 Good afternoon. I'm Celeste Wackentays, the Gene E. Fairfax Collegiate Professor of Public Policy and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. On behalf of Dean Michael Barr, who is in the audience here today and the faculty and students of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, it is my great pleasure to welcome all of you to this policy talk at the Ford School event with Cecilia Munoz. Cecilia and I will be discussing her recently published book, More Than Ready. Be Strong and Be You, and other lessons for women of color on the rise. In this book, Cecilia shares her own experience along with those of some extraordinary women of color she met along the way as an inspiration to those who are no longer willing to be invisible or left behind. Cecilia is currently on leave from her position at the New America Foundation, where she is the Vice President for Public Interest Technology and local initiatives while she serves as a senior transition advisor with the Biden campaign. Prior to joining New America, she served for eight years on President Obama's senior staff and was the first Latinx to lead the White House Domestic Policy Council. She is the longest serving director of the Domestic Policy Council in our country's history. Before working in government, she was Senior Vice President at the National Council of La Raza, now called UNIDOS US, the nation's largest Hispanic policy and advocacy organization. She's also a graduate of the University of Michigan and in 2007 she was a Towsley Foundation policymaker in residence here at the Ford School. We're thrilled to welcome her back to Ann Arbor today, even if only virtually. So finally, a quick couple of notes on format today. We'll have some time at the end of the event today for audience questions. We've received some in advance, but you can also submit questions in the live chat on YouTube or tweet your questions to hashtag policy talks. Welcome, Cecilia. It's great to have you here. Thank you so much, Celeste. I'm so excited to be there. I just wish I were in Ann Arbor. Yes, welcome back. Welcome back virtually. So I'm actually wearing a special piece of jewelry today in honor of our conversation. And this necklace says, Vote. This is a duplicate of the necklace recently worn by First Lady Michelle Obama, who you write about in the book. And what I love about the book is that it's both inspiring and very practical. You take us to 30,000 feet, inspiring us to think about the duty of the presidency and what excellent presidential leadership looks like and the role of advocates in that process. And then you take us into the weeds to teach us. You center leadership and mentoring in the book. You allowed us a window into your doubts and your vulnerabilities. And what I really heard in your writing is how excellent of a teacher you are. So I will be recommending this book far and wide. So let me get to my first question. You draw a thread from history to belonging to the work. Tell us why a sense of history is so important, not only to grasp public policy, but to define one's purpose. What a wonderful one for those warm and wonderful comments. You know, this moment that we're living in now I think is a really great moment to talk about why history matters to the to the work to our understanding of ourselves, understanding our place in the world. We're getting something of a civics lesson in the in the notion that we really there are ways in which we can't move forward, unless we understand our history as a country and I think that's true of us as people. And I was, you know, working on the book thinking about what I might have to offer, particularly to women of color, and, and what it is that we have in common right because I'm a Latina, you're an African American woman. I interviewed Native American women Asian American women as well in preparing the book. The first question I had to answer was what is what do we have in common is there is there are we a group of people to speak to that has any kind of coherence at all. And it it what became clear to me is that by definition, if you're a woman of color in America today in the United States you are maybe a generation maybe to but maybe not much more than that removed from someone who had to show extraordinary resilience. Yes. Right at that's 100% true of all of us when you think about it. In my case is my my parents and the immigrant experience. But the that's the Native American women that I interviewed have extraordinary stories coming from their families experience experiences which are very different than my story, but which required extreme resilience on the part of their ancestors. Many of African heritage in the United States knows has that's true them as well. And again it's not that far removed. It's just not that long ago when I was born in Detroit. