 So we're going to be doing lots of conversation, so this is a great grounding to get us moving. So as we move forward, we wanted to just give some background on who we are and the work that we do. So who is Make the Road? Make the Road, New York is a community-based organization whose mission is to build the power of immigrant and low-income communities to achieve dignity and justice, right? So what does that really mean? And how do we go about accomplishing that? I think to give a little bit of context about our history is helpful for our conversation and kind of grounding in some of the themes that we're going to be exploring today. So Make the Road by Walking was started in the late 1990s. Community members in Bushwick, Brooklyn were put in contact essentially with two law students, Andrew Friedman and Una Chatterjee, who were interested in law and organizing. At the time, that community was really coalescing around sweeping changes to welfare reform, right? So late 1990s, huge changes on the ground in terms of accessing public benefits. And so Una and Andrew were connected with a local pastor who had been a community organizer and had been working with this community. That pastor invited them to come and speak to the group and give a presentation on welfare reform. And so as they tell it, they went and met up with the community and were prepared to give this big presentation on the federal welfare changes, but ultimately the conversation was just about, how can you lawyers help me with my benefit case, how can this is happening on the ground, how can we make these changes, like thanks for this broad overview, but actually this is something that's happening right now to me in my life. And so they instead ended up doing essentially a big clinic on helping folks kind of navigate and try to get their cases that had been closed, opened. And as they were working with this group of community members, they realized that really the main issue that was happening is that folks were having a difficult time accessing their case workers because of language barriers. So while everybody is talking about the new work rules and kind of these bigger kind of policy implications, the community was like, yeah, those are big things, but I can't even talk to my case worker about these work rules, right? Because no one's providing interpretation at the local job centers. And so really what started in that moment was essentially make the road by walking's first major campaign around language access. And so I think in 1999 there was a lawsuit challenging, a federal lawsuit kind of based on SNAP challenging the agency's ability to provide or lack of providing interpretation services to folks. So that was really the start of a first campaign. That language access campaign really kind of took off and then essentially went into other areas of access. So challenging the Department of Education's providing interpretation for parents, providing folks in public housing access to interpretation. So that campaign really melded because it was looking at all of the different ways that this one particular issue was impacting folks in all these aspects of their lives. So that really set the scene for the model of make the road by walking, kind of organizing around issue area and building what is a committee structure around those issues. Casey's going to talk about our organizing approach in a second. So make the road by walking was kind of growing in scope, focusing in on the Bushwick neighborhood, which at the time in that original campaign was really folks predominantly from Dominican Republic, from Mexico, working on that particular issue. But it has obviously grown and now, well in 2007, make the road by walking had grown a lot connected with the Latin American Integration Center that was doing organizing work of Latin American communities in Queens. And so they had worked jointly on a lot of campaigns together and in 2007 ended up merging. And so what resulted was make the road New York, an even bigger organization that really was focused in on supporting immigrants in various issues of their lives, but really focusing in at the time and now on key issues, housing, workplace justice, immigration, and of course we'll talk about our youth power project, which also was really in the infancy of make the road by walking and has grown to most of our offices. So we currently organize in five different communities. We are in Bushwick, we're in Jackson Heights, where the Latin American Integration Center was at the time, and Staten Island. We have expanded into suburban communities, so we're in Brentwood, Long Island, and our newest office is in White Plains, New York, so we're north of the city there. The key pieces of make the roads work are the organizing work, which really is the heart of the work that we're doing. Then we have what we call our survival services, our legal team, our health services team, and our adult education team. So those three teams kind of make up what we call survival services, the idea being that we are supporting folks to engage in the organizing work by kind of helping folks manage these other things that might be preventing them from fully integrating into the organizing work. As well, we have a lot of different, leadership is a key part of the organizing work. And so we have a leadership school. We have folks that are getting trained through our community health worker program. So lots of ways that the community and members are kind of integrating into leadership and job development and things like that. So we provide a lot of those opportunities as well. So these are our tactics, right? We've got community organizing, like I said. We've got our survival services, opportunities for education. And then all of this together is working to implement policies that we see will improve the lives of the folks who are there to organize and change what's happening. So a lot of people ask, how did this name come about? So the name is derived from a proper Antonio Machado, who's a Spanish poet. Searcher, there is no road. We make the road by walking. And so that's where the name comes from. I just wanted to kind of throw up this quote from Andrew, because I feel like it just really kind of exemplifies the approach. And I'll just read it. We believe we cannot win justice for one low income immigrant community in New York City without winning it citywide. We would like to see a New York City where everyone has an opportunity to realize his or her dreams. That would mean that workers would receive decent wages that have their right to organize into unions respected, that immigrants would not face discrimination, that the public schools would prepare students to go on to college, that basic government services would be accessible to the millions of New Yorkers who are still learning English, that all New Yorkers' sexual identity would be respected and valued and that low income adults would have access to job training and educational opportunities. And I think this is just important for what we're going to be talking about today as we're talking to you guys about specific research and how are we really thinking about all of the issues that are impacting the communities that we're trying to, that we're working with, that are coming to us to really change the dynamics of things that are happening. So how are we looking at this multi-pronged issue in a way that is broader than maybe just the one piece that we might be thinking about? Okay, I'm going to turn it over to Casey. Cool. So I am going to briefly talk about our approach to organizing. Sienna mentioned and went over some of our core principles for organizing. The first one being member leadership. So members confronting issues and systems of power, believing that members confronting the issues and systems of power have the analysis, solutions, strategy and commitment to a collective struggle to radically transform oppressive social and political conditions. So what does that look like in practice? As Sienna mentioned, we do committee organizing in which our organizing committees members come together around groups in the community. So that could be like a youth power project, young people between the ages about 14 and 22, 23 or workers or housing. And so someone from the community might come in to make the road to seek support because they're being evicted. There are survival services to meet their immediate needs. So there's a legal team to help with their eviction case. But the broader power we're trying to build is connecting that person to the 10 or 20 other people two blocks away that are also being evicted to come together and then build strategies to confront this source of power, which in New York is real estate interests. And another core tenant of our organizing is mass-based organizing, right? That people have different strategies towards affecting change and organizing. We believe mass-based organizing in that we need to build a big number of people in our community that are organizing together, especially in marginalized communities. Our power is actually in our numbers, right? And so we are constantly in our communities recruiting new members to come into our committees and then building their leadership skills and developing them as leaders. Other folks may take a Vanguard approach, right? Which is like finding a small number of who they believe to be really strong leaders and using that small number to kind of try to shift and move the direction of other organizations or campaigns. Before I move forward with Christina talk, Christina talk a little bit more about our youth power project, does anyone have any questions about anything Sienna or I just shared? Yes. It's a good question. It's challenging. Any organization has challenging and keeping members engaged. I don't know that there's necessarily a secret sauce. I think what we effectively do, right, is people, there's a couple of things. Make the road for many members, it becomes church. I don't mean as like a religious spiritual space, but the same way in which churches and institutions and communities where every Sunday you go to church, our committee meetings become that place for many people in the community. And so our housing committee has a meeting every Tuesday. People get used to coming into that space because it's built a community for them the same way they might get used to coming into a church or another institution in the community. The other thing that's important is I think with all of our members with the work that we are trying to do, right, you're constantly trying to build a commitment towards a greater struggle beyond