 Hi, good morning, everyone. I'm Southern. I'm from Mississippi, so I'm gonna say that again. Good morning, everyone. On behalf of the Millennials Initiative, I want to warmly welcome y'all to New America and today's event, the Millennial Public Policy Symposium. New voices and ideas on care, community, technology, and civic engagement. My name is Melody Frierson, and I have the pleasure of serving as not only the project manager of the Millennial Public Policy Fellowship, but also, as today's, if you need anything, let me help you, Representative. Today's symposium is the result of months of hard work and planning from our fellows and support from colleagues across our organization. To give a tiny bit of background, one year ago, we received nearly 500 applications from young people across the country and around the world, seeking to be a part of the Millennial Public Policy Fellowship program. Our goals for the fellowship was to bring together a truly diverse cohort of young folks to work within New America's renowned policy programs and also explain and also expand understandings of what a think tank looks like and how it operates. Our 10 Millennial Fellows here in this room today arrived at New America in late August 2017 and immediately impacted the organization and their respective programs. We are indebted to our New America colleagues in Better Life Lab, Family-Centered Social Policy, Education Policy Program, Political Reform, Resource Security, Public Interest Technology, the Cyber Security Initiative, and the Open Technology Institute, as well as our friends at the Institute for Policy Studies and the Poor People's Campaign for challenging, mentoring, and lifting up our Millennial Fellows. Before I hand things over to our next member of the welcoming committee, I want to do a quick bit of housekeeping. Today's event will be live-streamed and we welcome folks in this room and those watching from elsewhere to join us in conversation on Twitter with the hashtag Millennial Public Policy. Don't forget the second end and Millennial is tricky. All of today's sessions will take place in this room, our main event space. Restrooms are located outside and towards the front desk. Should you want to connect to Wi-Fi, the information is located within the front page of your program. Speaking of programs, in it you'll find today's schedule, short bios on all of our participants today, descriptions of each Millennial Fellows policy research projects, and excerpts from our blog, The Direct Message. Once we felt that we welcomed y'all sufficiently, we'll move right into our four distinct sessions designed by the Millennial Fellows. New perspectives on communities of care, the promises and perils of technology and big data, policy engagement and political activism, and to round out the day, expanding the table in a generational activism and policy change. In addition to engaging y'all through these sessions, we hope to use our breaks, lunch, and closing reception to connect with each of you and have deeper conversations on the important and timely issues discussed today. This symposium and its fellowship program would not be possible without the generous support of the City Foundation. Thank you for being committed to helping young people build an entrepreneurial mindset, acquire leadership, financial and workplace skills, and begin to engage in a formal economy through a first job. With all of that said, please join me in welcoming City Foundation program officer Julie Hodgson to the stage. Good morning, everyone. It's great to be here with you today. Thank you, Melody, for that warm welcome. I'm Julie Hodgson. I'm a program officer at the City Foundation, and I oversee a lot of our youth programming in the United States. And today's event is exciting for many, many reasons. But for those of us who've kind of worked behind the scenes, I would say it's especially exciting because it's really the culmination of a two-year effort led by New America with support from the City Foundation to invest in future policy leaders and to identify and source a new set of policy ideas. The City Foundation partnered with New America in 2016, I believe, to create the Millennial Public Policy Fellowship Initiative, which complements our Pathways to Progress Initiative. Pathways to Progress, for those of you who don't know, is the City Foundation's film-thropic commitment to support programs that help young people connect to job training programs and career readiness opportunities. It's a hundred million dollar film-thropic commitment connecting 500,000 youth to those types of opportunities by 2020. And so the Millennial Public Policy Fellowship was designed to identify a diverse set of young people who could engage in a healthy, robust public policy discourse as well as to support their professional development as critical thinkers, as policy entrepreneurs, and really just as leaders. And I think kind of what the Foundation found so unique about this is that it was giving a platform to Millennials to identify solutions to some of the country's most challenging issues. And you know, I think it makes a lot of sense, especially for Millennials and the issues that their generation is facing, that we would engage them in helping us come up with the answers since they're so close to these issues. And I will tell you, having met with the fellows, they are a remarkable group. I was humbled to say the least by their intelligence. They are extremely thoughtful. They're engaged in some really interesting conversations, a lot of which we'll hear today. And I'm just thrilled to be here, thrilled to listen. I think they have a lot to tell us and I think that a lot of the solutions, you know, are within them and really excited to hear the conversation. So with that, I want to thank them because they're really kind of the driving force behind all of this for all of their effort and for embracing the fellowship. I mean, I think they've embraced it beyond our expectations over the last eight months. And then, of course, our partners at New America have been great in helping us bring this vision to life. So thank you for hosting us and for all of your work. And with that, I believe I will turn it over to Tyra, who's going to give another welcome. So thank you. Good morning, everyone. My name is Tyra Mariani, and I am the executive vice president here at New America. As I was looking at the lineup, I did kind of feel like the welcome committee. So for the third time, I will say welcome and particularly our special welcome to those of you that are visiting us from externally. I am really, really excited about the symposium that's happening today. As I was reflecting on the day and meetings that I had yesterday as well as today, I was reminded that New America was started almost 20 years ago by four individuals who were of millennial age. They were roughly young 30-somethings. And it is quite remarkable to both think about where the organization is now. And actually, in our leadership team meeting yesterday, we were starting to just recall some of the accomplishments over the 20 years. And so it feels really fitting that we're having this conversation today, both in the context in which we sit of what's happening in our country and our world, but also in the context of an organization that is about to celebrate 20 years in existence. And so I am personally excited not only because of the millennial cohort that I have engaged with, but also the millennials in general that in the room. For those of you that aren't familiar, New America is actually comprised of majority 20 and 30-somethings. In fact, 46 percent of our almost 200-person organization is made up of people that are 20-something years in age. And as an organization, we deeply believe in new voices, new ideas, and new tools. And I know that today's conversation will be no departure whatsoever from that. And I wondered what would come to fruition, what seeds would be planted, what would be our fruit that we will point back to today's conversation and say, it started here, there was an interesting idea that happened here among the millennials as well as just an intergenerational conversation, which is so, so very critical that it's because it started here that we can say that it bore fruit because of what happened today. So with that in mind, I will close with Reed's closing line and his letter, which is let's get on with the program. Have a great day. Okay. I'm Reed Kramer. I'm the director of the Millennials Initiative here at New America. And I guess I don't have to welcome you, but I can thank you for being here at the symposium. And with the support of many colleagues here at New America, this program's been organized, the symposium's been organized to facilitate a set of dynamic policy conversations. And I'd actually like to thank Melody Frierson, who really is the extremely able manager of this project. And also thank you for your work and our events and communications team who've helped get us to this day. And really a leadership of New America has been extremely supportive and a lot of our colleagues in the policy program. So it's been a pleasure to work with everybody and it really has been a group effort. I'm extremely grateful for Julie and her colleagues at the City Foundation, both for their financial support of this endeavor, this work, but also their real engagement around promoting pathways to progress for a diverse set of opportunity youth in the country, across the country, and also around the world. It's very important work and they've really been leaders in this field and it's been really grateful to engage with them. So the initiative was created to acknowledge that today's youth really are coming of age in a time of uncertainty. And there's a growing disconnect between the experience that they're living and the prevailing public policy that is either providing support or not providing support. And there's a misalignment between the social and economic conditions and it's creating a precariousness that is undermining the potential of an entire generation. So there is an imperative to develop a new set of ideas that can meet the moment that can create new pathways forward and ladders upward for the rising generations. And that was the thinking behind creating the fellowship opportunity. Good policy should be aligned with prevailing attitudes and behaviors and if that's true, then we need the engagement of those impacted to help drive the ideas generation process. And as Melody said, we designed the fellowship to identify this remarkable cohort of individuals who could contribute constructively to policy conversations and then also to support their growth and their professional development. So you'll see them today. They've organized this session. Their work is available on our blog, the DM, which is on our website, direct message for any of the non-millennials in the room. And there's also selected pieces of each of them in the symposium program. They've all been embedded in the different programs across the organization and working together, they've organized the symposium, really with the goals of elevating new voices and perspectives, addressing contemporary policy issues in cross-cutting ways. You know, they're all working on different things so we would come together as a group and bring some really unique perspectives to engage with each other. And then to begin to identify what some potential solutions could be to some of the most consequential issues of our time. And before we dig in further, I did want to consider what some of the limits and the value are in using a generational lens and then offer some kind of foundational data to ground our conversation. So the caveat to begin with is that defining and naming a generation is not a science, it's really more of an art, and we have to figure out how it can be helpful and where it can obfuscate insight. The Pew Research Center has been really helpful in kind of identifying a data-driven approach, so I've relied on a lot of their analysis. They define millennials as those born between 1981 and 1996, so the youngest are 21 and the oldest are 37, and that's obviously a pretty big spread that captures many different aspects of the life course. But it does give us a cohort to work with analytically, and using Pew's definition, we see that millennials are now 22% of the total population, 30% of potential voters, and 38% of working age adults, and they're clearly outpacing boomers more and more every day, and by 2025, they're going to comprise 75% of the labor force. They do share kind of historic and cultural experiences that are distinct from other generations. You can see there were early memories of some confusing social disruption with the Oklahoma City bombing, for instance, in 1995, the Columbine shooting in 1999, political disputes associated with sharpening political polarization with the impeachment of Bill Clinton and his acquittal in 1998. Millennials were between 5 and 20 when 9-11 occurred, and then they grew up during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And certainly, for me, the Great Recession looms large, and particularly its aftermath, which has continued to have an impact. Millennials were between the ages of 12 and 27 during the 2008 election, when the force of the youth vote helped elect the first black president, and then 2016 was a pretty memorable election as well, a surprising result, to say the least. And over their lifetime, I'll also note that a lot of socioeconomic indicators have gotten dramatically better. Teen pregnancies down, smokings down, drinking hard liquor, violent crime has had a deep, sharp decline during their lifetime. But if we look at the world with generalizations, we do miss some of the diverse experiences, and this generation is actually defined by its diversity. It's the most ethnically diverse generation in American history. 44% identify as something other than white, non-Hispanic. Minority shares are increasing across the board for all groups, especially Latinx, who 21% of millennials identify as Latino or Hispanic, and that's up from 9% for boomers. And given this diversity, we really have to be pretty skeptical of claims of universal experiences. Still, these are just demographic realities, and it's going to impact society as a whole. We've got older, whiter boomers that are kind of contrasted with millennials who are more diverse, and there's potentially a generational reckoning that could be unfolding, that's going to play out in policy debates, this cultural gap between the older, whiter society and the more diverse society. And millennials are really serving as this bridge to a much more diverse America. This is going to be the future of the country, and it will remake institutions and will remake the country. And if we acknowledge this diversity, we're also acknowledging that the experience of millennials of color is very distinct and actually quite perilous. Black, Latino, other millennials of color face a number of unique challenges. Unemployment is higher, living in poverty is more prevalent, wealth holdings are dramatically lower than for white counterparts, and violent crime more likely to be experienced, involvement in the criminal justice system. These are some of the issues that we're going to hear about today. But the diversity of the generation really should prompt us to look at where these disparities are needing to be examined more closely, looking for where policies not responding to current conditions. And what are those conditions? I'm going to just provide a couple of notes here of things that we can look at. The educational landscape has changed quite dramatically. There are more degrees and credentials, actually tripling since the 1960s, but we've also seen higher tuition and higher student debt. And our education policy program here in New America tracks a lot of these trends quite ably. They're producing a lot of great work. They document how students have taken on a lot more debt as tuition has gone up than their parents did, actually 300% more debt than their parents. And unfortunately, it doesn't always lead to a degree, which can be also pretty debilitating. So this debt and finances generally are changing behavior over the life course. We see marriage changing, millennials are less likely to marry. When they do, they marry older. Having children is less prevalent. The birth rate, not a lot of attention to this in our discourse, but it's actually reached a record low five years in a row in 2016. Lower birth rate. Since the recession, young adults are half as likely to own homes as young adults were in 1975. So previous generations, homeownerships, much less. And rents are going up at the same time. So more than in the past, let's see 15 years, the number of people that are spending more than half of their income on rent has gone up 50%. And this is really through no fault of their own. This is the economy that they've inherited. They've come of age in a stagnant wage economy. They're earning 20% less than boomers did at the same stage of life. And let's see. This is the net worth slide. Without the home equity to bolster the balance sheet, younger Americans are significantly behind older generations in terms of wealth accumulation. The median net worth is today 30% below its peak in 2007. But younger families, families headed by someone under the age 35, net worth is 41% lower today than it was in 1995. And in contrast, households headed by someone 75 years and older, seniors, their wealth has risen 32% in the last three years. So there's actually a millennial wealth gap that's emerging. And it should be quite alarming, given how wealth is so important for many aspects of stability. And when we combine the millennial wealth gap with the racial wealth gap, which is historic and it endures and it's growing, I think this is a terrible combination. Throughout US history, we've seen how every means of wealth accumulation, whether it's access to higher ed, home ownership, access to credit, it's been systematically denied to minorities. And therefore, we have these kind of net worth disparities that are up there 10 times wealth holdings of white households versus African-American households in recent figures. And so these are the new economic realities of the country. It's certainly complicating how young people are making decisions about their life, how they're assembling the building blocks of success and making the journey up the economic ladder much more difficult. And financial security has become the aspiration rather than the traditional features of the American dream that we talk about as a society, whether that's family, buying a home, moving into a community, settling down. So that's the state of play right now. And is this a problem? Is this a chance to respond? I think it's both. And increasingly, millennials are going to lead ships in public opinion that are kind of creating opportunities for large-scale policy change. We can look at this in a lot of different ways. As a cohort, they're skeptical of political parties. They want to be independent, but also, they lean liberal. They're open to big ideas. This is the spread of those that are voting. So this is, as a group, they're open to policy solution and big ideas. I think that's the point. The meta point I want to make to kind of close here is that all of this matters in a democracy, what people think about current affairs and the issues of the day. And the value, there's a value in elevating kind of new generational voices and perspectives in a search for policy solutions. So clearly, we've got some challenges in the political moment today. There's an undermining of norms that I think is making the system of governance much more challenging. It's adding some significant stress points. There's really value in thinking about the long game about what policies could work at scale over time. And I think we need to be vigilant in looking out for these solutions that can work at scale. We want to observe the world, ask questions, search for effective and durable policy solutions. So that's the task today. That's the spirit that we're convening this symposium in. We're going to stage a series of conversations that are going to really try to elevate some of these consequential issues of the day. And I'll just review some of the themes quickly. These are the featured sessions where we're going to ask some of these questions. We've got changes in the economy, evolving gender roles, changing expectations of families and employers. So what does this mean for how we care for each other? What does this mean for how we support care and educate our diverse populations? What's our collective responsibilities for care? So that the first panel is going to dig into that. Second, we're going to navigate looking at how big data and technological innovation has changed the landscape of how we live. And there's promise in peril ahead, which we're going to explore. How do we bounce these rights and social protections? And how do we implement technological solutions that can be transformative? And then third, there's political engagement that's required to make policy change. What's the civic space like? How do we govern it? Where policy and politics meet? What's the role of movement building and advocacy? How do we expand the table to get more voices in a meaningful exchange looking for effective policy change? So those are the questions today. Thanks for being here. Stick with us. And we are going to get on with the program. Thank you. So let's have Maika come up and bring on the next session. Thank you. Welcome to the first of several enlightening discussions we have planned for you today. My name is Maika Samson. And for the last eight months or so, I've had the privilege of introducing myself as the Millennial Public Policy Fellow in the Family-Centered Social Policy Program here at New America. This panel, New Perspectives on Communities of Care, is split into two roughly 30-minute sessions with a Q&A at the very end. In the first half of the panel, I'm joined by Elisa Dorana, the Senior Policy Analyst in the Better Life Lab, and Rodlyn Miller, the Millennial Public Policy Fellow in the Better Life Lab. In the second panel, Jenny, the Millennial Fellow from the Education Program, will lead a conversation with her colleagues Ernest Oswego and Abigail Swisher, members of the pre-K through 12th program and the higher ed teams respectively. So one of our goals for these conversations is to move past the wise, the justifications for care policy and to really get into the weeds of policy philosophy and in design. We hope that by now we're in agreement that people need paid family leave, that the patchwork of American public assistance programs aren't doing enough to meet the needs and aspirations of their constituents and that of course American public and private education systems are failing to foster equity. It's easy to whip up a populist frenzy over what's obviously wrong, but it's much harder to focus our attention to the myriad of historical, social, and technical considerations that must be taken into account if we were to ever get things right. Elisa and Rodlyn's work in the Better Life Lab exemplifies this commitment in depth to research in the field. They research and write about barriers to social and income equality, especially at the intersections of work, gender, and social policy. Before joining New America, Roslyn studied anthropology at Stanford University. Her studies focused on urban structures and their relationships to the public and private sectors. And before joining New America, Elisa's work spans the Department of Housing and Urban Development's promise zones initiatives. She worked in social services in the Washington metro area, and she did full bright research on social policy integration in the EU. Elisa, you recently offered an article that appeared in Slate on the Republican plan for paid family leave, and I think it really highlights some of the issues we'd like to talk through today. Specifically the messy things that happen when we come to a consensus on a good thing like paid family leave, but we have wildly different ideas about how to make that happen. And so to kick off our conversation, I wanted to ask the both of you if you could talk through some of the major points of this paid family leave policy proposal and some of the philosophical issues it raises in American approaches to care policy. Sure. So maybe to start, I don't know how familiar people are with paid family leave in the room, but there are currently two general proposals on the table. The family act, which was introduced by Senator Gillibrand and Representative Delaro, would create an insurance scheme so that people would pay into the scheme about a cup of coffee, the cost of a cup of coffee a day, and then when they need to take time off to have a child, to care for a loved one, or undergo cancer treatment, something like that, that they would have the ability to take that time and not lose their source of income. So that has been introduced several times. It's basically a Democrat only bill at this point. There has been interest from the administration, which is now crossed over into Marco Rubio's office to author a Republican plan. And so that plan has come together as sort of an extension of the social security system. So in the article that we authored last week, we were looking sort of at the merits of that bill. Surprisingly, or we're not so surprisingly, it's not particularly well thought out and would exacerbate funding issues within social security itself and also not be inclusive of the needs that most families have. So in the case of that policy, the Republicans would like to fold parental leave into our current social security system. So not even though the majority of people who take time off take time off for their own personal medical care, this would just be limited to new parents. And if new parents were to take time off pulling money out of their social security, they would have to delay retiring. So there are, well, there are multiple concerns, or I have multiple concerns about that, mainly that we already see a lot of discrimination of new parents, particularly women, the wage gap emerges when women are in their 20s and 30s. So that is one issue. And then the second is that the workers that probably need this the most who probably need to retire early because they are in very physically or emotionally demanding fields might not be able to if they take time off to have a child and then can't retire when they're no longer able to work. So yeah. Yeah, I completely agree with all of that. And I just want to add that right now we're at a moment where people are finally putting family values first in the sense that paid family leave has not always had a consensus about its value. Right now in American workplaces we expect people to adjust their lives, their families to the nine to five or to the shift work or to whatever it is that people are working in rather than making workplaces work for people. And that's a huge problem that I think paid family leave could be a cornerstone of fixing. And right now about 14 percent from 2016, that's kind of an old statistic, but about 14 percent of Americans have access to paid family leave, meaning that if you need to take six weeks off to give birth to your kid or to take care of a sick child or even an elder that doesn't have anyone else to take care of them, you have to sacrifice your salary, you have to sacrifice your position at work just to make sure that you can do those caretaking responsibilities. And that's not fair. And when we passed the Family Medical Leave Act that helped a little bit that provided unpaid leave for up to 12 weeks. And even not all Americans have access to that, not all companies are big enough. And yeah, why did we, you put policy forward and say this is important, this is valuable, but then not make sure that every worker has access to it or has the ability to take it. Yeah, and just a, I mean, a quarter of women in the US go back to work within two weeks of having a baby because they can't afford to take time off. So not to mention like issues around people who are disabled or like in the process of dying or there are many reasons why people need time to take off, but yeah, so the situation is fairly dire at the moment. I think part of the reason, well I don't want to speculate too much, but part of the reason why this proposed plan pulls from Social Security is over concerns about its cost. Frequently, the argument against developing robust safety net programs is that the cost will be enormous. And could you speak to that sort of scarcity framework and how it's framed other social policies? Sure, I mean Roslyn will also speak to this, but I think that we're in agreement that this is more a question of priorities and paid family leave would act as an insurance scheme, like people would pay money in and then they would have the right to take that money out when they need to take time off. So comparatively, it's, I mean it would function similar to like Social Security or Medicare, other social insurance programs like that. I think it's partially a question of values and whether we think that people in the US should live in dignity. I mean everyone is going to be born and they're all going to die and probably get sick at some point, so it'd be nice to support them in that process. And at the same time, a lot of the people, we've been subsidizing a lot of the way that we live on low, the work of low income, mostly women and often immigrant women who do like a lot of the child care, elder care, the domestic care work in this country for minimum wage or around there. So yeah. Yeah, I mean in the end we set our budget and what we decide is a priority for our nation is what we're going to have money for. And the policies that specifically paid family leave and then the Family Act, sorry, specifically those policies are created, they're well thought, they have a budget scheme in mind and it's something, at least the Family Act, is something where employees and employers pay into and it's a social insurance fund. So there is money for it if we decide that we care about people's lives and beyond dignity, beyond need meetings, we're allowing people to have freedom to live a life that they choose in a way that they choose beyond just meeting the baseline need, everyone deserves happiness. I think we can clarify what we really mean by our values in the policy making process. I frequently think about David Elwood's original plan for welfare reform in the 90s, which was a lot more compassionate than the current cash assistance programs we have now. And I think a lot of his ideas sort of took on a life of their own and even though he did discuss a lot of values about equity and fairness to folks looking for assistance and trying to get back on their feet, the tagline became and welfare as we know it. Personal responsibility is a goal of ours, that's independence is a goal of ours, it's a shared American value of ours. And those values really coalesce into something quite different than what you would imagine them to be. So my question is how do we really be clear about our values and clear about what we hope to achieve and not let our ideas get lost in the legislative machine? So I think that framing this as a family issue, an issue that people contribute to, it is both a public good and that we want to invest in the health and future of our country and our well-being as it stands right now. It's also something that exists both in the U.S. and worldwide, so this is not some sort of radical idea we're not talking about. I mean there are many other policy issues that are a little bit more far-fetched, but this exists in California, it exists in Rhode Island, it exists in New Jersey and then there's new legislation in Washington state, Washington D.C. and a number of other places. So I think it's partially like how can we reframe this as like a way that Americans can support their own families and that also we contribute to child development, maternal health, which is worsening in the U.S. gender equality and other sorts of things. Frankly we need to start with culture change. We need to make it normal to value caretakers, to value domestic workers and shift workers in all of the people that make other work possible rather than sort of idolizing this one idea of success. Yes, by putting families first we can get on the same page with values, but even if we're on the same page if we do get a good paid family leave program we're not going to see equal utilization rates unless we address gender equality, unless we address wage disparities. Something you mentioned is the unintended consequence of the proposed plan that it would, it might incentivize employers to discriminate against young parents. What frameworks would you employ to avoid some of those unintended consequences? Usually I mean in our work usually what we try and think about is like how would this policy affect historically marginalized communities by gender, by race, at the intersection of those two things, definitely able people, that sort of thing. I mean what we know about the Family Medical Leave Act for example is that it did enable some mostly affluent, mostly white people to take time off when they need it, but only people that can afford to take unpaid leave. So in a way it is exacerbated inequality even though the idea behind it was to families take care of themselves. So in thinking about any sort of future paid leave scheme or other types of social policies, like thinking through what incentives could be included in the policy or like how this will affect different populations. One of the things that we have seen from other countries is that it's really important to try and get men in particular to take leave so often to help so that women are not still disproportionately shouldering the majority of the care work in this country, both in terms of paid leave and unpaid leave as well and unpaid work in their families. So something, making sure that language around paid leave is gender neutral, but that there's also an incentive for the second parent or caregiver in a family to take it and making sure that it's the pay is high enough so that our lowest income workers have the ability to take time off. When California first implemented their paid leave scheme, the amount of money that people would get if they took leave was just 55% of their wage. So if your minimum wage earner and you are only getting 55% of your income when you have a baby, it's still not really affordable to live in San Francisco on 55% of minimum wage. So bumping that up especially for low income workers is really, really important. And California recently did bump that wage replacement up by, I think, to about 70%. To about 70%. And in order to encourage men to take paid family leave in San Francisco, in San Francisco men get 100% wage replacement rates for taking paid family leave and that encouraged utilization rates as well. I think this also brings up the question of the drawbacks and benefits to targeted versus universal programs. On one hand, targeted programs can somehow like single out some of the most marginalized people in our society and really draw negative attention to them. But that's where we need to foster equity, right? So could you speak to some of the perils of that? The targeted approaches? