 New York City, it's your mayor, Eric Adams. Welcome to the Get Stuff Done cast. Let's get to it. Welcome to episode 13 of the Get Stuff Done cast. 13 is a lucky number because I am so lucky to have with me these two dynamic leaders in our country. And I am really excited about just hearing some of the things that they're doing. First, my brother is Congressman Stephen Hossford, congressional leader of the Congressional Black Caucus and from Las Vegas, Nevada. I like to say over and over again, you don't bet on this brother, you win. He's a real winner. And my man, North Carolina Mayor Mondale Robinson from Enfield, North Carolina. Just a powerful story. When you speak with them and you hear their holistic approach to what we need to do in our country, their dynamic vision of how we can move this country forward and particularly not leaving anyone behind. I was, we met by chance, a good friend told me to get on the phone with you at an event in Las Vegas. And when we started talking, the synergy was just real and authentic. And I learned so much of what you guys are doing that I just really wanted to bring you in. You're here in New York now because you're the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. So while you're here, you're doing several different hats at one time. First, bring us back. How did you guys get into politics? Well, Mayor, it's great to be on. I believe in getting things done. And that's what this podcast is all about and definitely connecting folks. Look, I was born and raised in Las Vegas. I'm a son of an immigrant mother who came to the United States from Trinidad. My father was shot and killed when I was 19 years old, a freshman in college. I always wanted to give to my community that helped to raise me in Las Vegas and to make me into the person, the leader that I am today. Never planned to run for our office. I believed in kind of being behind the scenes person. But after serving in the state Senate for eight years, I was the first black majority leader of the state Senate. I had an opportunity after Nevada earned a fourth congressional district to run. And I decided, why not me? We need more people in Congress with real life lived experiences of adversity and of overcoming adversity and giving back to the community. And so that's why I am a public servant and love doing what I do every day on behalf of the people. That's a powerful snippet. And I think about what you were saying about losing your dad. There's no way every time you hear of a gun violence stories that you don't relive that thought and that memory and say what if. And sometimes, particularly with the overproliferation of guns in our community and young people losing their loved ones, family members and parents losing their children, you feel as though you're in a dark place. And sometimes that I say that dark place can be a burial or planting. And you took that pain and turned it into purpose and now you're saving the lives of people. And young people need to hear that. I know you move around, you speak to a lot of different groups, but it's something that folks can resonate with. That's just a powerful story. Every time I have an opportunity to share my story and to definitely uplift young people, young black people, people of color to know that they have a sense of purpose in them. I'm now chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. We have the largest membership in our history. Part of my job is to help lead us at this critical moment on a number of important issues, including how we improve the safety in our communities, eliminate gun violence. I'm a primary sponsor of the Break the Cycle of Violence Act, which is all about disrupting gun violence before it happens. And most importantly, providing economic opportunity through jobs, through job training, something I know you are doing a great job here in the city of New York. And the leadership that you are providing in creating these great economic opportunities. You were sharing that with us last night and the fact that you guys are working hard to create all these jobs. And we just want to make sure those opportunities are available to everybody. And so, I usually analogy that there are many rivers that feed the sea of violence. We have to dam each river, you know? We can't just deal with gun violence. It's not, let's see how many people we could arrest. It's really, what are those rivers that's feeding the sea on employment, you know? Something as simple as dyslexia, screening that we're doing, 30 to 40% of our inmates that dyslex it. And that's the same across the country. So if we do dyslexic screening and prevent it, we are damning that river, you know? Employment, job training, you know? These companies and industries that are opening in our cities and municipalities, they have an obligation and responsibility to really do paid internship program and introducing young people to jobs. So it's about damning those rivers. And that is what we are focused on here in the city. I come from that work. I ran, led the largest job training program in Nevada for 10 years before I went to Congress, the Culinary Training Academy. It's a partnership between all the major hotels and the Culinary Workers Union. So my work before ever coming to Congress was about creating those economic dams, as you say, really the training. And I've seen lives change. I've worked with adjudicated youth, homeless youth, foster youth, people who did not come in with the skills who left out with the confidence to know not only could they work in hospitality, but we've helped expose training in a lot of other sectors, which is again as a priority of the Congressional Black Caucus because when we are creating opportunity, especially in new sectors, we have to make sure that we're intentional