their individual struggle at the time so that they're not just committed to I came in here, I had a housing issue, my housing issue has been solved, you know, I'm going to go home now. That's fine, right, like if that's what happens, that's absolutely fine. But we are constantly working to get them to see that the issue that was affecting them was a larger issue affecting everyone in their community and solving it for the community is the only way that we're going to actually move beyond some of these issues. But like any organization, right, like there's no perfect, you don't perfect that, right, you are constantly working at that and you're constantly evolving and your strategy used to keep members engaged. And just to add to that, I think just at a very basic level, the committee structures are designed in a way, I think, to really like encourage engagement and keep people able to be able to engage in our offices. So for example, all of our committee meetings, for the most part, I think, except our parents' committee, which meets in the afternoons, are in the evening, like every meeting is at seven o'clock at night, so folks are able to come after work and be engaged. What happens when they come? We have childcare provided, so we have a childcare room in our offices, right? Dinner is cooked every night, so we have, our offices have kitchens, which is awesome, so you might come into Bushwick and we've got folks who are starting to cook at like three in the afternoon, getting ready to have the meal for the committee meeting that night. And so there's some real key things, right, that if folks are able to like, I can come during that evening and these other things that would prevent me otherwise from being there at night or taking care of someone, my kids are gonna be safe, we're gonna eat, you know, it just provides this sense of safety and like security so people that are able to engage. So at a very basic level, that structure is kind of created to just allow for that kind of participation. I would say just one more thing. There's a lot of different ways to approach organizing. I don't think there's any one right way. For Make the Road, we're very intentional that we are building campaigns. So there is something that we are concretely, structurally trying to win at the end of the campaign and when you win, it helps to keep members engaged. So I think for us, we're intentional about that, that we have campaigns and there's a goal and there's a win involved in that campaign that will concretely change or shift social conditions for our members and communities. Any other questions? Okay, so I'm gonna touch on the youth power project, why is it important and like my experience. So in my experience working with Make the Road, I learned that at the forefront of most movements, young people are the one, being the gear of making those hard questions and being the power of the movement. And at the same time, in my experience, I realized young people are the voices that are missing around the table when we're talking about making changes and policy and et cetera. And so having a space like Make the Road, New York, where we are able to come together and have developed leadership as well as a critical analysis of the structures that we have at hand and where do we fit in the world and talk about our identities and power dynamics and developing language and also tools to advocate for ourselves as well as others. And so every Tuesday we would have political education where we would be the one to sort of like act or prep, like what kind of topics we wanna touch on. What are things that are relevant to our communities right now and what are affecting us on gentrification or the school to prison pipeline. There might be a policy that is really affecting us as to why are we getting suspended so much. And there are many topics that we touch on and it varies on what office or like what is going on in our neighborhoods. So we have many offices in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, so the youth power projects looks different depending on where you are. But on top of that, we often have retreats where we're coming together and we're like building relationships across each office. And we are also building the campaigns. So we are also at the table in many levels of make the road. We are in committees, we're collaborating with other organizations and we're coming back and talking to each other on like what is going on, how are we feeling and building that sort of like safe space where often like young people have not been exposed to a space like this where we're talking about like this is happening and somebody else is dealing with the same issue and so what can we do in order to like put a pause on it or address it. So yeah, it's kind of fun. It's fun and it's powerful at the same time because we don't really often see young people being around the table. I had the opportunity to be part of like the mayoral task force on school discipline and climate. And I was one of the only young people there but I was able to do that with the experience that I had with make the road. And yeah, we're often talking about transformative changes. So not just like thinking about what kind of policy changes we can do but also doing things on the ground. So there's like also like employment or like internship opportunities like in the summer we often have like campaign building where uphold like young people that I have not even like experienced community organizing what that might look like and have like that whole summer of like being integrated in the community, learning how to build relationships with each other and like learning how to be vulnerable and transparent and taking accountability and seeing how that works. Just with the culture that we build with the make the road. There's so much I can say. And that here's, there's the youth. Yes, in action. Cool. So I just want to give a quick primer on our our lawyering approach. So our, and it has shifted over time as the organization has grown and I think a lot of the themes that we'll talk about kind of have also percolated I think within the legal work that we're doing and some of the challenges that the team broadly has faced. But our approach really is to play a supporting role. So when make the road was in its infancy there were a handful of attorneys kind of on staff. And the idea was that the members right had access to the lawyers and kind of anything that was happening the lawyers were dealing with. And that was one of the benefits right of membership at the time. Our membership model has shifted as the organization has grown. But in the early iterations of make the road the lawyers were only available to members. And so I think it was, it provided an opportunity for members to really feel like they had a team that was really working for all of the things that were impacting their lives and really kind of built kind of strong relationships between the lawyers and the organizers who were all kind of working together and knowing who the members were that were dealing with particular issues. And so the goals of the lawyers always were to support the campaigns and support the membership. We have always kind of focused in on three key areas of work. So directly legal services has always been obviously the kind of the main component of the work. And I would say by and large it's the largest piece of work that the team does now. But with the volume of work that we're seeing there's opportunity for bigger strategies. We're seeing lots of issues. We're working with the organizers who are teasing out and working on campaigns and bringing folks to us to work and identifying those trends. And so we're in a position to try to think about bigger litigation. I'll talk about some of it in a minute. And then lastly the space where the organizers have really called on the lawyers is to assist with their policy reform and policy agenda. So we have policy meetings once a month with the organizers. The lawyers try to take a back seat. Our approach is that the organizers are leading the meetings and the lawyers are there to provide a supportive role to help with research where needed to think about approaches that the organizers want to pursue. And so all of our attorneys engage in some level of policy reform impact litigation where we can and then everybody has a huge docket of direct legal service cases. So that's kind of broadly the work that the legal team does. We have attorneys in all of our offices but we really now because of the growth and because of the growth of our team related to be honest funding sources, right? We now have a model where we don't, we can't just provide services, legal services to members. A lot of the grants that we have require us to make sure that we have an open door policy for our services. And so our structure has shifted in that now a lot of folks will come to the organization seeking only legal services. And the challenge for the legal team is how do we then turn that person into an active member? And it's a consistent challenge and it's something that we're constantly working on. We call it agitational intake. How do you take that member who's like I'm getting evicted in a week that's great about the new housing laws? But actually I just wanna make sure that you're gonna be in court next week and handling this problem. And so the challenge for the legal team is to really think about and strategizing with the organizers about how can we best make this person come to your committee next week and become engaged, right? That constant question of like how do we keep people engaged to kind of really tackle the bigger things? So now our services are open to anyone that walks in. We focus in now on three key areas of law. Housing and benefits, workplace justice, and immigration. Immigration law wasn't an area of practice probably in the first maybe even decade of work at Make the Road. But as members were coming in for all these other issues it turns out so many people had an immigration problem we're an immigration court. And so our immigration team in the last I think seven years has grown exponentially as you can imagine and is now our largest team. So we have the most attorneys and the most paralegals in that unit. I'll say another piece of the work really is supporting the organizers, supporting the campaigns and thinking about how is Make the Road positioning itself to do that impact litigation. And so a key piece of work that the attorneys work on as well is facilitating the organization to be an organizational plaintiff in cases. And so now we're parts of huge pieces of litigation but