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can't just capture everybody with a targeted approach. And often you isolate the community that you're hoping to serve. And there is a stigma associated with it as well, especially if you're getting vouchers for things and waiting in line forever. For example, if you're, if you're trying to get food for your kids, and you have to wait in front of a food shelter for an hour early in the morning with people walking by in front of you, there's a certain stigma associated with that for trying to provide for your family. And we see this all the time in education as well with voucher, education voucher programs being offered for community colleges, but not for for your universities. What we're doing is we're saying that people are worth a certain value. And maybe the numbers show that that's where the impact is, but we're not centering the human, we're centering the statistic in that sense. So yeah. And then also universal approaches have a problem with ignoring marginalized communities. So I guess the big question is how do you balance both to make sure that a policy really does address the need that you wanted to rather and the people that you wanted to serve rather than your stereotype or perception of what a population needs. And I think that we can do that by including people in the policy making conversation and hiring the people with lived experience as well as in our research design, actually incorporating qualitative research. Yeah. No, I mean, I think that's great. And I remember hearing Virginia Eubanks recently talk about her new book. And one of the things she mentioned is like policy, if you're implementing a policy or research question and you would be unwilling to participate in that policy itself. So that's probably a good gut check as to like whether whether you're on the right track. But certainly, I think, including the communities you're trying to serve and the research and policy making process, making sure I I think that I generally have more of a preference for universal policies than targeted. That's the approach that the Better Life Lab takes and thinking about P.D., but making sure that we're yes, designing policies or research with communities and for communities that have been distributed. Yeah. And I think a historical approach to policy making is something that's often left out of the traditional policy making process. We tend to speak in euthymisms when we design policies like I was doing it earlier saying marginalized populations rather than talking about I'm getting more specific the way black women specifically were excluded from a lot of major social programs in the United States. And now that's a direct result of, you know, chattel slavery in the United States. That is usually considered sort of irrelevant to our design process when it comes to social policy, but it's completely irrelevant. And if you can speak to the ways that your work often tries to integrate history when proposing policies, I'd love to hear that. Yeah. I mean, with the case of the Republican paid leave plan and one of the issues with designing paid leave through social security is that a lot of the populations that we're talking about are cultural workers, domestic workers, like mostly like people of color, they're not a part of the social security, they were excluded from the Social Security Act, they're excluded from a lot of the labor protections in this country. So as we think through the retirement security, like unemployment, paid leave, whatever the policy is, I think that like looking at sort of, yeah, the construction of that policy, like where did it come from, who was included, who was not, how is that changing? I mean, right now, more people work it sort of in contract hourly work. And so even if they had been included in our safety net before, they're probably not included anymore now, given the changing structure of work itself. So, yeah. I'm curious about how this applies to your work as well with family-centered social policy. Yeah. Family-centered social policy absolutely loves historical approaches to policy building. And I think a lot of that is not just like a sort of historical research, but directly bringing in the people who are going to use these programs to the policymaking conversation. People who are going to benefit from these programs should have a say in how they're designed and how they operate, rather than sort of going to the technocrats and the people with fancy degrees calling out myself here. But including those folks at the table is really critical. Any other last words before we wrap up and go to our second panel? All right. So with that, I think I'm going to welcome the education team up to the stage. Thank you, everyone. Can you hear me? We're going to go ahead and jump right into our second conversation where I hope we continue to grapple with some of these same questions, but bring it into the education space. I've invited with me two of my colleagues from the Education Program at New America. They're working on two distinct projects that I think could serve well as case studies to begin to impact some of these questions around how do you intervene with care? How do you design policies with different communities in mind and ensure equity? So we have Abigail Swisher, who is with our K to 12 program, and her work revolves around college and career readiness. And today she's going to be talking about some of the work she's been doing in the last year on youth apprenticeship. And we also have Ernest Usuego, who is a program associate with our higher ed team, who does a lot of research and writing on a host of different issues. But today it's going to be talking about predictive analytics and higher education. So just to start off, can you guys give sort of a brief overview of what your work is? And we'll start with some of the positive aspects, the promise. If we do this well, who can benefit? And then also jump into some of the challenges and ethical concerns that are coming to the fore as you research this further. Okay, I can start. Yeah, so thank you, Jenny. And thank you all for being here. Like Jenny mentioned, the topic area that I'm currently working on in New America is predictive analytics and its use in higher education. Predictive analytics being the idea that institutions are taking historical data and then using it to make predictions about what really I should say forecast what student behaviors lead to success and learn more about what types of behaviors students make in general. I think the great promise of predictive analytics and in general the conversation about data and higher education and data use is that data used ethically and effectively has the potential to teach us more about student success than we've ever known. It can inform the way that we learn. It can inform the way that we intervene when we know that students are off course. And there are a number of other things, right, that having access to data can teach us. But the key in all of that right is ethical and effective use. I think if done properly, everyone, all students benefit from predictive analytics. I'll say all students, but like students at the institutions that are practicing this because it's still relatively new work. I actually think that first and foremost, students from historically underserved communities can benefit the most from predictive analytics. And I'm sure we'll get into that through this conversation. Thank you, Jenny. Thank you, Ernest. And thank you all for being here today. So as Jenny mentioned, my colleagues and I have embarked on this year-long project around the equity dimensions of youth apprenticeship. And if you aren't familiar with youth apprenticeship or if your idea of youth apprenticeship is still, you know, Benjamin Franklin slaving away in the workshop, youth apprenticeship has come a long way since our traditional conception of it, although it is a many centuries old program design. The idea being that it's a partnership between three institutions, the high school, a post secondary partner, and industry to provide students with paid on-the-job learning along with classroom learning in a post-secondary setting for post-secondary credit. And ideally, at the end of it, it should lead students, we believe, in a high quality program to a family sustaining wage job and a path forward in a specific industry. So functionally, what this looks like is a student either during the school day or after school, going to a work site, getting paid on-the-job mentorship in workplace. And either during the day or on the weekends, evenings, also going to a post-secondary institution to receive college level coursework in their industry area. At the end, they should get an industry-recognized credential or something that really validates the work experience that they've had. And as, you know, this program model has become more popular in the past few years, questions are really arising about who we see youth apprenticeship as for. There are a lot of potential benefits that it can accrue to a student. For instance, getting post-secondary credit early can reduce time and debt to a degree. It provides students a really stable pathway with built-in mentors to get to and through post-secondary into a family sustaining wage career. And it also means that for students who by necessity have to work while they are in high school, they're not working at McDonald's, they're not working at Subway, they're working in a workplace that will not only provide them with a living wage, but also move their careers forward. So that's, I think, a really tremendous potential. And so, you know, as we are thinking about who this is for, very often the discussion has come to this as a solution for students who we know traditionally struggle to get to and through college and into family sustaining wage careers. Specifically, very often this is put forward as a solution for low-income students and students of color. And as much as, you know, there is, I think, a tremendous potential benefit to that, we also have a pretty pernicious history as a nation around tracking and vocational education that has to be a part of the conversation today. And that was really the starting point of this project. It's a year-long sort of listening campaign across the country done with the support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation at the end of which we're hoping to have a better framework for what equitable program design would look like as these programs proliferate. Ken, Ernest, can you say a little bit more about what some of the challenges are for sort of the wrong turns that have been taken with your particular work? Because I think it's quite interesting and would lead us to the conversation. Yeah, certainly. So I think right now the challenge that institutions in particular are grappling with in relation to using predictive analytics is just this idea of practicing ethical and effective use while mitigating some of the effects and some of the kind of built-in negatives, unfortunately, that we know about using data. We live in, unfortunately, a time where we're still grappling with the effects of structural inequity. Earlier, Eliza mentioned the work of Virginia U-Banks. Kathy O'Neill also wrote a great book called Weapons of Math Destruction talking about the idea that currently algorithms while they happen to the benefit of maybe rich and the rich and wider communities, they're being sort of forced onto people from lower income and communities and communities of color. And I think what's key to understand there is we're grappling with this in this time. This idea that the rich get people and the poor get algorithms is just this idea that prior to algorithms, it's not like we were getting fantastic service from people either. This idea of grappling with whether or not we're using algorithms individually versus whether or not we're really thinking through the human ways in which algorithms can affect us, making sure that we're looking at how predictive analytics and data can have pitfalls related around tracking. All of that is key. I think that's the discussion right now that institutions are having. How do we use this data in a way that, and how do we make sure that we're not bringing to life all of the inequities that we know exist because we're using it? And part of this is interventions too, right? What does this data tell us about the way that our students are and how do we practice the most human part of this intervention in a way that really does highlight the needs of our historically underserved communities? I think what's interesting and what I found interesting about both of your work is that there seemed to be this very slippery slope between wanting to do good and having well intentioned policy and then tracking. There's a very thin line between this becoming sort of very paternalistic and reinforcing some of those deficit perspectives or stereotypes that we have certain communities. Abigail, you wrote an interesting piece about vocational schooling and how that might haunt this new sort of resurgence of apprenticeship. Can you speak a little bit more about that? Yeah, so I think your points will take in especially, you know, the anecdote that comes to mind was a time that we were meeting with the State Youth Apprenticeship Council in this past year and the college and career readiness person from the State Department of Education was talking about what she sees as the benefit of this program. And specifically to your point about paternalism, I'm thinking about what she said about who she sees program as forced. She told me this program is for the students who think they're going to college, but they're not. They don't have savings, they don't have the support, and we know that they're going to drop out within a semester, so we want them to go into this program instead. And that strikes me as the height of paternalizing however well intentioned it may be. I think very often when we were thinking about these programs that help guide students towards careers, we failed to think about their aspirations and that they have every right to the full amount of choice that students with the most privileged get in determining their career pathways and that as much as we have to balance the need to be practical and talk to students frankly about the challenges that they are going to face no matter what they choose for their career, I think that there's a fine line to be walked between that and shunting students onto the path because we believe certain things based on data about their opportunities. This is something we often don't get to in these conversations, but how do you avoid that? How do we fix that? Have you all seen in your work people that are designing or implementing some of these programs well that have been able to avoid some of those unintended consequences? What do those conversations look like? Yeah well so I mean that's sort of the million dollar question for this particular initiative and what we're trying to you know hear these programs are very new. They haven't undergone rigorous evaluation that tells us like demographically how they're serving students yet so it's an open question but I think like the first thing that people need to do when they're designing a program like this is to take care in what data they're collecting, how quickly they're reporting it before programs are scaled and also like actually know and be able you know to tell others who they believe their programs are for and that to me is the first step in sort of figuring out what are tremendously complex and multifaceted equity concerns. I think you know so far I've really only spoken about equity concerns as they pertain to long-income youth and youth of color but there are so many other like aspects to this issue related to you know English language learners to women who are disproportionately barred from certain apprenticeship fields to students with disabilities. It's it's complex so the short answer is we don't know yet. I think that's also the million dollar question with institutions grappling on how to use predictive analytics. It's just this idea that colleges are beginning to realize that you can have all the data in the world, you can have all the tools in the world, you can have the most complex algorithms but the way that we interpret that data as humans and the way that we intervene like the way that data into forms of interventions is critical to this work as well. I think an excellent example and probably the most talked about example in the field right now is Georgia State. They'll tell you that they worked with the Education Advisory Board to create this set of tools and algorithms that helped really pinpoint places where students were struggling some and help and help them discover right areas to intervene early and really touch on students but they will also tell you that before prior to having this whole set of predictive analytics their ratio of students to guidance counselors at the school was 700 to 1 and after implementation they took deliberate steps to also to also really step up the way that they were addressing like human needs with with humans you know decrease their ratio of to 300 to 1 which is still large but but it's much better right and really begin to target interventions really begin to use this data in a way that interfered sorry that informed their interventions and help them focus on like what to talk with students about leading from a wellness mindset instead of from a deficit mindset starting off to simple things like starting off emails as kind of nudges to students saying like we're proud of you and we understand that this is hard work here are the ways like here are the resources available and not just like warnings you know what I mean they're like hey you failed this test you're now like 25 20 you're like in this group of people who are likely to drop out of school and so you know I think that's part of that work as well it's happening and I think like schools are are across the board from all like walks of the higher education landscape are discovering that data is critical predictive analytics certainly help interpret that but the way that we as humans take that and then and and interact with our fellow humans is also critical I think that part of being able to have that forethought that was involved in being able to do something like that that was successful involves having and we spoke about this earlier diverse representation around the table when these programs are being designed who has been in designing these programs who has been at the table and what conversations have happened have people starting started using this historical lens in that work yeah I would say I would say that the number of the institutions that we've talked to who are really doing this work well are putting a lot of thought into who their personnel on this work is and who their team is so not just like which vendors outside vendors are you using are they producing the type of tool that you think can serve your student body and are you talking about them or talking with them about the effects of like negatives and historical data on your algorithms but also thinking at an institutional level from the student to the IT and IR institutional reporting departments who's involved in this work on the inside and how are our teams like working together with these institutions to identify potential issues that might arise identify unintended consequences that might arise as well I think it takes like a certain amount of bravery to be able to admit some acknowledge some of these problems at the onset and say these are the things that we know historically these are the problems that we know can arise and start building from there and I don't think that's something that happens very often at the go yeah um so I you know I wouldn't wish to speak for all initiatives across the country primarily um because it's it's a really diverse landscape and these are these are highly localized programs I will say that from what I have seen we have a lot a lot of work left to do to make sure that the like policy and programmatic planning level staff working on these programs represent the students that they are hoping to serve primarily my observation with these folks is that they are mostly mostly white and mostly male and I think that going forward that has like bound to affect how these programs will turn out in addition to thinking about you know the diversity of an inclusiveness of policy and programmatic level you know staffing you also have to think about how you're trading people to confront implicit bias which I think is is going to be one of the trickiest things to do with these programs um you know when we talk to people about it particularly when it comes to the level it's funny you mentioned counselors on the post-secondary level on the secondary level um implicit bias from counselors is one thing that people bring up uh again and again that like students are coming to them and saying like I know that the counselor recommended me for this because she doesn't think I can go to college um or you know on the flip side my teacher told me I shouldn't do this program because I need to go to a four-year college uh to succeed and so at all levels um there's there are issues both with inclusion and staffing um and confronting the implicit biases of the people who are already in the room think right it's probably safe to say in both of our fields and like people are coming to realize um exactly what was mentioned I think in our first the first half of this panel that uh you know if you're not talking to the people who are going to be affected by these things then you're not really doing this work as effectively as you can so they just flagged me and said that we have three minutes so maybe one person can answer this one um I want to go back to this question that arose earlier about you know the tension between universal and targeted approaches um have you seen that tension arise in your particular work um do you think one is worked more effectively than the other have any general thoughts around that I don't think I have a short answer to this question do you want me to go ahead yeah um so I think that in education in general um you know what we know like about universal versus targeted approaches is that we need targeted approaches for students um who are traditionally underserved in our school systems because they are getting less not more right now um than the average student across the board so we do need those targeted approaches and we also know that when we have universal approaches to interventions in education whatever they may be then in general the people with the most social capital the parents with the most social capital are the ones to immediately snap up those opportunities for their children um and I think about that a lot in the context of youth apprenticeship as it begins to funnel students towards high wage high growth family sustaining wage jobs um that have sort of a greater level of prestige than say you know plumbing has traditionally had um that a universal approach to these types of programs will mean that they're only utilized by the most privileged yeah I agree did you want to wrap up cool I can try to take a minute I go I completely agree uh Abigail yeah like one of the most frustrating things about uh policy education policy in general is I think that there is like this pointing towards um an approach that's all inclusive approach but but Abigail you're 100 percent right uh at the end of the day when we do that the people with the most social capital benefit the most um in predictive analytics it's it's of particular uh importance to focus on like structural and local interventions because different communities respond to different things different ways um and if you're creating once one uh once that fits all uh interventions for entire college communities where students are coming from different walks of life and backgrounds uh you're guaranteed to you know I mean rub rub people the wrong way and um having those adverse effects on those unintended consequences I think it also speaks to what my I can mention earlier about the scarcity framework and that if we really instill equity and that sometimes means that we're funneling resources extra resources to particular groups of people because they need it and I think that people are afraid that that means that there is less resources for them and so that's sort of a question we also have to grapple with right that there is not a finite amount of resources that we really have to focus these where they need to be focused and ensure that people don't get forgotten in the design of something um I want to thank you both for being here this was a short conversation but I hope one that sparks more conversations throughout the day throughout our breaks and in our reception um so I just want to thank you all for being here and listening to us and thank you both for coming on board and talking about the things that you're working on so thank you um really quick we're going to start a question and answer uh session it's going to be 10 minutes um we just want to let you know to be mindful of um waiting until you get a mic but we'll go ahead and start right now she can get a mic um oh sorry we wanted to get Elise up here sorry gotta gotta gotta and also in Mayaka Mayaka is up here and Roslyn is around also if you have any questions for her so so how I'm trying to find out how you divide determine the dividing line between the the millennials and the successive generation you know use 96 or 94 how how is that a year maybe able to determine to be the boundary line between the millennials and or you know I'm trying to think where how they determine like 81 to 96 or 81 to 94 how those how those are the boundaries between the millennials and the other generations I'll speak as the as a millennial I think that I don't know how they defined it I think they just really drew a line in the sand and I think that's why the conversation we've had is how much can we really focus on these these generational groups of people how much can these labels really define us um so question to that is I mean we don't know this question for Abigail um what role do you think for-profit institutions play in the apprenticeship model that a lot of young people are going into especially in areas where you see advertisements for you know these for-profit institutions that oftentimes pull resources out of people that are already cast-strapped and um you know does that impact apprenticeship models or should they be non-profit post-secondary institutions versus for-profit institutions I think that I could safely speak for my program when I say that ideally it should not be a for-profit institution providing the post-secondary I think that that to us wouldn't wouldn't be a high quality model but you know to speak more to that it was funny that you that you bring up for-profits in the context of this conversation because we we had a convening around youth apprenticeship here in this space last week and it's something that a participant brought up to us that youth apprenticeship actually has great potential for young people who are struggling to find their way into post-secondary institutions to avoid getting sort of um you know into the clutches of for-profit institutions the idea being that we make it easier for young people to um you know to access these programs and stay on um sort of a safely guardrailed path um through post-secondary so that when they leave high school they're not floundering and um and ending up you know sort of prey to those institutions which I thought was interesting and something I hadn't considered before. Any other questions? My question is for anyone from the first panel on the family leave I wonder if you think the change in landscape of work in terms of the shared economy has what impact that has on policy? A little bit of hard time hearing you could you repeat that just a little bit louder? In terms of the change in landscape of work and the rising of the shared economy like Uber and Airbnb what kind of impact that has on policies relating to families and equity? Yeah that's something that we're actually very concerned about um and interested in because a lot of uh a lot of our assumptions about paid family leave and other labor policies are um well we assume that people are going to like a nine to five job and that they have like healthcare through their employer but what we know is that more and more workers particularly millennial workers um they are working more hours unpredictable hours they probably don't have benefits um and this is true not just for people who like or like they work for Uber or Lyft but for other others as well so we're sort of trying to explore what the difference would be in terms of like a universal insurance model versus portable benefits like how do we capture the the most workers and also like our most vulnerable workers to make sure that they have um access to those policies it's not like a an exact science because a at this point we're still like in the process of developing those proposals um partially because this is a phenomenon that is perhaps more prevalent in the US than it is in other countries that um already have paid leave policies in place or already have more uh additional labor regulations around um health insurance paid leave and other policies so ideally um I think in an ideal world whatever the the paid leave policy that we implement federally which is probably not going to happen in the near term but ideally that that that policy would capture uh both like different types of worker years working different hours so it's not like underpaid family and medical leave right now you have to in order to qualify you have to work for an employer that has more than 50 employees you have to have been at that employer for over a year um so already like almost half the the labor force it does not qualify even just for unpaid leave so as we think about policies in the future we want to make sure that we're including part-time workers hourly workers contract workers um all the workers like agricultural domestic workers that aren't included in our current labor systems so yeah I have a question for aliza I was wondering how uh in your thoughts about and BLL's work on paid family leave you're thinking about families that are not necessarily traditional and that they don't involve a birth but could be adoption or foster parents or older siblings taking care of younger siblings anything like that yeah so we uh our approach to paid family leave like we think that it's really important to be as inclusive as possible and that and this is part of uh our criticism of the republican plan is that um families take lots of different forms so I it is important to recognize the the diversity in that structure and so making sure that um we like to talk about the concept of family as something of love blood or choice it you know it might be that the person who's caring for your child is your neighbor it might be a grandparent it might be you know a same-sex partner it like we want to make sure that um we're enabling people to care for those those structures so um we've worked with organizations like uh a better balance to sort of talk through um what that language should look like so that we include adopted parents foster parents um lgbt the lgbt community or even um let's say this is something that we've thought about a lot in in response to sort of police shootings for example that like often the people who end up caring for the children of people who have died may not be biologically related to those children they may not be qualified they might because of that under law not be qualified to certain benefits even though they have assumed um lovingly resumed responsibility for um these families that have you know uh been targeted by the police so that that is something yeah we're very much interested in and further developing yeah so my question is for Abigail and Ernest um i'm curious about what correlations can be made if any with the new youth apprentice movement and linking it in some way to school voucher program the school voucher program and i know years ago it was meant to really support those in the lower income strata and it's not really becoming a program that's really supporting that demographic anymore it's really been shift like the the focus has shifted and others have really kind of figured out how to make it work to their benefit who weren't necessarily of that demographic that was it it was intended to support and i'm curious with the youth apprentice model taking hold and also just this movement for many students uh millenials wanting to go to um more trade school uh and even um you know like non-traditional you know for you know for your program degree programs like where you think there's a correlation if at all um and if it's an issue that needs to be thought about now as a possible potential problem later and if so like what what can be done now to ensure that that doesn't happen yeah um i think that's a that's a fantastic question um and it's an interesting parallel