stage actually around the world. And so we jumped into both of those feet first and started contributing our pipeline. So any deal that we saw we tried to get those companies to put themselves on these platforms. And then we tried to find a way to share our research. So we had our team out there presenting almost like they were presenting our investment committee pitch to other investors around the world, whoever would dial in. And we viewed that as a way to somewhat efficiently attract more capital to the entrepreneurs who needed it most and in a time of crisis and so Kate you asked how do we see that going forward even when we're past the crisis and I want to talk about inclusion for a second, because one great thing about the way that we've been working through the crisis is that I think organizations have been more open to sharing more open to, to asking, hey, what are, what other deals are you seeing when we bring together since we're all limited right now by the virtual environment. And by and large the feedback I'm hearing is that that's opening organizations to broader access to different types of deal flow, different types of entrepreneurial networks and resources. And so my hope is that through this more collaborative approach through these more high level deal aggregating resources like abacus that we can start to democratize access on my panel earlier somebody asked, How do you get in, how do you get money, if you're starting a business and I know that how do you get that question a lot from entrepreneurs but taking away that veil is something that we've we've seen work fairly well during the crisis and we'd like to keep that going in the future. That's great. And I'm so glad to hear you say that I've been hearing both here at Socap but just in general in the industry, more of a spirit of collaboration. And, you know, we talk a lot about how the missing middle is where the jobs are created, but it is the missing middle because it's hard to invest there. But the more we who do invest there start sharing our deals. The more we make it easier for the entrepreneurs who need the capital right now. So I think that's a really, really great point. I know you had some examples that you wanted to share and I know it's not ideal. At one point, you might have wanted to share some slides, I think it's possible. But now, okay, at least on my screen I know it's really, really small. Rachel and you're still on mute. I know I'm happy to just, just speak to it. So, yeah, I mean, I think just to pick up on the theme of kind of being able to move quickly. As we started to see what was happening at the start of the pandemic. I mean, obviously as a healthcare institution, we were pretty focused elsewhere in the early days of March and April and whatnot. I mean, we, you know, we had been having conversations with people like bubble and and PCB and, and other organizations about, you know, the idea of supporting small businesses the idea of supporting job job growth in our communities as sort of core to our ability to promote health in our communities for, for some time. And so I think that helped us because we had those relationships be able to, you know, check in and say, how are things these days, and, and pivot and, and we, we made a pretty big commitment in late June of this year, our CEO announced $100 million towards addressing racial equity and, and promoting economic opportunity in our communities and sort of the economic opportunity piece both looking at addressing racial justice and also looking at responding to kind of the immediate crisis and so as part of that our collaboration with PCB. We also have a pretty significant partnership with list. We have a $60 million investment partnership that we've both contributed $30 million into, and that investment comes from our corporate treasury. So that was some that was actually literally years in the making and we were just able to activate it. This summer. So, and that collaboration. We also have a grant aspect to that it's it's looking at investing in businesses responding to the crisis but it's actually you know it was designed prior to the crisis and and it is looking at sort of recovery and and really centering job growth and neighborhood wealth in, in recovery and so we have one piece of that that I just wanted to share today which is, we call it the good jobs fund. And it's a $20 million impact debt fund that offers flexible financing to small businesses that are intentionally bringing quality jobs. And so it's, it's very focused on supporting minority owned businesses but it is sort of more mid level businesses that are major job creators that have also demonstrated a commitment to job quality so we've looked at deals. And we have a worrying conversation with a call center business that's looking at expanding into multiple different cities. They have sort of a growth mentality of, of, of taking over sort of failing like malls like retail blight, and converting those into call center facilities they have a very strong commitment, not only to hiring from sort of untapped councils and underserved communities, but also to providing really good wages and, and just amazing supports to their employees like homeownership programs and things like this so one of our, one of our investments is looking sort of explicitly at this job quality issue, as well as, you know, being aware obviously of the context of the recovery. And I think that I just did want to share I mean, and I think it is really important for institutions like ours