we are there as an organizational plaintiff. And so this is a strategy that we've kind of developed with our organizers to think about how can we as an organization have major impact when we don't have capacity to take a case to do a major piece of litigation ourselves because of our resource constraints. And so we are working often with the organizers to think about what pieces of litigation should we engage on. Because of our model we are also contacted a lot by outside impact litigation firms about pieces of work that they're developing. So because we have such a high volume of folks that we see we get contacted, we think we wanna bring this lawsuit. Do you have any members? And so that often presents challenges because there's a particular issue that maybe we think is actually a really important issue but is it an issue that our community members are seeing? Do we wanna expend a bunch of resources kind of being an organizational plaintiff? If yes, we may have four or five folks that are impacted and we can credibly say we're doing work on that issue but is that issue a priority of our membership? And so we are constantly kind of dealing with that tension of how do we stay true to what the community wants us to pursue on the ground but also recognizing that there's this other really important issue and if we're not a plaintiff there might not be a plaintiff to pursue that litigation strategy. And so there's some parallels as we're thinking about how are we staying accountable to community in the work that we're doing that as an organization we are constantly facing as well. And I would say a little particularly in the legal team. So that's a little bit about our approach, our legal approach. I'm gonna turn it back over. Any questions I guess before we move on? That way we go back. Just before we get to the new slide is gonna be that we discuss. So racial justice is like actually in the title and I would just like to ask participants the group just to get some people to kind of respond like when you hear racial justice or racial justice organizations or organizations committed to racial justice would just like to get some different interpretations of like what that means to you. Not that we're trying to build a consensus in today's meeting. I think it's helpful to understand some of the different analysis and interpretations we bring in for the conversation. So racial justice, anyone? I think about racial justice as sort of economic, political, social equity for people of all races sort of regardless of their origin. And I'd build on that by saying also that it's addressing sort of the historic inequalities that are baked into our policies and stuff. Anyone else? No thoughts around racial justice? So I think this is consistent with what people who already share but I also think about it in terms of correcting for historical wrongs or particular effects of policies that have been in place either for a long time or even newer that have disproportionate and disparate impacts on people that can be sort of traced to the fact that a group or community shares a similar racial or ethnic background. That's great. The one thing I would add to all of that so as an organization, we don't go around defining racial justice, right? Like there's nothing internally in any of our drives that racial justice is this. I think the one thing I would add is in terms of the correcting historical wrongs I think for the US, right? For me at least there are kind of two structural historical wrongs that our society is still structured around. One of those being chattel slavery and the other one being genocide. And so for me when I'm approaching the work what is it that we're trying to do? What I'm striving for, what we're striving for is to actually get at solutions that are getting at the root of the kind of two original historical wrongs that has structured the society that we live in today. And with that I'm gonna ask some group questions. So our first group question is how have we seen research and or policy support white hegemony? And so thinking of the canon of research that has been done over the last 200 or so years can anyone identify or name a report or research or anything that comes to your mind? And this may have been done with the intentions to support a marginalized or oppressed group but actually help to reinforce or re-entrance or aid white hegemony. Or supremacy, however, whichever term you find yourself leaning towards I like hegemony just sounds good. Yeah, so in research Gary Becker, I don't know what year. Some people know what I'm talking about already. Yes, he came up with this taste-based discrimination in which he said that basically there's a distaste for blacks and by customers, employers, things of that nature and that in the long run labor market discrimination won't exist. And I'm kind of like, but what if the customers are racist? So I mean, I think the business will still exist. So he has this whole idea that again, labor markets are efficient because again, if you want to have the best employees, you're gonna get the most productive person. So even if you're racist, you're still gonna hire that black person. And I think that that's totally false. Yeah, so I would say Gary Becker. I would say the Moynihan report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan that supposedly was out of concern for African-American families, low-income families, but in fact did considerable harm by looking at the families in terms of deficits as opposed to looking at policies that created the situations in which people find themselves in terms of policies that were, my area of specialty, I'll go with that, policies that were designed to create wealth for white families while simultaneously creating barriers to or stripping these families of wealth. Does anyone else, anything? Yeah. One example that came to mind is the research in the early 20th century that tried to actually ascribe racial characteristics or essentialism of these groups, you would see studies where they would measure heads and be like this person's head is bigger and that means that they are inherently superior. And I think that that thread continues through a lot of research today. And another specific example that came to mind was Charles Murray's bell curve and that work. From a policy standpoint, I would say the new deal in early labor law where it created a basically a hierarchy of exploitation in the labor market and you can pay black workers less, you can pay brown workers less, we're gonna leave out agriculture, domestics and make sure that the minimum wage doesn't apply to a host of other people. These are really great. Does anyone else have one? Please keep them coming. Yeah. Just thinking about the random assignment experiments that lend to welfare reform and then it's not really what they said, but it was sort of interpreting to read work first and education and training were useless and people should just be pushed to pay whenever a job was available. So we've named a lot of names of terrible people like Charles Murray and things like that. But also I think to some degree, I'll just speak for myself that I had a career where I have looked at a lot of social policy issues and only probably in the last 10 or 15 years have really paid any attention to the issue of race and what I do. I think there's a lot of silencing and excluding and not addressing the issue that I think we also at least some of us in the room probably have to own up to as part of how research and policy have supported it not intentionally but indirectly. So what we are going to ask the room to do now is taking and building off the examples that were shared at our tables in a group discussion to think through and discuss a couple of questions. So what has been the impact on the field of research that these studies have had, right? What is the long lasting impact that these studies have had on your field? This question is not up there so we're gonna throw a curve ball a little bit. How are your organizations or your research working to undo the harms that those studies have created in the field? And if not, you can always share the ways in which you think your organization could or that your research could work to undo those harms. And the last one being what were some of the underlying problems or approaches in that research? Whether in the methodology or just that people were racist and were given the resources to produce resource. So what were some of the underlying problems and approaches with that research? So we're gonna take some time now in your groups to discuss those questions and thank you for bringing up the Moynihan Report because that was one of our reference slides and there's an annotation here from the Moynihan Report. So just in our groups we're gonna take about 10 minutes to discuss the bottom two questions and a third question we're asking is how is your organization or your research working to undo the harms from the research that we just, the impact of the research we just discussed? So it'd be great for us to just start hearing back from the group discussions about what were some of the major takeaways that you had in your group discussions and so thinking about the long-term impact on the field and then thinking about what are some ways in which your organization or your research is working to undo the harm of that impact and what were some of the underlying problems or issues with the original research that has shifted the field. And so really feel free to provide takeaways of any one of those questions. So, yep. We felt like the impact on the field was that this research actually shaped the field, defined the field and that there is another point to that and that it defined what counts as objectivity and the value of objectivity and so to name race actually draws into question the objectivity of the work and to be a person of color draws into question the objectivity of the researcher because of how it shaped the field. Other groups. This is a bold space. Please help us be bold. Other groups, other groups? On any three of the questions that your groups were discussing. Any takeaways from any three of those questions? So as an economist I think a lot of the research that people talked about before was really useful in convincing people that if they were struggling or if their labor market outcomes weren't good it was due to their own flaws as a worker not being productive enough and it's sort of really centered the discussion on it is you that are flawed not systems around you and it really made it sort of the individual was the only unit of analysis and broader issues of power