one that i hadn't um i hadn't considered before but i think you know there's a real danger in that as these programs um become seen as as you know i mentioned earlier sort of more highly desirable um and um you know the type of education that people want to move into roles that they're interested in um and and how we how we guard against that i think is really an open question and i think jenny's framework of sort of targeted versus universal programs is is a one way to think about it but it's it's a really thorny problem and one with it we're you know we're excited to continue to work on regarding the earlier panel we we heard that a woman who's homeless has a family and has to wait on a long line or use a lot of time to get food for a family uh is there anything like amazon home delivery uh an equivalency that could be ride by the local jurisdiction uh that might make sense in a case like that there can't be too many cases like that but something and i wondered does this vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction across the country it must i would think do you hear that clearly yeah so um your your question is uh related to you like how we provide food benefits basically and whether we can improve that or okay um i also don't know if rosalind would like to respond to that if she's in the audience but uh yes you're right yeah so i believe that was brought up in the context of stigma in accessing programs so uh that would be cool an amazon delivery system that brought food to people but you would have to make sure that you could get that to rural communities you you'd have to make sure that you there's so many different aspects to that and i guess in the context of this panel which is about care and education and creating those inclusive policies yes uh there are technological answers but uh we just need to make sure that we are considering the needs of the population when you're creating those technological answers and avoiding um creating extra stigma or consequences that you know we are unexpected but we we can check in on those by talking to the people that we are serving yeah i think i want to add because i think that is something that had been proposed earlier this year somebody said about um giving out meals like blue apron to communities i think i can't remember who's yeah um so i think you run the risk of again having a paternalistic strategy right like to dictate what the people what food people are going to get and then you you have to dictate the quantity of food and i think um that's a slippery slope and i don't i don't think that um that's necessary i think also like my concern is like why don't like why do we allow so many people to like endure like the humiliation of being economically insecure and impoverished which is not going to be solved by delivering food to their house like they probably need money for other things like medical care they probably need money you know to pay rent um so i think that you know thinking about like the whole picture of like a household budget their emotional uh and other needs like that is really really important and i think that um to respond i think to previous comments about targeted versus universal approaches a lot of what we think about is whether there's like a yes and approach so i'm thinking about paid leave we want it to apply to everyone we want it to um be gender neutral specifically since women have historically done more care work but making sure for example that like the the wage reimbursement rate is higher for lower income communities or that people who haven't done care work are encouraged to do so so like making sure that we that there's like additional supports for certain communities baked into the policy but that most people will have access is sort of the way that we we like to think about uh social policies yeah who has a mic so for the education folks it strikes me that a lot of what you are talking about or the the barriers to some of the high quality apprenticeship implementation comes down to mindset and low expectations and until replacing or raising the expectations of a workforce that has high expectations for students and young adults is a big task we've been undertaking for many many years now have you seen any um policy design or programs that have been able to make the shift to think about high quality apprenticeships and who needs the most sort of aside from getting in those adults who can think about it in that way of of the design that you talked about Abigail in the beginning have you seen any policy design that sort of helps to circumvent the adults with low expectation that still produces high quality outcomes for students um at the short answer being or are you studying it as part of this work yeah so that the latter we are we're studying it as part of this work um hoping to you know sort of over the course of years be able to lift up early success um I think like beyond you know as you speak to the mindsets of adults beyond that there also has to be some accountability to make sure that those mindsets um aren't infusing program design and so in these early stages what we're really looking for and and what we hope that people will do is collect and publish um very clear demographic data about who they are serving and how well it is serving those students after they complete their apprenticeship so that's what we're really hoping to see in these early stages thanks I have a question about the paid family leave um you've referenced other countries kind of throughout your commentary and I would just be curious to know what countries you look to to kind of emulate their policies and kind of what is it about their policies that that you think is particularly strong um and that could maybe be adapted here in the United States yeah so we um I think that there are a couple years ago actually we had an event called uh paid leave leap progging and sort of trying to understand like what mistakes we can sort of see in other countries and what are things that we can learn um we did an evaluation last summer looking sort of the landscape of like how much how long should paid leave ideally be in order to maximize um infant well-being and attachment uh maternal health gender equality and then business outcomes and our conclusion and this has been been reinforced by like public health officials out at UCLA is that uh we probably need uh at least six months um for both parents of whatever gender they are uh to enable all of those things especially for I mean for early attachment uh there's also interesting data looking at the fact that if leave is too short women won't take it if leave is too long it becomes very difficult for them to re-enter the labor market so there are countries that provide like three years of paid leave but then they have a lot of issues with women's labor force participation um and then it's interesting uh Iceland in particular we like always idealize Scandinavia but um like Denmark for example actually has an issue with like women's labor force participation because a lot of women will as the default just take paid family leave and the men will continue to work and that's when the wage gap grows and inequality around who's taking care of children or the elderly or you know the disabled grow um so what Iceland did was to create sort of like their their paid leave is gender neutral but they have what they call like a daddy quota or a bonus so if both partners take paid leave um then they will get additional time which helps them sort of pay for infant care so it's and it's really in a very short period of time bumped up the number of men taking leave and what they've also seen is that when men take leave um in the first like year of an infant's life it helps to equalize the amount of unpaid care work they do in the household either of the child or housework and that sort of thing so it's really uh in a very short time period like altered people's attitudes and perceptions of of care work just in that context so even within you know homogeneous Scandinavia there's like a lot of diversity in terms of who's taking leave who's providing care um and how that affects the society writ large so yeah looks like we're out of time everyone so I want to thank you all for your very thoughtful questions um it looks like we're going to take a short break um there seems to be some refreshments outside and then we will be back in 15 minutes thank you uh a seat nearby uh right oh my gosh it's 1145 exactly so we're right on schedule yeah let's give it a little settle down all right thank you thank you okay thanks hello good morning everyone oh good morning everyone my name is Braxton Bridgers and I'm a millennial public policy fellow working with the research security program here at new america on behalf of my cohort and program thank you for attending our spring symposium a quick bit of housekeeping before we begin directly after this session we will have lunch provided I'm really excited about that I don't know about you guys um so please feel free to grab some food and mix and mingle with us millennial fellows and new america staff my cohort and I are really excited to host discussions around some of the most pressing issues that our generation and future generations are expected to face one such issue is identifying the role of big data and technology in the policy making process whether it be in building government service platforms with the user center design or analyzing trends in user behavior on social media platforms to counter violent and extremist rhetoric with big data and technology have the ability to spark the creation of innovative and effective policies during this session our expert panelists will explore ways in which data and technology can be used to strengthen policy as well as examine the challenges associated with data and technology driven policy making we'll have conversations in three rounds our first discussion features millennial fellow and macomb and conversation with public interest technology and open technology institute fellow dupain goch emma and dupain will discuss the utility and having technologists at the policy making table drawing from dupain's experience as a technologist in the public policy space next millennial fellows bandy sing and new america international security fellow ivana who will discuss the challenges encountering violent extremism online and last but not least millennial fellow dylan rosine will host a conversation with new america cyber security fellow robert lord and public interest technology fellows sonia socar around the benefits and risk of health care data with a focus on patient privacy and security but before we dive into these important conversations cilia munoz vice president of public interest technology and public interest at new america will provide remarks regarding the role of data and technology and policy before joining new america cilia served on president obama's senior staff first as director of intergovernmental affairs for three years followed by five years as director of the domestic policy council prior to her work in government she served for 20 years at the national council of floraza now unidos us the nation's largest hispanic policy and advocacy organization where she was senior vice president for the office of research advocacy and legislation she received a macarthur fellowship in 2000 for her work on immigration and civil rights and serves on the boards of the open society and kresky foundations as well as the nonprofit united to protect democracy please join me in welcoming to the stage cilia munoz thank you very much brexton uh still morning right good morning everybody um i'm really excited to do this i'm really excited to be here in part because uh i'm pretty thrilled about the millennial fellows program here at new america emma colman who you will hear from in a moment is has been working in particular with the public interest tech team but as i have gotten to know the fellows and the work that they're doing across our components it's just a quite an extraordinary group of people um and more importantly an inspiring group of people and and i just am one of many across the institution that have been really inspired by their presence here and the work that we get to do together so thank you for that um and thank you all of you for being here so as you heard i'm a civil rights person i i spent 20 years in the civil rights movement before i went into government and um it's the combination of those experiences which brought me to doing public interest technology at new america and i'm just going to outline that for a minute to sort of set up the panels which are going to come um but that context is really relevant because i didn't i don't start out thinking of myself as a technologist i've discovered as i have learned about how this works and i learned about it from the experience of being in government at the domestic policy council i sat at the intersection between the sort of policy nerds which is what i am the policy team is working on a variety of issues solving a variety of different problems and this thing that we created the u.s digital service where we brought in hot shot technologists from the silicon valley we recruited them to do two-year tours of duty sort of peace course style to help us in the work of solving public problems and i got to help place these tech teams which seem to have magical powers because they knew stuff that i didn't feel like i knew um with policy nerds like me who like i didn't really get why we needed them to sit down with a product developer and engineer and when you got these different kinds of problem solvers sitting at a table together try to solve problems it was not just magical to sort of watch it happen but it was transformative and the insight that i picked up from that experience coming from the world that i come from is that the civil rights world that i come from the NGO world that many of us support that we are indeed part of here at new america we need the same capacity we need that's those those same transformative skills to solve the public problems that we try to solve so i came out of that experience feeling like the way in the future that we're going to be protecting voting rights the way that we're going to be solving homelessness the way we're going to be addressing income disparities in the future all of those are going to involve data and all of those are going to involve technology and in most cases we just haven't figured out how that's going to work yet but we must because we count on the institutions of civil society in this country to help us identify when disparities are happening and to help us identify what to do about them right that's what the civil rights world is about that's what it's for we pass statutes that give us the tools to hopefully get in front of discrimination before it happens but certainly to address it after it happens those tools are imperfect tools but they are sacred they're important the way we protect voting rights mostly in this country's through litigation on the voting rights act which was pat 50 years ago which has been weakened by the supreme court recently and it's not it was never a perfect tool it's not going to become a more perfect tool in the future we need additional tools and we live at a time in which technology is transforming everything about the way that we live and work it's trans it's right we're in this moment where we're in conversations about the future of work we are in conversations about the strength and the capacity of the platforms that probably everybody in this room uses to advance our connection to people but also to potentially undermine and corrode some of the institutions of our democracy everything is on the table everything is changing and the question that we're asking here at new america and with partners around the country is how do we make sure we are leveraging those tools to solve our public problems to make sure that they are in the hands of the institutions that we count on to identify when there's a problem and to help us steer towards solutions to those problems so just to give you you know one of the many negative examples that that are circulating we know for example that we can be perpetuating some of our biases some of the things which create inequalities lead to disparities through algorithms right that we may end up creating structures which perpetuate some of the things which have created inequities in this country right we again we count on civil rights institutions we count on the institutions of civil society to help us figure out when that's happening and to help us fix it help us get in front of it before it happens even better still the civil rights institutions largely are not living and working and operating in a tech environment they don't necessarily have those skill sets on their teams they're not necessarily they are thinking about the problems they're not necessarily leveraging the right skill sets to help get in front of them and to help us resolve them that's something that we want to change by building tech capacity into that work but I also want to make sure to give you a positive example because we think we we are starting to go down the road about thinking about this in terms of the potential dangers and those are very real it's important to understand what they are but it is also true that we can be leveraging these same tools to solve public problems so a modest example from from the city of New Orleans which leveraged data they figured out you can use data to figure out when a where and when a house fire is likely to happen in the city of New Orleans or anywhere in this country you can figure that out through zoning through the kinds of buildings that you have by past history of house fires there is data that you can leverage to figure out which parts of the city are more susceptible to have a house fire which is not only costly in terms of property but costs us lives and by using that data they transformed what fire departments usually across the country do which is that they do outreach and get people smoke detectors right so the typical way of doing outreach is to kind of get out there use access to media go out and speak to schools like hopefully try to find the people who need this information and that need smoke detectors and hopefully get them in the hands of the right folks but by using data the fire department was able to target neighborhoods where deadly house fires were more likely to happen and what did they do their outreach strategy was to go knock on those doors and help people install the smoke detectors and in the first quarter after instituting that policy they were able to prevent what could have been a deadly house fire they got the information the smoke detector worked they were able to stop the fire before people died so we can be leveraging data and technology affirmatively to get in front of problems before they happen as well there is as much positive potential as there is negative potential but the thing we have to do is make sure that there are technologists working in these fields working in city governments working for the federal government and working on the teams with NGOs there are lots of good people in the tech world who are who are smart there are problem solvers there are thinkers and they believe they have the solutions to potentially every problem and maybe they do but what I can tell you for sure is that they don't always fully understand the problems that they would be seeking to solve right there's lots of people who think you can build an app that can solve any problem I'm pretty sure that's not how we're going to solve our problems but I have witnessed what happens when you sit technologists down with the doers at the Department of Education to create policies that are transformative and tools that can have the potential to transform the way people access higher education in this country I've seen that happen and I have seen the light in the eyes of technologists who realize that how much meaning there is in public service and how extraordinarily rewarding it is to be tackling some of the big public problems that we face so what we are hoping to create here is a field of public interest technology so that you know somebody who is deciding to how they're going to pursue a career is interested in data is maybe interested in engineering can be thinking about getting that training so that they can go solve homelessness or getting that training so that they can be as addressing disparities in the healthcare system that's the world that we're trying to create here we're very I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to bring that passion to building a team of public interest technologists here at New America and a team that's working to build a field of public interest technology you're going to meet some members of that team including our millennial fellow Emma Coleman in some really fascinating and important discussions about how we leverage these tools what kind of public problems we need to be attacking and how we're going to be building this world together so I couldn't be more excited to have all of you here and on with the conversation thank you well thank you for that introduction Cecilia and thank you Braxton as well hi everyone my name is Emma Coleman and I'm the millennial fellow in the public interest technology program I'm joined today on stage by Dupain Ghosh who is both a public interest technology fellow and an open technology institute fellow as well and he focuses mainly on privacy security and civil rights policy so before Dupain came to New America he worked at both Facebook and at the White House as a technology policy advisor and his most recent work has been digital deceit examining the technologies behind precision propaganda and political disinformation on the internet in which he explored election meddling and disinformation campaigns across social media so thank you for being here Dupain yeah so I'd love to start off our conversation you've worked in the space for a long time why is there an urgency now to incorporate technologists into the policymaking process well I think that I think as Cecilia was just saying we are seeing technology really come to the fore across society when we are trying to read the latest news we turn to our phone when we try to hail a cab we turn to Uber or Lyft when we try to find that the nearest gas station were we're turning to an app again and so it has created so much opportunity economic opportunity across the board and has created the platform that we really turn to every day for every single every single thing that we try to do but I think at the same time as as Cecilia was also saying the use of technology across society has has really raised a lot of a lot of concerns and has raised a lot of really difficult tensions that we need to navigate in the way fold and so I think technologists have to increasingly be at the table both to figure out ways to leverage technology in the in the in the to its highest potential but also to to help remind us that there is a there is a darker side to and there's an underbelly that we we need to address and we need to really try to work around so that many of the tensions that we've seen thus far can can be avoided in the future and I know that you've worked in several capacities in terms of as an advisor on these types of things and now you're doing more research and writing what would be the best way to go about incorporating technologists is it to bring them into elected officials offices is it to teach elected officials how to even understand some of the more complicated uh elements of technological learning that we have now such as machine learning or algorithmic discrimination or anything like that I think it's all of it I think you you raise a couple of really great examples we have uh we have the tech congress initiative which which aims to actually place smart tech technologists into offices on the hill and we have several colleagues of ours that that are doing exactly that in leading offices on the hill that is important because we we saw just the other day a set of hearings that um you know I think I think members try their best to to understand all the issues at at hand but of course sometimes there are gaps and they're not technologists all the time in fact very few are our technologists it it helps to have a staffer who who is a technologist and who can raise these important issues in the right way and and can understand these issues and navigate around them so I think I think that the goal is really to bring that expertise closer to the decision making table now everybody has constraints of course members on the hill have constraints they have they have a they have a set budget and they can't hire everyone in the world and of course I'm sure they would love to have a civil rights expert and a technology expert and a health policy expert and and many of those are roles that are that are filled in in many offices but everybody has constraints so I think we just need to figure out ways to bring technology as close to the decision making process as possible especially given its really central role across business functions and our livelihoods and our our social life and I know now you're working on an anthology around machine learning to sort of educate policymakers could you talk a little bit more about that yeah um this is this is uh really about one of the issues that Cecilia had mentioned um that of algorithmic discrimination and algorithmic bias um and as a as a uh related issue um addressing ethics as artificial intelligence comes to the fore um algorithms are used across society in almost every every app that we use every um decision making process um that that the business world engages in whether it's uh determinations of credit worthiness or um routing a car through traffic most effectively or um making decisions about federal housing and and public policy um these are all decisions that are increasingly driven by algorithms and as artificial intelligence comes to the fore those algorithms are getting smarter and smarter and being trained on more and more hysterical data to drive um basically the corporate sector and the government whoever is housing those algorithms and trying to implement them um to to greater efficiency that is to greater profit um what we need to make sure though is of course that as those algorithms are being developed and implemented we stay grounded and we respect civil rights law we respect um ethical frameworks whatever the whatever the context might be um and and don't make decisions that can lead to enormous disparities uh across society in ways that can really really be damaging and hurtful to many many people um because that has happened in the past it it really needs to stop um and I think I think we need to bring ethics into the development of of algorithms in a in a much bigger way in a much more um concerted way starting from that decision making table um and so this in anthology is is really about trying to raise some of the biggest ideas uh across the country and around the world in this area and give experts a voice as to how artificial intelligence and algorithms raise ethical concerns in different spaces and what can be done about about those those issues and your other recent paper digital deceit uh which looks at the tools that are used to spread disinformation uh you suggest the the resulting ad tech policy should center on three main areas which is election law privacy regulations and consumer protection law when you have these global platforms like facebook and you're you're asking for these sorts of changes how do policy changes in one country affect such a broad problem does it need to be that technologists in across the world or in multiple countries are coming together to work on these policies yeah absolutely you're spot on in that analysis um these are global platforms they raise global societal tensions and so we need global collaboration to to address those problems um I think I think in this case that paper which I which I collaborated on with with Ben Scott a senior advisor at New America uh is our our goal is really to make one central point which is that the leading digital platforms of the day whether it's facebook or google or or twitter or any of the other leading internet companies um are are really premised on one function which serves which contributes to more than 95 percent of their their revenue uh which is targeted advertising um it's a space that it it's a space that doesn't really have much regulation right now in the in the United States we have um the federal trade commission which is charged to try to police it but they don't they don't have much authority in the space um and there aren't any other federal agencies that that have much authority and so the business community the industry um has almost grown like photosynthesis toward the light of um the practices that that can bring them highest profit margin and that whole business model is really premised on creating extremely compelling services that uh that are borderline addictive um uh collecting as much data as possible about individual people through those services and creating opaque algorithms to to try to target ads at those people and there's because there's no regulation in this space uh they've grown in this direction um in a in a huge way um for example facebook's facebook's revenues 10 years ago were three billion dollars and today they're 43 billion dollars um and uh around that time of a few years ago that is when they introduced all their uh tremendous ad targeting technologies um i think that the solution really lies in understanding that business model uh both here and around the world and trying to address it by listening to the listening to the global community's concerns and that's something that the industry is is trying to do more and more um but it really lies in global collaboration with with europe with japan and korea with india with brazil and argentina as they also consider data protection regimes um there is a big conversation that's starting now in in on capitol hill about a data protection regime here as well and i think moving forward this will really require global collaboration because regulation in the united states does not necessarily mean regulation in india or brazil and these are global platforms they're not just u.s companies anymore and as you mentioned facebook has seen incredible growth over the past 10 years that you know no one would have necessarily expected at the beginning how do we end up creating policies that are agile enough to adjust for how fast new services tend to come on the market i love this question because in the u.s we actually have a very rigid regulatory regime the two agencies that that oversee tech and telecom are the federal communications commission and the trade commission and it there is almost a waterfall effect of um you know depending on who is in in power democrats or republicans the regulatory regime is is either here or it's here and uh when the politics changes it moves back to step one when and then when it changes again it moves back to step two and there's really no certainty there's no consistency and we just really need more agile regulation um that can that can address the harms that and the benefits that uh that the that the sector um germinates and and and creates um i think it it will require more advocacy it'll require more events like the cambridge analytica news frankly it will it will require the public sentiment shifting um to understand that this is how the business model works and this is how it can create tensions across society um and as such we need to rethink the way that we oversee the industry um now that's not to say that that we need to implement strict and stringent regulations against everybody but but we do need to give the government a little bit more agency understanding how the sector works and uh and addressing it and how have you seen that change over time both during your time at facebook and during your time at the lighthouse honestly i haven't seen the regulatory regime change all that much um so i think the biggest example of an attempt at changing it was with the net neutrality uh announcement um briefly net neutrality is the idea of treating every bit that travels over the internet the same so you can't engage in paid prioritization or blocking or throttling of content you need transparency on the internet connection those are some of the elements of president obama's um idea for what net neutrality should look like um and what he tried to do or what he what he actually advocated was that um talcom providers should be reclassified uh under how the federal communications commission considers them providers of an information service versus a more utility like service and he he advocated that the the the federal communication communications chairman at the time uh tom wheeler actually proposed that they do get reclassified that's been that was brought back though that was brought back under the trump app cc pretty quickly um and uh that's that i think was the biggest attempt that we've seen at trying to legislate or regulate this there have been a lot of legislative efforts but they they haven't really moved forward through committee either so i see it as on the hill it's a lot of advocacy uh trying to um bring public sentiment um a little bit further um and in the administration you know i see i see attempts one way or the other to to try to have an impact on on regulation but i think we again we just need to think about the public sentiment and there needs to be better public education on how technology works to get us over that hump of political gridlock and how do you think the most recent uh big news stories around tech policy so net neutrality and then zuckerberg's testimony before congress have impacted public sentiment and then will in turn impact the regulatory side well uh we we just saw i think in the past day facebook's revenue grow by by 63 over the quarter so um you know i think i think public sentiment is is still pretty high in general it's it's almost like a filter bubble as sicilia was alluding to that there is a um there's a conversation that's happening amongst dc