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s I realized I was walking around a community with people who had grandparents who had been enslaved. That is not that far removed from our experience and that tells us something about who we are and why we have the dynamics that we have today. And it is essential to understand that I think if we're going to shape our country's destiny going forward. And certainly as someone who works in public policy you of course have to understand how it is we got where we are if you're going to undo some of the obstacles that Americans have. You have to know where they came from. And that means you need an understanding of history and I think our own history, our individual history. It's important to recognize that that's a part of it we tend to learn. I mean the history I grew up learning was the history of of the guys who had been prominent in the shaping of our country's right. Yes, not the she rose. Yeah, not at all, not at all. And so as women I think it's also important to understand we have history, we have our own families history which may not be the stuff that has gotten written about but it's tremendously important and it comes from people who showed extraordinary grid, extraordinary resilience almost by definition. Yes. And I think we can take strength from that. Absolutely, absolutely. And I love how your book talks about those kind of heroes of American history and then also talks about and makes space for the role of the term I just use the she rose the women who were involved as well and have done amazing things. I want to point to a particular moment in history that you talk about connecting to your Latinx heritage, and that's the 1980s census. And you write in the book that that was a critical inflection point for the country and for your career. It was also a moment where Latinx folks were recognized as a sizable minority and a force of political power in the United States. So I wonder if you can tell us about the significance of that event, the census in relation to what we've seen in the decades since, in terms of the rise of Latinx political power. Yeah, what a wonderful question. So before 1980. We were not we Hispanic, Latinx or whatever you want to call us there all kinds of there are different names for us but we were not counted with any degree of accuracy in the census. The first Hispanic members of the of the Congress the founder of what is now the Congressional Hispanic caucus a congressman from California named Ed Roy ball fought hard for a census question that would actually count us before 1980. You got asked if you had a Spanish surname like my surname, but you didn't get asked who you were and that question doesn't actually capture the community and the reason that that's important is that because before 1980. We couldn't tell a an empirical story about how many of us there were what was what's our educational status what's our economic status. What's our family size before 1980 we didn't have the data to describe our own experience as a community in the United States and of course our roots in this country go back to the beginning. And so it's pretty extraordinary that we didn't really get counted in any kind of meaningful way until 1980 that it took deliberate it was part of a civil rights movement effort that got that question added to the census. And as a result, I came to what was then called the National Council of La Raza 1988. We were still processing that data. And one of the things that NCLR developed around the time I got there was a project on poverty. Now, I was working with people who knew about poverty in the Hispanic community because that's where they came from. But we didn't have the data to describe it really until that census, and we learned, among other things just by crunching the numbers that came from that census, that poverty in our community was not defined by lack of work by unemployment. In fact, Hispanic males have the highest labor force participation in the country. So it was defined by where we work by by the kinds of work that we have the kinds of jobs that we have. So if you're a policymaker, and you think addressing poverty is just about putting making sure people have work. It turns out what the data showed us is that that's not the answer. Right, it was about the quality of the jobs whether they came with benefits whether they came with earnings that we sufficient to support a family. So the data is essential to understanding who we are. And it's essential to developing the policies that address whatever the obstacles are that we face. And of course, this is a very timely moment to be asking that question because we are the census is underway, although the current administration has just shut down the count. But all of the work around processing the information making sure that it was accurate is still going on there's of course a big civil rights battle over the census happening even as we speak. Absolutely. The reason that it's happening is because the census is so important to just understanding who we are as Americans. Really critical and particularly also when we think about this importance of the symbolism of being counted but also the data and the ways in which those policies get informed and in voting districts and all sorts of things. I wonder if we can talk a little bit about immigration it's an area in which I know you spent a lot of time thinking about. When it was one of the domestic policy issues where you got your start and how you came one of the ways you came to the attention of the Obama administration. What would you say is the work that must be done with our immigration policy. And we seem to be at such a standstill. And in fact seeing some things that that many find quite troubling. So I wonder if you can just educate us on with all of your years of experience what needs to happen is it relates to immigration policy. I have been working on trying to update and reform our immigration system on the same piece of legislation now for 20 years, not just me obviously many many people. The last time our immigration system was updated was when I first got to Washington in 1990 1991. And the extraordinary thing is that we don't for all of the noise that you hear on immigration and a lot of noise at the moment. We mostly don't have a substantive problem as Americans we mostly don't disagree on what it's going to take to fix our immigration system, the vast majority of Americans agree that some kind of orderly process to bring