 I'm Jake Edwards. I'm a vice president in social finance, and I'm delighted to be joined today by my friends and partners, Justin Steele from Google and Layla Mekorachi from Merig America. Today we're gonna talk about the workforce and economic opportunity challenges that we face and the critical role that employers can and should play in actually addressing those challenges and providing meaningful opportunities and on-ramps to economic opportunity for those most in need. Before we dive in, I would love for Layla and Justin to introduce themselves. Then we'll have a 10-minute video where we'll actually get to meet two Merig America graduates and hear their stories, which are amazing. Then we have some questions that I'll ask, and then we'll try to say five to 10 minutes at the end for any questions from the group. We have two microphones on the side, so as we get to that point, have your questions ready and we'll tee that up. So Layla, get started. Can you tell us a little about your role in Merig America? Sure, good morning, everyone. I'm Layla Mekorachi. I'm thrilled to be doing a fireside chat with my colleagues here, and hopeful that just like Franklin Roosevelt's original fireside chats, after ours, there'll be an overhaul of our economy and an entirely new middle class will flourish. But hopefully we won't have the succeeding World War. So I'm there, I'm our Chief Business Officer. I oversee all of our revenue streams, both philanthropy and earned revenue, and really excited for our conversation today. Great, well, I'm Justin. It's good to be here. I work at Google.org, Google.org is Google's philanthropy and my team is responsible for our philanthropy in America, so Canada all the way down to Argentina and excited to get into the conversation today. Excellent. Well, we'll move out of the way and we'll pull up a video, again, just incredible stories and a testament to Merit, America, their work, and Amy and Brandon. So without further ado, we'll get that started. Hello, I'm Jake Edwards. I'm a Vice President at Social Finance. I'm delighted to be here with you all today. I think we're all too familiar with today's uncertain economy. People aren't just looking for jobs. Jobs are looking for people. To address this challenge, companies must shift from being talent consumers to talent investors. We're seeing promising examples of this nationwide, like the Google Career Certificates Fund, which Google and Social Finance launched earlier this year. Through this fund, Google is investing $100 million to help 20,000 people learn new digital skills with training providers like Merit, America, and Europe, with the goal of achieving $1 billion in wage gains. In today's session at SoCAP, we'll explore what it takes to design and manage a fund like this and discuss learnings from additional examples of employer-led workforce investments. But first, I'm delighted to be joined by Brandon and Amy, two graduates from our training partner, Merit America, to get the learner's perspective on how programs like this are enabling their success and what the opportunity means to them. So, Brandon and Amy, thank you so much for being with us today. To get started, I'd love to just hear a little bit about yourselves. What were you doing before you enrolled with Merit America? Before Merit America, I have been working at an Amazon distribution center for about two years. I had been working as a problem solver as well as operating heavy machinery. So I was that girl driving a big, crazy machine. So it was a really fun job. It was also a lot of hard labor. I had had two back-to-back spinal fusion surgeries during my time with Amazon. Unfortunately, I was no longer going to be able to perform the hard labor that I had been doing. So I was really in a time of uncertainty in my life and I knew I needed to find another career path. And lo and behold, one day in a bathroom stall, this is my favorite part, I saw a poster and it was talking about a program, a nonprofit called Merit America who was offering a career pathway to get into the IT sector. And the best part of that is they said you didn't need a bachelor's degree. And so that's a little bit about how I got started before Merit and how I got introduced to Merit. My name is Brandon. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Before Merit America, throughout the pandemic, I actually was working for Amazon. But I was Amazon shopper with Whole Foods. I was doing gig econ work like Door Dash, Instacart and like while bouncing back and forth doing these gig econ jobs, one day I received a random email that's a promotional email from Merit America. And most of the times when you see emails, you sort of disregard it. They're just kind of like moving to the side but something told me to just take a chance and just jump on it. And I went into the IT track, the IT cohort which I've always been interested in technology so I thought it was a plus for me and that's how I got into Merit America myself. I love that, thank you both. And how have things changed since you've completed the program and moved on to your subsequent careers? To go from such a place of like uncertainty being a single mom, not sure where my next job is gonna be or if I'm even gonna be able to perform that job, I was very fortunate. So I was connected with a program called Career Circle. And from Career Circle, I got introduced to a company called Tech Systems. And my job progression, I do contract work. I've worked at amazing companies such as Microsoft, BBVA and now I work for the San Diego California School District. So I think sometimes too, just to help future learners and people that are considering doing this. I like to talk numbers cause, let's face it, we're looking for a wage increase, right? We're looking for a way to be self-sufficient and