about how we reach youth, especially black youth, youth of color, who don't always see themselves being able to have the exposure to those jobs. And I draw oftentimes on my law enforcement experience when I look at some of the policies that I put in place and I was a ranking member of Crime and Correction in the state and then using that same experience when I became a ball president and now mayor. And so the employment issue is such a real issue. We need to really lean towards you and see where that success came from being the largest job training program in Las Vegas and get so many ideas. So I'm going to look forward to have my team sit down and just sort of have you brief us on some of the things you did because we're all looking, how do we get our young people into the workforce? And how do we meet them where they are with where their skill level is and take them where they ought to be so that they can be gainfully employed? I say all the time the precursor to sleep, to experience the American dream is employment. You have a job, you can raise your family, you can provide for yourself. And so I really want my team to connect with you and hear some of the things that you're doing. Truly get it done podcast. He just got it done right here. I love it. Mayor, mayor, my brother, Mayor Robinson. Also have a powerful story. You gave me chills, man, talking about your hometown and what's happening. You say this is that people want to say third world. They need to look at what's happening in black and brown communities in this country. So just your trajectory to politics. Yeah, so I mean, much like you brothers, you both know that as black man, you don't play politics, politics play you. So I didn't get into politics. I was born black in America, which obligates me to have a point of view. What happens though is the system is not set up for me to express that point of view. I had a lot of questions as a youth. My dad was a great man who did a lot of amazing things for the community, but we were still poor, extremely poor and I couldn't understand why. As I got older, I realized my dad got a felony conviction when he was 17 because he was the son of a sharecropper and the white man that he grew up with who was the son of the owner of the farm, smacked my grandmother and my dad reacted. So what happened was my dad got a felony conviction because of that, which began a trajectory that prevented us from ever realizing what was possible. My mom had to stop school in sixth grade because she too was a daughter of a domestic and a single family household. And I wanted to know how could this be possible in these United States? Plus, you know, we grew up so poor. I grew up on a dirt road in Field North Carolina, a rural space, a lot of people believe that rural spaces in this country equal white, but in the South, black people, brown people are overrepresented in rural spaces. So I wanted to know how could we be right up the street from Raleigh, North Carolina, which was so rich and be so poor? Outhouses still prevalent through the 90s. And so what happened was I started questioning the status quo, realizing that my town was 90% black, but all of the leadership was white. The town didn't own a lot of the services. They had been duped out or sold out to individuals like the fire service, police servicing, the emergency services. So I went to the Marine Corps because nobody could tell me how to navigate college. After the Marine Corps learning that that's not a place for social change. Great for patriotic views, but not social change. Get out the Marine Corps, came back home and started doing a lot of IE work around the country and felt like how can I continue to do all of this work, know that people are suffering back home. And I needed to do something for the people that were living in what Forbes said is the eighth poor city, my hometown. So I went back home and started to rally people around what's possible. Using my hometown as a case study ran a massively progressive campaign about what it looks like for universal basic income, how we create healthy housing, how we address some of these issues you all are talking about, but also recognizing that our issues are not just political. We have a serious, like some sociological issues on if you consider what Maslow told us about people that don't have their basic needs met, can't think about things like self-actualization, can't have healthy relationships and are more likely to be involved in criminal activities because they're all broken, the whole system below and nothing was stable. So I wanted to address all of these problems. So I went back home, ran for mayor, beaten and incumbent by 50 percentage points. And now we're on our way to trying to address some of these problems that make Enfield the eighth poorest city in the country. Wow, eighth poorest city in the country. Yeah, the average income, household income in Enfield is $20,542 a year, a year. For a single adult? No, for a household. A family? Family of four. Wow. That's impossible to live off of. Right, right. The index says you need 68,000 for a family of four to live in America. So we're already telling these 90% black people in a majority black county that, hey, you're 40,000 below what it takes to survive. Right, right. And you have to say, you look at these Herculean tasks and people of automatically start to feel as though it's insurmountable. And that's why when we tell our personal narrative, because someone to see, you're a congressperson, you have the CBC, you're a mayor, that you don't know what it is to be hard. That's why it's crucial to be a story teller and to constantly tell the story so people can see that, you know, what you came through. Like people know your glory. But I don't know your story. They