and historical legacies were shoved to the side because the market doesn't care about those things. So putting the onus for people getting better lives strictly on making themselves better workers rather than organizing together I feel like it was a big part of it. Anybody else? Yes. We talked about a few ways that our organizations are working on doing this. One, deciding that we will prioritize race and not shunt it off to the side not have it just be one department's job to integrate race that we're gonna focus on racial justice and corporate power and the connection between those two and not separate them. Addressing structural racism in the context of the work and institutional priorities and not just assuming that there's individual faults or behaviors are the reasons that there are structural disparities and then starting with race and centering it as a concentric circle in terms of making sure that our policies actually do help people of color since we know that the default is able-bodied white males when we're talking about policy. Thank you. So to build off that I'm gonna get a little bit more specific. So any other takeaways from any other tables about how your organizations or how your research is working to undo the harms of the impact that we heard from some of the earlier research? Or if you're at an organization or you feel like your research right now is not striving to do that and you have questions for the group of how you could strive to do that. I'm a talker if you can't tell already. So yeah, I would say that EPI organization about 10 or 11 years ago we started the program of race, ethnicity and economy. So it's great that we actually have a subgroup under EPI where we focus on race. This is probably one of the few places I could work at and I have a black woman that's an economist, that's my boss. That's actually really amazing. In my research I'm a historical economist and so I look at lynching, slavery, things of that nature and how we continue to influence the voting behavior of blacks, economic outcomes of blacks, things of that nature. Anybody else? So that question of how is your organization working or striving towards undoing that harm? Or if your organization is not currently which many of our organizations are at different levels of how we're addressing this. Any questions that you might have for the group and what are some ways in which their organizations began to first dive into how they can as an organization shift some things internally and structurally? Sure. So as I said, I think we have made, we're certainly better at focusing on race than we were when I started at my organization. I think we're better at doing it sort of in the analysis abstract level. I think what we're really trying to think about now is sort of the topic of today about really partnering with groups that are more on the ground and working with directly impacted people and trying to make that more of a dialogue and less just putting stuff out into the ether and hoping someone reads it. How many organizations in here partner with groups on the ground as part of their research projects or data projects? Okay. We're gonna get into a little bit. I just wanted to take a temperature check. Would love to hear some direct takeaways about the final question. So this research that has shaped the field, that has created a canon that shapes the field, what were some of the takeaways about what were some of the underlying problems or issues with the research? The approach to the research, the outcomes of the research, what were some of the takeaways with the underlying problems or issues? It's racist. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I think it does take, it adopts the assumptions that have been longstanding and are a legacy of sort of racist ideology even if it's not meaning to be racist itself. Anybody else? I think part of the problem is that it's still alive today and so people are still using them as arguments, right? So we're seeing Medicaid work requirements, food stamp work requirements. Those are all things that people are drawing on that research today. So it's continually doing harm. Anybody else? Yeah. That's not my point. It's a point from the table, but we were just talking about the Moynihan report and the way it created the myth of the strong black woman and kind of personalized that almost and left very little room for differentiation and then had also the knock on on the other side, the knock on effect on the model minority of Asians. So it still percolates through a lot of thinking. Yeah. And I'm not sure for our, I'll speak in the eye, for my organizing there's an approach I take where I see myself as being in constant conversation with folks that are no longer here, right? And so I'm in relationship with community organizations and other organizers that are organizing right now at this very moment. But my approach to my work and my organizing is also in relationship to folks that were organizing in the 1920s, folks that were organizing in the 1800s. My work is in constant conversation and reflection with their work. And I just wonder if people approach their research in the same way and that it's actually in some ways in conversation with the research that came before. I'm familiar with Moynihan. I think it's something that everyone is familiar with now what someone else mentioned about some of the early race science that happened in the 1800s, late 1800s, right? Like Moynihan's work was actually very much in conversation and a reflection of that work, right? And there's a constant kind of like continuous circle of people in power that have racial superiority, biases in conversation in the field that's shaping the field. And that sometimes even permeates people that don't necessarily see themselves in conversation with that. I'll tell a brief, I don't know if anyone read Khalil Jabrah Mohamad's Condemnation of Blackness. But in it, he references research that the boys did on black criminality in Philadelphia. And the boys was very much trying to debunk that there was something unique about black criminality in Philadelphia. But at the same time, the boys was also going into the area of, you know, black people have just been freed from serfdom. So of course there's going to be some idleness and some other anti-social behavior in them, right? He spent years like looking at his earlier research and doing the work to undo that research. And it also makes me think, who was he in community with when he was doing his earlier research and who was he in community with when he was doing reconstruction and his later research? And so I think it's just something to think about that we're not just in community with the people that we're with right now, but we're also in community with people that did the work before us. And how are we in community and confronting them? I think it's important conversation for us to have when we're approaching our work. And with that, we're going to go into thinking about how has research in the past aided to dismantle white supremacy, white hegemony, white hegemony and work towards black and brown liberation. And so we've talked about some ways in which there's been harmful research in the past, would love to hear people have some examples of how research or how studies or anything else in the canon has worked to actually support, oh yeah, before. So I think that the groundbreaking research by Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro did an excellent job of undoing or at least taking a step towards undoing some of the mythology created by research that just focuses on the individual and individual deficits by looking at policies historically that have contributed to the status of people of color currently and looked at what they called, what was it? I'll think of the term that they used later. I'm blanking on it. Or someone else in the room knows about the term that they used. But it's what they were getting at is how racism and structural racism have created this kind of cemented, has been cemented within our research and policy. Anybody else have any examples, current or past? That's okay. Oh, okay. One example I was gonna share currently is the Washington Center for Equal Growth. We fund academic researchers, both academics as well as those who are working towards their PhDs. And there are a couple of early in their career economists that we funded that I think are doing a really good job of actually, one thing we had talked about at our table is one problem with research can be that it takes the status quo as granted, is like a neutral situation, and then looks at outcomes and without actually exploring, well, what led us to this situation where this is the policy context in which the situation is playing out. And so, for example, one paper by Allora Darinacour and Claire Montelou looks at the 1967 change and minimum wage laws, which brought in for the first time, because as we talked about, the New Deal purposefully excluded a number of categories of workers from being eligible for the minimum wage, and that meant you were excluding black Americans. And so they looked at how that changed alone when you actually brought in farm workers, brought in hotel workers, had a big impact on the earnings of black workers. And so I just thought that was a good example of people actually doing research to explore, like the policy context that gets you to a place as opposed to just being like, oh, earnings, they're lower. Anyone else have anything top of their mind? And you are standing between us and lunch. And so, so we are gonna get started with the afternoon section. And if any of your group partners are not back yet, they're gonna miss the best part of the workshop. No, I'm joking. We're just gonna review some of the morning stuff. Great, so in the morning, we went through some community building practices we shared a little bit about who make the road is and our approach to our organizing and legal and survival services work. We also began to delve a little bit into the ways in which research has shaped the field in which it may feel like for some, there are actually some real structural barriers for the field to support racial justice, more intentionally liberation for folks. So what we're gonna do in the afternoon is share a little bit about ways in which research, legal policy across the fields of research are actually really important critical tools in the fight for racial justice and the fight for liberation. We're going to delve into a little bit about what have been some of those approaches been that have been effective at building mutual respect across research institutions