sustainable. So Merit America, when I started, I was making $15 an hour. My first job that went up to like, let's say $40,000. My next job, I went up to $56,000 a year and now I am at $79,000 a year. And so this is starting from 2019 to where I am today. So it's just monumental. Like it's just fabulous. I came from a point in my life where, you know, I felt like I was going through a dark tunnel and I couldn't see the end, you know? Going out every day doing gig econ work and not knowing if I was going to make it, if I was going to pay bills, if I was going to be able to pay my rent, you know? So now I'm a lot more comfortable, I'm a lot more stable and mentally I feel better as well. You know, with financial stress, you know, you do see the climate mental health. So I feel my mental has increased exponentially since graduating from Merit America. Through their partnership with Infosys, I was able to get a job there being a tech support associate, which is similar to Amy's company with TechSystem. They do contract work, so they work with various companies. And through Infosys, I am actually under a government contract with a company called Erogyr Rocketdyne, which basically designs and engineers, business and rockets and works directly with NASA and the United States government. So I would be, and this is also a remote job where I work from home. So, I work from basically working seven days a week, 24 hours a day, or back and forth, not knowing if I was going to make ends meet. So now living more comfortably and being more mentally healthy. It's a big difference. Wow. Well, congratulations to both of you. It's truly incredible. I'm going to test it. I think probably the work that you invested and the energy you invested in the program. So congratulations. We'd love to hear a little bit about what you perceive as the role of corporate employers and what they can do to make it easier for learners like yourselves to get relevant skills that ultimately land you in the positions that you have, whereby you're able to have meaningful employment. So I think for employers to be able to incorporate non-traditional talent such as myself and Brandon, one of the big things for me when I first started applying to jobs was every entry job level or entry job that I looked at, right? Said that you needed to have five years of experience to apply to this entry level role. And it was just mind boggling to me or they would use a lot of jargon that I didn't understand. So it just automatically would make me feel that I was not qualified or I was underqualified or I wouldn't get the job if I applied. And one of the great things about merit is merit teaches you to apply to those jobs anyways, right? Because we've gotten the skills. So I think it's something they could do to kind of help incorporate more diversity and inclusion in their companies is to make those job descriptions more geared towards the skills at hand that are needed to do the job, right? So if we're talking about, hey, we're working over here with SQL and Tableau and R, then list those skills. And that way people will can at least know that, hey, I've got this certification under my belt. I know how to do SQL. I can apply to that job. So they don't automatically feel discounted. Another thing I would like to point out is Amazon. One of the great things they offered was a career choice program. Not only did they offer like so much money a year towards your education, but they included certificate programs in there, such as Merit America, where you're going to get your Google certificate or your data analytics certificate. So offering programs like that as well as, if you want to go get associates we'll put towards that too, but also include programs like that as well for your future talent. I'm really big on collaboration. And I think more employers should collaborate with other companies such as like, what's happening now with the Google certificates fund and they're collaborating with organizations such as Merit America, which helped myself in aiming. And also with IT, there are a multitude of certificates, you know, range from Google, Microsoft, CompTIA A plus, a lot of those certificates, there aren't cheap. It would be great where you can get real certificates and have a great knowledge base that you can learn and grow within your company. So it would make you feel like you're gaining experience and having a more long lasting career and being more knowledgeable in your role as well. Thank you so much Brandon and Amy for sharing your journeys with us. I'm struck by what we discussed today, but a few salient points stick out to me. I think the first is that there's a tremendous difference between a job and a career and what that means for your health, your family, your wellbeing and your fulfillment. I think the second piece is that meaningful employment is not dependent on the traditional post-secondary pathway, but rather far more dependent on gaining relevant and practical skills that are informed by employers. And then third, Brandon, you touched on this at the end, but technical training is an important ingredient, but all the features that surround that training, whether it's career coaching, mentorship, or other supports are just as, if not more important, to the ultimate success that we're hoping to achieve. There's great hearing, Brandon, and Amy's experiences in the Merit America program, and we now have the opportunity to get the perspective of Merit America and Google and how they engage in partnerships like this. I love that. Personally, the opportunity to meet students and learners and actually hear about their journeys is far and away the most redeeming part of what we get to do. So thank you, Layla, for presenting and sharing Amy and Brandon's stories with us. I think that provides a fantastic backdrop