tech policy people but but there needs to be a broader sense of how things should change for the sector how the government should should be more agile in responding to it i think that the public sentiment has shifted a little bit but only a little bit in general because we might we might think that it's shifted a lot based on everything that we read in the new york times and everything that's that's being said on in different forums about the sector but i think the average american consumer still uses facebook every day and still will for the foreseeable future and and has a high affinity to all these platforms as a matter of fact i think it was just reported through a wall street journal poll last week that most americans think that we have enough regulation of the sector already um or that we have too much regulation of the sector so um so i think i think it'll require a little bit more um and as we sort of create these policies and move forward how do we create that collaboration between public sector and private sector between the government and between these large companies when so often they're demonized in the news for justifiable reasons but still in a way that we need to have them in this collaborative process yeah i mean they are demonized and news reports we have to remember that that uh you know not not to cast aspersions or anything but we do have to remember that the business model of tech implicates the business model of journalism and news and so there is a there's a hard tension between those two industries right now and so a lot of the reports that we might see might not always tell both sides of the story as as well as they could um many of them do but but many of them don't and so i think uh i think we just need uh a better representation of technologists and everybody in the sector uh sorry in the in the in the um in the universe of this conversation all the stakeholders at play we need them at the table um facebook actually uh facebook google twitter they do have they are global platforms and there are many many um minor and major implications of any public policy change that they might make um and we don't always see it unless unless we are you know working there or talking to to folks who are there it's it's often hard to see how a change here or a change in policy uh in in the company's privacy policy might implicate the global usership in ways that we might not have seen and once we you know hopefully have these evolved policies that better protect uh consumers what does the technologists place in enforcement look like well in enforcement we actually have a couple of good examples one um i'll just mention is the cto at the federal trade commission um we've had a a series of really brilliant people in that role from harvard professors to princeton professors to uh the chief technology uh technology officer um actually i think in this case it was it was not the cto the the title was actually the the principal technologist i might be wrong about that but um some some really amazing people have had that role and that is an important role because the federal trade commission which is headed by a chair men or chairwoman and has four other commissioners who all vote on um on a proceeding or a regulation moving forward or a an enforcement action for example um they are they're typically lawyers or or policy experts but but don't have a broad understanding of or a deeper understanding of technology and of course technology is defining a lot of the agency's priorities now um because of implications around privacy and security and communication and and so the principal technologist at the agency advises the commission and the and the chairperson um and that really helps the agency be incisive and understand industry practices to a much greater degree than they otherwise would would be able to and having that person internally really helps because it it allows them to trust um the recommendations that are coming forward as opposed to having a narrow influence actor telling the agency what it should or should not do um so i think i think that is one good example of how bringing a technologist into the into an agency or into an organization can drive a discussion as to what priorities it should take on well thank you so much for your insight uh and we'll welcome the next panel onto the stage thanks bye hi everyone thank you so much for being here my name is bandy and i'm a money a public policy fellow at new america's open technology institute i'm very excited to be joined here today by avana who avana is a new america fellow on the international security program and she's also the ceo and a partner at omelos omelos is a machine learning and data analytics firm that seeks to automate quantify and standardized approaches to countering violent extremism or cv e avana has done a lot of really awesome work around the world and it's kind of hard to condense at all but um just a couple of amazing points she's um interviewed a number of former extremists around the world from groups like hezbollah isis aky and the taliban and she's also participated in a number of de radicalization programs with neo nazis in scandinavia um so i'm really excited to be joined um with her today and today we're going to be talking about how can we improve the space of cv e um by including data and by using data um and to give you a little bit of background on sort of this conversation through the fellowship i've been writing a paper that looks at what are the challenges involved when it comes to evaluating um cv e approaches that are implemented by technology companies um and i found that a lot of it is related to a lack of metrics a lack of data and a lack of clear definitions in the space and as you know um companies like facebook and twitter and google have come under a lot of pressure um over the last couple of years to take down content and to do it um in a more quick manner and and this has sometimes translated into legislation so like at the beginning of 2018 uh germany instituted the network enforcement act which mandates that companies have to remove content um within 24 hours of it being flagged and they have to remove harmful content which includes extremist content otherwise they will face fines and so there's a lot of growing pressure but there's no real proof that these approaches work um and so this is sort of what we're going to be talking about today so um to kick it off ivana you've worked in the cv e space for a really long time and you've worked at this intersection of cv e data and technology can you talk a little bit about the challenges that you face when it comes to evaluating cv e programs um and how omelos has worked with us yeah so i'll start with uh the challenges i mean the first is it's really hard to measure the lack of something right because cv e comms left a boom right before stuff blows up and so with the pentagon where your mission is lethality you can say um a drone took out five uh bad guys and ten civilians and because of that x1z happened with the network but with cv e you don't really it's really hard to say oh yeah well this person because of the work that we did this person decided not to join isis or al-qaeda or a new nazi group unless you know it's a very um it's timed so well that you have managed to actually disrupt a plot that was happening and then you can count the plot right uh and so i think that's the first challenge and the second is also just it's the mentality in the space is government is not used to measuring anything it's and when they do they look at click like uh clickthrough rates they look at shares and likes i don't actually know what any of those things mean right because we don't know if they lead to any kind of change in behaviors they're just numbers and there's an interesting stat that 70 percent of people who share links on facebook with their friends we're on their news feed they don't actually read the uh the article they just read the title and then you and and that also causes other problems like fake news and all that stuff but that's a different conversation um so the way that we're looking at it at all malas is we said okay how do you actually measure the radicalization level of groups of people we really don't go down to the individual level because people change and people are fundamentally irrational especially when they're emotional and so we look at the group data so we're so what we're saying is right now the way that these things are measured is someone's walking around with a clipboard in Kabul or even within the Somali-American communities in the US and they're asking how do you feel about joining alshabab most people are not going to be like yes i really want to join alshabab right they're gonna they're they're going to tell you what they think you want to hear but that's basically lies and then we start thinking okay online people tend to be more truthful and they're probably a bit more radical online than they are in real life because there's a screen separating them from the online environment but that probably gives us a better data source than walking around with a clipboard or doing it by polling or any of the other options that we have so far so we start to look at okay where are the narratives that they're talking about can we actually start to match the online behaviors of people as compared to the online behaviors of non-violent extremists so these are people who you know we don't care about extremists we care about the people who are going to become violent extremists and so we started to use machine learning and create this really cool algorithm that gives you a score at the end and that's what we used to measure so when you're sending out a counter messaging campaign where when you want to look at the local narratives that people are saying about the US or about ISIS or any of the groups you can just sort of use our dashboard and organically track what they're saying online and when we talk about metrics and definitions in the space this is something that's come up in the conversation quite recently like over the last couple of years but companies and you know organizations that work in CVE haven't really implemented this quite enough so just as a couple of examples this week Facebook put up a blog post that provided an update on their CVE and their takedown work and in it they said that they were still working on defining their metrics and they're defining metrics for programs that they've run for years now that's kind of concerning that they don't actually know how to measure this similarly a couple of months ago some of the major internet platforms testified in DC about their CVE work and the Twitter representative was asked about metrics and he kind of just gave a vague answer and was like we're working on it so it kind of seems like you know they spent a lot of money spent a lot of resources to create these programs but haven't really paid any attention to what actually works so what do you think are the challenges that are associated with establishing metrics in the space like why why are there no metrics right now um it's just people don't care haven't really thought about it or are there actually hurdles to creating them or taking down content taking down content and CVE in general okay um I think for a lot of the tech giants it's not really in their interest they're basically meeting the threshold that the government has put in front of them and just speaking very frankly if you have watched the Facebook hearings with Mark Zuckerberg it's glaringly clear that our policymakers at the highest level don't understand technology they don't understand technology not even talking about AI which got flown around like I don't know what like they they did not understand it and the hearing I actually missed the entire point of why Mark Zuckerberg was called is like that was a national security threat and they made it into something completely different and so I think it's um technical illiteracy on behalf of the policymakers and because of that there the metrics that the metrics that they're giving to these tech companies um are just not sufficient and so it's not that they don't exist they just really suck amen to that and so when we think about um companies and governments operating unproven CVE programs can you talk a little bit about the consequences that this can have on people both online and offline I think the worst consequence is having a backlash uh meaning that the CVE programs typically are done with very good intentions they're implemented by people who really care um and yet there's a backlash effect that it actually further radicalizes the exact group of people that they're trying to help um DARPA did a pre a study on the effectiveness of the redirect method done by jigsaw which was google ideas and what they found was that this program which has been written up by every single newspaper um as this is the way forward and tackling online radicalization they found that there was a backlash effect and that it further radicalized people um who received the content through google but we don't really talk about that either right um and and you sort of see the same thing in places in pakistan and that's why a lot of successful CVE programs are not branded as CVE they're branded under community resilience or agricultural livelihood um or something that's completely different even though you know the actual mission of the program it it's to decrease the number of um push factors definitely and i mean when you talk about content takedowns like a lot of the criticism that you receive is that running an unproven content takedown strategy can actually censor um you know censor legitimate voices and that pushes them to be further marginalized and radical actually can i ask something to that so it's interesting because um we i actually sound the same stage with the uk home secretary who has been super gung-ho about taking down content and i asked a question i said you know taking down content is getting it's the topical way that we're trying to fix a problem but it doesn't fix the underlying problems of why people in the uk are actually joining these programs she didn't like the question very much um but i mean i think that's taking down content also has the unintended consequences that human rights human rights abuses were were were war crimes actually get scrubbed off the internet because from a from an ai perspective they look the same and so you know i have talked to the international criminal core and i talked to a lot of the nonprofits are gathering evidence against isis to try to prosecute them if a war tribunal actually happens and there and that's our biggest thing is you know youtube is taking down all the evidence so what do we actually have now to prosecute anyone yeah definitely um and so a number of these platforms also focus on the big groups so the islamic state al-qaeda but there's a lot of concern because obviously these are not the only extremist groups that exist and um you know some experts have said that by only focusing on these groups and only strategically dedicating your resources to these groups you're letting these smaller groups gain a presence online engage and then they can like in a world where there is no isis or no al-qaeda anymore they would become isis 2.0 and they would become isis 3.0 so can some neil nazis stuff have been taking had has been taken taken down um but yeah they're definitely missing the boat and even with al-qaeda with all this new attention turned on isis for the past couple of years what we have seen on our platform is that al-qaeda propaganda has risen significantly um telegram channels for isis have been taken down but al-qaeda in syria hattash any of their affiliates they're just it's like a wild west for them because they know that they're not going to be taken down yeah definitely um and so when we think about companies reporting data on their cv e um when it comes to content takedowns the real way that they do this is through transparency reports with your blog post updates um when we talk about counter narratives like you mentioned jigsaw's project there's not a lot of data disclosure that's going on in that and that realm how do you think companies can you know improve on that do you think they should issue transparency reports similarly for these kinds of programs or do you think that um you know companies shouldn't be the main sources of data and we should rely on things like omelas instead to um do that kind of evaluation i think the incentives the incentive structure is a little bit miss it's skewed right now it's not they you know you can say i've taken down 10 000 pieces of content or 10 000 accounts um but we don't really know what that means because it could also just mean that um isis immediately created another 15 000 right so what's the actual environment like and i think you do need someone objective who's not getting paid either by the government or by by the tech companies to basically be like a special auditor or like an independent odd odd yeah something like that um and then going back to jigsaw what's interesting to me is that the most sophisticated metric that we have that's widely accepted um within counter narratives until maybe a year or two ago was a click-through rate and jigsaw is it's internal think tank at google but if you're a client for google advertising like xpedia or anyone like that and you walked in to the client with the click-through rate they will literally laugh you out out of the room and so we have a lot of people who come from google advertising who work for my company and they specifically said if you don't have anything more sophisticated than you know the lifetime value over the average customer acquisition cost of a campaign like there's no way you're going to land that account and you will most likely be fired and so you have this very interesting juxtaposition of like the far of expectations and yeah okay great and so i think we're almost out of time so as a last question what do you think the next steps in this space are how can we use data to make cve more meaningful and who should be the real stakeholders who are doing this i actually want to see civil society step up a little bit we do some work with civil societies who who get money from the u.s government because they're more credible voices than the government itself and i really want to see that they get their skin in the game in terms of helping us come up with these metrics and also be a little bit more literate in talking about it because we do a we have to do a lot of education with them first um and then i think i mean in terms of the government the global engagement center as state just got a lot finally they got their money and so they now can actually do something and i want them to instead of leaving the monitoring and evaluation to sort of this last thing that needs to get done is you know when you're actually thinking about and giving giving vendors money to create the content is you actually start to talk about m&e like right there because it's really hard to run an m&e if you don't have a baseline in the beginning and i think that nuance um still needs to be further emphasized great um with that i think that's all the questions we have so thank you very much for all being here good afternoon everybody i think enough time has passed since cecilia is good morning that we can actually say good afternoon safely uh i have the somewhat and sometimes unenviable task of being the moderator of the session right before lunch uh but i am actually very excited to be joined by two colleagues today for a really exciting discussion on healthcare data and technology my name is dylan rosine i'm the millennial public policy fellow in the cyber security initiative here at new america and in my time here i've had the great fortune of working on a number of projects last fall i helped deliver a report to the united nations secretary general and his chief executives board on various normative entry points for the un and shaping norms around various frontier technologies and most recently in the topic of conversation today i've been working on developing a series of policy recommendations around uh healthcare cyber security and so i'm really excited to be joined by two folks today who are going to talk a little bit about that and generally about the promises and perils of healthcare data and technology so i'm joined by sonia sarkar here on my left uh sonia is a public interest technology fellow here at new america um she's also the former chief policy and engagement officer for the baltimore city health department and sonia's work is focused on identifying the role of technology in facilitating connections between various aspects of health sectors particularly through an equity lens and to sonia's left we have robert lord who is one of our cyber security initiative fellows here at new america and i might add has been really helpful and really leading the development of some of these policy recommendations that we're working on for the healthcare cyber security policy report which he may speak to a little bit in addition to that robert is a co-founder and the president of protennis which is an analytics platform that leverages artificial intelligence to detect data breaches in healthcare and he's a leading entrepreneur and thinker in the fields of artificial intelligence cyber security healthcare analytics and data privacy uh so very excited to be engaged in conversation with them really about one key question which we're going to be addressing on this panel today and that key question is how could the proliferation of healthcare data and technology both improve patient health outcomes while also exposing patients to new risks and what can we do about it so just for a brief background for those of you um who are just hearing about some of these some of these ideas today the emergence of new healthcare technologies has really grown and has been unprecedented in the past few years after the high tech act was passed by congress in 2009 we saw the rapid transition away from paper based records to electronic records in the healthcare system just to give you a sense of how fast that transition occurred in 2008 only nine percent of hospitals were using even the most basic electronic health record system but by 2015 that number had soared to 96 percent using certified EHR technologies so a really fast transition in addition we've seen connected medical devices growing at an unprecedented rate including things like infusion pumps and pacemakers which are connecting to each other to your cell phone and making it all very exciting for the possibilities that we can have with some of these new technologies so with that I want to turn to Sonia to talk a little bit more about some of those exciting developments and the possibilities that we can have in leveraging these health technologies really to deliver better patient health outcomes while in the clinic but also before patients even step foot in the clinic in the first place great thank you Dylan and I too am working through hunger so I understand what it's like to be to the panel right before lunch but I you know I really appreciate the conversation and one of the things that I'm very interested in as Dylan was referring to is how do we think about health as beyond just the clinic walls or the hospital walls how do we leverage technology to really address the fact that about 90 percent of what actually impacts our health outcomes doesn't take place through the traditional medical medical care system as we think about it but has to do with where we go to work and how we get around and what we eat and so one of the things that I'm really excited about and I get to play tech cheerleader today which is not a role that I'm often in is the ways in which we can leverage not only the EHR which we've seen you know a large proliferation and how that particular system is really being used you know both inside of the clinic but also to connect to systems outside of the clinic but also other types of technologies that enable us to identify what types of social needs a patient might have so you could imagine in a clinic in East Baltimore where there are significant health disparities being able to keep a patient out of the emergency room because it's been identified that maybe they're struggling to put food on the table at the end of the month and we're able to get them enrolled in a food assistance program they're able to connect with a local urban garden that's in their neighborhood and they're able to join with food advocacy efforts in the community that are actually focusing on why those food deserts and those food disparities exist in the first place right which are tied to all sorts of policy issues and so in that vein you could imagine that a screening tool that's identifying that that food insecurity exists in the first place or even a module in the electronic medical record that actually shows that the patient has a food need and then an automated referral for the patient from the clinic to an actual food bank or to that community garden could start to bring the patient along this sort of full stream of health and social services that's really relevant to their health as a person and not just as a patient that's receiving medical treatment so I think there are a lot of excitement a lot of exciting pieces there just in terms of the pure technology the other sort of area where there is great room I think for us to think about how technology could be a force for good is how it actually lifts up the voice of the patient itself so as a patient is receiving care as they're interfacing with the health care system as they're actually collecting data on what's out there in the community and what types of services are out there being able to voice their own opinions about how those services are or are not meeting their needs and then thinking about how that information gets back to the health care system so that health care institutions can be advocates for some of those services as well and just before we pivot to Robert to talk about the flip side of that could you give an example of maybe something that you've seen in Baltimore working to really empower those patients to be able to take their health data and really go out there and and advocate for themselves yeah absolutely so when I was at the Baltimore City Health Department we were very lucky to be an award recipient from the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Innovation for a program called Accountable Health Communities so this is basically the idea that we should be able to identify patient social needs refer them to resources in the community or to government programs that actually address some of those needs and then be able to loop back to the health care providers and to the health care system so that this information about their social history becomes part of the standard intake it becomes part of that standard quality of care in terms of how health care is being delivered so one of the things that we were very excited about on the patient side was that many of the community organizations that we started to talk to said we want to know how we can have access to some of this aggregate data as well so that if there are hundreds of patients in Baltimore City that are being identified as not having access to affordable housing that's not particularly new news in Baltimore City for the people who do work around that but if you're able to show both on the health care side and on the housing agency side how many of those referrals are actually getting met what it looks like to come off and on of the housing waitlist etc then you actually start to get some traction and you gain some unlikely allies in the form of clinics and hospitals who may not be actively involved in housing advocacy work but now are as a way of the technology and the systems that they're engaging with thanks Sonia now Robert I want to come to you to talk a little bit about the flip side of that and thinking about some of the the perils perhaps of introducing new technology systems new platforms and really how those technologies can introduce new privacy and security concerns that could actually negatively impact patient health in some ways could you speak to that a bit absolutely I'm happy to be the tech boogeyman today a little bit I was actually just at a talk where we were right after lunch so this is you know now you guys are hangry before I was dealing with people in a coma so it's a little bit of a nice switch for me personally but I think actually it's most you can kind of most illustrate this point with a story that I had for a little bit of context before my co-founder Nick and I started for tennis I was a medical student also in East Baltimore and I one of my real clinical interest was working with HIV positive patients and I worked in an HIV clinic for a lot of my clerkship time and one of the things that I noticed there was that a lot of patients were very very hesitant to be forthcoming they would ask questions like where are you putting this data who can see this information when you're putting that into the computer where's it going that type of thing and it really made me think you know I heard it a few times and heard it over and over again and I also saw this with psychiatric patients as well so people who had sensitive diagnoses of some sort or another and I really began to dig into that question and just start to ask how are we protecting this data what's the current state of this information and you start to realize two really terrifying things when you just scratch the surface of that problem the first is that the basic cybersecurity hygiene and protections that we have in health care are probably roughly five to ten years behind industries where you have similarly sensitive data I mean really I would say terrifying structures with regard to how we protect that data from what you might think of as like a traditional external network-based attack this is improving in some ways but for a little bit of context while comparable industries probably spend about eight percent of their budgets on this on this type of problem in health care we have about half a percent on budgets for most places so pretty bad situation those numbers vary and they're difficult to get but that gives you a little bit of context the other thing that I began to realize that will be intuitive if any of you happen to be clinicians or people who work in a medical record is that actually the real problem for a lot of health privacy is insider it's people who already have access to the electronic health record and in health care we've got two really big problems and trends we've got one where we are opening up the data to all these different sources we're creating all these new linkages between individuals between institutions we've got health information exchanges we've got increasingly interoperable systems in our communities and that's really great as a student I saw that all the time it was really important to be able to get the complete medical record but simultaneously there's no controls over who can access that information in almost any case when I was a medical student if a let's just say high-ranking DC VIP came into my institution there would be nothing essentially that stopped me from taking a look at that person's record or likely for anyone to know that I was even in that record so you can imagine as a first year medical student even as a volunteer actually working there in many cases and this is essentially every hospital in the United States so there's no exception in fact the place I was that was really advanced in this regard and this was still the case and so what ended up happening was you know my co-founder and I started to realize hey we think that there's a much better way to do this and that's how we embark down that path I used to be a what's I guess called a quant at a hedge fund bridgewater associates used to be in the intelligence community and a former green beret and we said look you know in finance and in national security this can be done very differently and that's how we ended up tackling that problem but just to give a little bit of context of what you see on the ground things are getting better but we still got a long way to go and that's some of the work that Dylan and I and Ian are working on right now along with many others at New America to try and create not just I think where we're focused right now which is how do we stem the gaps and put band-aids on things but actually how do we actively articulate a more proactive vision for where our industry should be in five years and have that be a more constructive look at the future I think one of the questions that would strike me in thinking about how much access everyone in the ecosystem has is why why why would a first year medical student have access to say a VIP DC insider yeah so it's a great question and it comes down to two things and there and one's a really good reason and one's not so good one is that there's a real culture of open collaboration in health care that stems from two areas one it's a very collaborative it's a very exploratory it's a very I think academic community especially at many medical centers and so people want that openness and sharing and teaching but then two you've got the emergency situation problem which is if you don't have access to an allergy when someone comes into the ED and you've got to push a particular drug and you don't know if that drug will kill someone or not then blocking someone with traditional say role-based access controls is a lethal decision in a set from a cybersecurity capacity and so essentially healthcare systems decided look we'd rather have the insider threat versus that person dying right there while we were helpless to do anything which was literally just look up a piece of data so certainly the technology is there no one would deny that but the the structures to do that are really hard and that gets to the second piece of it which is we frankly just don't understand health care workflows well enough to permission people appropriately so what does a nurse really do they could be inpatient outpatient research they could be in an oncology ward they could be in the OR all of those have completely