and communities through some historical case studies and through some of our own experiences at Make the Road, New York. So we are actually gonna start, as we did this morning, looking at some of the historical experiences and the ways in which research has actually created structural barriers for racial justice through policy and other solutions. We're gonna look at the ways in which research has actually been a critical tool by organizations fighting and struggling for racial justice. And we are going to be looking at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Does anyone, are people in the room first familiar with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee? Yes, I see a lot of head shaking, yeah. So I'll just very brief, as Christine said, they were young people. Many of them, 18, 19, 20 years old, were really on the forefront in the South during the fight for civil rights in a multitude of different campaigns, one that people may be familiar with where the freedom rides and freedom summer. But what a lot of people are not familiar with is how key of a role research played for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee so much so that they actually had their own arm, they had their own research institute within SNCC. So they created their own research institute to help support and advance their campaigns. So we're gonna delve a little bit into that, go through what were some of the ways in which that approach to research was critical in advancing their fights in the Deep South for racial justice, civil rights and human rights. So here's our first slide. Let's go over you now. So here's the first slide with really what you're seeing there is a tool that the research department helped develop and a SNCC organizer, it was a magazine, a pamphlet at the time, a SNCC organizer actually going in door to door and engaging with people and passing out the pamphlet. This was during a time when SNCC was organizing around voter registration efforts, specifically in Mississippi and Alabama. So here from SNCC's research institute, research was not a top-down process. Rather, organizers and researchers were closely with each other as a larger collective unit. Organizers shaped and did research and researchers informed and participated in organizing. Everyone was in constant interaction with each other. As organizers sought to expand the movement, researchers provided information to field staff to help their campaigns. And so we understand not all of your organizations or institutions are set up in this way and you're not going to leave tomorrow and set up your organizations and institutions in this way. I think it's important to think through what are the ways in which you can collaborate with groups on the ground that continues to hold some of the principles and values that we're gonna talk through this afternoon. And so for example, and there's two examples. One is on your desk now, but another one is here. The care and feeding of power structures. Care and feeding of power structures. So the research department put together a pamphlet, the Mississippi Power Structure, that analyzed how big money from cotton farms, northern capital, oil companies, electric power and finance capital was invested in the state and how it related to political power and class and racial hierarchies, right? And so we talked earlier about how do you undo some of the harm that's been created in the past, right? And so for SNCCs, organizing and research, they were very clear that the fight for voting rights was actually connected to a fight to dismantle class and racial hierarchies in the South and their research tools that they produced intentionally reflected that. SNCC named names and mapped out the ties between these different entities to reveal the flow and interlocks of corporate, racist and political power in the state. On your tables, there should be a different pamphlet that actually maps out white racial terror in Mississippi that organizers helped to use when preparing for the freedom rides. So we wanna stop and transition again to some group conversations. And so before we left, people were sharing some examples of research that was aiding and supporting, advancing racial justice in very intentional ways. And so what we want you to discuss now in your groups for about 10 minutes are, in what ways did that research work to undo some of the previous harms from other research? What were some of the approaches that were different? What was different about the approaches? And how has that research had an impact on the field? So we just wanna bring ourselves back to the larger group. I think the earlier transition into the group discussions was a little clunky. So I just wanna reground us again and some of the questions for us to explore and navigate. Specifically, it's the contrast, right? So the contrast from the Moynihan report as opposed to the contrast from the reports that the SNCC research department was developing, right? And I think from the Moynihan report, there's a couple of things, right? So unless this damage is repaired, all the effort to end discrimination and poverty and injustice will come to little, right? And so this is not to say nothing good in government policy came from the Moynihan report, but there's a framing of top-down research that in this way, right? One, it re-entrenches that part of the problem is due to black people and black families' lack of morals and values, which then becomes an intractable problem, right? Where for SNCC that's organizing in Mississippi and Alabama in the 60s where racial terror is rife and when you're dealing with people having their houses burned down, lynchings and all of that, racial justice would feel intractable, right? Like it would feel like an intractable problem. But because the research institution for SNCC was on the ground and formed by organizers and community, right, like their research was very much pointing to we're going to confront racial injustice through the power of people in organizing. So it was not at all intractable, so problem, right? Like they were creating and developing really concrete solutions on the ground through their research and community with the people on the ground that were facing the issues. And so I think what we want to try to think, do and explore is where do you see your organization or research sitting between those two contrasts, right? And so we have Moynihan in the morning, we have SNCC now in the afternoon, and just want to hear people kind of share, you know, where is it within that contrast? You currently feel like your organization sits, and this is not, you know, to be judgmental, right? But it's to kind of really see if this is a space where you can explore what are some of the barriers or what are some of the challenges for our organization, our research, our approach to move more towards a bottom-up approach. So we'd love to hear some takeaways from the table discussions. So one thing our organization does, or we work at Georgetown Center on Property and Inequality, we partner with a lot of organizations that focused on issue advocacy. So a recent paper that we did was with the Vera Institute of Justice. They're working on a lot of campaigns around criminal justice reform. And they have a full campaign right now on Pell Grants for people who are incarcerated, and we did work with them to do research around that. So we did a lot of data analysis on the costs for states for not doing this, and then they can use that information as part of their campaign. The report was really long, so there was a lot of other data that they can use as part of that campaign. And we, so it was sort of a feedback loop that our research was informed by their campaign, and then they could use the research in their campaign. Anyone else with those, yeah? We didn't talk about this specifically at our table, but to your question about barriers, I think money is very important and sort of dictates like funding, it dictates how you can even go about your research. And so oftentimes, especially like for example, I'm with the Urban Institute and we do a lot of federal research. And so it is very prescribed, and so there's a very specific way and specific questions that they're sort of aimed at answering. And so it sometimes prevents you from being able to be in community or really have a closer relationship with folks that are experiencing the issue that you're exploring on the ground. And so I think that that can sometimes be a barrier. And I know other organizations have different funding structures, but I think it's also important to talk about the money. Anyone else, some of the takeaways from the group where you see your organization kind of sitting within those two contrasts? So it's not exactly the difference between bottom up and top down, but I do think it's very hard for an organization or for anybody to write about white supremacy if they're kind of on the beneficiary and the white supremacy. So I do feel like it's very important for organizations to give voice to researchers and to be made up of researchers who essentially know what they're talking about because they've been on the wrong end of that whole process. At least as serious as the money problem. That was great, yeah. So CPD is a different kind of organization than a lot of the other organizations here because we're a network of affiliates like Make the Road. And one of the projects that we talked about was this project during the campaign, which has become an ongoing project, with the corporate backers of hate, which looked at some of the funders of the Trump campaign who were also funders of white supremacist organizations and looked at which organizations they donated to, particularly around immigration. And their interest in those organizations, their interest in Trump's campaign, and then we also sort of provided like where they owned property and that kind of thing. And so it was helpful in terms of being able to drive actions to the right places, but it also gave a storyline for sort of a story that was more than just sort of like see he's a racist or a xenophobe or a hater, which is all true. But also sort of added new players and invested them in a way to, and it made a new storyline. And it was deeply informed by the work that Make the Road was already doing and helped shape sort of how we were thinking going forward about a set of research that we would do. Great. I'm gonna encourage our table team in the back or this table team here, if you have anything that you'd like to share or take a ways from your group. So no pressure, but someone raise their hand now. No, I'm