don't know your story. I don't know your story. But you are doing something really exciting with the whole Black Men Vote initiative. And when you look at the numbers and you realize that across the country, black men are not voting and not really men of color are not voting. Can you lean into that? Tell me about that. Yeah, so Black Men Voter Project is my child. I don't have any kids. Black Men Voter Project is my child. And what I saw was 20 years of doing political work, going around the country, no one truly was doing a great job of engaging black men. And we know this because like you said, 72% of the brothers that are registered in this country have not voted or only voted in one of the last three presidential elections. So what we do know though, that's not a critique of black men. That's a critique of our tactics. We see politicians, the electoral cycles show up in a very transactional way, with a demographic that is the least successful if you're using social markers to measure. Black men are the least successful with our only demographic that can be born into a middle class or wealthy family and likely to experience poverty in our life. We have the shortest lives of any demographic, not just in America, but in all of the new world, right? So when you think about all of these issues which are political issues, we needed to do something that was more, not transactional, but more transformative. So we created Black Melvoda Project as a love story to black men and how we engage black men does not involve any of the traditional tactics. We use real world experiences and we engage and build our platform not based off of super voters, brothers like us, but people who are disengaged or not involved in politics. So we use brothers who are in the streets, brothers who are part of street tribes, what the world called gang members, brothers who are participating in the underground economy to build a platform. We ask these brothers in a very intimate space, what would it take to get you involved in politics? What is your political stance on issues? And from that, we build our platform and we begin to engage all brothers, knowing that if we can move these brothers to the political process, then we're really expanding the electorate in a way that our community can benefit. We also know that when brothers vote, they're less likely to recidivate, they're less likely to participate in illegal activities and more likely to be involved in other parts of community activities. So voting seems very simple, but for these people who are living live, who don't have their basic needs met, it's our avenue to take brothers out of this entire shadow. No, and it's so powerful when you look at that simple act of walking inside a polling place and casting a ballot, something that folks died for. And there was a reason it was held away from folks for so long that we need to really meet folks where they are, not where we are, but where they are and take them where they ought to be. And that's what I see. And Congressman, that's what I see what you're trying to do across the country. And the combination of looking at federal, state and city is a real powerful, a potent combination. And so the CBC is leaning into this as well. We are, you know, honestly, I sit here and I think back when this year started and starting as chair of the Black Caucus, one of my first meetings was with the Black Mayor's Association to talk about how we could partner. Before I did anything as chair, I just went on a listening session to all the different stakeholders. And as Mayor Mondale just said, you know, a lot of times the very people that we're trying to reach feel like they're not included, listened to, consulted, or don't have a stake in what it is we're asking them to participate in. Now, to be clear, it's a choice to not engage in politics. But that doesn't mean we don't have a point of view as Black people as men of color, as citizens. But we also, that doesn't mean that that abdicates us from our responsibility as citizens when things aren't going right. So the Congressional Black Caucus after having a national summit earlier this year on democracy and race, because we saw all the issues coming down from the U.S. Supreme Court, the attacks on our state representatives, the expulsion of the two young leaders in Tennessee, Representatives Jones and Pearson, the attempt to erase history that we're seeing in places like Florida and Texas, and the banning of books that was happening all over the country, we decided it wasn't enough to have a summit without a plan for action. And so we implemented a democracy for the People Summer of Action campaign where we have been going across the country. We've been in seven cities. We're here in New York today. We're at Medgar Adverse College with the delegation from the CBC, from New York, hosting us, and we're doing two things. We're having a town hall with constituents to hear directly from them about what they care about in their democracy and what it means to them, from their schools, to the courts, to voting, but also to the other issues of the economy, of gun violence, of how we can create more equitable opportunities around housing. Those issues always come up in the town hall as well. But the second part of what we're doing is we're doing organizing training, civic education, in partnership with People for the American Way, where we're literally building a cohort of organizers, democracy defenders in each of these cities so that we're not leaving, we're actually embedding a seed in each of the communities that will continue to work, not just with the Congressional Black Caucus, but with the partnership of city and county and state officials at every level. And I'm really excited to be here with you and our delegation