different contexts and different types of patients they're accessing and different ways that they're using the electronic health record and if you think about it you probably have the equivalent of millions of different roles in a health care system even if there's tens of thousands of people and so a lot of your basic security paradigms for protecting data inside an institution just completely fall apart which is why kind of more advanced analytics are coming about as an alternative to that approach that are more behavior-based it's clear to me hearing from both of you that there's a balance to be struck and taking advantage of and leveraging these technologies to improve patient health outcomes while being mindful of the risks that they introduce so rather than have one of you play the cheerleader and one of you play the boogeyman can you think through sort of critically where that balance is and how we can be mindful of the risks while also leveraging the technologies at the same time yeah i think one of the things that really resonates about your story robert is as we were planning for the accountable health community's work we had convened a coalition of multiple social service providers multiple healthcare providers and often i think when you're in the direct work of patient patient care delivery or service delivery there's a sense that the more you know about the person in front of you the better you'll be able to do your work right so if you have the whole set of data that could possibly be out there more is better and you know that's kind of the overriding philosophy that comes to really sort of run the design of the intervention and things like that but as we were having a conversation there was a representative from house of ruth maryland which is an organization that does a lot of work around domestic violence and you know is very invested in the idea of really defining what it looks like to provide information safely and how to protect women from potentially being exposed to you know former abusers or current abusers within a system and she asked the same question you did which is really you know why are we collecting this data and how are we actually ensuring that the right levels of protection are in place to ensure that the right data is getting to the right people and so as we think about issues of consent as we think about issues of really sort of you know making things available only when they're needed for me there's a very large incentive to actually talk to patients and stakeholders directly and you know find out from them what they would view as appropriate and really sort of give that equal weight with the subject matter experts or the technical experts that are often in these rooms yeah i would i would really echo that patient involvement side of things i would maybe even take it a step further and say that i think we need to start having mechanisms of transparency where consumers can consumers of health care i should say should really be able to understand what the cyber security and privacy posture is of the institutions that are they're going to entrust their data with right trust is a two-way street and if we don't have that transparency you're basically i mean everyone here has gone into some form of doctor's office or something and basically they say here let me give you a stack of 10 papers that you're going to sign essentially giving all the rights away to every one of the most sensitive pieces of data that might be in your life unless you've undergone like a top secret sci clearance that's basically the only thing you can i can think of that's more invasive than a medical record for many individuals um and so when when you think about that it's all about okay well what are you going to give me back institution what technologies are you using what cultural elements are you using to protect my information and i think that is a is a huge piece that we can that we can implement i think a second thing is and i see this a lot have been a clinical researcher as well we always talk about and i know we're talking about AI and all these other technologies and buzzwords that have lost all meaning to me at this point having been in the field for a decade now um but we always talk about these technologies in terms of how are we using the data to improve outcomes and to do more clinically focused analytics but a lot of those same tools can also be used to protect data in a variety of different ways and i think we just need to have a parallel track of investment and thoughtfulness about how we're using these kind of sophisticated techniques to defend our institutions as well as we are using them to implement improvements to patient care which should come first i agree but really does have to happen in parallel so it's looking like we have about time for one more question and unfortunately there's no q and a for this panel but we're going to go to lunch and i encourage you all to um stick around and and ask those questions to all of us certainly but the others who came before um the final question that i have relates back to um imma colman and depaim gosius panel about bringing technologists to the table and so i'm wondering if you can speak a little bit more concretely about bringing technologists into the healthcare space and encouraging those collaborative dialogues between patients technologists policymakers how we leverage public private conversations to really deliver the best outcomes and um maybe if you've seen an example of that in your own work sonia or robert um if you can speak to what that looks like and helping deliver the best patient health outcomes yeah i think it's a great question we were talking earlier about the fact that oftentimes there isn't a great understanding amongst technologists of healthcare workflows and i'd flip that and say that similarly there's often a great sort of lack of understanding of technology in general but then certainly the way that technology gets incorporated into actual healthcare workflows amongst public health professionals and healthcare providers themselves and so one of the things that i have found to be incredibly useful is to from an equity perspective think about how to bring technologists to the table in a way that really is in a mode of learning and not just in a mode of saying we're the sort of you know we're the people who know how to design and code and we're here to fix your problems which can often be the sort of positioning of some of these types of um conversations and instead to say everyone's got different assets that they're bringing to the table and i found that to be incredibly useful i'm not a technologist myself but i really enjoyed getting to learn from the other technologists in the public interest technology fellowship who have helped me to break down some of the pieces of the policy questions that i'm looking at and then think about how technology could be applied against that yeah you know i i always think about it having been in health it specifically for about the last five years as it's really a two-part problem and i think that it requires a bridging of the gaps between two mindsets on the on the healthcare side there is very much a culture of no that has emerged around technology and it's all about okay let's protect patients let's protect patients so we can't do something new we're gonna do it the way we've always done it this is beginning to shift in some ways but we need to start thinking about the long term which is if we're really going to protect our populations and the long-term health of our nation we can't do it the way that we've always done it and so i think we need to move into that shift of from a no all the time into a yes but let's be thoughtful and i think that that's a really important cultural shift inside of medicine simultaneously i have a lot of friends on a certain coast that when they go into health care are often just focused on like let me just disrupt whatever i can i'm here to disrupt i'm just disruption as a service today right now and i was talking to health care cio we were at this conference and he said the last thing i want to hear is someone is going to disrupt my hospital okay just that is not a word you want in a clinical workflow does a surgeon want disruption in their OR no um and so i think we just have to start to think about the nomenclature that we use and the thoughtfulness and the ways that we're entering that space as technologists and being respectful both of the cultural norms as well as the unique challenges because there are elements to that that are definitely playing the entrepreneurship game on on expert mode or the policy game or or other pieces of that and i think we we just both need to come to that understanding and concordance and i think it's events like this that are helping to build those bridges that are just so so important well i hope you'll join me in thanking sonia sarkar and robert lord for being here thank you dylan thanks everyone and congratulate yourself on making it to lunch um i believe lunch is served out in the lobby so um save those questions we'll be back in here at 130 thanks we're going to start up soon next session so if you could all um yeah just you can keep eating away um but i'm going to bring my colleagues out now they're going to magically appear they will and we'll get started we're going to shift the the the conversation into kind of um politics and organizing and how it moves with the policy conversation and how to get some intergenerational dialogue going so come on guys did you hear me are we good mic check mic check test all right good afternoon everyone thank you for making it all the way to the third of today's panel i really appreciate y'all being there uh my name is erin afki and i'm a millennial fellow here at new america and i'm also the editorial assistant for the poor people's campaign a national call for moral revival and so today i'll be introducing uh our two panelists as well as saying a few words about what the panel will seek to address so this title of the panel is policy engagement and political activism and our goal today is to communicate significance and distinction of youth activism and to learn how political organizations can better serve to empower young people and i think this discussion seems timely given the wave of media attention that young activists especially parkland students have received in the past month but rather than approach the concept of youth activism as an inherently progressive or transformative force it is perhaps more valuable to think of young people as a cohort shaped by laws institutions and political events that have transpired in their lifetimes so for example when asked to comment on why white supremacy is theorized as permanent in many leftist circles professor kianga yamata taylor said to me the answer is simple we have not had a successful social movement in this country in two generations and the labor movement the working class movement is almost non-existent in its form as labor professor taylor's comments can be instructive for how the political activity of young people is historically grounded why surges of youth activism might transpire around certain issues and not for others and why specific organizational structures and ideological positions gain popularity and rather than understand youth activists as a singular sort of stable constituency it's also important to take into account the divergences within generations along lines of social identification and lived experience nevertheless young people organizing together and leading in politics has in its most profound moments resulted in new models for organizing and and has brought forward extraordinary political victories so here i'm reminded of the formation of the black panther party at merit college and you know the political victories of young workers who organized the flint fitdown strikes in 1936 and so with this in mind building out the political infrastructure to sustain and foster youth empowerment ought to be an imperative for movement building and to understand how this has historically been achieved as well as to discuss current limits and opportunities for centering young people and political activism i turn it over to our panelists today and so the first person i'd like to introduce is dr marcia chatlin a provost distinguished associate professor of history in african-american studies at georgetown university and a new america fellow dr chatlin is a historian of black girls in girlhood during the great migration her first book southside girls growing up in the great migration was published by duke university press in 2015 she's also written on black lives matter and its historical trajectory as well as the role of black women in racial justice movements she's currently writing a book about race and fast food titled from sit in to drive through black america in the age of fast food and our second panel panelists today is joseph green he's the director of youth programs at split this rock the dc-based poetry organization that promotes social change and youth empowerment through the arts merging activism with poetry joseph has co-founded dozens of after school creative right creative writing programs and poetry festivals across the country including the hyper bowl which is the largest poetry slam for high school students in the mid-atlantic region in addition to his work with young people joseph is a nationally recognized poet and public speaker and so with that let me turn it over to our moderator today christian hozzam christian is a millennial fellow and he works with the political reform team here at new america right so thank you everyone for being here it's so exciting to do this part of the day to kick it off because what we kind of thought about as a cohort when we were kind of deciding on doing these these panels was you know the panel after this is going to kind of talk about activism in a more kind of grounded practical practical way we kind of wanted to take a step back before that and talk about some of the myths and realities when it comes to youth activism and it's so interesting and exciting to be here because there's so much going on particularly around kind of what we might call youth activism right now particularly around parkland but not limited to parkland and i think that's actually where i might start so you know in your intro erin you talked about you know um the quote by doctor taylor gianna taylor about you know um how young people we've we've not experienced a successful social movement for the last two generations um but that doesn't mean that we have not seen powerful displays of protest of organizing of consciousness raising and i'm thinking of particular of black lives matter so for the first question i'd like us to maybe reflect on how blm kind of emerges as bellwether for the political class of young people in this moment and how the movement does or does not affect how we're thinking about what we mean by models of organizing so marcia i'm wondering if we can maybe start with you and then we kind of talk a little bit in depth about that yeah thank you and um erin what beautiful comments what a wonderful you know framing uh narrative so you know when i when i think about black lives matter i think of it um i think we think of it as a protest movement which it is but i think we also have to think about it as a method as a way of getting at a series of questions and when we do that i think it helps us understand the parts of it that um are particularly attentive to the ways that young people interact with kind of larger political systems and so when we kind of you know uh boil it down to its most basic history you know black lives matter emerges around the death of trevon martin in a kind of local way in which a local issue is able to um amplify a national problem around gun violence stand your ground laws um the interaction of people of color especially people of color when they are harmed and these larger systems um you know some of the the details of what happened to trevon martin when george zimmerman killed him are emerged because this group of young activists kind of show up as witnesses to you know what is happening and so i think that it's important to remember that trevon martin's death was the inspiration for the movement but it was michael brown's death that really internationalized it in terms of thinking about this method of arriving at the scene of this moment of state sanctioned violence critiquing the inability of response and using that as an opportunity for people to both locally nationally and internationally to learn more about how structure works and i think that that there's a pedagogical function a teaching function of what black lives matter does that um while it's not as dramatic as some of the kind of larger protest activity that we often tether to social movements it's the it's the educational quality of social movements that i think um we have to remember also in some ways the pedagogical value is there because we kind of don't have these kind of larger protest spaces right so that that moment of arriving on the scene kind of emerges because we don't have these civic in local civic institutions to kind of be there in in in kind of preparation for this right i mean i if you look at you know ferguson was such an incredible um revelatory moment for the nation to think about how communities exist apart from the resources from the kind of structural leadership and as all of that information emerges people are then inspired to think about how they shape their action um you know when student when students talk to me about kind of wanting to be part of any type of activist movement now one of the things i suggest is read about the student on violent coordinating committee and read about the titles that people had policy director field director you know northwest regional coordinator this idea that these roles are really about a series of relationships and all of those relationships were shaped by either policy initiatives that they wanted to push or the inability of policy to protect people equally and i think that that's the type of thing that we have to bring out if we're really going to help uh young people understand the various dynamics of how to make a difference yeah and joseph i think this this is so helpful because you know with so many civic institutions on the on the decline right now you know labor um the church even you know and thinking about political parties kind of not being kind of present in the same way that they were for previous generations what would you say your the what would you say is the role of your in particular which touches on the intersection between art and activism in terms of developing kind of like this infrastructure of participation and engagement that might help young people kind of see participation as viable and worthwhile so it brings me back a little further in time to 92 in la uh when the riots happened and that was the first time in my life that police violence against people of color was real and on on tv but by real is i've heard stories i've read things but to see it on nbc abc cbs but i didn't have anything to use to respond you know i was 12 years old and that's the beginning age of most of the young people that i work with who by the time i had heard of it i've heard of trevon they had already heard of it they had already responded to it they were already texting and tweeting and and the response had already happened so this the difference has to be stated for the tools that are being used to um to speak about and speak directly to these things uh these events that are happening and so in my work our job is to give young people a platform to express themselves give them the tools with which to express themselves and immediately our response was how do i feel about this and how can that shape the argument and i think that's what we learned uh the hard way was they don't want necessarily to be impacted by our political beliefs in this space they if we believe that they can actually make the difference that they say that we say they can make they want to be given the tools and for us to sort of show them where to go but get out of the way um and in effort to respond to these um to these incidents in that way our work becomes that of uh creating a marketing platform you know so the open mics the spoken word events the slams all of these things are ways for young people to market their beliefs to themselves based off of what they are experiencing even if it's not happening directly in front of them um and it just makes it more visceral now to see the videos into to um hear their their their favorite artists responding in music and film and things of that sort to what's going on and this is for for you jose but also for you erin as well you know that that kind of that that moment where you say you know we want to give them the tools to express themselves is important because it it kind of points me towards like what is the use value of talking about young people and youth activism as a unit of analysis because in some ways we can talk about the civil rights movement as a as a movement for civil rights in addition to talking about as a youth movement because there's because there's a student nonviolent court and committee even now with parkland what is the value of talking about it as a movement around gun violence versus around a movement versus a movement that's around kind of like the experiences and the experience of being a young person in this moment so so i guess for all of you but you know for for joseph and for erin in particular what do you think we gain from talking about i mean millennials but even under us talking in that way and in that mode about youth activism sure i'll go first so yeah i think it's really complicated when you talk about young people as a unit of analysis given just the divergent experiences across across identities right across race across gender across class i will say though that one thing i've seen in the poor people's campaign and i've seen in other examples is that i think young activists have oftentimes successfully been able to leverage their identity as young people within the context of a political campaign and i can think of two ways in which that works so if i'm looking at you know the poor people's campaign a lot of it is challenging you know what we say we value in america with what we actually value right so if children's rights are lifted up as something that we care about in the lives of children are considered precious we look at the gap between how children are treated and what we say right and young people can leverage that right through their protest um in a sort of a flip and i think parkland in many ways they've done that right they say you know you say we care about the lives of children the lives of teenagers look what's happening in our schools a kind of a flip side of that that i think is also interesting and i also want to raise up is when young people have recognized that based on the laws and institutions of our society they might actually have more protection as young people and that they can say things and do things that other people can't and i've seen that too and i see when young people have used the themselves as young people to advance um to give to give an example with the sheriff elections for sheriff joep high on being xarizona young people organized with unite here um to sort of unseat him and they did voter registration drives they did a lot of walkouts a lot of actions and they were particularly able to leverage their position as young people because of the fear in their communities of violence that many of their parents and families felt that they themselves didn't fear didn't feel that they were as vulnerable to and in that case the union of analysis of young people it was successful in sort of carrying out political work i don't think um i answered your question about institutions right so we open this conversation with the labor unions and so what young people imagine are the institutions that come in and save us when there's a problem and i think that um i often use this as an illustrious example is that my students can't imagine a world where pbs isn't sponsored by a number of people right when i say well when i was a kid you turned on sesame street and it was just a children's theater workshop but now it's you know brought to you by axon brought to you by you know whatever you know so it the the underwriting of what we think is public i think shifts our imagination and makes us understand that we in our communities or in our public um publicly funded entities are not enough and i think that message as probably has the strongest influence on how students imagine problem solving and how to organize you know if i were to say to a group of students we have everything we need they'll say no but we need a sponsor and i think the reason why they say that is because they that idea of a labor union the idea of a church being the one that feeds your family if they don't have food this is something this is an america that no longer exists but the idea of it's so powerful that when communities fail to meet their own needs when they fail to get the sponsor they start to believe that there's something faulty in the community and not the larger structure of how people get their needs mad and so i think that when we think about black activism particularly and people say where's the church and black lives matter and i said the church was powerful and the civil rights movement because literally church was the only place you could be you know black people can be in other public spaces generally right without fear of retaliation most of the time but if you think about the church as the only place people can organize then the church becomes powerful but we can meet online we can meet in homes we can meet at a you know at another space and it shifts those power dynamics and i think that we have to keep that in mind because often that is the source of the critique well the institutions are failing or people are failing it's like no the system has failed many entities and we have to kind of reclaim the possibility of it and that thinking is some of the most radical thinking yeah so i was going to i was originally going to pick it back up what you said but now i want to pick it back up with you say um and what i've been what i consider success in the spaces that i work in are young people taking it upon themselves to create the space themselves right so i will go out and we'll strike a partnership with the Kennedy Center and we do louder than the bomb there and we do that there so that the young people can you know feel special about having their words broadcast in this you know hollowed institution or whatever you want to call the Kennedy Center but the thing that really matters is will you take it upon yourself to do an open mic in your own school like will you do it in the classroom after school with 30 young people because you know that what's really important here is the communion of you guys having these conversations and creating these spaces for yourself if you can't get the classroom are you willing to meet outside of the school are you willing to meet at the Starbucks are you where are you willing to go without permission because you have had that switch turned on where you realize that what you have to say matters and the only way that it can come to fruition is if you are pursuing these spaces relentlessly to have these conversations so if i if we're succeeding again it's not in telling them what to think it's by convincing them that they have the tools to solve the problems if they have the resiliency to see it through you know what you both said reminded earlier in his opening remarks about you know we don't we no longer have as a generation financial security as like a foundation of our lives we have it as an aspiration and that change that again we no longer have it as like a foundation in our lives but instead that security is like an aspirational piece so so what that does is it changes the kind of our political imagines as you're saying right so it means in some good ways that you know the atom might be split in terms of the kinds of policies that we thought we would support right so i'm thinking of um senator jill brand came out with a policy yesterday about like unbanked people being able to kind of get their do their banking through post offices right there's a different kind of of energy that might not have existed but that also kind of on the flip side means you know we might be more willing to ascend to authoritarian attitudes right we might be more willing to ascend to kind of um less state-centric organizing which i'm not i'm not casting judgment under one way or the other but the point is that financial security security of these institutions the and and the and the lack of a sense you need private large multinational entities to underwrite your entire experience does matter a great deal in terms of the kinds of things you're willing to support the kinds of things that you want to organize around the things that you know you believe can actually gain traction so it that matters quite a bit in terms of what might be valuable in terms of thinking about um generational analysis right because if if we have a different framework how we even enter into um policy preferences then we may need to kind of have a different dialogue about what is viable um and you know based on that you know erin your work on the poor people's campaign might be helpful here to kind of think of kind of some of these these fissures when it comes to activism so the poor people's campaign in kind of some ways articulate itself as a continuation of the civil rights movement continuation of these kind of more traditionalist movements in some ways it doesn't though and i think that's a response to kind of the understanding that the young people are coming from a different place right and so you might i hope you might just talk a little bit about you know like the the disjunctures between kind of these traditional institution-based movements and what the poor people's campaign is both trying to do it and trying to push back against right now let me say i i don't speak as a representative of the poor people's campaign speaking as an individual um but i i think yeah like definitely there there is definitely an influence of the church present in the poor people's campaign right the the sort of founding coalition the poor people's campaign is partially made up of faith-based groups at the same time it understands itself to be sort of a secular movement i think it's trying to merge both so it's trying to work within the networks and the frameworks of churches particularly in the south i think that's another thing to point on is that when we talk about the decline of the church we need to be careful in terms of overstating that based on the regions in which we're referring to right but they're trying to blend both so the the the sort of structure i think of the poor people's campaign in terms of how they're organizing might exemplify how this is happening they're doing faith-based chapters uh they're they're connecting impacted people with community and labor organizers with clergymen and women right forming sort of tri-chairs to work within uh multiple networks within an entire state and then trying to break through that rule and that urban sort of setting right um and so i think that's one example in which they're trying to sort of work through that i hope you all talk about you know this moment where it does seem like you know when we talk about young people or even just marginalized communities in general we talk about their preferences as if those preferences are divorced from the shifting of institutions right so i mean it seems like what we're all poing to here is that we need to actually bring not even if those institutions are fraught right that we could because we don't want to pretend as if just having them there kind of is as is um anti-political but we do need to bring them back in as we're analyzing what can and cannot work right so when we think about the work that institutions can or can't do in terms of responding to the needs of young people very few institutions are adept at shifting at remaining grounded in a vision but shifting their pathways to that vision in ways that can accommodate the needs of young people and i think that this point that you make about financial security is so important because you know there there's this kind of there's this something is in the air right now where um we both appreciate the kind of energy of young people i think a lot of um you know so-called progressive organizations appreciate the energy of young people but when young people make demands like salary and benefits they're like whoa these young people are just ah you know they're they're so entitled and it's like are you kidding me you know and i think what happens is that social change becomes a leisure class activity becoming a teacher becomes a leisure profession hell being a professor is a pretty leisure professor you know profession and and and so it concerns me that we create um a caste system among idealists and we say to um you know we say i think it's so interesting that the poor people's campaign is using some of the the work that the southern christian leadership conference is confronting but they're doing it in so many dynamic ways that you can still bring the idea of king's poor people campaign into play in 2018 but you can understand that it has to have some secular ramifications you have to understand that it has to think about lgbtq violence you have to think you know it's also thinking about um some of this kind of rural urban divide in these really thoughtful ways so you can't say that you know reverend barber is just recycling an old idea no he's bringing a responsive kind of leadership to a framework and i and we don't have enough examples of it and when we don't have those examples we always see failure because we have an idea of what success looks like but but i just the thing that concerns me so much isn't that as young people get older they lose their ideals it's just that there's no footing there's no next step there's no solid step for them to continue