joking. Let's just hang it out. I mean, obviously we're identifying here barriers for your organization to really like have a different approach. And I feel like there's a lot more that in terms of power, who's, I'm interested to hear more, this is a safe space, but in terms of what are some of the other real barriers that are preventing, prevents your organization from really taking bold moves to address some of the root issues that we're talking about. I mean, I would offer that there's a way that folks who are in sort of like the research arm, like firmly in the research arm, need to write. That makes it hard. So if you go back to the Moynihan report, one, the sentence that you read, Casey, right, unless this damage is repaired, all the effort to end discriminant, like there's nobody doing any action in that. And if there's nobody doing any action, like how do you then like name white supremacy in a way that's powerful, right? Because you could, I guess, say like, you could write a sentence like that that is about white supremacy, but they're still like, how do you solve it if you're not naming who's acting? And so I think that that's a challenge. And it's a challenge because it's a convention of the fields as opposed, I mean, it is also an individual choice, but it is a choice to go against the conventions of the fields. So we didn't talk about this in much detail at our table, but I can share at the National Women's Law Center, we have engaged over the past couple of years in more participatory research projects than we have in the past, which are wonderful and something we as an organization would like to do more of, but doing participatory research well and in a way that is a dialogue and not just a national organization coming in and saying, share your story, and then I'm gonna use it and publish something, and thanks, but to really have a dialogue, it is time and resource intensive for everybody involved. And so then there's also the funding question that was raised up front that to be able to do this kind of research well prolonged over time in a meaningful way is something that we just need more resources for but also have to balance with other priorities and a desire to have impact on a wider range of issues than we can necessarily engage in the deep participatory research on each one. Thank you. So what we're gonna do now is transition to share some of our experiences working in partnership with research organizations, not to create or offer a blueprint, but just to share what we feel as an organization has been some of the core principles and values that have created a relationship that felt it was grounded in mutual respect across the research institutions in our organization. Okay, so I'm gonna talk more about like my or our experience working with the public science project at the CUNY grad center and around 2013 the people at the public science project came over to make the road and we ended up collaborating on sort of like surveying and collecting stories of young people's experience with the police, their experience with the police inside and outside of school regarding stop and frisk and the way that they went about that was they kind of like introduced themselves and they asked to collaborate with us and it was sort of like a, I guess, bottom up approach. They were already interested in doing research around policing and made the road already had a campaign aligned with dealing with like police reform. And so it was sort of like how can the people at the public science project help us or build some sort of skill with us in order to get our experience and our stories out. And so it was sort of like a year or two year sort of like partnership, but during that summer they came over and they were sort of like familiarizing themselves with us and vice versa. We were actually building a relationship with them and hearing their stories and their intentions as to why they were doing the work that they were doing and they really helped create like a sort of like safe space for us to engage in that way. I know like a lot of students, especially a lot of young people, especially during the summer where I mentioned before like a group of young people who are being introduced to actually like organizing during the summer, they were giving the opportunity to sort of like be the ones asking core questions. So like they helped us develop questions that we wanted to ask and engage our community members with. And we did it in many different ways, like engaging with arts as tools. And like first we drafted questions and we created the survey and we decided how we wanted to roll out with the survey and like cool to ask. We did like walks in the neighborhoods and like actually engage in conversations with people, with young people around policing. And at the end, I feel like the experience overall was very welcoming. It did not feel like a take, it was more like a give and take type of thing because us young people were actually learning. Yeah, hello. Hello. It was more of like, we were actually learning about how to collect data and to look at statistics and actually understand what it means and like how do we use it? And then like in terms of like policy making, like we weren't, with them we weren't really engaging like this is what we're gonna do in terms of making policy change, but we use that sort of data to further our campaigns that we were already developing. And so with the work that we did, we were able to use that information to inform two things, our Community Safety Act and our Know Your Rights Act. So yeah, so that process happened and at the end, we decided like how we wanted to roll out this information. And with the survey, we were able to do this sort of like exhibition where young people were, the ones actually designing this. So we did like testimonies, we have a campaign online, we use the hashtags like more than a quota hashtag. And we did like participatory, it was fun. I don't even know how to explain it. Like there was different stations where you can engage with the information and it was very engaging. Like you in the exhibition, like you will walk in and some people will be like stop them first and like have like a conversation about like what does it mean or like what is that experience for them? And so I feel like in terms of like feedback and like ownership of like this information, young people were definitely centered around how this was developed and how this was sort of like, yeah, I feel like what I'm trying to hit is that the young people actually had ownership of this information and they were developing the skills to tell their stories and honor that. And we were compensated for it. Yeah, they allowed us to go to the CUNY Grass Center and use their computers and their tools. We often had snacks and they gave us metro cars and for some of us like we got paid to do the work. And so it wasn't like we're just doing work for them but it was really a collaboration. That's great. A couple other things just for context. And so again, Public Science Project is a research institute at CUNY locally. So Christine was talking about a stop and frisk project that our youth did with them. Public Science Project has a representative that sits on Communities for Police Reform, which is a coalition in New York City of community-based organizations, research organizations, legal organizations that are in coalition addressing police violence, police brutality, police accountability, and transparency, right? And so I know that some organizations here are national organizations and so sitting in certain coalitions where people on the ground are impacting issues may be like a structural challenge but I think it's important to mention that they are able to continue to build relationship and be in relationship with community groups on the ground even if they're not doing a specific issue with them. Their work is still informed by being involved in coalitions with community groups on the ground. The other thing I would just say in terms of the scope of stop and frisk at the time, which has been dramatically, dramatically reduced but still happens, I think over a three to four year period, over a million young people in New York City were stopped and frisked. And when I say young people, we mean between the ages of 13 and 18. And so that was the context and scope in which researchers came into community to work with a community group to figure out how can we aid in ending this practice and policy. So with that, I think just for time consideration, we're gonna jump into Sienna sharing a little bit about some of our experiences with the legal team. I'm gonna make this brief. I wanted to just share where we haven't completely delved into how are you building your relationship with groups on the ground kind of in a practical sense. But a couple of examples of experience I've directly had when folks have reached out to make the road through me or through a funder that has put like a researcher or somebody in touch with us because they wanna engage in some sort of research project. And we've talked about make the road. We have 23,000 members, I guess officially, both dues and non-dues paying. And so we, as we've talked about, we are in touch every day. I mean, I think we have hundreds of people coming through every day our community centers. And so for researchers and other entities that want to get in touch on particular issues, we are a natural space for places to reach out to. Often we get lots of requests that don't feel well thought out. And folks reach out and they are looking to engage in a particular very narrow piece of research. And they wanna convene a focus group next month or in three weeks. And they're wondering, can we host it in your space? Oh, and by the way, will you be able to provide interpretation because a large majority of your members are monolingual Spanish speakers? We know that, but we're hoping you'll have some organizers that can be there to share, to be able to interpret. And no mention of Metro cards, no mention of compensation. Maybe there's a 10 or 15 or $25 gift card to somewhere. But a real lack of valuing us as an organization or just the people that you are trying to engage with. And so we had a funder had put a organization working with government and in touch with us, they wanted to look at rent-to-own experiences. And it was the same thing. Wanted to set up focus groups in our spaces. We said no, we're not gonna be able to pull this off in three weeks. What is really the ultimate goal? Never got any information about what the ultimate goal was about this project. How can we, is there a bigger issue