for the conversation we're gonna have today, which is about how we can break down barriers and create linkages between employers and institutions that provide skills. The macroeconomic backdrop for this is that there's a tremendous opportunity. There are 10 million unfilled jobs and there are six million individuals who are unemployed. And so if we can do that right and we can even just on the margin, change the ability or improve the ability of employers to signal the skills they need, talk to training institutions about what elements or characteristics they look for, then all of a sudden we can dramatically change the trajectory of folks who are stuck in the cycle of chronic under or unemployment. So we referenced briefly in that video the Google Career Certificates Fund. Justin, we'd love to hear a little bit about how Google arrived at this approach and what priorities you're trying to solve through the fund, which is, as we mentioned, a $100 million fund that leverages both Google's balance sheet and its philanthropic resources to enable low-income and underserved individuals to get access to programs like Merit America. So Justin, we'd love to hear a little bit about it. Great. Well, maybe I'll start with my own personal journey because I think that this work is pretty personal to me. I came to Google in 2014 after having spent five years working at Year Up, which is a job training partner just like Merit America. And when I was the deputy director of our Washington DC site, so I was teaching classes, I was leading learning communities, I was in charge of all of our budget and finances for the site. And one of the things I realized a few years into working at Year Up was that we could do so much more at scale if we could find a more scalable financial model. I remember I went down to do a Case Change Academy program at Duke with Dan Heath, who is an author and a professor there at the time. My big idea was trying to figure out how to generate some additional earned revenue through student success placements. And at the time it was just like, I remember bringing it back to Year Up and it was just like heretical to suggest that we would make students pay for any portion of the program. We provided 100% of the cost that some of it was earned through employers who would pay for the apprenticeship so there was an earned revenue component, but the students never paid anything. And it was like, you were going against the constitutional law of Year Up to suggest otherwise. And so I remember coming to Google in 2014 and feeling like I'm gonna find some intersectional, innovative idea in Google for social impact and I'm gonna be like the only person there coming from a nonprofit. So I'm gonna be able to like find some silver bullet thing and I have not found it. There is no silver bullet. Social change is just freaking hard. But what has been really interesting is trying to figure out how to leverage Google's balance sheet beyond philanthropy, which is kind of the holy grail of philanthropy is how do you make something repeatable and sustainable? My team has given out something like $60 million in a wraparound support to job training providers to provide all of the coaching and the teaching and the job placement support and everything else for learners, but that money never sort of comes back and recirculates. And so the genesis of the idea for this program was is there a possibility to leverage Google's balance sheet in addition to all of that philanthropy? And we did this a little bit with small businesses during COVID where we partnered with our Treasury team to do both grants and loan capital small businesses. And then there was a question of like, what could we do it for learners? And I was like, well, let's circle back to our providers because when I was working a year up and there was a non-starter, like there was no way they were gonna have learners pay but Merit America has been pioneering this model from the very beginning of their existence. So we knew there were providers doing it. And then you zoom out like for the macro problem, I mean, we know two thirds of jobs are required, at least the medium level of digital skills. So it's like, if you're gonna make an inclusive economy, you gotta make sure there's pathways to people being able to get skilled up. But we also know that if we passively just put online courses on Coursera, you're not gonna get learners with multiple barriers to employment to successfully complete those programs. Like you've gotta do wraparound support. So you've gotta support the Merit Americas of the world. And so yeah, that's kind of where the genesis of this idea was born, excuse me, is just can we maybe leverage balance sheet capital with philanthropy? And so we ended up putting up $50 million of philanthropy, $50 million of Google's Treasury capital. The Treasury capital will circulate for 10 years and eventually come back to Google. And the learners who pay that, or only the learners who get a job, it pays more than $40,000 a year. They're a positive outcome and they're paying like $100 a month back into the fund and it recirculates and allows more learners from the very start. So, and then of course the philanthropy is here to cover learners who don't complete the program, don't get a job, or don't get a job that pays above threshold and my philanthropy on my team will cover that. So we're pretty excited about it. I love it. Having been brought into the journey maybe halfway through your own journey of Google, I can say that it's been tremendous and exciting to see it grow and just see the enthusiasm and engagement from across Google, whether it is at Treasury, whether it's grow with Google, whether it's Google.org, just a testament to the commitment to the work. Layla, we'd love to hear a little bit about Merig