through the CBC. I know we had an opportunity to visit a number of the migrant centers and to learn what the city is dealing with and the leadership that you're managing on that issue. Among all the other issues that you have to deal with, but our democracy is under attack at this moment. I'll say it. But we have power also to defend it. And so my message to young people, to anyone listening is while you may be concerned about our rights being eroded, our freedoms being taken away, that doesn't render us powerless or hopeless. And our democracy for the people initiative is one attempt to help respond to that effort. So I'd encourage people to go to democracyforthepeople.org. We've partnered with Mayor Mondale Robinson with the Black Men Male Voter Project because we also believe of being intentional about reaching different segments of our population differently. And he's shown us how to do it effectively. So rather than going out and doing something different and duplicating or competing, we got together and said, hey, how can we do this together? I like that. And now we're building something even bigger. And how does that build up look? Like, how does that infrastructure look? Are you doing local chapters? How is that going to happen? Yeah, so we're not building chapters. What we're doing though is, excuse me, we're actually, we work in 17 states, we're about to expand through this program into more states. And what happens is in that 17 states, what we noticed was there are these numbers that we're talking about, 72% of Black men sitting out elections. We use these states for the past four cycles to show what happens when you invest in Black men. There's a direct correlation between investment in a demographic in a way that's not transactional when you show up, you're around when you're providing services. Part of the work that we do is we teach brothers with felony convictions, how to code. We teach brothers with felony convictions who come home from prison in the life care. So they can be providers. We sent them around the country where Black men are dying in hospice with no family members and friends. And they go visit with these brothers and sit with them to their past. What's happening is there's a level of compassion that's being taught. Also the person who's dying is dying with dignity so they won't think that their life didn't matter. But also these brothers come back, that program is called Street Legacy. These brothers come back with a different understanding of what exactly transform, not just for the person who passed, but just the one that's sticking around. And so we're providing services that don't traditionally look political, but they absolutely are. This gives us the ability to be trusted messengers. So right now, like I said, we're in 17 states. We run full programs year-round. Most of our programs are service-based programs providing access. Because what people don't talk about is investment in voters is how people vote. There's no pathology in black men to say, oh, we're gonna set out elections. White people in Iowa aren't better situated than black people to be better voters. What happens is our party, our party, the Democratic party spent 40 years invested in Iowa as a first state for presidential primaries. If they would have did that in Mississippi, that muscle, that political muscle would be in Mississippi. But in Mississippi wouldn't be a bright red state. So we know that investing in brothers will turn out more of others. We saw this in Georgia where we was our first state. We actually turned out more brothers in 2020 than voted for Barack Obama. Georgia has 1.1 million black men registered to vote. Of them, 460,000 that were eligible to vote for Barack Obama did not in 2012. In 2020, we took of that 420,000. We targeted them all year in 2019. And of that 420,000, 137,000 participated. Not just in the general election, but in the Democratic primary. We took responsibility for that because in June when Georgia had its general primary, Biden was already the nominee. So you can't say they was excited about the presidential election. This was the work of engaging these brothers, focusing on issues that were important to them, not responding to Republican talking points and prioritizing their needs, making them seen in your politics. And that's what we're doing in all of our state. So this program is gonna be expanded. Hopefully you're gonna be an ambassador in New York because we see a great opportunity in your state too with the number of black men that you have here and the way that they're disengaged with the political process. So what we're trying to do now is reimagine how politics work. Politics shouldn't just be this thing that start after Labor Day cookouts with church fans and proverbial fried chicken, right? You need to talk to brothers year round about these issues. And we need to stop lying and say this is the most important election with the most important candidate and tell brothers the truth. Politics is not gonna serve everything or solve everything, but it is a tool in the box that you cannot build anything without using. Love it, love it, love it. And you know, this is the foundation that the legacy of the foundation of the Congressional Black Caucus. When I think back on the founders, we're in our 51st year of the CBC. We have the largest number of 58 members we are approaching 40% of our members of the CBC are 40% of the House Democratic Caucus, which what does that mean? It means we are a strong leverage and an influential block, but it's not just those members. We represent 140 million Americans across the country, 14 million black people when you collectively look at our membership and where we represent from every region. And it's important thinking back on the legacy of