undocumented people out of the shadows. As long as they meet certain conditions, most Americans agree that it's a good idea to help them get on the right side of the law. Most Americans agree that it's worth updating the systems that we don't have backlogs for people who want to reunite with their family members. So we don't have a substantive problem. We have a political problem and the obstacle preventing an immigration reform that has the support of 85% of the American public is a political obstacle. So the way when I was in government we passed an immigration bill bipartisan bill 68 votes in the Senate in 2013. And in 2014 we could not get the Speaker of the House John Boehner at the time to bring up any bill for a vote. And the reason for that was, you know, in some ways ironically, because it had the votes to pass. It had 218 votes, but the configuration of those 218 votes was that it was essentially nearly all the Democrats and a handful of Republicans in the House of Representatives at the time. And because we had a Republican Speaker of the House and because the dynamics the yelling on this issue is so intense. He felt and perhaps he was right that if you brought an immigration bill to the floor that it would pass but that the majority of his Republican caucus in the House would punish him for having brought it up by potentially throwing him out of speaker. So it's the sad truth of the matter is, we agree much more than we disagree as Americans on this topic. But we have a political problem and the intensity is really all on the anti reform anti immigrant side. But the, the point of view the perspective of the agreement is is overwhelmingly in favor of reform. And that is such an example or a microcosm of so many of our policy issues right now where public opinion is one way. But as you said, it's not necessarily a substance of disagreement. It's a political problem and a political disagreement in terms of how politics and politics are working and how policy gets formed, reformed, stopped, etc. What are your thoughts on how we respond to that? What are your thoughts about how we can get the levers of government working in a more effective and functional manner? First and foremost, it really, really truly is about participation. Right. And of course we're in a moment where people are people are standing in line to vote even as we speak vote early voting. I live in Maryland early voting started in my state today. If we participated to the extent that we are eligible and available to participate, I say we as Americans, our politics would be very different. And so first and foremost, understanding that we own this democracy and that the way you exercise power in this democracy is by showing up to vote at every level up and down the up and down a ballot is incredibly important. But then you know there are a lot of people who are taking a look at the institutions of our democracy, particularly in this moment that we're living in and and observing that they are that we have some problems with them. They're not as strong as we thought they were. They're not as quite as resilient as we thought they were. There are people questioning the electoral college because now we've had presidential results where multiple times in the last several election cycles where the vote of the majority is at odds with the electoral college result. And we're realizing we have a system that was built built in such a way as to as to make to delegate power to the states as well as to the public as you know as well as to the population and that that's supposed to help us create balance and there's ways in which it may have gotten out of balance. So there are there's a, you know, we it's been a long time since there have been amendments to the Constitution. It's been a long time since we've engaged in that kind of process. It's been a long time since states have been added to the United States. But all of those things are procedures that our founders contemplated they are all procedures that we've used throughout our history. But it's we don't quite have the muscle memory to do it anymore. And it may be time. And to expand our kind of political imagination about what's possible and not to have the immediate reaction of well, that would be too hard to do. We haven't done that and in many ways as you point out, it's just that we haven't done it in our recent history. That's right. But if you have going back to our earlier discussion, a longer view of history, you see the ways in which seemingly impossible things have actually happened and occurred and to make it a more perfect union. Yep. Yeah. I want to ask you about economic and and social policy. And I want to start with a quote from your book. On page 175, you state, I am living proof that flexible family focused work place policies pay for themselves many times over and loyal hardworking employees. And as you know, there's data that make that case as well. But I really enjoyed hearing your personal story about how you have met employers around along the way who have been so helpful to you in that pursuit. So I wonder if you can talk about the roles of responsibility, the roles and responsibilities of both employers, but also the government to create these kinds of workplace policies. How should that partnership work? So this is, again, such a poignant time for you to be asking that question because, you know, I'm not sitting in my office having this conversation I'm sitting at home. In my regular job as well as my current job with the with the transition. We are isolated I'm working in both cases I'm working with people who have children at home who are trying to figure out how to keep