America's role in the fund and what this capital enables as it relates to your ability to meet your mission. Yeah, absolutely. So Merig America is one of the inaugural training providers of the fund. Essentially what we do is we provide a pathway for adults who are stuck in low wage jobs, predominantly without college degrees, as Amy mentioned, to transition into better paid careers. And we do that at scale. Why did we get involved in the fund? We saw this really small, struggling tech company and we decided maybe we'll give them a hand. Actually, putting all joking aside, three really important reasons. The first is really strong mission alignment. The mission of Merig is centered on economic mobility and access and the mission of the fund. We found really strong alignment around making sure anyone anywhere could access a family sustaining career, not just a job, as Jake said in the video. The second, as Justin just alluded to, is the financial sustainability and scalability that the fund enables for us. Merit next year will be five years old, will be serving over 6,000 learners, making us the largest provider in the country. And we just cannot operate at the scale that we want to operate and we have ambitions to operate, relying on philanthropy alone. There's not enough philanthropy even at a very, very low per unit cost of training. We need really sustainable earned revenue streams in order to reach our scale plans and the fund is an incredible enabler of revenue for us which enables scale and impact. That might be a little bit more commissure with the size of the problem we're facing. In the US there are over 50 million adults today stuck in low-wage jobs. This is about half of our workforce. People are stuck in these really low quality low-wage jobs and they can't afford to leave them to go back to school or to do a more flexible, expensive boot camp program. So if we're gonna really make a dent, that's again commissure with the size of the problem we're trying to solve. It's leaders like Justin and Jake that we have to partner with to come up with the financing that's on par with the size of the problem. And then lastly, we're just so excited about being part of this innovative model and we're really hoping that other companies and other government officials will steal the idea and replicate it. 10 or 20,000 learners is huge. It's never been done before in our country and yet there are millions of others out there and so we're thrilled to be a part of the fund as an inaugural training provider and really hoping that other companies and other government institutions will replicate and create even more opportunities. I love that. I think where you end dig is probably where we wanna go next which is the biggest or worst kept secret in economic development or workforce development is that employers are what dictate success. You can have the best training, the best curriculum in the world, but if there isn't an engaged employer on the back end that's all for naught. So I've always admired Merig America's ability and creative thinking as it relates to the different ways you can actually understand what employers need or have them contribute resources or have them be a flagship partner. And so in that vein, Leila would love to start with you and then Justin, go to you, what are some of the creative or innovative things you're seeing as it relates to getting employers to the table and having them playing active role in actually helping your learners? Yeah, the first one Amy actually talked about sponsoring your own workforce, right? So Amy came to us through Amazon Career Choice and yes, we do actually put posters up in bathrooms. Turns out it works. And making sure that employers, our large employers do provide the opportunity for their frontline workers like Amy to access high quality training programs, whether they're short-term programs like Meri or opportunities for higher education. This is a really effective model to give you a sense when Amy came to us, we were working with about 50 Amazon Career Choice Associates this year we'll be reaching closer to 800. And we're just one of hundreds of providers that Career Choice uses. The second is really investing in high quality, early career and apprenticeship programs. So we partner really closely with companies like JPMorgan Chase, Accenture Infosys, Southwest and others to source talent for their early career programs. And the third is skills-based hiring, where when I first got involved in this work I spent a lot of time talking to employers as Amy mentioned to focus on skills and not just degrees. And we're really starting to see some headway with 110. For example, this mission is to hire, retain and promote one million black talent over the next 10 years. Merit just announced an exciting partnership with 110, where we'll be providing 2,500 of our graduates for a coalition of over 60 different employers that have committed to 110. So I think those three areas of investing in your existing workforce, offering high quality early career programs and pursuing skills-based hiring practices are three things we've seen that are working really well. I love it. Justin, I feel like you could probably answer this question from a few different entry points. Either you work with the year up where the employer role is significant and meaningful from Google.org as a grant maker in the workforce development space or from Google as perhaps one of the largest employers in the country. So I'll defer to you as to where you want to take it. I think it's a lot of what Layla said. So I'll just underscore that. I mean, I think like a formal apprenticeship programs, especially a member for a year up, you can't just send a young person who's never worked in a white collar job into a workplace and not have any kind of support system