here that we're wanting to look at or think about? Never sharing of that information. Can you send some information? They had a, then they were like, okay, we'll host it in our Manhattan location. Great. All of our folks are in Jackson Heights, they're in Bushwick, they're in Staten Island. It can be a real challenge to get members there for a $25 gift card. Refreshments, what does that mean? And no other real kind of thought about how challenging it might be for folks to be able to participate effectively in this thing. And so we said, oh, sure, send us some, okay, we'll try to direct folks. We'll advertise it, send us some flyers. English only flyers. With no information, the flyers will just bare bone. And so this is something that happens all the time. And it's pretty shocking, or maybe it's not, I don't know, but really thinking, for me it really raises how organizations reach out to community-based orgs like ours and how they're really valuing our members in their process of getting to whatever it is that they're trying to get at, right? And so I just wanted to share that. Obviously I don't know the scope and a lot of the work that is happening here and how that research arm really works as you put, I guess, what is your pedal to the metal, metal? But just some things I wanted to share. And it does inform how we then are responsive the next time around to organizations who are reaching out to us because they wanna tap into the membership base that we have in order to do some research on a particular project. So I just wanted to share that. And it does raise, we've kind of talked around it, but this idea of money and how your organizations are really thinking about value and thinking about where those resources go as you're looking to engage with community-based organizations who by and large are often operating in the red or doing everything they can to scrape together enough to keep the programs running. So I just wanted to flag that. So we wanna share just from our perspective and experiences, from some of the earlier historical examples we shared, what are some effective elements to effective partnerships with community groups? I'm sorry? Yeah. Oh, there we go. Christine, I think talked about it. Transparency in the goals, and I'll let Christine jump in but having from the very beginning a real sense of what are we aiming to accomplish here and allowing your participants to just feel invested from the very beginning because there's a roadmap. We know what you're trying to do. We know how we are going to be involved in what our role is in trying to get to research that's gonna ultimately change, hopefully change some issue that is impacting our lives. And so I think being very upfront about what it is you're trying to accomplish and the role that everyone is supposed to be playing. Right? I don't know, Christine, did you wanna add anything to that? No, it is exactly that, just knowing what are the intentions behind working with the community you're working with? Again, speaking to Christine's experience, the shared ownership of the work, right? Feeling that you are in step with the partner, the community is feeling in step and has real input in how the outcomes are gonna be shaped and the direction of that work. I feel like oftentimes working with researchers, sometimes you don't feel like you have ownership of the end product and that's very important to have. You share this story, you share your experience and your time and you don't really have a say of how is it presented or just having ownership of where it is and how is it presented. You as the research person teaching the partners that you're working with, teaching the organizations, teaching the individuals, sharing in how to do research, how to collect data, making this an experience where people are actually really growing from their involvement in this bigger picture, allowing it to create shared learning for partners. Anything else on that one, Christine? And this next one, really understanding the challenges that the partner, the community is facing. When you are doing your outreach to an organization, or to a community group or whoever, the folks on the ground, I was, and I'm speaking from the eye, we don't want to have to educate you completely on all of the things that are going on, the issues or even just the work that we're doing, right? So in coming to the table with a real understanding of what it is we're trying to accomplish and some of the challenges that our members, our communities are facing, because it's another, it's a value, right? It's another burden you are potentially putting on that group of folks who you are expecting to engage with you. So I think really understanding those challenges, like interpretation, right? Something as basic as that can make that research, can make that partnership really effective and make the community want to continue to work with you. Yeah, and then again, speaking to the kind of the money, in all the other ways that we value folks, value the time and efforts of the organization. So how are they having to really adjust their lives to be able to participate in the research project? Do they need a metro card? Are they gonna need childcare? Are they gonna need all of these things to really be effective in working on the issue? And that means thinking about your organizational structures and how you can put pressure on your organizations to value the work in a different way, right? And value the partner in a different way. There's just not enough resources, well, is there? We can think of all the ways that we, in our nice offices or where are we spending resources? Like let's be real about that, right? So we had a lovely lunch, I'm super stoked about that lunch. But how are we thinking about where we're spending money and then how can we redirect resources to make it really effective for folks to be able to participate? The results, outcomes of your research are clear. So we're all on the same page about what we are trying to get at. And I don't know if you wanna speak a little bit more to that. I think what that bullet point speaks on is the idea of sometimes research falling short in their acts. So having clear intentions of what are the goals and you can write a research paper but the acts is not there, that radical statement is not there. Being explicit of what the actual core problem is is missing. So I don't know, having that present as well. And then I think last, kind of how are you presenting the research, what is the end product and how are you, is it something that's, what did you say earlier, it's just gonna be on a blog somewhere that no one's going to read and that the community that you worked with has no access to at all. So how are you thinking about all the different ways that you can share back that research? Who has access to it ultimately? And who's involved in kind of determining all of those different ways that you're gonna be sharing and sharing back the results of the research. So I think those are kind of our key takeaways for things that make a partnership really effective for organizations like ours and community in general. I would just say one that's not up there that is critical, as we said, this is not the blueprint. Value the expertise of the community you're going into. And so the expertise is already there. There may be some shared learning across community and researchers that will be done through that process, which is great, but any community that you're going into, you should be going in valuing the expertise that already exists in the community. Yeah, and then the communicating, we saw that SNCC was doing pamphlets, like they were doing real intensive research and then that was being communicated out to a larger community through a pamphlet. The one Christine was speaking to about results and outcomes of the research, I'll share quickly. We do a lot of organizing through Make the Road around the impact of the criminalization of young people in the community and in schools. And a lot of that research is really focused on the impact of police in schools. And a lot of community groups on the ground for some years now have been pointing out that there's no evidence that metal detectors or police officers are making schools any safer. There is evidence that shows that black and brown students that go to police with metal detectors, that go to schools with metal detectors and police are more likely to be criminalized from normal youthful behavior and have negative outcomes for having metal detectors in police. And there are a lot of folks that are providing us that research, which has been great, right? Like it has been a real tool and a lot of organizing campaigns. And we are great partners with them, but a lot of the recommendations in their own research usually falls short of saying get out metal detectors and police from schools, right? It's like, we should learn how to retrain police officers or we should think about some other strategies or, right? And so it's their research that's actually feeding solutions that young people are coming to, like this isn't making our schools any safer and there's better ways to create safety in schools. But their research often falls to explicitly say what the people in the communities they're working with are saying as a solution to actually eliminating or dismantling this problem. And so it's just, you know, on the one hand, the research is tremendously helpful. On the other hand, it's falling short of, as Christine said, as making an ass that's grasping at the roots of the problem. And with that, we're going to transition into our last section. So again, we're going to transition a little bit into talking within our groups. We are going to use two quotes from Ella Baker to help us reflect at the end of the workshop and think through some things that we may be able to explore and navigate in the future. And so I'll start with the short quote, which is, who are your people? Can be interpreted in many different ways, like who are your people? Who do you come from? In this context, we want people to interpret who are your people as in who are you accountable to? So when you are doing your work, when you are doing your research, who are you accountable to? In what ways are you accountable to them? And the other one is, I think, something we've been touching on throughout the day is in order for us as poor and oppressed people to become part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning, getting down to and understanding the root cause. And so at our tables, we wanna explore, yes, we did write them one thing. Okay, so at our tables, we wanna