everybody safe from the pandemic how to make sure. You know, school age children are getting the education that they deserve and they're trying to hold down their jobs and this is a challenge facing women and men although women are dropped out of the workforce in droves as a result of the situation. And, you know, in both cases as a manager. It's just so clear to me first that the generosity that was extended to me when I was a working parent with little kids at home. And made it possible for me to, to participate to, to, you know, make a difference in the way that I contributed both to my workplace and to the country because I was a public servant during that time. I was really lucky I had bosses that understood that if I had to step up, you know, stand up and walk out of meeting at five o'clock because it was time to pick up somebody at daycare that I was still going to get the job done, just as I was able. And so right now you're seeing employers, hopefully the good ones one, you know, I'm trying to be a good one and say to my colleagues, I understand you might not be available every minute between, you know, nine and five or you know whatever the working hours are, because you have, you know, toddlers who are going to need you at a particular time or you have to go monitor the third grade that's happening in your family room. And, you know, I need to give you the flexibility to get your work done now I work with very dedicated people I'm not worried that they're going to get the work done I'm worried that they're going to drive themselves into the ground, right. Yes. So that's what employers need to be thinking about. But also, as a matter of public policy. Part of the reason we are in this jam part of the reason women are in this jam in particular is because we don't have paid family Lee. They can't if there are 40 million workers in the United States who don't have sick leave, and we're in a pandemic. Right, so the arguments that you and I would have been making a year ago about how foolish it is not to have paid sick leave, because it's bad for the public health if somebody has something contagious and is still going to work in the restaurant where they work. This is now really, really clear. It was maybe felt theoretical a year ago. It's not theoretical right and it doesn't feel theoretical now. So it, it shows that we that individual workplaces in order to be successful and supporting their employees and helping them be as productive as possible need to have flexibility. And as a matter of public policy we need to make it possible for them to have that flexibility. Now, this isn't just a nice thing we do because we, we want to be nice to say women who end up with the majority of the child rearing responsibilities. No, we need to do it because our economy depends on it. Right. That's really the, the, I think the, it's one of many things that this crisis that we're living through is making visible, which is how much the thing which makes our economy go is caregiving caregivers, right. Yeah, that's a portable. We're caring for children, people who are caring for our elders, right, are making it possible for others to be in the workforce. And without that, without those supports in the number of childcare facilities which are going on a business in this moment right now is absolutely terrifying because we need those facilities for a huge segment of our workforce to be able to work. And we don't support them nearly enough through government policy and that has to change. Yeah. So do you imagine as we think about the post COVID economic recovery and the actual, you know, as we think about what are the health recovery of the nation is going to look like the public health recovery of the nation is going to look like and of the world. And then if we think about the economic recovery and the intertwining between the two, what, what do you imagine we need to think about as we think about the quote unquote post COVID or during COVID economic recovery. And do we need to have a gendered lens, do we need to have an intersectional lens as we think about the disproportionate impact that women and particularly women of color have suffered economically as a result of COVID. Yeah. I think we can see a lot of stuff that a lot of us couldn't see before as a result of COVID as a result of the illness as a result of the impact on the economy. And it's showing us that we were already teetering on the brink of I mean at some level we were already over the brink right we already know what the numbers show about the enormous disparities in income and the number of workers who were working full time plus, but not earning the wages, wages that are sufficient to support a family. And one of the, one of the things which highlights that is that the workers which the government deemed to be essential workers the workers that the government said you got to you. These are the folks that we are relying on without whom we can't function 40% of them don't earn $15 an hour they 40% of them don't earn a living wage. What that tells you is that our economy is dependent on workers that we have been unwilling to pay. And, and we are the other sort of supports which make it possible for someone to be in the workforce like childcare like paid leave are also not nearly available enough. So, and now that we've kind of seen it stripped bare, it's clearly not going to be enough to kind of go back to where we were. And it's also causing us or at least it should cause us to question. Why is it that we that the indicators that we look at we're telling us that the economy was humming along just fine, when in fact huge numbers of people contributing to the economy