kind of built in to ensure their success. And so I think structured onboarding programs and whatnot are important. But I think there has to be a... Well, I guess the second thing I'll say is there's these sort of structural pieces too. Like, once I got to Google, I worked with coalition people to ban the box. So we weren't sort of eliminating opportunities for people with criminal histories. We also had to kind of change the way Google thought about college recruiting. Like the first barrier was having like a short list of elite colleges that were the only schools in which Google would recruit. So that was like the first hurdle is like, okay, let's expand the list of colleges. And then after we got that done, then it was a conversation around, can we have a conversation about whether we need college degrees at all for entry level roles? And so we've kind of been making some progress there about eliminating the sort of four year degree requirement on job recs. But then there's another structural problem that we don't often talk about that I don't think we've solved, which is there aren't really entry level roles at Google. There just aren't. These days, if you look at high tech companies that don't have like a retail footprint, because there's some companies who, like Apple has their Apple stores, or like there's some companies who structurally have like a retail component that if you look at their numbers in an aggregate level, it looks like you have entry level roles, but it's sort of siloed. But if you look at the sort of core roles that exist in sort of the knowledge part of the company, I remember when I first started at Google, I had an intern and I had her do an audit of, I want to know every entry level job in the company. There were five. One of them was in the daycare center. One of them was in the security center, like doing physical security. The only one I could really identify that was like a technical role, there were two. One was in the data centers. So there was a data center like operations role, which some of the best stories I think of merit graduates and stuff have been coming through data centers. And then one of them was the IT rotational program, which is our IT help desk. And that was like an intentional program that was created to hire people without college degrees. And it was where we were placing most of our year up graduates at the time. So that's like a real structural barrier that is like a macro economy, what kind of gets me down to like culture shift and culture change. Like how do you get business leaders to sort of get behind the idea of hiring people without college degrees? How do you get behind the idea of creating entry level roles? I mean, there is no like mail room to the C suite. Like that doesn't exist in companies anymore, at least in high tech companies. So like those kind of structural challenges are really, really hard. And so if y'all have ideas, hop on the mic, let's talk about it. I think some of this is social movement work, honestly. So, yeah, absolutely. And I guess the natural follow up from that is given the structural barriers and the challenges that corporations are facing, Layla, like how have you actually gotten companies to change behavior, change their hearts and minds? What have been the tactics, the approaches that resonate? Acknowledging that every company is going to operate differently, have slightly different needs, but thematically what's actually getting them to move in the direction we need them to move into? Yeah, I think the most significant lever we have is solving an actual business need for a company. So it's funny when you were saying, Justin, there are only five roles, I was thinking in my head, what about the data center roles? We've got those. Yeah, that's a great one. It's like, we really have to hone in and figure out like, what is the actual business need a company has and how can our extremely talented, hardworking, really impressive graduates help adjust that need? So whether it's for Infosys, who actually truly needs hundreds of entry level IT support technicians a year, or JP Morgan Chase, who really actually do need entry level software developers to support all of their teams is like really with a fine tooth comb, finding within each company what their actual needs are and how can you become a valued partner and vendor? And I say vendor because this work is not effective if it happens through CSR teams or through corporate foundations. Those teams do really important work and yet they're not solving business needs. And so if we go to a talent acquisition team and we can help those recruiters or even the hiring managers fill seats that they urgently need filled and we do that well with a highly trained, super talented person like Amy or Brandon, they're gonna come back to us and ask us to do it again. And it's really important. I think folks who know me, I always find a way to bring this up in anything I talk about. It's really important for providers like Merit and Europe does this as well and others to be engaging with companies professionally and to be charging for that work. It's actually really surprising. When I first joined Merit, we did a pilot. We placed our learners for free without charging companies. So we thought, you got a great job, we've got a great learner, let's get them in the role and move on. And then I said, well, what would happen if we charged? Like 80% of our learners are going to companies that have over 2,500 employees. These are companies with talent acquisition budgets and they spend their budgets all the time on staffing firms and recruiting resources and college campus recruiting programs that predominantly bring in white talent. What would happen if we said, hey, you want a more diverse pipeline? Awesome, we can help you with that and