that, you know, it's amazing that we have our Treasury assets, and our corporate Treasury is willing to do some impact investing. And of course that we have grant capital and we're making it available to our communities. We're also looking very deeply at, you know, our own hiring practices, recognizing that healthcare is a career, especially an organization like ours, we were very committed to our, our labor partnerships. Most of our workforce is unionized. We're, we're really looking at, you know, how do we find individuals that are underemployed or unemployed in our communities and, and help track them into some of the more entry level jobs that can then get them, you know, on a path to to to advancement in a career, and to a better stable career. We also do the same thing with our business partners. One sort of COVID related story is, you know, I'm sure everybody heard about the personal protective equipment supply chain issues. We had relationships in LA, we had sort of commitment among a lot of our business leaders to and they they built a partnership with apparel apparel factories in LA in Los Angeles to to create masks and gowns and a number of other things that we needed for our personal protective equipment and to save those jobs in LA so we have, I think, built a lot of institutional commitment to these issues that sort of stretches across the different ways that we engage our communities. Wow, that's, it's so interesting to hear, you know, Kaiser has so many angles to come at this particular question I'm curious when you talk about the investments you've made that are specifically thinking about quality jobs. Does Kaiser have a point of view about what are the elements of a of a quality job, what you're looking for. Well, we like, we like PCBs framework. That's part of the reason we're working with them. Yeah, I mean, and, and let's get now working with them to which is great. I think, you know, we definitely believe in fair, you know, family sustaining wages we believe in benefits obviously that's also sort of selfish. I mean, self interested but but of course we think that jobs should provide benefits that should provide leave sick leave. We have some work we do on the policy side that encourages cities to adopt sick leave policies so we, we I think, sort of would check the boxes that you would see anybody check. And we, we judge ourselves against the same criteria. Great. Thanks. Yeah, I know I appreciate the word of support there Rachel. I shared the link to our good jobs framework in the chat, just so everybody has it, because it's not as easy to share screens right now. But it's, it's our online toolkit to be able to work directly for small business owners so that's the target audience for that website with micro actions, even pre crisis right we launched this internally after years of research and like what we need to have a quality job in America, launched it in 2016 as a piece of research, and then user tested it within our own lending portfolio, got some feedback from our own entrepreneurs and launched online, just a year ago, and had just started raising the first cohort of good jobs advisors over the winter to be able to match our small business owners directly not just with a financial advisor on our platform but, you know, for those really committed to the good jobs journey to be able to work in hand with an advisor, specifically on HR and scaffolding the HR and finance quarterly basis to really figure out, you know, when can I make that next investment to be able to help my staff on professional development or on maybe exploring entrepreneurship or what is, you know, what does that next step for me look like. And right now, I guess one thing also to note pre crisis. We were the first CDFI last year to ever be able to offer incentive payments within our lending we call them loan rebates to our lending clients who are making progress on any of the quality job framework. And really, as impact investors right in our roots of our whole organization. We were really looking at how do we do blended finance through our capital model to be able to create a little bit more of a stickiness effect with our lending clients that could say hey you need affordable capital we know you could probably work with a financial advisor, but we really want to stay committed with you on this good jobs agenda. And we're willing to show up in the way you need us to to be able to help you stay on that journey with us. Now, given the crisis that we have, we are not only trying to, you know, keep people on the good jobs journey for those that continue to grow, but really also play a jobs preservation and impact preservation agenda as much as we can. So with whatever grant capital we can raise to be able to beef up those micro grants within our lending to a meaningful enough small grants program, especially for a lot of our entrepreneurs of color who need affordable capital, even more so, who maybe weren't reached off by PPP or other programs yet to be able to just hang on to their business and hang on to as many jobs as they can, because, as we know if the business closes it's almost never going to come back again. But if we can help folks just ride out the tide of the crisis a little bit better. There's a lot more we can then do to continue their trajectory on the good jobs journey with us. So we're doing this in a couple of ways. One is raising, you know, I was talking about affordable capital earlier to really be able to launch a little bit more of a small grants program, especially