were unable to make it work. Like, how does that plug what are the numbers that tell us that what metrics did we deem important. Yeah. Exactly. And what are the metrics we should be looking at in order to determine whether our economy is in fact working for our people. And perhaps we should be building an economy on the basis of those metrics and looking at we've been measuring economic growth. Clearly, economic growth is not taking a look at who is a growing for and who's getting left behind. And so we need to be thinking about building the economy in ways which support caregiving, which support that you know human need to stay home when one is sick, which support that you know the need to take a leave when a loved one is ill, still too few Americans have access to. And most importantly, the driver of everything is wages. And we spend a lot of policy attention on lots of other things. I was deeply involved in the policy conversation about workforce training, for example, which is a big deal. It's not that that's not important. But if you look at all the energy aimed at workforce training, for example, or even the energy aimed at education, which is also hugely important, and measure it against the policy energy, the philanthropic energy, which is focused on raising wages. And it absolutely dwarfs in comparison. We are not spending nearly enough time talking about making sure people can earn at least 15 bucks an hour. And that turns out to be the thing which moves the needle the most. Right. And we saw like several living wage campaigns and that conversation. And the other thing that I should, you know, want to add to this discussion is, I think it's also creating an interesting moment for us to expand our idea of family care, and who's doing it. So we know that women are disproportionately impacted, but I think it's opened up questions about fathers about other, you know, intimate partners in the home and the ways in which people are making caregiving work. In ways that aren't captured by our sometimes crude measures and sometimes antiquated way of thinking about who's doing the work and the need for our public policy to shift to think about, you know, what is modern caregiving look like. But, you know, I really take your point that, you know, we remember those moments of and they're still important living wage campaigns going on. But I think it's struggle to really stay in as a part of the national conversation because I completely agree with you're saying we shifted to other measures of economic progress and indicators of economic progress. Well, and maybe we never looked at the right ones, right? Because this is the phenomenon you and I are describing are not new. Right, right. And in a way we've been making economic decisions and policy decisions on the basis of a set of measures and feeling like pretty good about how we were doing at a time when the disparities were increasing and people were getting left further and further behind. And that tells us that there was something also wrong in the policymaking apparatus, right? There's, we weren't necessarily looking at the right things. Yeah, yeah. I want to ask about presidential power. And you write about a difficulty that I think any staffer might go through with a change in any presidential administration that includes a change in political party that leads the White House. That is watching what you've worked on seven days a week as you describe it, four years, the undone be radically changed and moving in a very different direction. Yeah. How do you cope with that? Oh my, well, it's possible that I'm not coping so well, to be honest. It's a big question. The example I'll give you is something that I find hard to talk about which is I worked on. So as you mentioned immigration migration is my area of deepest expertise. The hardest summer of my life which I describe in the book was the summer of 2014 when we were dealing with the unexpected spike in the number of unaccompanied migrant children coming to the US-Mexico border. And the challenges of making sure those kids were getting adequate care and getting reunited with their families. So there was a whole team focused, you know, intensively on making sure we did right by those kids because but if a child shows up, if an 11 year old shows up alone to your house, you don't just, you know, you figure out how to make sure that child is cared for. And this was the national version of that. And, you know, as you know, and it's back in the news now, the current administration made a set of policy decisions for which were deliberate, which resulted, I mean they took, they took people's children. They actually took them even when they were infants and they did not bother to track the children and the parents for the possibility of reuniting later. And in the pilot project that they started in 2017, we now know that over 500 of those kids and parents still haven't been reunited. The government is counting on lawyers from outside of the government to do the reuniting. The government is not even bothering. The government which separated these families is not bothering to try to reunite them. And I am haunted by that because I know how that, I know how those decisions get made. And I know that they knew exactly what they were doing when they made it. And I think it will go down in history among the worst things that our country's ever done. And here we are, right? You and I, you know, and the folks who are participating living in a country which has done this in our name, and it's actually still, still happening. And I was very close to the policymaking, you know, on that set of issues. And I have a lot of grief that this