we're not gonna do it for free. What happens is you get taken more seriously. Turns out companies value things they pay for. And that's actually, it's a win-win all around. We found that our learners have a much better recruitment and onboarding experience when we're on a team's budget line, when we have an actual person assigned to engage with us. We as a provider can actually service the company's need much more effectively. I can put an account manager who can understand the nuances, the really specific needs that that hiring team or that talent acquisition team needs. We can share data, we can do all the backend tracking of demographics, wage gains, who's coming to you, from where, time to hire, all the metrics that companies care about. We can take that burden off of the team and do that for them. And we can help with really incredible and honestly just really genuine, authentic storytelling. Our learners like you saw Amy and Brandon, they are amazing. They are so, so incredible. They do programs like Merit while working full-time, which really, I mean, I really want to applaud them because if you came to me and said, Leila, you need to do 20 hours of yoga every week on top of your current job and being a mom of two young boys, I'd fail and that's yoga. They're learning how to code, how to do data analytics, how to do IT support 20 hours a week on top of working full-time, sometimes multiple jobs and taking care of their families. And so we can, as a provider, if you're paying us, we can help facilitate these really important storytelling opportunities that ultimately build the brand of the company themselves in an authentic and genuine and respectful way. So a couple of places to start. I love it. Well, we're going to open up for questions from the audience in about three or four minutes, but last one before we do that, for both of you, we have folks in the audience, I imagine, in the impact investing space, perhaps from practitioners or training providers themselves, folks representing companies and corporations. What advice or guidance would you share for individuals that are interested in collectively contributing to solving this problem of enabling underserved populations to get relevant skills, get meaningful employment? What's the advice? What do you think, Layla? I've got some ideas. First and foremost is if you're an employer, pay a family sustaining wage and keep the wage the same as you would if you're removing a degree requirement. If you're reclassifying roles as, these roles are now open to more diverse set of candidates and you're bringing your salary grade down, we're really not moving in the right direction there, right? So make sure you're paying a family sustaining wage and the wage doesn't change just because you decide to be more open to a diversified talent pool. The second is to offer remote opportunities to entry level positions. We see increasing demand from our learners for entry level work, especially our learners of color and we're just not seeing the same opportunities available for remote work as more senior employees might have. And we understand the reasons why employers are reticent, but I really think that if employers trust their talent and provide a hybrid or remote work opportunities, the loyalty you'll get in return will more than make up for it. And the third, I really love Justin, what you're saying around sort of more of the social movement work and the culture change. It's not just about hiring commitments, right? That's the first step. It's a really important step, but what happens after someone's there? After you have your first black female developers, are they gonna stay? How will you retain them? How will you promote them? How are we gonna get to a place in a few years where Brandon and Amy are sitting on the stage? And I think part of that is not just about access to income, which is super important to keep folks, to get folks out of poverty, but access to wealth. What are the things we're gonna do next to generate wealth? If someone is earning a higher income, maybe they're not in poverty and that's wonderful, but how will they accumulate assets? How will they have access to capital so they can generate wealth, particularly in historically marginalized communities? And I think that that is very, very complex work. I think a lot of it, to Justin's point, goes back to cultural shifts and social movement building, but I think it's critical work and kind of the next step after increasing incomes. You wanna follow that one up, Justin? Yeah, I was struggling a little bit with this because I kind of have a policy not to give people advice, but rather just share my lived experience and then I was trying to think what experience to share that would be helpful here, but I think if I step back and think about trying to lead this work, or we created in Google.org back in 2015 an entire racial justice focus and portfolio, and how do you get this work done? It's difficult and hard and there is some internal resistance to it and I think there's the power of proximity and we've done a lot of work with Brian Stevenson and he really preaches this quite eloquently, but I think we've done a lot of work to bring our leadership and our Google teams more proximate into this work, whether that be through doing a film screening. We did one here at Irvingo a while back and bringing folks out and having that proximity or engaging them in the work or placing people on boards. But it also is really important to have people with lived experience inside your company, you know? Like until we have people who have actually walked some of this journey themselves inside the company making decisions and being willing to use their own lived experience inside those companies to say to people who haven't experienced it, like let me share some