on that ideological journey and i think that that's what we're seeing when we say you know in a few years you'll you'll forget or you won't care it's like no in a few years my debt will be crushing and i and i need to take care of my family and i my healthcare you know requires me more to this like watch what i eat these are the things that i think our progressive communities really need to be responsive to just really quick even when it's about like progressive organizations not responding especially with salary benefits that goes back to the institutions question because they never had to make those asks before because we because we had kind of these these things undergirding our society so when it was not a question the same way that it is now where we're always contingent i mean even the labor force or more generally is becoming more and more contingent you talked about the academy like how much contingent labor for young people for for agents in general is just taking over the field so that's that's a big big piece of this there's just some work out of the University of Pennsylvania a graduate student um and apparently the first person to do this talking about not necessarily about income inequality but living paycheck to paycheck as a form of political engagement and i was like i couldn't believe that it had not been done before honestly right that that would have not been done before so um just i know you probably have something to say but i also wanted to ask you a question um could you i mean because in addition to whatever you're you're going to say i i really wanted to know if you could talk about this mode of political education for young people because it seems that there are some distinct factors that we need to address when we're talking about politicization consciousness raising and what that might look like so i want to talk from your experience and just from your expertise about what that looks like and what it might not look like for other people okay so i'm going to answer i'm going to say the thing that was in my brain and i might have you restate what you just asked me because it's just the way it works um i am i've been working in my position at spittish rock for two years now and before that i started my own nonprofit and i was there for five years and i find now that what the biggest obstacle for folks one of the biggest obstacles for folks that do our type of work is knowing when it's time for us to move on to do something else like if the idea of the poor people's campaign is to be reinvigorated it has to be reinvigorated with the problems and the issues and the blood of the people who are trying to deal with the issues that are happening to them right now so i look at you know executive directors i look at all of the positions we create inside of these giant nonprofits and i think that the the issue is not the entitlement of the young people but the fear and the lack of imagination of the folks in the older ranks to be able to walk away and say there's other things i can do um now that i've gotten this much experience under my belt i can start something else i can go and i can give speeches i can do this i should have been saving my money but now i'm nervous because i want to retire but there's no more social security and we're we're holding on to these jobs and and we're retiring from working at an educational institution that's based on young people and we're 75 years old right and we have to actually so well how active were we over the last 30 years when we're dealing with problems that don't directly affect us anymore um and so i think that's something that we in the older generations really never i never thought i'd say that in my life um no no but i mean it's going to be me if i'm saying if i don't start planning for it now now should have been 10 years ago but if i don't start planning for it now then in 10 years when i have all of these young people that have come through my programs but now have no real jobs in what we do because i'm still here and my salary is this much and if it was gone it could be split four ways and we could have four young people doing work um because i didn't prepare to not be important in this way so that was just my the other half of that is not so much young people get creative and figure it out it's older people start preparing and maybe the way our system is created is not ideal for people to progress and make be able to make a living while also helping and making trying to make the world a better place all right that's a lovely point yeah you know and i think about it with with particular respect to housing so there's a way in which if you are a homeowner you have a lot of political power and particularly in some of these more urban areas and what people don't really think about is that you know young people particularly as we kind of move out of college go into the young professional world in 20 to 27 approximately are rent burden at much much higher rates in previous generations now what that means politically is that if you go to like a zoning council or a kind of like a county council they're primarily run by people that are older that have equity in their homes and and basically can control in many ways how expensive places are the amount of housing that is that is available all these ways so there are many notes in which you need young people to be represented and that were not right if you look at all of these things that were 50 years ago the traditions of success college now it's one of the most expensive things to have and that college education a home now it's one of the most expensive things to have paying for your healthcare is one of the most expensive things to have how can you be uh an activist a revolutionary when you trade your $80,000 of college debt for $500,000 of house debt um and and again the question becomes not wrong or right but how can we address those issues while still trying to address the issues that we are already working on this is this is the political education so all of the kind of like like the the think pieces that are like oh it's it's horrible to be young sorry guys we got the benefits of all the system good luck that is not a political education that's noise a political education is to say okay how are we going to organize all the young renters in this community and how are they going to show up at the meetings and how are we how am i am as a homeowner going to think about you who want to rent in my neighborhood and how to be really just about it how am i going to tell my colleagues who own property to say hey guys this is what housing discrimination is you may not want to do this and you know what it you know when we think about setting rents on the properties we own i'm about to show an apartment i own to a tenant right i want young people to be able to rent my apartment these are choices i have to make about how much i should rent my apartment for because i'm in washington dc and i remember getting my first job here reminding people that this is where political work happens that it isn't just registering to vote and vote and it's not just paying your taxes which is also very important but it's also understanding that the more power we amass then our personal choices become highly political so i can't say well i would never discriminate against someone who's renting it's like well i have to send a rent price that is actually reasonable that someone could move into my apartment and live in it right like and those those are the places where the like radical work happens because these are making choices and these are those exchanges that you're talking about but if we don't even introduce that to people as political work then we're losing all of our power is left on the table and we're just kind of you know we're playing musical chairs around it and so i think when we think about political education our strongest work is in drilling down all of the places in which we can hoard our power and gently inviting people to disperse of a little bit of it at a time yeah that's leaving your job leaving your job yeah i i'm doing a second that enthusiastically um and say now and you reminded me of what the question was so you don't need to repeat it uh political education um i i'm going to say three facets i might only hit two there might be four we'll see how it goes um but the go for the yeah buckle up yeah i like speaking in numbers uh first thing is leading by example um i find my job to be a political job right and so four months ago i'm pulling my hair out i'm having this i'm having a horrible time i haven't slept um my one of my young people comes in and they say man you know i used to want to do what you do but now i'm i'm good homie like i have no desire to get paid what i know you get paid um to do what you're doing and and i thought to myself i just gave this young person an awful political education all right i'm not taking care of myself i'm not creating this space in a way that makes it seem like they would want to come into this work it doesn't have to be this hard um and so our lives as an example itself and that goes into broad not just making better decisions but broadcasting it like i'm putting my apartment for rent for this much and this is why right and i can still eat right it is and it's looking and so the second thing is destroying this perception of what security means to um this idea that we have to i mean i i took a very weird past like i i after school i i just kind of roamed the world trying to be an artist but what i learned in that space was that i can survive off of 12 000 a year right um now that's not ideal but it's also not the opposite of where i don't feel like i've been successful or that i am secure unless i'm making a hundred thousand dollars a year right there's something in the middle where when we're working with young people uh we have to attack the their the definition of success or have them attack their definition of success based off of what we've shown them in the past um and we also have to um attack our and theirs definition of what security is because a lot of the things that we do are reaction to needing or wanting to feel secure like i'm gonna go and i'm gonna drop this 120 000 on this education um so that i have the security of being able to make a certain amount of money for the rest of my life with that one decision based off of what you perceive security just handcuffed you for the next 15 years right to having to pay this off and it's kind of hard to be like you know what i'm gonna skip work and go out to that um to that march because if i get fired then and this is something that's not brand new to anybody but it's just when i'm working with young people i have to remember i'm not just teaching poetry right i can't it can't just be now we're going to edit our poems it's like well what are we going to do with our poems and what are we going to do with our bodies after we leave this space how do we take the idea of editing and so this is number three the actual tools of what we do in our space of editing poetry writing poetry asking hard questions um creating space how do those things translate to activism outside of writing poems so again if they are learning what we are hopefully trying to teach them they are realizing that they have to ask these goal-setting questions about their lives and that they can edit it as they go through um and they have to be able to um be willing to ask themselves hard questions and then share those answers to a group of people that's what a poetry slam is ultimately if you don't spoken word poetry raise your hand if you know what it is all right cool awesome i just want to make sure i was like talking about poetry and poetry slam and maybe you don't know what it is um but that that all it is is everyone writing letters to themselves and do each other about what it is they care the most about and being willing to share and and that's the first step in any real radical change is being able to have a conversation and be vulnerable in a space um and so whatever it is that you do with young people just to make sure that those lessons are are getting through i had a phone call last night with two young people from two different teams that are competing this weekend in our competition and it was an hour-long conversation about the rules they were upset that these rules made it harder for teams from this area to compete and so on so forth and i had to take a step back and say i appreciate you calling and trusted me enough to come to me with this but the reality is if this is what we're arguing about at 10 30 at night then i have not given you i haven't that led you in in the right direction and so we had instead of having a conversation about rules we had a hour-long conversation about the reason why we have to make these spaces equitable for both teams that are in arlington and teams that are in southeast dc so maybe you don't get to do all of the poems with all of the people that you imagine will we do that so that we can bring everybody to the table and then okay all right it's not about poetry anymore does that make sense to people hopefully that was useful for those of you who don't work at poetry organizations but you know i i do want to but you know as you as you guys are talking about political education i do want to talk about education more formally because i think there is a moment at which all this talk about what i call lowercase p political education is done but capital p political education education is done in higher education particularly right and that space is so dominated and and so dominates our perceptions of what young people are and the activism around it and i know you talked about this before in that length so i would love for you to go into um a little bit of detail about what we think about with respect to young people and kind of as particularly in that higher ed space right what is student activism in that in that world and what is it not so one of the things i think is interesting at this moment are organizations that label themselves youth organizations and organizations that label themselves as student organizations and you know if you look at black youth project um 100 they're very intentional saying we're not a student organization we are a youth organization so your relationship to a college campus does not define kind of the political ways that you enter but the reality is is that college campuses are an excellent place in which we see movement building and movement support and organizing happen i think one of the ways um i like to allow my profession to take credit for this because i think we have to stand up for it but one of the things i think is most powerful is young activists who are organizing in the mode that reflects the shift in how we teach civil rights history so when i talk to a young person who is part of a social movement they'll say we organize on these principles because we don't want to make the mistakes that they made in the 50s or the 60s they're very clear that there were mistakes in the mainstream civil rights movement how do know how do they know there were mistakes because there are actually historians who are willing to write a different history of the past that we are no longer stuck in this mode of celebration we're in a mode of analysis that was only possible because the academy was able to expand enough to bring in scholars of color and women when you have history written from a different perspective history's value also shifts and the reason why i always say this is because as someone who teaches in the humanities in higher ed i'm under attack because i apparently teach something that's useless that everyone needs and i'm in an industry that we are now at a point where a you know there's i think people are saying it like 43 percent of people of a certain political or orientation think that higher ed is ruining the country and not helping it and so i make this point all the time that just so you know what we do and why we do it all of that is to say that the political education of higher ed whether a student on the right or the left it happens the second a family has to make a commitment or that individual has to make a commitment or the g i bill has to make a commitment to pay for that education welcome to welcome to political life the second you make that kind of financial commitment you are now in a political process the question is are we transparent enough in higher ed to say that regardless of the classes you take or your major you are getting one of the finest political educations because you were probably subject to a student loan processor you are educated you are subject to the department of educations shifting perspectives on the regulation of student loans you are now subject to some of the protocols for federally funded research you are a political subject my friend whether you like it or not and so i think that our responsibility in higher education is to expose the way that students are at the center of a series of political processes some more vulnerable than others that they have to understand as part of the experience because we often frame the political work of higher ed as some ideological battlefield that just like does not exist between liberal professors and administrators and conservatives that never that is not what is happening what is happening is we have generations of young people who are engaged in some of the consequences of policies that are made by people who do not know higher education who are often at institutions run by people who have no background in higher education and they are subject to all those whims if that is the type of stuff that if the new york times would write more think pieces about that there would be a real revolution on college campuses because students would be radicalized by the conditions in which they are learning and the policies that are governing their professionalization and their future i'm just saying so it is all deeply political we just have to do some more unmasking um i wish this were filmed so that we could take a break after every time you talk and i could have a moment to catch up um yeah because i'm i'm processing all of that and i and i i i agree passionately with with what you were saying and in my ideal mostly with high school students and public schools and that's the same it's the same thing in those spaces so i'm not going to name the school district but i was recently brought into a school district to do a professional development uh and the teachers they all gathered around when we came in it's like we know what you said you were here for but what we really want is to learn how to bring these political issues that our young people are talking about into the classroom without getting fired for it um and so that became the conversation as opposed to whatever i thought i was there to teach and that in of itself should be a political education for the teachers the fact that we're in this room huddled quietly so that the person who hired me doesn't hear what we're talking about so we can figure out how to get young people give them permission to talk about the issues that are already affecting them so that's that's number one we have to be unafraid and create spaces or create tools rather where people are speaking to those things that aren't necessarily directly in the line of fire um and so it is our newspaper so it is the editorial so it is the huffington's and the so-and-so but we have to find a way to get stories to them that get stories out about these spaces so that teachers who are already being inundated from every direction aren't also now having to put their entire livelihood so that our young people can get a better education uh secondly for those of us outside of that sphere um who have a little more um leeway we need to make sure that our programming is is directed in the um in that in that space also so for example uh we did a thing this summer called the james baldwin institute where we brought young people in and we said we gave them a survey what political issues are directly affecting your life and i kind of did it like a bracket beforehand and i figured i bet you they're going to say these five things and i was completely wrong the number one thing was how to get jobs you know these are young people signing up for a writing workshop but they're like yeah this is great the only reason we're here is because dc is paying us to be here otherwise we would have to be working at chipotle right now and now they're really far away from getting whatever education we could have offered them uh and so we had to create our program based around the things that are directly affecting their lives so that they can see that there can be change right they if they learn about these things that that's the first step in them actually being able to to do something about it and the movements of the past um they have to be told twofully um these people have to be made to seem like humans because otherwise and and this is where the storytellers are at fault um we sing these songs and we exclude all of all the blood and the scars and the injuries out of it and it's just you know marlitha king the statue and that marlitha king the like the human who was who who was scared and was nervous and and second guessed himself and made bad decisions and had to recover from that uh and therefore i young man from southeast actually could you know be that for my community i could actually do that yeah i come from um a mother who is addicted to drugs and a father who's gone and and but i don't have to end here and that's the power of storytelling and that's the power of us being able to create those spaces where um we are encouraging people to tell their whole story and not just the success and not just the the good parts i don't know where i am in the conversation right now but that's how i feel about it well i do want to um to open up for questions because we we have a we have a time left um i will say this i heard marcia say this before and i loved it um a question is a search for knowledge not a recitation of it so be aware of that as you asked your questions um but please open it up i'm so excited to hear from you guys see if this works um i loved how you talked about the culture on college campuses i graduated from UCLA a year and a half ago and one of the things that is going on currently with our campus is we're seeing the infiltration of groups like turning point usa and others because of the structure and jane mayer new york or new york i should say did an article on this i was just wondering if you could comment on you know the culture that's really being created because all these right wing donors and right wing organizations are literally trying to run not only congressional style campaigns on college campuses but like you're saying creating this huge environment i just love to hear your thoughts on the whole institutions so um jane and nancy claims book about the coke brothers and my former dissertation advisor in the washington post this week this week matt garcia talked about some things at arizona state let me be very clear there is no golden age of benevolence and you know robust public funding you know whether i talk about the civil rights movement of the 50s or the labor movements of the 20s and 30s there have always been dollars in these movements someone has to pay for signs someone has to pay for the buses and the sandwiches so i want to be very clear that when i talk about robust public institution i'm not saying places that are free from outside money but the self-determination of the organization and the possibility to imagine within those i think was was stronger with that being said what is happening in higher education is the continued donor influence my concern is that the the concessions that are made to donors now are done in a deep awareness that the state legislatures are not coming to save us the federal government is not coming to save us so the checks and balances that both public and private universities could have made on donors and saying look you're not going to pick all the faculty and we can't say we're only doing this one thing that lessons as public support of higher education lessons and so now institutions are in this very desperate position where they're taking money from wherever it can come because they know they're not going to recover those dollars and similarly legislative retaliation against colleges and universities is something we have to be very very cautious of listen i don't mind people donating to higher ed i completely understand that impulse but what i am concerned about is when we have multiples we have two political science departments we have two history departments we have two american civilization programs because there's one ideological commitment that funds one and the other one may not be equally funded or more susceptible to retaliation and so i think all of this is a great opportunity for us to really learn what higher education is now you might have gone to college in the 90s that framework doesn't help you to understand colleges today and if you went to college in the 50s that framework doesn't help you understand colleges today but it goes to your your point that our leadership structures are stuck in the moment in which they had the experience rather than very attentive to the ways that these things grow and shift hi i'm gustavo karnigy um so my question so it seems like the undercurrent of what you guys keep talking about um is that they're fundamentally needs to be some kind of like large like like as you just said like capital is needed that's how fight for 15 has been successful because sdi you have spent tens of millions of dollars on organizing that um and you know the buses were paid for the science were paid for there was is is money is the ability to get organizing going um so i'm wondering my question for you guys is how do you structure particularly um political education capital p capital e like christian was saying how do you structure policy engagement particularly among youth particularly among lay people towards that ultimate goal of there needs to be a redistribution of capital from the good guy from the bad guys to the good guys well i'll i'll just say two things on that so when you when you think about um higher and just and political education more generally as marcia kind of point this to not as like kind of sitting around a circle or a classroom but rather as the product of a series of decisions then it becomes harder to kind of delineate between the good guys and the bad guys sometimes so that so that's the first thing but your your point about us needing to kind of really establish capital as a framework or capitalism capital all kind of in terms of stockpiling it is we need to kind of understand what's actually going on this is what you're talking about with unmasking so it's very difficult sometimes to see Americans for prosperity as a kind of a bad guy not because it isn't but because they actually have a very very variegated scheme of what they do so it's not always something that we might on on the front end classify as conservative or even like necessary i mean there are these principles that guide them but nothing but not that much else so it becomes very difficult to kind and a moving target in terms of what their goals are so it so some of the work that we do analytically is understanding kind of the the the breadcrumbs of where these things are going so that's where i start i don't know i don't know if that's right and um i would i would add that a lot of the work has to come with let me let me back up the decisions that get made as to what gets taught in schools um and how budgets are distributed are made by you know people and they're people that are are in elected positions and but on like the elected positions that you're never going to hear about on the news right so the people who are telling me that i can't talk about this particular thing in school um you know they they they like 165 people came to the election that put them into that spot on the school board or whatever it may be and so um the political education has to be based around it is something i personally getting people more involved on local small levels to make those decisions um and to get those those positions changed we're talking about you know the young people are talking about voting out the senators and voting out the president and voting out congressmen and so on and so forth but like their school superintendent is a person that needs to get voted out and and you know they might not be millionaires but they're living comfortably and somebody made their signs too and it wasn't them um and so yeah so on on that on that lower level we need to be people everyone's staring at the bright light and we need to bring it down a little bit and and and take this opportunity and this this new invigoration of young people and and try to guide a 30-year-old can't be the superintendent of a school district there's no reason why that can't be right they were the ones that were just there right they have an eye they have they have eyes on what can can really make a difference in that space but it's um yeah that's you know and to that point what's what's important about that is you know not only are we not talking about superintendent not talking about like registrars people that that really a lot of my work at new america is on voting rights there's so many small people that have such huge impacts in our lives that are elected officials that we have we know nothing about right so those are the so so it's an and in some ways the lights are not on them on purpose so this is where these these these again these the series of this decision that are being made there are so many people that affect our election times where we can vote all these different things that are elected that we don't nothing about so that's another piece of this puzzle in the yes okay i wanted to follow up on the comments around education and i wanted to hear from joseph and the professor about what you see as a difference between civic education and political education i think we're seeing more of a push for even civic education in the school system and even graduation requirements around this but it doesn't seem to get at the heart of teaching young people how to be active and so i wanted to hear your thoughts on that the distinction i would make is civic education is about processes that are highly impersonal and political education is about the various ways that power moves and so a lot of our conversation about youth activism is a form of political education because it talks about the ways that people leverage power that is both given by the state and not recognized by the state so if you have a bunch of 16 year olds in florida who are saying we're going to be able to vote in two years but in the meantime we're going to raise hell around this gun issue this is a kind of way in which power kind of mutes right like it goes from everyone who's voting age to people who are slightly under voting age so i think the political education piece in my work with k through 12 teachers i always say the most political work that you can do within your restraints is do the civic education and just use political examples no one can get upset about that um those are some of the ways we get around um the hesitancy and the resistance to doing more political education uh and and i i'm going to stick with uh the professor's distinction between i'm not going to redefine but as far as as getting it out there and getting it into day to day life and getting young people to think that they can actually make a difference it is is doing a better job of defining the actions and and you know for me i have these conversations and i say for every video that you watch on youtube about this can you take a moment to watch a youtube video about something political or about a movement or a speech from somebody um can you start splitting your time and attention a little differently because i think what happens after that is a natural progression after that i don't need to say voting is important you're going to know i don't have to say that um she deciding what neighborhood you want to live in is important uh you're going to figure that out you're going to see that we've already lived through these things and for whatever reason there's so much noise in between you and getting to those spaces um and getting to that education uh that you are going to have to live deliberately reeducate yourself uh and the tools are out there if you are willing to take the time to sort of back away from the things that they tell you a 16 year old is supposed to care about as opposed to the things that we know that they can and do care about when it steps into uh their own backyard or into their schools so we have just about two minutes left so if anyone has a question i'm going to let Micah and Braxton kind of just give you the mic and then we'll kind of answer the rapid fire style so who still has a question no more question oh wait let's see too too soon all right go ahead please sorry and this oh there we go um there was a good discussion earlier about what's happening on college campuses and i think that of course we're thinking about four-year residential campuses traditional quote unquote age students um and others are still despite all the obstacles pretty good places for people to become politically active and engaged um and so i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about spaces um or areas of life for social social interactions where that kind of education and self-organizing and sort of experimentation with organizing can be happening with other you know the majority of young people who don't go to four-year colleges really quickly you know that is such an important point because the vast majority of students do not go to four-year residential colleges and so it's important to make that note i will say that you know if we get to this moment at which we're thinking about political education not as you know reading argy lord who is critical i hope everyone reads argy lord but also like thinking about a series of decisions that kind of lead you to a specific moment there's actually a lot of organizing that happens at community colleges