the CBC when it was founded 51 years ago today, this is the work. This is the work. And I'm saying this more often. Look, I'm not here to promote a party. I'm here to uplift my people. And I believe when you lift up black people, you lift up everybody. We are unapologetically black and I'm also unapologetically for making sure that people have access to good paying jobs and quality healthcare and safe and affordable housing. The cornerstone of the issues. And a lot of times we're not talking directly enough to black voters, black men, especially we're hearing from them. They're like, how does this agenda that you all are talking about reach me, affect me? And what I love about what the mayor's done with the black male voter project is he's talking to people in spaces that aren't your traditional spaces. They're not the town halls. They're not the community forms. People aren't gonna necessarily come to us so we gotta go reach them. And so whether that's posting up at a black male salon, a beauty barbershop, whether that's going and having some cigars, because we have a point of view. We talk. Without a doubt. And you know, I always say the neighborhood corner, that's the black man's lounge, you know what I'm saying? And back when I was bar president, I used to meet with current leaders and I used to meet with current and former gang members and sit down and engage in real conversations with them. And some of these guys had bodies. Some of these guys just came home and just those real conversations. And I'll never forget one of the conversations we had. I asked the question, how many of you have learning disabilities? And it blew my mind when like 80% of the room, people had some form of learning disability. So it showed that we are feeding the crisis. You know, a quote I say all the time from brother Desmond Tutu, we spent a lifetime pulling people out of the river. No one goes upstream and prevent them from falling in in the first place. We have a downstream mindset. All we do is hang out downstream and pull people out of the river. A lot of people make a lot of paper from watching the dysfunctionality of these systems and pulling people out of the river. And what you're doing by talking to that brother who just came home or talking to the one who's on that street corner who may be at that time, being doing some dirty stuff, you know? But in order to get him from doing something wrong, you got to feel that void of how do you provide for your family in the process and meeting people where they are is crucial. And it's an unorthodox, you know? And when we look over our lives on how, you know, just hearing your story, people would look and say, I mean, that could not have happened to you. You know, people tell me that all the time. I feel like it's my story. I don't know what happened to you. Kind of, dude. And I know how it's influenced me, but it may be unorthodox, but it's necessary. It's necessary. And our very survival, our very existence as a Black people, the success of our communities, of our families, our country, the world, depends on making sure that we reach people and that we make sure they fill a stake in this thing called democracy. And I know sometimes it can be kind of an archaic term. What does this really mean? What, you know, they didn't really mean this for me to begin with, but that is what we have to demand of our institutions. Democracy is made up of the very institutions of our schools. You talk about, you know, dyslexia and access to educational services. Well, yeah, that's why we need to make sure we're adequately funding schools that we have certified teachers in schools, that we have a pipeline of teachers and administrators that look like the student body of the schools that they're teaching in. We have a whole discussion about this at the federal level right now in Congress, because there's attempts again to literally defund public education. How is that gonna make our economic situation any better? How's that gonna overcome someone's educational challenge or barrier? The courts and what they're doing to erode rights for women, for voting, for the fact that race can be used as a criteria to pull over a young person, but it cannot be used as a criteria for college admission. Look at the hypocrisy of that. And then, you know, we have the eroding of rights even for those in the LGBTQ plus community. At a time when we just won rights on a quality marriage equality, this court just said it's okay to discriminate against someone based on their lifestyle and their behavior, something that we've not seen ever under the civil rights law. So we've got some issues, but we also have the power to demand more of our democracy. Yeah, and I think also, I mean, if we're honest, we do a bad job and I'm not the people in this room, but I mean, you know, collectively, our side of the aisle, the horrible job at telling black men, especially, what we're doing for them. This is why 70% of black men don't trust or don't like black electeds, right? They don't think we're speaking on their behalf, but when you're talking about fighting for voting, people need to understand why, for instance, we talk about there's other types of voter suppression that's happening in rural spaces all throughout the South. A lot of people don't even talk about it, right? Every year around election time, police departments start setting up roadblocks within a mile of black polling locations as a deterrent for people to go to polling. Nobody's talking about that issue, but people see it every year as a part of the culture. There's places in Georgia, Southwest Georgia, where there's only one factory. Everybody in that town works at that factory, but the owner says, if you go vote, I'm a fire you. That's voter suppression that people are not