within California to be able to pair with our lending capital. So we're doing this with by also working with some of the other black led CDFIs. Rachel was mentioning lists that they're also partnering with we're also working with help credit union across the deep south, Appalachia community capital across the Appalachian region, and a couple of other companies. We were already part of an entrepreneurs of color fund with CDFIs nationwide, where we are, you know, helping them access these advisors and good jobs advisors to reach their small business clients and cities like the Bronx and Detroit and others, because, you know, we really obviously beyond being committed to good jobs, as businesses can afford, you know, additional increments of the framework, right now, keeping that impact on track and really figuring out, as investors, how do we continue to innovate and provide the products and services that our entrepreneurs and especially our entrepreneurs of color need and are asking for even more so that we show up in the way that they need us to to keep them on this journey with us. And then one last thing I will just say that I think might be important to note, when we think about our underwriting as an investment into these small business owners, we already saw pre crisis that entrepreneurs of color, when we were doing our underwriting in the last couple of years tend to under report things like personal assets, whether it's because we, they distrust the financial system that their assets might be seized if the debt goes under, or because they don't, you know, think their personal assets have enough worth worth reporting for a variety of reasons we have been really innovative and playing with our lending criteria to be able to make sure that we are not being unintentionally punitive. So when we think about sort of systemic change to be able to show up with the kind of capital and have the kind of outcome through our small business owners as agents of change, being able to invest in them better with a whole entrepreneur approach that's a little bit closer to character based lending was really important for us to get to so that we're not looking at a minimum credit score we're not looking at sort of the, the tight credit boxes that FinTechs or banks tend to look at, because our design is to reach the community that gets rejected by banks, SBA, and even in many cases FinTechs that have a tighter credit box and look for a higher minimum credit score than we do. So just really thinking deeply about if we want to invest better and better in entrepreneurs of color. And if we want to have the kind of community wealth building and racial wealth gap outcomes through them, through creating good quality jobs, what are we doing up and down our policies and our work to really make sure that we are doing systems change we need to do within our organization, and within our industry, and being able to better and better communicate that with stakeholders, especially this year, to be able to try to keep some of those jobs and as many of those jobs and families supported as we can. Great. Thank you. So that is a really rich understanding of how to support our local communities here in the United States. I want to pivot a little bit with you, Merida, because the Sorenson Impact Foundation and UPIA Social Ventures co-invested in a deal this year, which was all about jobs in a company called LAL10. And I have to say that when Merida shared the term sheet with me, it was unlike anything I have seen yet. And all we do is invest for jobs, but it had very particular terms in the term sheet about job creation and income improvement for those for the artisans involved. Merida, if you want to comment about how you think about embedding your values into your investing. Sure. So the term sheet that you're referring to was an example of how we're trying to pivot. When we say we're impact investors, it's interesting because you look at term sheets and oftentimes you don't see the impact in the term sheet. It's the financial terms laid out the same way that any other investor looks at a deal. And we wanted to explore that and think through how do we create some accountability in an achievable way that's supportive to entrepreneurs. But also, I like the word you use bubble incentives, creating incentives to have a multi stakeholder approach. I mean, especially when it comes to jobs and employees, I think that if you're focused on the wrong area, that can become an expense to reduce, not an asset to leverage. So what we did in the last time it deal is so that this company organizes artisans in India and provides them with skills development and access to supply chain and lots of coaching and mentoring so that they can increase their income through aggregated sales, their products to retailers around the world. And when we started looking at the company, we liked the fact that they had really impressive, not only number of jobs that they were creating so upwards of 1000 every year that they've been operating. It'll reach almost 2000 this year. But also the income increase was really impressive. So, so far this year, the artisans who've been working with well 10 have increased their income by over 23% in a fairly short period of time. So we said, okay, great. I'm, we're so happy to see that so the key deal terms in our term sheets of the discount rate and the valuation cap are actually on a little grid. That's front and center in the, in the term sheet and the rate that they get is more beneficial to the entrepreneur