sometimes because of that very reason that because people see the budget cuts the financial devastation as something to organize and to raise hell about so that it can happen but we really have to do some really critical work nationally and at the local level of redefining the meaning of my by capital people at a call real quick i'm sorry um start younger one two uh we need non-profit organizations and foundations to start focusing on young people between the ages of 18 and 24 more so than they do now uh apprenticeship programs um uh different spaces for them to go and learn directly internships that are paid things of that sort so that it's not four-year university community college or vocation there are other things that you can do to figure out how to be an active member of your your country uh yes i say this in a loving way the internet this is why i love the internet people are organizing themselves in all sorts of collectives on the internet and i think that's actually really good because it doesn't diminish for the in the ground organizing and the break room that 15 minute like federally mandated break politics are happening at that break and i think the the question is do we have organizations to help then connect the resources to that organizing that happens and on that note we will go to break right now there is there are there there's there's stuff right here in the back so we'll take about a 10 minute break and then we'll kind of have our closing panel so thank you guys so much for being here and taking part hello mingling can find a seat somewhere and um thank you gable you coming in thank you and um yeah this is the final panel i'm going to turn it over to to rosalind to to moderate but i want to thank everyone for their engagement today um and really exciting day with a lot of wonderful conversations and i've learned a bunch and yeah this is the goal is to kind of get these conversations to incubate ideas and change and policy ideas and looking at where the interaction with policy and politics might unfold so rosalind all yours yeah thank you so much read um hello we made it to the last panel of the day how are you guys feeling good i'm a little tired but i wore my special shoes with bootstraps so i can pull them myself up by them in case i get tired um um so yeah i have the honor of introducing our panel for expanding the table intergenerational activism and policy change so first of all thank you to the panel right before us for setting the historical context for this conversation we're about to have kind of discussing how to center youth voices and also navigate activism intergenerationally what the best practices are what the strengths are but also what our personal experiences are in doing so um so i'm going to let the panelists introduce themselves but just for names we have tatiana benjamin who is an american studies phd candidate at the university of maryland college park um who just i've heard defended her uh dissertation over here tatiana um and closest to me i should have gone closest to me farthest but we have asia gardener uh a who is a poet and activist for split this rock and then at the end we have sumi who is a community organizer for the national korean american service and education consortium so that's a lot and before organizing this or having helped organize this with melody frayerson and becky chow um i wasn't really familiar with these organizations so if you could start by talking about your organization your work how you got into it and sort of what your journey has been that'd be great so usually in these times we do rock paper scissors in nakasek but you know since i have the mic now i just okay hi like she said my name is sumi that long organizational name we actually just call it nakasek um and you know what we primarily do is work with asian american communities and so we try to organize the asian the api asian american pacific islander folks to really get um active and engaged in terms of social and racial and economic justice and so we're a national or but we i'm actually out from the virginia office and so we'll be doing a lot of that um in terms of how i got involved um it's actually a funny story so before i got here i actually never heard of nakasek um before this i was actually working for a state delegate and i just told my delegate i was like you know i really got to find my roots i gotta see some asian people like i am out here and i don't see my asian folks and so i really want to know what my asian community needs and i want to i just want to hear them out i'm just curious and so i moved back i was out in bronok which is the southwest part of virginia and i came back to uh northern virginia and then found this this organization and um so my friend my best friend her name's sandi and we went through high school and college together and also elementary school so we were like blood sisters by at this point and um you know she really talked to me about what it means to be undocumented so um she was the first person and um she's the one really that that really fuels my passion for doing this work um we were in high school and uh you know we were talking about our faspa and talking about college going to public colleges and talking about getting our driver's license getting a car and you know there was sandi who couldn't be a part of that conversation and to feel uncomfortable and feel like you have to hide and run away from conversations that are just that are things that we all want to talk about and be engaged in um i saw that that was a pain that i i never felt and um working with knock a sec i saw so many youth who had to struggle with the same things and even more you know already even folks with status struggle you know with getting out of college and all of the debt you know paying off things um and really knowing what to do with our education but that is amplified those struggles are amplified for those that are undocumented so um that's just a little bit why i'm doing the work why i'm still here even with all the you know farmers tan and all that but yeah so i think that's that's my story hi i'm asia gardner um i am with with this rock nonprofit organization around poetic provocation and witness um i have been with with this rock since 2012 when i was a sophomore high school i was a sophomore yeah i must have been a sophomore um and um i started out okay a little bit about me in my life i was a natural like poet artist you know raised up in an artistic household my mom was a visual artist uh who is a librarian actively now um and my sister's father who was my male influence in the house was a drummer he drummed with the likings of jonathan butler and um currently he's with um right now valerie simpson so i had grew up in this really like earthy arts environment right um i went to high school at woodrow wilson high school which is in tinley town right so that's in a predominantly white area of dc um and for me i noticed in high school right there was no place for me in my music department there was no place for me in my theater department right so if i was to decide to go out and try out for the school play and i wanted the main role because i'm i can sing jazz you know i can act they've trained me my whole life for this i've been exposed to artists and people right i can do that i can claim that role i would get responses from the people who are in charge the directors of the plays and you know the sponsors of the program to say like you are amazing so we want to give you an ensemble role because we can know that you can support the cast so well right and you look at the ensemble year after year after year and it's full of colored kids you know and this is just where they get their space in school and that was not enough for me um so i went to my librarian with a group of my friends who were also my tried and true ensemble friends and we saw my mother happened to be the librarian of the school we were so upset we're like mom there's keep doing this to us and we're better than them i know we can do better and she was like i dare you to start a club start some kind of club do something um and at that time split this rock was just opening the louder than a bomb competition for high schools um louder than a bomb is a competition that started out in chicago um to bring their area high schools together to get all the students on stage for poetic exchange right so bring your personal stories your your thoughts on politics your view into your world you know and let's exchange it from all corners and they brought that to the dnb we're like we want in we want to be a part of it we don't know what it is or what it entails but we want in um and that year we co-founded motley society which is the current standing um poetry club and team at widrow wilson senior high school uh for my friends we named ourselves motley society because we were a group of people we said um we could not fit in we just couldn't for the likings of us you know we were arch kids i was a poet um we represented a full diversity you know it wasn't just black it was afric it was um afro latino it was latino it was um caucasian it was everybody you know all we were together in this because we shared a completely different idea external to what stood you know and split this rock came and gave us coaches they gave us two two cool dudes to come and just summon as many kids will get our message to more kids who might be feeling our way in our school right and we look up one day and we have a whole team and we're all writing poetry together and we're like poetry is nothing but songs without music but rap without a beat but you know a monologue without like all the cast and costumes and all that kind of stuff so we can live here you know um currently i've gone on to uh use split this rock and the things that they've taught me on poetic activism um to go back to that school that i graduated from and i'm currently a facilitator of their uh excuse me of their poetry club as it stands now through split this rock um we are participating in that same competition we went on to win the first two years of it that year we went on to you know keep in in all the festivities you know that there are students around all the high schools that felt like we felt at our school you know it didn't matter about the demographic it didn't matter where it was it felt like there just was no there was a confined space that a minority artist could exist in you know so we broke that we completely changed it up you know so now i sit on a board with youth facilitators of all walks of life you know and we come together we work with students to get them into a place of feeling like they belong they have a place for themselves your talent is not going to go to waste here it's not going to slip away from you're not going to age out of it this is your time and you can't do it so that's a little bit of as stated i'm tatiana and i'm happy to share the space with both of these wonderful people and all of you um a little bit about me and my story i am a graduate student at university and Maryland college part i'm not officially um affiliated with any organization but when you start graduate school you have to find your research project and i was reading a book one day and one of the scholars stated that a respondent said to them study yourself study people like yourself right oftentimes you find research around blackness um being done by scholars who are not from these communities or communities of color so i wanted to tell that story um and i grew up in new york and i grew up in a family a mixed status family by families jamaican but i had folks who were documented and undocumented and i was like well why isn't the story being told the often the immigration race and ethnicity narrative is about black immigrants advancing that they're doing better than the african-american counterparts there's this kind of model minority myth around the success of black immigrants but where about what about the narratives of black immigrants who are working class um folks who are undocumented who have been deported within my own family i've had two people deported when i was about eight years old my eldest brother was deported back to jamaica then when i was graduating high school i had an uncle deported back to jamaica um and i was like well what's happening here why is this narrative not being told um we now have a movement around dreamers but often the representation and that image is of non-black latinx people so where are the dreamers who are black why is their story not being told why are they not being represented how come they don't have access to doctrine what is that narrative so my dissertation itself is about how are immigrant advocacy organizations addressing the needs of a growing historically disadvantaged black immigrant population how are orgs like the natural immigration law center or other orgs that seek to serve all immigrants all low income immigrants doing doing intersectional work and is that work being done well and how can it be improved so i have worked with orgs like milk i've also worked with undocumented black network has some of the orgs that i've been able to work with and knock us back as well during a api um immigrant action day so the goal has been to really understand blacklands more broadly and that's been the goal of my work wonderful well thank you all so much so a common thread i'm seeing and this is applicable to me too as a former foster youth who's doing research on foster youth and does activism in in that community we're all connected to our activist communities through personal experience and so my big question here is we cannot make change or we cannot grow a movement just by the people who are most affected by those issues so how do we incorporate more young people with diverse experiences and different backgrounds and motivate and engage them in activist work that may not be directly relevant to them or even if it is may not be accessible to them how do we center young voices i can speak on that um i feel like my young voice was centered at one point in my life um how can you you just reach out you know uh when you see a student um in in my programs you know it wouldn't i imagine in other programs around they they are this wide access you know to a large diversity a large demographic of students from all areas and all walks of life in that process whatever program you know your i don't know whatever curriculum your program entails um you notice the moment they are stepping into themselves and you see the fear in them you know you see the unsure youth you're watching them like struggle under the judgment um you push them into greatness you challenge them to challenge themselves you challenge yourself you challenge your curriculum you challenge your program um because it's all subject to change you know and that's the only way we can make a change is to change how we we currently exist um i can speak on a instance with split this rock my my my poetry club recently um i allowed them to be involved in a conversation instead of practice for the day um where their school was having a diversity task force um around a play that they wanted to do um it was a beautiful play was colored museum and i don't know who many people are familiar with colored museum um but it is an african-american satire on the black experience in america right um it was being produced by a group external to the school with predominantly white kids they had casted black kids for the roles these kids had never had an opportunity to participate in theater you know so they're like i got a role for me i can do this everything and i saw a need for communication they had to my poets who spend their time studying african-american experience they stay in the library reading up on their history and their lineage to students who didn't necessarily have that first inclination you know so me as a facilitator i say go join the conversation you know let's start there inevitably you get around the the kids decided they would not go on with the production that it was something that they had not thought on completely you know but i looked up now and my my poetry club goes from being four goes to being nine you know and these kids are seeing me as someone who wants to be a part of the conversation so when the kids are getting like riled up and they're in their tears because their lives are real you know they sit in classes and they feel under the pressure of society of stereotypes of constructs of just being life in their circumstances the cards they were dealt those are real moments you know we have to acknowledge them they have to realize that they're real and not subject they aren't just something they put together in their mind you know so i i give them their validity in that moment i tell them you are entitled to go through whatever process but we have to come out of this with a resolution you know so before we leave we wipe these tears we've got to walk out knowing what we're doing tomorrow when we come back you know and i feel like it may be stressful for me as a facilitator but i know it gave some kind of change to the temperature so getting kids involved this is simple as acknowledging them you know and being aware of the processes when they're put in front of you so you talk to yana have you seen any strategies work yes i would add to that youth are passionate they want to get involved they see things happening they're trying to figure out how can i get involved what can i do my advice is pick an issue you can't solve everything at the same time pick one issue go learn about it maybe today you go read a book about it you go find somebody on your campus or at your school or your organization because youth are also watching right they're always watching they're always looking then the next step is if you have questions plus dialogue i'll answer your questions i'll talk with you if i don't know the answer i'll find the resource with you teach them how to do the research go out to that one movement to that protest to that event go learn more about it for me i think education is so important are we teaching you how to find out more about the institution and the structure that are causing the issue regardless of their issues that are a part of your own identity or not do you know the root cause anti-capitalism let's talk about anti-blackness right those that have the same roots right how do we talk about power so i don't know if everyone here knows what organizing is because i sure didn't when i first applied i was like what is organizing and and really um it's about i heard this term it's a grassroots consultant and so you're really um going to your communities and listening to what it is that's the problem that's the issue that that concerns our people and our neighbors and our families and um your question on how we can get people who are not directly impacted to get involved in this activism work is i myself am not directly impacted by you know the things that we've been working on which is Dream Act um DACA um and a lot of our undocumented people who go through struggles every day and um you know we i see high schoolers i i also do a youth program and they are not impacted directly impacted and i think that there is a need for change in how we phrase you know those who are allies because we say we have impacted directly impacted and then indirectly impacted but at the end of the day every single one of us that are involved in this in this movement in the society we are all impacted in one way or another and two i think that's the one thing that people you know tend to forget it's like oh no you know um we have to put those that are directly impacted at the forefront they are also important but we have to recognize the need for allyship and i think once we recognize what kind of power those who can support and really be you know be the voice that sometimes you know through voting and civic engagement that undocumented folks or other folks that are oppressed can't have that's that's an important role and so i think educating like he said educating our young people but i think also showing them that there it's all connected that you know the issue that we face personally the issues that your parents face and the issue that an undocumented family faces issue that black people face these these issues are all connected and that's one thing that folks forget like oh we got to think about immigrant immigrant communities you know and then within those communities it's like all right we have the black community and then we have you know the Asian community and we start separating and i think there once we see that there is a connection amongst all of us that we are all oppressed and that's why we're in this movement now is when we can have that involvement of everyone that's that like everyone terms as um directly uh indirectly impacted but i think there's a need to say we're all impacted and that's why that's why we have to be here that's why we have to fight this movement fight this battle we have to do it together or it's just not going to happen wonderful uh sumi i want to build off of something that you said about measuring impact so that word gets thrown around everywhere in the activist space measure impact you know count how many people showed up um but what beyond quantitative measures how do you measure the the impact of a movement um specifically with youth activists where um a lot of times they're disenfranchised right if they're under 18 they can't vote if they're undocumented they can't vote how far can youth activism actually go and how can we measure that distance and anyone can answer not just well i actually want to touch on that because it's so funny so sometimes when i'm in the shower or i'm doing my makeup i like listening to podcasts i'm like i'm going to do something productive so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to be learning while i'm showering like this is going to be a productive productive day i'm like you know i got the panel let's start it with a podcast and i don't know if you all know simon senic do you guys he's like this really big guy in leadership and he was talking about um leadership in a very in a really simple way and so i always say that the first thing that's always on my like new year's resolution is i'm going to go to the gym every day i know all of you share that resolution and i failed to do it all for like 23 years but you know i there's never that consistency but you know we have that urge to want to get involved uh to want to go to the gym the first few weeks we're going and we're going every day and then you know at some point we fall through and that fall through may take a long time and then next thing you know you're just never going and so what he said was you know just like leadership and also that impact is the same way going um you know going to the gym once you're not going to look any different than going to the gym twice uh it's still not going to be any different but if you go every single day and have that consistency you will see a difference at some point and then you'll realize oh something's happening that's the same thing with the movement that's the same thing with an impact you participate in one protest you're not going to see a difference you go to one you know a legislative meeting that's still not going to make a difference but if you consistently move trying to make an impact day by day and you just fix some of these habits that maybe is is feeding on to this oppressive system those little changes will one day you will see that there is a change that there is we are making a difference and there is an impact so when we think about of course we can look at and once we get to a point where we're making that impact I feel like it's easier to measure you'll see more people you'll see legislation and policy going towards the change that you need and so it's just about I feel like it's so important to always consistently be involved in that fight and that movement I want to touch on that what Sunni said about presence I completely agree with presence as I've told you guys before I was a youth of split this rock who is now a teaching artist at split this rock I've been involved in almost every youth program the split this rock has had to offer around poetry and spoken word I was on DC slam team on and again another year in DC you slam team I'm currently on there you shindy a performance troupe at a time there was no there we had a concept of like okay activism we're in school we can talk about our problems with our coaches and our sponsors and our librarians our English teachers and they're going to like our words because we're being you know proactive citizens and stuff but where does it go after that you know the people who are supposed to like what you're saying are gone you know and I look up now and they have you shindy so you shindy performance troupe is a space for performers artists you know activists between the ages of I believe 18 and 25 who go around they they hold they carry on the traditions the culture of what we stood for as youth and poetry and spoken word right so I look up now and I look at all of the generations that have gone you know come back from oh my gosh from like 2009 right who were my elders before and they're like on tour now and they're oh I had one of my coaches who was nominated for a Grammy and I'm like oh my gosh you know I'm watching all of this happen in front of me and I never left you know I've watched their students I've seen who started off shaking they couldn't even tell you their name when you asked them their name they break out into a fit of nerves you know and I watch them now stand in front and give valedictorian addresses to their classes and I'm so amazingly proud of them you know that's changed you know and it's being present for every part because at some point you know that kid wasn't sure of themselves at one point that kid was so sure of themselves you know he thought nothing in the world could break him the moment before he got on stage he reverted back you know you know and you're like you got it you can do it's like okay this is this is it and you're like wow you've you've bloomed into a butterfly you've gone through the whole stage and here you are you know and that's the change and you don't see one kid like that you see groups of kids you see like whole graduating classes from 16 17 schools around the tri-state area who are coming out and stepping into their power being able to say ouch that hurt yes I like that I don't think that's healthy for the environment you know and I'm that's that's the change you know and it takes being present to witness that process this is a tricky game you know everything is about how many people showed up today to this event um but the conversation we we're having right now excuse me batter this conversation will go somewhere it will be on your live stream somebody will see it um you know I work in the lgbt equity center now and student groups meet weekly sometimes it's just the facilitator sometimes it's five people sometimes it's ten but it's the consistency it's the going it's the community building if one person can have a conversation they can go talk to somebody else okay I the focus on if if one person's impacted by immigration that should matter to all of us if one person is affected by homelessness that should matter to everyone it doesn't matter if it's a hundred people or one person we should be able to have the resources and use the resources to solve the issues regardless of numbers the impact is in the consistency it's going to take time to see it the same thing with any kind of presidency we're not going to know the effects of any presidency so after they're out of office truly right like that's just a reality that doesn't mean there wasn't an impact that there wasn't change it requires going back it requires going back to the history that's where the data should thank you um so a common thread that's been coming up throughout the symposium today is the role of technology in each of our spaces and uh you know needless to say we're pretty weary of it but also hopeful that it can really advance and move our movements quicker and in the activist space it's very important for organizing and i'm curious what your experiences have been with technology using it what are its drawbacks and uh is it is it our panacea can it cure our can it cure our social ill i don't think so question to clarify is the technology as far as social media or technology as a whole uh social media i feel is very relevant to activism especially when you start talking about slack activism um i think so um like i said going back to organizing we do a lot of that grassroots work a grassroots work voter registration canvassing going out doing issue ids seeing what the community needs are like what issues that's really impact them and what kind of changes we need to see in our legislative system and um i feel like technology for me as an organizer is a hit or miss sometimes so you're right i can reach so many more people using that nice uh nice little technology saying hey hey guys hey everyone this is great can you come out to this event or we're doing canvassing what what issues are concerning you at the same time one of the most one of the most things that i i feel that we are now losing is that relationship the genuine relationships that we're able to create when we have those one-on-one conversations and we genuinely care about what's coming back in terms of response and um as much as i love reaching to me i know it makes an impact to reach a lot of people but at the same time uh i feel like it's really important that we also make sure that our conversations stay genuine and that using when we're using that technology we have to remember that the purpose of it is to get these people involved you don't want it to be a one-time thing where they're like okay i saw the message and then turn it over you want it to be a genuine conversation where like oh hey hey hey jen can you come out today you know i didn't see you last week and so to know that you're paying attention to their presence and to their activism i think it's really important so yes it speeds up the process but we have to make sure that we use it effectively and make sure that we don't lose the genuine genuine relationships that we should be building with our community members i agree with that i mean the technology is hit on the social media particularly one how many things do i scroll past the day that i'm like i'm not reading this like i saw the headline i'm not making that that does nothing i haven't clicked on it i haven't looked at it you know um people can also create worlds where they don't engage other things they can create bubbles that's also dangerous they're not abreast of the issues in the world i think a good space honestly has been twitter i will give twitter that facebook i'm like i don't i don't care what you have to say um everybody's auntie's uncle's on it talking crazy i don't have time but what twitter allows me to do is i'm able to see so many conversations twitter town hall meeting people are able to ask questions um scholars that i've read i can say hey how are you or people i've never seen before i can follow hashtag i get so much more information that way so i will say i'll give twitter that um technology has also connected me to people as somebody who grew up in an immigrant family i can't see my family in jamaica i can't see my niece but what that allows me to talk to her often right so there's connections in that i can you know sometimes it's just telling somebody hey i haven't seen you in person but let me tell you just see how are you today or i like your photo or self-confidence right um we often talk about young people having confidence issues um self-esteem issues um the levels of mental illness or depression and things like that i'm like sometimes posting a photo is somebody's way of saying see me i'm getting that life matter i'm getting that common matter so i don't know i hear you on the head of missus it's a fine line to walk definitely um i deal with everybody's social media and everybody's technology every day after school um and it is indeed a hit or miss um i don't know if you guys are familiar with like the whole cyber bullying and everything right um in my poetry groups you know in order to prevent that because in their high school they have this ongoing thing around everybody's class every teacher has the same issue as me um where they talk they have separate conversations they'll have like multiple group chats in the same room so if i'm sitting with 10 people uh three of you in one group chat seven of you in another group chat me and my best friend and in our own personal and i'm just like that is so disrespectful like that is so doesn't on as the honor system you know the honor code you know of being able to be accountable for the words that you say you know and and the way people receive them so if i say something that offends you you are entitled to feel offended you know and you are entitled to tell me you know how that hurt you and it's my job to say i'm sorry or i don't care you know and that's how conversations start you know and we get around to getting to the root of these issues and if we never address them we hide behind all of our group chats and it's like putting up doors like this is my my mic and my conversation we can't i can never get anything beyond the other side of the curtain you know my side and your side that's completely different um however google has been a really great um assistance for a spoken word artist in this whole competition process um i don't know if you guys are familiar with the difference between regular poetry and spoken word poetry right spoken word poetry doesn't just live on a page it lives on the stage it's live in front of you right so their action word their movements that accompany words their tonalities that change right and that's so hard to communicate just across paper but google and google docs allows you know for bowls and italics and also to like add p have people who aren't present for the meeting you know adding in on and their poems going home the kids never stop writing you know whenever they want to they can just add something to a poem tomorrow they're like hey