willing to fight against because this is the only job in town. I'm not risking my family for a vote, right? So, I mean, when we talk about democracy, people understand, yeah, there's a local, there's a local understanding of democracy, but we don't speak it in a rural space. We should be training all of these people how to vote by mail so that this guy won't know that you voted, right? So, but this idea of democracy is not being defended because it's a different language. We, when Armad Arbery was murdered in Georgia by these vigilantes, the number one issue for black men was public safety. And everybody was like, oh, what black men are sounding very conservative with this public safety thing. But when nobody was doing was that they were only just calling on these polls or black men want public safety, they want public safety. Nobody was diving, nobody was diving into what public safety meant. And black men's definition of public safety was actually, black men's definition of public safety was actually like, we wanna be police like white communities. That's the opposite of what the world say public safety is, right? You need less cops to be police. Like black men need less cops to be police like white people. So I think once we start speaking people's language or meeting them where they are, understanding and listening to them, our platform is come and what's possible becomes completely different in our minds. Yeah, but come on, man. It's 2023, ism don't exist. Racism don't exist, anti-semitism don't exist. You know, anti-women, anti-LGBT, you guys are stuck in the past. We're at all the time. And then you talking about the sophistication of doing roadblocks, nail a polling site. That's the depth of what we're dealing with. And you gotta call it out. If you don't call it out, people want to act like it doesn't exist. You know, it's really interesting the title that every black man fear, the angry black man. So you hold in all that pain and anger because if you get that title, your career is destroyed. You'll never move up in corporate America. You'll never be able to carry out the things you want to do. We have to be fearless of that title and say, you're damn right, I'm angry. Why wouldn't I be? I care about people. I care about black people specifically. I gotta be angry in America. I listen, I tore down the first month in the office, no lie. The board voted, the board voted before I was elected two years but the mayor that I defeated wouldn't remove the Confederate monument in the city park. It was sitting there. This monument, I saw it my whole life. I don't know, on one side it had a white only fountain and there was a spot where it was supposed to be black only but that thing was corroded and fell off. But massive Confederate flag, massive like car then beautiful marble and granite. And so I got the board the reveal to take it down. And I got, country guy would attract say, hey, let's go knock this down tonight. SBI investigated me. Everybody was at the city, they was angry. And they like, what's wrong with this angry black man? This monument was not bothering anybody. And I'm like, it's bothering people because of the epigenetics. The trauma associated with something that my ancestors went through is real. And I refuse to let any other black kids sit idle by that, right? So for me, for me it was like, I think this is what happens with the black experience when people tell you not to be angry and see everything that's happening around you. You're asking me to ignore all of the trauma associated with being a black man in America. I'm angry as hell. And exhausted. And exhausted. You couldn't see through the podcast, but they gave themselves a serious pound. I gave them that handshake that says, brother, I got you. I got you. And you do, you know, and, but exhaustion does not mean surrendering. Correct. You know, you're tired of the basics of what you're asking for and people believe they're going to wear you down. And I tell people, listen, I'm not gonna beat you with brownies. I'm gonna beat you with endurance. You know, I know this battle and we have to push through it. And we should always remind ourselves as people say our jobs are hard. You know, I say, no, hard is picking cotton. Son up to son down, delivering your baby on the cotton field and getting back out there. You know, hard is what your mama did when you lost your dad. Or, you know, hard is having that outhouse in Carolina and seeing that you had to raise a family of four and $20,000. So, you know, we know what hard is and we've had lessons that prepared us for this moment. You know, I'm really, I'm blessed by having you today on this podcast. As we get stuff done on a CBC level, you have an awesome job in front of you. But, you know, it seemed like you bring the level of excitement and commitment to do it. Like your whole face light up when you talk about the journeys that you're doing. And brother Mondale, what you're doing about this black man vote. Many people don't even realize how we have to start building those dams, you know, one river at a time if we wanna stop this sea from overflowing. This is a good time. This is a good moment. This is a good time to, you know, just be alive. But, and people should not equate with what we're doing as trying to destroy anything. It is making it better. It's lifting it up. It's building it up. This country is better than the product that they've been showing. And it's time for us to make sure this product stand true to what it states it is, you know. So again, thank you so much for coming in. Get stuff done with two brothers from across the country that are getting stuff done. Thank you, brother. And this is the information I wanted to share today. I hope to see you for another episode of Get Stuffed, Done, Cat.