if they're overachieving on the impact side so if the benefit to the artisans who are by and large their employees is increasing over time and so we felt like that was one way that we can, we can act with impact at the forefront of what we're doing, but also align everybody's incentives so that the companies incentivize to continue to develop so that they produce better products that generate more revenue. So for that, that one was a no brainer solution for us and so far they're tracking and they're doing really well. They are and they also pivoted really quickly with PPP or PPP sorry, too many P acronyms this year. All right, we have a little over 10 minutes left and I just say three cheers to Bulbul who is not only speaking very eloquently but also staying on top of the chat and responding to people quickly. But we have had some questions that I want to just put out to the broader group. Evan Gill puts are you working with, are any of you working with worker owned or multi stakeholder cooperatives as a means of workforce development and equity. And Bulbul I know you answered this in the chat but maybe you can speak to this and then Meredith and Rachel you can as well. Take it off. So yeah, we definitely look for these within our lending as much as we can, both with applications coming in if they're interested or where our lending can be supportive and helping companies convert into worker ownership. We definitely have some of these in our early history at PCB where we started as an equity investor for the first several years several years before pivoting into CDFI small business lending. We also partner with organizations like project equity and a handful of others that are particularly trying to serve multi stakeholder worker co ops and support those conversions where our lending capital can be valuable in the capital stack. And to be able to access our advising platform because often being able to work with a financial advisor and making that conversion happen is really important. To note, we've seen when we talk about minority owned small businesses, especially we have not only seen a lot of them close up with the last great recession, but, and we're definitely starting to see that again but for the most part, we see them bought out by middle and larger sized companies, not convert to worker ownership and keep the wealth, either because someone in their family doesn't want to take over the business or because they weren't able to or weren't supposed to work or co op models or financing so we're also really trying to work with minority supplier development councils that are nationwide and regional in the country to really be able to make sure that we're integrating into their messaging and work to try to keep wealth in black owned communities for example, and to help make those ownership conversions happen so variety of different, you know, combination of lending advising and some some policy and partnerships work to be able to reach those folks better. Oh, go ahead. I was just going to jump in so as part of the good jobs fund that I mentioned our partnership with list we conversions to employee ownership is sort of a priority there and very interested and I'll put just the, the contact information for that fund in the chat in case people are interested in learning more. And then on the other side, the other thing that we are looking at is looking at our supply chain and trying to understand some of our particularly our diverse suppliers so we were a member of the billion dollar roundtable we spend actually close to $2 billion a year with businesses. And we, we are kind of looking at those business partners and particularly in the area of construction and building related trades we're seeing a lot of minority entrepreneurs kind of reaching retirement age and not showing a lot of interest, or their interest in taking over the business, considering selling the business. And so we are doing actually kind of a deep assessment of our supply chain of our diverse suppliers to understand if there are some among them who may be willing and open to a discussion around employee ownership, and then providing them and connecting them with technical support potentially capital, not our capital but like our partnership with list that sort of thing. I don't think we would direct lend to a supplier but at least not right now. But but just trying to use those different influence pieces and the fact that you know we want to maintain our business relationship with those entities and that could be a very strong aspect of a conversion business plan. That's great Rachel and sorry Meredith I think you had something to add as well. I was just going to give just an example of from from our perspective, we admittedly don't see as many worker owned proposals. But when we do, I would say that we tend to be biased positive and an error towards those solutions because again it's a multi stakeholder approach so we like the idea of building wealth within communities not just with a entrepreneur or shareholders who may or may not be located in communities, but with the workers themselves so an example. We're invested in a company in Liberia where the majority of the workforce is female and the women own 50% of the factory the assets. The company itself and will continue to earn even when they're not working there. And then another example is we have a company here in the United States it's called indeed well and they're an affordable housing producer. They, they have a really neat model where they go