we finished a whole poem like wow won't you guys find time for that you know and i find that um in sharing it and all of that it's it's super purely that word really really effective you know um at uh you know keeping everybody involved that way so i would say like uh for us my solution for that between google and the group chats is um purposeful you know use of technology like right now we are working you know so if you need to use your google you know crack out your phone so be it i'm watching you you know i'll hold them accountable myself you know as as someone who's responsible for creating a space space you know so it's work time be work don't use this time talk about the gossip so oh yes and i will also add um i wasn't here for the earlier panels but think it historically um think about the civil rights movement in vietnam right in the protest against vietnam that happened because we were able to see on tv what was happening in the rest of the world twitter has allowed that facebook has allowed that google has allowed right that we are able to connect we're able to hold other governments accountable and those governments can hold our government accountable but we can be in a global human rights movement because of technology so i just wanted to get that positive as well yeah so technology social media in particular allows us to communicate with each other a little bit more and have access to more people but it doesn't necessarily mean that we're connecting or learning or actually doing anything for the movement so beyond hashtags we can go out and actually see each other in person gather it rallies and make a difference through organizations and individually um so i guess that leads me to my my next big question which is um how do we how do we get involved like what's our next steps what's what's most important to start first uh i know we we talked a little bit in the back room about culture change versus policy change um what are where do we do we start by changing policies and then adjusting culture do we start by changing the way we think about things and then hoping policy will go along with it what where's the most important starting point for people who want to become activists i keep ending up getting the mic first but um i think there's so many ways there's so many opportunities for us to get involved but because we see that there are so many different ways for us to get involved we we start wasting time right man i don't know what to do do i go to a protest do i do i join like do i become a member of this organization what do i have to do but really you just do it you just got to do it if you see someone that's that's knocking on doors to get you know to understand what the issues are you join them and if you see that if there's a protest with the purpose not just any protest but protests that shows that there is there is an issue and there is a concern and that they're really trying to be vocal and make their voices heard you join that i think the more time we spend thinking about how do we make change happen the more time we are losing and the the farther we get from the movement and so i really do believe that it's really important that we get involved by just doing whatever is at our at our you know at the front of our door because at the end of the day it's all connected and as long as it's it's it stems to the values of what you believe in and you start making small changes like that then you know at the end at some point in our lives we'll see a change happen i agree and it's both and i don't know if you have to do one or the other it can simultaneously occur right late we're all on this panel doing something different engaged in different work but all of our work goes back right the issues are racism gender bias um you know sexuality all these other things but the sorry i put the hold the mic right here i'm very bad at this um it's both and it's always both and um start somewhere just go and do it i agree you know if that means that you spend your summer interning somewhere then do that maybe you'll find out i'm not really a fan of interning i don't want to do policy i want to be on the ground maybe talk to you every day is your thing maybe be in the office maybe tweeting behind the scenes technology you're only going to find that out by trying by getting out there you don't have to stay with anything long term per se adding to that um definitely being the change that you want to see in this world right um coming out of high school i'm like i'm an adult i can make my own decisions i have power right with that power i didn't want to just be loose with it go have fun with my friends and like a party but you know i wanted to i wanted to do something because something so profound had been done in my life right i talk a little personal history about me um i come from a background of domestic violence and for me getting through high school that was the most traumatic years of my parents divorce so i found this piece in poetry i found this space to address the issues that i had been silent on that people in my family had been silent on that i felt needed to be addressed for the safety for the health of our future and longevity you know and i was like who am i to be selfish and keep that to myself you know so i was like where can i go to continue this work what can i do to continue this work if it worked in me you know um and i started reaching out to every nonprofit organization that dc had to offer around um poetry and activism and change and youth work um and i found split this rock i held on the split this rock i found um there's a few of them that are going on um and i kept going you know i started just attending the shows or just going to the open mics and seeing what the kids are doing being a good spaceholder like while some kids were on stage getting through hard poems being that person after to go up there and be like i'm so proud of you i don't know who you are but it took courage today to go do that and you that's something you never let go of you know and i don't know why i came there but maybe that was that one reason i was there for the day i felt like i did my part you know and going on from that i'm saying okay now if i can support kids who are i don't even know these kids you know i can like work with students to believe in themselves before they hit the stage you know so let me go figure out how that works okay i like how this works now how can i go do that with myself with adults who have already mastered that process to go make a bigger impact in the world you know so it never stops every time you decide that you see something wrong and you fixed it yourself it's almost your obligation you know to walk someone else through that process you know if you don't no one else will and if that knowledge gets lost it's history you know cultures traditions things get lost in processes if they're never passed down if they're never taught if no one ever takes the time for understanding you know that reminds me of one of my favorite activist models which is silence is violence if we're not saying anything then we're if you're not saying anything you're part of the oppressor um so very interesting and i'm i'm curious practically in your organizations and in your activist work now or in your academic work what's next uh are there are there upcoming events what are you guys what's the next step here so poetry people i don't know um split this rock is so cool oh my god i really love them um they have a poetry festival that i believe is still happening um it's for the old the old the old cats you know the people who know and have been around in like artistic you know you guys want sophisticated environment um you can go and split this rock.org to find out all about that information um but when i'm more versed in is they're cool louder than a bomb competition the tri-state area dmv is happening this saturday at woodrow wilson senior high school um come out and see them do their like prelim stuff their finals is happening may fifth i believe at the millennium stage at the kennedy center and you guys can definitely come out but split this rock.org you can find all of the cool things to be involved in academically i don't know what i'm doing with my life i'm at the end of my journey so i'm trying to figure that out but i will plug andaki black um andaki black is a great organization doing great work follow them on twitter follow them on instagram they have a website google them um read i know i keep saying this but honestly educate yourself misinformation is out there so much and everybody thinks they're doing they're like oh yeah be intersectional what does that actually mean when you hear these words these catchphrases look those up so that's my point um for me i think so with knock a sec we do a lot of crazy things we did like a campaign out in front of the white house 22 days 24 hours yeah we were like those crazy people and we're starting a new campaign called um citizenship for all so we're like if you're not gonna give us a little dream act that we're gonna ask for the entire pie so um we launched a campaign it's a 45 day campaign starting august 15th and we're gonna bike for about 20 2600 miles and go to all the strategically congressional districts and try to listen to the voters and um of course there's there's that there's like that big leap in our national level but i also wanted to ask who here is from virginia anybody hi one one lone soldier you and i both um so uh there is a lot of local things happening either that be local ordinances um for us it's midterm elections everyone everywhere you all have a state i'm sure at some you guys go home somewhere so um there will be midterm elections go canvass go help do phone banking go make sure that you have the right person in power and that you elect the person that you want to represent you and so and that is next and the last thing i would say is listen and be more aware is to listen not not just think about your own issues but listen to what your neighbors are dealing with listen to the the problems that are going on in your society just be more aware and educate yourself um and that's it for me wonderful i also want to put the audience on blast um so if you look to the center of your tables there's a card there that says now what on the back uh you can find links to a lot of our panelists organizations as well as a few other resources um but i recognize that there are a lot of amazing people here and i kind of want to flip the flip the dialogue and put it on y'all to um say what's next with your organization so if we can get a mic passed around um raise your hand say your name your organization and if you have any upcoming events or activist priorities that you think people should read about or focus on or just anything that can that someone can do next um now is the time to to announce that to the room anyone no bracils okay um well hold on to that definitely it's something that i'll run around asking people at the reception because it's important that this work doesn't stop whatever you care about whatever that issue area is gun control immigration it's important to tell other people and to keep up the the good work so um yeah let's with that move on to our question and answer with the wider audience and while people are thinking about questions that they want to ask our panelists um i will go ahead and start us off with one of mine so this is one that i think about quite often and it's how do you maintain momentum especially in the current political landscape the way that people have been talking about making change federally versus you know the pause there how do you stop from getting tired and wake up the next day and go yeah this is something that still matters that i still care about and go out there and put your all into it what motivates you community um i have the greatest friends um so just a little bit um a couple years ago i lost my mom i was still in graduate school i'm still trying to finish and honestly it was the folks in my friendship circle who was like one go to counseling you need it you need friends to be honest with you get those folks in your life um i also live in a house with people so that helps in terms of motivating me every day to get up i have people to talk to every day i also work on a canvas with undergraduate students so i put myself in spaces where i see people constantly um and seeing them going keeps me going um and then in terms of just i watch Netflix sometimes i'll just chill out i i don't talk to anyone i stay by myself i rejuvenate i regroup i think about it and i always keep with the forefront of my mind is what's my biggest goal here what is ultimately what is it that i want to do and that is to in fact change in order to do that i have to get up every day how do we keep momentum right um so for me in in what i do as a youth facilitator as a teaching artist um i deal with these kids in their most rawest forms you know they come to me when they're like the most you know gassed up to do poetry or they're like the most angry and they want to put their anger into words or they are a bucket of tears and they're just falling apart right and i have to remind myself every day not to internalize you know their issues as my own but remind myself that i care and i see them and and to an extent in some of their stories i can empathize with them on a personal level you know and for some of them i can look at them be like i would not wish that on you you know but we're going to deal with it and that's the thing that keeps me going every day we have to deal with it like we can cry in a day but tomorrow we got to wake up and do something about it you know and i that's that's what i constantly hold on to um i always think and i laugh with my my coaches who who are now my like peers in this whole teaching thing and i tell them like i now understand like what you meant like leaving us and be like i'm going to go have a glass of wine don't call me till 2 p.m. tomorrow you know i understand that you know because in this process you have to take yourself out of it because if you don't you come with all of the aggression from everybody's argument including your own so i'm upset that someone hurt my kid and now i'm upset with anyone who looks like they're going to hurt anyone else to the extent that someone hurt my kid you know and i'm like er now i'm upset that you would even try me you know so that all that stuff has to be decompressed you have to say we made it through today you know now we have to make it through tomorrow and we have to have ourselves and pristine shape to make it through tomorrow you know um yeah it's about it's definitely about self-preservation in the process well i'm just gonna i did owe everything um but really i just kind of look in the mirror i'm like man my reality sucks like i gotta change it man i have all this that like this is awful look at my friend her reality sucks then i look at look at my parents i'm like oh man that sucks too i'm like well it's not going to get any better if i sit here and do nothing it's not going to get any better if i go and find if i look at a job i'm like i'm going there because of how much is going to pay me because will it will my life get better all my dads will my my friends and i don't think i don't think it will so that's why that's what keeps me going every day so that i can get out of this this whole that i'm in get other folks out of that whole too an announcement and a question so i'll start with the announcement um my name is sakina i work for dc hunger solutions and if you are a district resident um the council is in the middle of their budget cycle right now um primaries are coming up and on may 15th my organization um as part of the fair food for all coalition is hosting a candidates forum to talk about issues related to food insecurity health equity food access urban agriculture and economic development um for people running for council positions and specifically the chair position uh phil minnowson and ed lezier and so if anyone is interested in that in your dc resident or just want to be involved i'd be happy to you know loop you into that i have a question about language specifically um from an academic from an activist from a poet and where all those things mix together um i think that a lot of times the term people of color can sort of flatten experiences um and so my question is when do we as as writers as artists as managers as people who um are concerned with the experiences more largely of poor people when do we get explicit in our language when do we say black when do we say native when do we say latinx or even more specifically mexican savadorean korean you know when do we get explicit in our language versus um using the catchall phrase people of color which i think has a lot of power in it but i think doesn't always honor um or recognizes the the explicit experiences of people that are struggling and so i'm asking maybe how does that show up in your work or maybe in your in your analysis in your activism in your poetry when do we get explicit and when do we sort of group um in poetry um it's a very fine fine place we walk right um it's figurative language right these are words that were chosen on purpose right so um i'd like to believe sometimes when people use the term people of color they lack knowledge you know and that's all that they have and that's something that can that gives people representation enough you know and it's unfortunate that that's enough but that's that it gives in our society it logs you know exactly who you're talking about when people add color you know to that part um what i'm learning now which is really cool about what my students did with the diversity task force is to be impeccable to be accountable for your words speak in truth and speak in purpose you know so if i if i when i say caucasian or i say white i'm not saying that in a derogatory way you know if i say black i say african-american or negro i'm not saying that in a derogatory manner you know um i'm i'm saying that in the context in which it applies you know so when you take your out your little form you check off that you know race what race are you box i'm using the terminology that you would check off you know as far as i'm concerned you know or as far as you whatever knowledge you've given me um which is really it can be scary in certain environments right so when we had our conversation around the colored museum we asked the students to use the terms which they meant you know not the ones in which sounded good or not the ones that were derogatory you know to anybody present in the conversation because if you can imagine a very segregated conversation you know a white cast who didn't understand what the issue was with wanting to give this play to the community because they're like you know our our mixed demographic does not show in our department and so let's do this so we have presence right context is everything you know and and when you say black are you saying black with an amount of you know normalcy are you saying it like okay you are black you are african-american right that's what you are or am i saying black like it disgusts me you know am i saying black like it's an issue am i saying black like it scares me you know that's when it becomes scary when you apply all of the the stereotypes that come along with each race you know the tones the connotation the context behind the word is the scariest part of it all and that's all can be guided by your personal intention you as individuals as people who can speak we have a vocal cord and like a pair of lips you know in a mind that controls it you choose what words come out of your mouth with what tonality backs those words you know in what positions at what time in which you say them and you use them you know and as poets that's what you find my students are not allowed to use vulgar language no curse words no slurs no name calling no nothing right so they have to be very mindful about what they say so i have a student who has done a poem about like antagonists in history right and i'm saying when you're speaking on the spaniards in the conquistadors and everybody else you know make sure if you're using names you're using names and you're saying them in the way you mean it you know you're using them in the context in which is relevant you know you're not just saying it just for shock value you know and i think a lot of times in our society people say things just for shock value you know literally just to agitate someone into conflict you know and i think we have to as a society decide that chaos is not the best form of entertainment you know and i think we haven't decided that so in the process we love the stereotypes of it all and i feel like we entertain that more than taking the time to get down to the truth you know behind those terms um i i actually want to um i'm one of those people that is in this process of learning so in in college i in high school i thought uh defining the black community as black community was wrong because they would say oh assuming you can't say black i'm like okay then what do i say they were like you use african-american i'm like okay and i started using that and in college they're like assuming not everyone is from africa you can't say that and i'm like then what do i say i i learned that i can't say black and now i i can't you can't judge where where the person's from by just looking at them so what do you want me to do and you know over time i i was like i think it just you have to see if they feel comfortable and then i came here and knock a sec and then started working with undocumented people so when i hear people say illegal i get i cringe i'm like oh man don't say illegal that's not right but i had um and we always call folks undocumented right but um we had we had an uh an impacted person um who was documented say i'm gonna own the word illegal and i'm gonna call myself an illegal immigrant and i'm gonna own that word but um at the same time you have to understand you can't own that word by yourself you do not represent every single person in that community for the word queer community in the lgbtq community that was adopted because that although at some point the word queer was a derogatory term to phrase those folks that were in the lgbtq community over time they took you know the community took ownership of it but that was only because lots of people in the community accepted that and said we can take ownership but one person saying i can own the word illegal and and be illegal immigrant that wasn't something that came by the voices of everyone so i think we are walking on fine lines we are trying to understand what words what words fit and how we know at the same time i don't know the entire history i don't know when so i think it really you can just ask you can just ask like what's the best and at the same time you're you're learning but if you ask and you don't apply it then there's a problem so i think it with language it's really of picking up if who's comfortable and where what setting you're at and making sure that you learn from that experience uh yes i personally use black or people of color um but that's context um if i was talking about a group of people who are diverse i would say people of color in my own personal research i am talking about black immigrants and i use black broadly speaking right so that encompasses caribbean african um afro latinx all of that but then even when i get deeper into my work i'm like okay i'm about Jamaicans here i'm talking about ghanayans here um so it's about intentionality about being as explicit as possible and also just because i call myself something does not mean that you get to call me something and you should ask right um i guess i identify myself the way that i want to i use black because my family is caribbean but i also want to encompass that i grew up in an african-american setting as well but i don't always use african-american so it's it's about intentionality what are we trying to get across be explicit because their experience is tied to specific populations to specific history so it's not just people of color are affected no latinx non-black latinx are affected in a particular way mexicans are affected in a particular way the narrative created around that around mexican people as being undocumented or illegal has a particular representation right um blackness or um some other term has a particular representation to it what are we saying about those experiences and how are we talking about them be explicit be intentional wonderful uh i'll take another question uh yes one theme i've noticed fairly across the board were one of the first things we talked about was that young people have different you know more diverse than any other generation different views the fact that we're having this conversation now you know 60 years ago absolutely not um i'm wondering what you know based on the industry that i'm working in i work for the democrat governor's association and kind of some of the things i've seen um only third week on the job but um you know at least uh for elected officials you know whether it's state local federal um it depends on ear time for them you know who they're talking to um to be informed regardless of you know um who they are it's about you know who's their advisors and who they're talking to from outside interest and something i've seen is that you know if it's government relations professionals at all levels not a lot of diversity there and uh some things i've been thinking about just least of you know two pronged approach one and maybe it's both and this is a lot to ask about um is it trying to make sure that there's a pipeline for um you know people of color and you know for regards of education level as well it's not just you know race or ethnicity it's across the board income education how can we um you know get a pipeline going so that you know when there's these conferences with um government relations professionals it's not just uh caucasian people there at the same time you know do you have any suggestions on organizations that are effectively lobbying you know going to dc for example i'm from los angeles and there are definitely more advocacy organizations uh going to dc in the bel air area as opposed to the south central area and i think that's important for elected officials to have both perspectives but from people i know working on the hill they're getting much more of that bel air uh lobbying experience or lobbying than the south central lobbying which i think is um not as uh not what we need right now in terms of diversity so i just wanted to see if you any thoughts on that overall and what we can do to promote uh diversity and lobbying um i think one thing that's important is that we get out of our comfort zone so for me i if there is all these tables and i see an asian person i go to the asian person because it's i feel more comfortable um and when i was at an organizing training we had a lot of organizers very diverse and we always said but we don't want to work like we can't work with white people we can't it just it's because there's we talk about colonialism and how there's a lot of that that oppression that's coming and how privileged white people are and that it's not it's not fair you know and then i'm thinking it's i'm like you know we have to all work together we gotta all bring we gotta we gotta work together and get out of this idea that we can't we have to stick within our community and that our community is the only one being oppressed we have to work with every single uh kinds of of of folks that are being oppressed like we are and so in terms how do we get folks that are more diverse into these kind of conferences and and doing that it's we go into communities that we've never been in before we go and make sure that we go introduce ourselves to organizations and say hey let's collaborate with youth let's let's do something together and and once that relationship builds up and and we do that then we can see that these conferences become more diversified and there is not there's no more barriers that say we're different because at the end of the day we're not because we're fighting for the same cause so i think there really is a need to just get out of comfort zone go do something sit at a table that you've never met before with people you've never met before that with people that don't look like you try something different and and i think that's the only way we can we can get that started um no one wants to be a token so a lot of times the model for diversity a lot of orgs is just getting a person of color it doesn't matter the person of color all right so they identify it's Asian or black or whatever oh yeah we have a person of color they're gonna talk to other people of color how many orgs are you connecting with not just this one black org is your one black org but how about five other orgs in dc just connecting like i don't go to a lot of places that are predominantly white because i don't only be the only person there that's a black person i spend a lot of time on campus at maryland i'm like what is the goal here in diversity is it just about having one person and we can just say oh okay we checked up our box for black we checked up our box for latina we checked up our box for lat um for asian american whomever so my suggestion would be to your organization is who's on your list sir what orgs are on your list sir what orgs have showed up who do they know send us a five people or five different black orgs or five different asian send to nakasak and ask nakasak hey who do you all work with right and i'm not the black who are you working with maybe they're working with bodgy i don't know right but also the burden shouldn't be on just asking people of color either like what model's already in place and what's what's happening with those models to speak on like the you go you're going through like the real process of what the high school is going through right now and trying to figure out how do we diversify their music department right um what i've seen them do which i i feel like is so profound and what they've done is stopping everything you know they stop pressing for the deadline they stop reaching for like they are upset that they spent money on the script already and money on the costume they're like forget the money you know their people's feelings mean a lot more than this money and the time that we say is like document like we have to like monitor every minute of it right and they said let's figure out how our high school came to have such a racially tense environment in the first place you know they sit with the librarian who's on the board of the alumni association and she's getting to understand like what is the history of black and white presence at wilson high school right and they're learning that wilson was one of the one of the last high school first high schools to integrate and at the start of that integration a lot of the white families said that's disgusting we're leaving the city they moved they bought other houses and other parts of this area so there was like a small moment of time in the 60s where woodrow wilson high school was predominantly black but the circumstances you have to understand the context and the history behind that to know why it was predominantly black you know it wasn't given to black people like here take all these great resources and and finally better your education it was given to them by default you know and they had to sit there for that year when those kids came back and you know they realized they couldn't stay at those private schools those public schools that okay now we have to have this conversation because my parents have been telling me one thing about you and my parents have been telling me something about you so let me know what your parents have been telling me about telling you about me okay and I'll tell you what my parents have been telling me about you now we'll pick out the truths and stuff together so I'll say that even if you have two people going in different directions to get different kinds of of knowledge so someone's in Oakland and someone's you know wherever else they come back together you know and you say like what did the people in Oakland have to say about the people over here and what did the people over here have to say about the people in Oakland and then you start to pick together like what are just the opinions you know of the people what is the bias of the people you know and where is that rooted and what is just truth you know what is that one thing that ties them all together yeah and I'm actually I'm gonna speak to this question as well really quickly one is we need to get rid of the idea that naming race is partisan right now a lot of people hear black brown Hispanic and immediately if they're Republican close their eyes stop listening we need to get rid of that idea because race is something that applies to all people well not race is something that matters and two you know there are black Hispanic Asian people here in DC already we need to hire them and we need to respect their voices and listen to them and we need to do that by addressing systemic barriers people who are low income can't take the day off work to come lobby on the hill people who have who live in the suburbs because that's where they were redlined 250 years ago have problems with transportation we need to address that so there are so many systemic policy things that we can do to increase diversity beyond just our individual actions and the way we treat people so I encourage you all to to read to look into those issues as well so we're running out of time I'd like to take one really really quick question and maybe a rapid fire answer if there is any no okay well we'll be we'll be here after come bring your questions directly to us thank you thank you to the panelists for being here and thank you all this is our last panel so I'd like to introduce Reed Kramer I just want to thank the panel was great really compelling thank you for being here we're closing the symposium now and we would love for you to join us upstairs on the 10th floor I think there's a nice deck we'll be able to get outside today for a reception so please join us up there and thank you for your time and attention today yeah thank you