is where we are. And this is only one issue. It's one that's very personal to me, but you know, multiply that times undercutting the food stamp program, which so many families rely on for food. You know, there are so many examples of ways in which people have been harmed by policymakers. And in the case of the kids that I'm talking about, very deliberately their strategy was do something so horrible that maybe people will stop coming. And that is, I don't have words for how terrible that is. And can you address, I think it'll be really helpful for people to hear because one of the things that's been stated is, Oh, well, the Obama administration did the same thing. Can you address that and and and provide the the the details and the information for people to have a accurate perspective on that. It's quite simply not true. The Trump administration made a very deliberate policy decision to criminalize crossing the border and to prosecute people as criminals for crossing the border and the the prosecution itself requires essentially putting the adults in detention and separating them from their kids. So they, that was a decision made in the Trump administration on purpose. And the current president likes to say that it's something that the Obama administration did, but it's not true. The only time that required a child being separated from the adult that they came with was when we suspected that they were being trafficked. We did not separate children from their parents at the border in this way. It's just it's one of many falsehoods we've been told. Yeah, thank you for providing that perspective. I think it's really important. Before we move into some audience questions, I have a few more questions. Moving into the realm of your conversation around leadership in the book, and I have to tell our viewers. This book offers such an excellent perspective on leadership and what it takes to rise to the levels that you have in political life and what it takes to truly make a difference and the tensions around that and you write about it so beautifully and so candidly. So I have just a couple of final questions before we turn it into the turn it over to the audience. One of the things that I want to kind of highlight is your educational training. And I want to talk about the role of ethnic studies in your work and you studied and have degrees in Latin American studies. And it's a field that's often defined as a niche. Prior to coming to the University of Michigan, I was on the faculty at Northwestern University for 18 years. Hello to my wonderful Northwestern colleagues as a professor of sociology and African American studies. So how do you think a background in ethnic studies and specifically Latin American studies prepared you for policy work? Great question. It goes back in some ways to your first question, right? That it helps. We're going to be successful in making policy. We need to know who we are. We need to know how we got to the obstacles that stand in our way. You know, the state of Arizona has been trying to suppress Latino studies, Chicano studies. They've been trying to make it impossible to teach. They've been having a fierce debate about that in Arizona. There's a reason for that because it's powerful to understand our history. And not nearly enough policymaking happens with a deep understanding of the people whose lives it is that you're trying to affect. I mean, in some ways this is what defines the work that I've been doing at New America is essentially sort of using the tools, the same tools that technology companies use to get in our heads and understand, like, what's the thing on our phones we're going to be addicted to next week that we, you know, have never heard of today. Right. If you could use those techniques to understand in a moment like this when you're trying to deliver unemployment insurance to people. What are the, what do we need to know about the lives of people who don't earn enough money to pay taxes and therefore can't access the unemployment that you're trying to get to them through the tax system? Right. If we understand the lived experience of the people whose lives we are trying to affect the public policy, we're going to make better policy decisions on the front end. And it's not good enough to say we just passed a law that provides paid leave to anybody who wants it as I think six or eight states have done. If, as in the state of California, less than half of the people who are eligible for pay leave actually use it, that's not just an outreach problem. It's a design problem in the law. And it's a design problem that stems from the fact that not enough of the people making laws understand the lives of the people that those law that we're trying to reach. Yes. And something like ethnic studies is a great example of, of the more you understand how people actually live their lives. And the more you understand what questions to ask and how to bring that experience into the room where you're making policy, the more successful you're going to be at reaching your goals. Like we didn't, the victory wasn't passing the paid leave law in California. The victory is when somebody gets paid leave. Yeah. Right. And we're not, we're spending a lot of energy at the front end and not nearly enough, making sure we deliver the things that we, that we're trying to deliver. And that's such a good point because it brings me to my question about diversity. And knowing the value that you bring as a person of color, as a woman, as a gender or sexual minority, what you bring into the room, and why that is so important in these major decision making moments. Can you talk about that? Yeah. So I, this is part of