explore, we're just gonna, for time's sake, we're just gonna look at the bottom three questions. So who are the people that are impacted by the research that you currently focus on, you or your organization? How are you or your organization accountable to them? So at your table, we want you to explore how you're accountable to the people that your research is, in many ways, aiding and supporting, right? The other question is, are the solutions that your research, the recommendations, the solutions that you're coming to, are they mitigating harm, right? Which is, again, we have to mitigate harm to create social conditions, so that's not necessarily a bad thing, but are your solutions, are the recommendations that your research is coming to, is it mitigating harm? So is it, you know, getting a couple people of, I don't wanna say this flippantly, right? But is it getting a small number of people of welfare roles, is it, or is it radically changing the conditions that people are living under? Or is it attempting to get at the roots of the problems and change them? And then the last question is, what are the structural barriers to building accountability to community and adopting solutions that grasp what the root cause is? So again, I mean, we just talked about that a little bit. So at your table, just thinking of these, discussing these last three questions will take about 10 minutes. So for 10 minutes, within your tables, discuss these questions and then we'll have some reflection and take away with the larger group. So I just wanna, as I've been spending time with you all today, something that, as we're starting to close out our time, is coming to me now is, you may not individually, but your organizations have a lot of power, right? Your organizations are developing research and data that just through your organization, that research and data going to a legislator could turn into the drafting of federal policy, right? Like we talked about, for our organizing, our power, that we are constantly in communities connecting with as many people as possible because for us to exercise power down here, we are getting up in the morning at three in the morning and bringing bus loads of people down here to even show the people down here that are crafting policy that we matter, right? Your organizations can email some data or research to a legislator that then could turn into policy that impacts the rest of our lives. And so, I mean, make the road for a nonprofit, we're also kind of a larger organization. So with that, we understand that like shifting the culture, transforming the culture of an organization is a long-term process, but you all should be grounded in the outsized power and influence that many of your organizations have on crafting policies that impact the lives of millions of people. So I just don't wanna, that's as we're closing out our time here, and I know that doesn't mean that power is like then automatically transferred to you as individuals, but it is something to think about in the ways in which like what is necessary to try to change within the organizational structure or culture of your organizations or how you advance policy in the world. So it's just something I hope folks take away from here and think about and continue to explore and navigate. And with that, we would just love to hear some of your last thoughts on the questions that you discussed in your groups and potentially what are some things that may have moved you today that you heard from other participants in the room. Thinking about these questions and then anything that just may have moved you to explore anything in the approach or the work that you're doing when you leave today. So one of the things that struck me early when you guys I think we're just doing the introduction and you were giving the example of the meeting where they were there to discuss welfare reform policy and the community members just having an even more basic question than that about translation, being able to even just talk to the case worker. And so to me what that triggered was that as we do research that is connected to and intended to inform policy, sometimes it's good to take a step back and sort of think about what that experience is from someone who will be affected by the policy. Yes, it's important like you were saying to address this issue of work requirements but as the person going through the process what might be some of those barriers that affect the outcome that we're able to observe which may be the hours of work or whatever, what may be some of the other things that influence that. And so to me that was really helpful in sort of thinking about that perspective and in thinking beyond the outcomes we can measure to some of those things that are influencing those outcomes and how we can incorporate that in the work that we do. Thank you. Thanks. So I'll share just on this last point these two questions that's kind of trade off between so A, like who are you accountable to? And then when you work with a group how do you balance this like mitigating harm versus transformational change? And we, so like ITEP always has kind of like the door open to collaboration, et cetera and we were recently dealing with this when we did a report on a proposed EITC expansion for the city of Chicago. And so this was something that kind of came to us and we were asked for recommendations and analysis, et cetera. And it's kind of this balancing of are you on the same page? Because we think of who are accountable to who our people are kind of being like the bottom 60%, bottom 20%, et cetera. But how do you kind of balance, this is one proposal, this is an EITC expansion at the end of the day. The people who would be receiving the credit are still probably, you know, they're kind of held hostage to the rest of the labor market and whatever else happens. And how do you balance that with like more transformational change? Like, you know, how do you balance on a, especially on a smaller level like that, like investments in like education and schools and infrastructure and kind of just like trusting partners to like know what's best in their situation but then also, you know, balancing your own time and saying this is, you know, this specific proposal is worth our time as a national organization, like we're working in a bunch of states. You know, how do we prioritize and how do we listen to all our partners in all these different places and trust them that they are gonna ask us for things that are their highest priority. I think that's just a really important point. And then I'll just say like generally from the day, I actually died when you said safe space versus bold space. I think that is perfect. And I think I will definitely take that back to my office. Thank you. Anyone else? Yeah. I'm really sinning with the accountability question because I think, you know, we keep the people we're trying to help in mind but like that's not actually accountability. Accountability is like having someone able to say like, yes, you hit the mark or no, you didn't. Who's like that person who you're trying to infect not like my peer is sitting around the table. So don't have an answer to it. But I think, I'll definitely take it away from today. That's great. One thing that we were talking about and I think I heard that table there also talking about the structural challenge of philanthropy and I would say the way that we're challenging short-termism and the financialization of the economy. Like we could do the same thing with philanthropy that we end up with these like deliverables. We have to be able to show wins on the board in a year or two years, which means that we're necessarily looking at how are we mitigating harm as opposed to the transformational change that takes five or 10 or 20 years. So that was a barrier. I was just saying at the table as part of that same conversation that when we look at our results in such a short-term way, we also take off the board places that are hard to work in like the South, which is where most black workers live because if you're gonna get a quick victory in a year or two with legislation, you're looking at blue cities and blue states. And so it's important for us to figure out how we can take credit for interim outcomes that are sort of building up to the transformational change, which means we have to have a vision for what that is and plant backwards. So just expanding on the point about philanthropy. Philanthropy also can determine who your people are for a particular project. And I was saying that the research that I'm the most proud of, my people were the residents of Washington, D.C. But depending on what the philanthropy, the funder wants, I mean, they may be your people if they're wanting you to inform them, which is a very different feel in terms of sense of pride in what you're doing. Regarding what I enjoyed most about the day, first of all, I woke up really happy. Aside from the whole hearing, I woke up happy about coming here because I just love being in the space and being able to talk about these issues and learn from you all. And the piece that I think will stick with me the most is learning that SNCC had this research department that produced a document like that, which I definitely want a copy of. And if there are other reports that they did, I'd like to know about those as well. Thank you. So as good facilitators, we want to end on time. Or we try to be good facilitators. So it's two o'clock. We want to thank Valerie and Connie for inviting us down. We want to thank all of you for participating today. We hope it was a fruitful conversation. Our information is up on that slide. If you have any questions, please do reach out. We could probably do a whole workshop on the philanthropy question that came up at the end. Couldn't fit it in, but yes. But if you have good philanthropic partners, please send them to my email. No, I'm just joking. Yeah, so thank you very much. We hope you continue to keep creating this space here. It seems like a really great space to kind of begin to delve into and explore. I think challenging questions that people are navigating across all different fields within the ecosystem. So thank you and have a good rest of your day. Thanks. And one more thing. Thank you to Sienna, Casey, and Christine. It was outstanding. And thank all of you. Enjoy your afternoon. We will have our next workshop on November 14th. So we're taking the month of October off, at least for this workshop, we're taking the month of October up. So I'll see you back here, November 14th, and we'll be talking about contemporary social issues and the Native American experience.