of my journey, my story. I sit next to you every day and maybe you didn't realize but I've traveled an alternative route or I benefited from these programs that gave me a leg up to where I am. I'm the first person in my family to have kind of crossed over into a job like this. So I think it's super important to have people with lived experience and roles like mine and decision makers above me. So maybe those are the two things I'd share. I love it. Well, we have microphones on the side. If anyone has a question, I encourage you to step up. If not, I have other questions I can fill the time in the back. Yes, please. And if you can just introduce yourself as you ask the question, please. Sure, my name is Abby Disney and I just finished film called The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, which is about precisely about the value of what you're doing, which is in a lot of people's minds, the American dream, right? The ladder out of poverty, the ladder out of the dead end job and so forth. So what you do is incredibly valuable and important and very much the American dream, but my concern is for the people who, the 10 or 12 or 15 people who rush in to fill Amy and Brandon's jobs after they've gotten on that ladder, because the problem with the ladder is it only fits a single person at a time. And we don't really stop to ask ourselves, well, where are they climbing to and what have they left behind? Because the need for those better jobs is created by the fact that those jobs they're leaving behind injure them and burn them out and do not pay a family sustaining wage, as you said. So you referred to FDR at the very beginning and one of the most important pieces of what FDR did was support collective bargaining as the single and only thing that protects workers from the vagaries of corporations. The money is there, the financing is there for those jobs not to be dead end jobs, they're called corporate profits. There's plenty of money and we do not need to be paying. So my problem is, well, my question is, to make this a question, not a statement, is what do we do about the presumption that those jobs need to be dead end jobs in order to create the desire to climb the ladder for people to merit this better pay? Isn't there something we should be talking about at the corporate level in terms of understanding the way we divide corporate profits more justly? What a fantastic question. I think to some extent, we alluded to this earlier in the conversation, but the problem is so complex that social finance is not gonna be all solved, Merrick is not gonna be all solved, Google is not gonna be all solved. I think the effort that we are partnering on is focused on predominantly upskilling and enabling economic opportunity and well-being. That is a sliver of the problem to your point. That's helping people get up a ladder, but the shakiness or the weakness of the first rung in that ladder isn't necessarily something that we're gonna solve on stage. That needs to be addressed by things like the federal government's good jobs initiative where they're saying standards for what is appropriate working conditions, what is livable wage, what is the employer's obligation to look after the safety and well-being of their employees. So I'm not skirking around the question as much as saying that it's a tremendous problem. And ultimately, if we're going to change the trajectory of our society, we're gonna need to solve all of them. But yeah, I think of it guys as we're providing the ladder, but there still does need to be strengthening and elevating of the first rungs and perhaps a little bit out of the scope of what we're doing, but I would be curious, Justin and Layla, for your thoughts. I don't know what the macro solution is. It's so complex, but at an individual level, I think we each need to develop our capacity to suffer through climbing the ladder ourselves and getting ourselves into decision-making roles and try to make different decisions and stomaching the fact that you're gonna have to just be uncomfortable a lot. Like I'm uncomfortable every single day. I mean, it's just, it's very difficult. Like you're swimming upstream, but you have to do that and stay in the game. How do you do that and stay in the game? Especially as you get higher and higher into positions of more influence and authority, you get tested more and more about like, are you loyal? Like is your first priority defending this company? Are you, you know, like, and so how do you sustain yourself and get yourself into those positions of decision-making so that you can make different decisions without people thinking like it's like an immune response. Like all of a sudden, you know, you're a foreign agent and like you get ejected out of the system. That is a difficult thing to do. And I just think that more of us need to use the privilege we have to try to like access those positions and hang in there until we can be in decision-making roles. But I know that's more of an individual level response. I'm not, I mean, I can pause it on with the macro level responses, but I don't know how to accomplish it. So. Thank you for sharing that, Justin. I can't also solve the problem, but I think a big piece of the solution is government. We don't talk that much about government in these tech spaces, but if you take a look at countries and economic systems that do a better job, they have government that works and institutions that set laws and enforce them. And, you know, even our own government in the United States in the past has done a better job than we are doing today, but I think it's not in a capitalist market. We can't just leave it up to the corporations to fix it. They're not going to and they haven't and I don't think they will. I think it's government needs to step in and partner really closely.