into communities partner with the communities, and then their employees on 20 or 25% of each factory as well. This company also pays a living wage they fully pay for healthcare. They put their employees through vocational education I mean they really are impact and all angles. And from our perspective companies who are who are thinking about it that way again it's such aligned incentives that as an impact investor we, we gravitate towards those types of solutions. Great. Thank you. I was just going to jump in I think Meredith pointed out something interesting where she was saying that they don't see a lot of these coming at them in terms of investment capital ask. One thing we saw in our research in our good jobs research last year, pre crisis and our impact survey was that the companies that we were making the most good jobs progress with with their workers tended to be companies that were, you know, slightly on the larger size of small business and largely white male owned. So, that for us, there is an inherent conversation internally ongoing month by month of, yes, we are committed to good jobs and for all, you know, low and moderate income communities, where the bulk of our capital goes. But we're also really committed to investing in BIPOC owned small businesses. And so that inherent challenge of how do we help support more of those folks that tend to be smaller and younger in size of business earlier stage with the kind of capital and advisory support that reaches them where their needs are to just get them in and help them on that journey. Maybe they aren't as fully baked coming in. I think we see similar demographics frankly in the past in the be lab community. So, really just trying to translate the language we use around impact and community in a way that resonates with the language that the communities that we want to reach even better use. I think it's something we have continued to learn and iterate on to make sure that they don't impact them with impact investing language that they don't use or they don't necessarily connect with immediately to translate it into their language better. So just a word of sort of insight that I think we share at least similar to some of what Meredith was saying earlier. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Bulbul. And I was going to sort of in a similar vein just, you know, in terms of impact investing language and the kind of capital that is available. You know, one of the things that has frustrated me as an investor is we're an equity investor. And so typically we can't support co ops for legal reasons. We just can't get our capital in and yet because they really do represent what we're trying to do, which is, you know, wealth generation and stability for the job holders. You know, we are actually beginning to move to more depth, because that's the kind of capital that they need and that's helpful. I think we have time for one more question, which is do you have any examples this is Nicole Tanner of ways in which you're working in partnership with any public sector partners such as health education and or social services. And I will let anyone take that if you've got a response for Nicole. I can share a few things, not explicitly investment related but so one piece we but good jobs related I suppose one thing we announced a couple like a month or two ago a partnership with the state of California to to hire 500 contact people in the state that is essentially to support coven 19 spread by by contacting people who have encountered a coven positive individual. As part of that we are working with a nonprofit institution public health Institute, and we are focusing on underemployed people of color for the job roles and we built into the partnerships are good paying benefits and so just from that angle. Again, not necessarily an investment opportunity the other area that we're very deeply involved in is in schools. K through 12 and we've had relationships with schools throughout our footprint are our markets for over a decade. We have a program called private schools and initially it was really focused on healthy eating and and activity and in the last couple of months really pivoted to be really focused on resilience and mental health, both of the students and of the faculty. And so, and then we've also done a lot of work through that to to, we developed a playbook for kind of safe and healthy learning of schools. And so we have, we were kind of able to triangulate a lot of things. We've also been involved there's a collaboration that an organization called healthcare without harm has been supporting that looks at actually food, food sourcing for schools and healthcare and that does have an investment component that we haven't directly invested today but we've been more supporting on the on the supply chain side so we've touched them from a few different angles. That's, that's great. And that is perfect timing Rachel thank you. We have about 30 seconds left. And I just want to thank our incredibly concrete and specific and valuable partners today, you know this was not an high level conceptual talk it's about how do you really can make it happen. And we all know that a good job is the path to stability into building a life that that allows you to pursue your dreams. So, thank you to Bulbul and Meredith and Rachel, and all of you for being part of this. We look forward to seeing you in other sessions over the next few days, and over the course of our work. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much everyone.