this is in some ways, if you had to boil down to one thing, the reason I wrote the book, this is it, right? Yeah. Throughout my career, frequently been the only woman in the room. I've frequently been the only Latina in the room. I was frequently the only Hispanic person in the room at the White House. And we had a huge and diverse team. There were a lot of white, I described team Latino as we called it in the White House, but I was on the senior staff and there weren't very much, very many of us and I was frequently the only one. And we know there's a lot of data that now shows, right, that in a corporate board room in any setting that if you have diversity around the table, you'll make better decisions. That will be more impactful, that will be better informed and the outcomes will be better. Like we know there's plenty of data to prove that. And you are the person in the room, and you're the only one or you're the first one to occupy that chair as I was the first Latinx person to be the domestic policy advisor to a president. You, it's hard not to walk in with an awareness that you've never seen anybody like you in that role. Yeah. And the, you know, the women that I interviewed in and preparing the book all had variants of the same experience and they all felt they described it as like weight, like you carry on your shoulders. The fact that it's not just you in the room, right if you make a mistake is not just your mistake. It's like every Latina ever. It's, you know, our mistake because you may have just messed it up for that person coming up behind you. So we feel like we can't, like we can't make a mistake. We over prepare that's part of the reason my book is called more than ready right the way women of color deal with either our awareness that the people around us underestimate us, or we bring our own doubts into the room. The way that we overcome them frequently certainly the women that I spoke to is we do our homework we make sure we are ready for whatever we're going to be doing in that room we make sure that we're not going to make a mistake. Yeah. And that's because we carry the responsibility that we're kind of not just speaking for ourselves we're kind of representing everybody. Right. And it's, it's, you know, it's exhausting, actually. Right, right. It reminds me of Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum's book why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria and other conversations about race. And she starts with that puzzle of why, why do I see all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria why do minority groups want those kind of congregation spaces and it speaks exactly what you're talking about because it's exhausting to do all of the work that you just described. And people are looking for respite they're looking for a safe space they're looking for a place where they're allowed to make mistakes where they're allowed to be individuals so that is a kind of safety seeking resource. And when you talk about team Latino in the White House, it sounds like you all forge you forge that community within the White House of we just need that that's kind of small community to support each other and to support our work. Yep, that's exactly right to sort of understand each other and to help each other with the calibration that you do all day long like am I pushing too hard in this meeting am I not pushing hard enough. Right, are they hearing me as like the gadfly who always says the thing that you know that everybody expects you to say are they able to understand what it is that I'm trying to convey right it's constant constant calibration and it can be nice to sit in a room with But you don't have to explain why, you know, I tell the story about coming back to NCLR one day after being out on Capitol Hill and saying, you know, remember the Senate complimented me on my English today. I didn't have to explain why that was outrageous. As they knew that kind of safe spaces important especially if you're kind of out there on your own. Right, which brings me to my last question and we're going to go to some audience questions. You do such a phenomenal job of also talking about the kind of flip side of that if you will which is the responsibility that you feel from within your community. And the desire to serve once community and then being subject to critique and criticism from your own community because you are now your you've moved from power on the trying to be an outsider speaking to power to being in the power seat. So, can you talk a little bit before we go into the audience questions into working as an outsider to power versus an insider to power and how that shifts one's role within an underrepresented community, often in very fraught ways. Well, so I knew, I knew that it would happen the moment I accepted the job that I would be criticized and I accepted that that would be true and it has been true. And I believe very strongly that if the expectation from people in your community is that you have to stay sort of pure right that you that you can't get your hands dirty working in government you can't and you know my case that the tricky issue is immigration enforcement which is a very uncomfortable issue in my community. It's going to happen right it's not there there, there's, we're, I don't foresee living in a situation where we don't have immigration laws that need to be enforced. So, whether or not there's immigration enforcement isn't an isn't a conversation that's available when you work in government, but how to do it is available. And I accepted when I took the job that getting engaged in how to do it meant that and I was never going to get it to perfect so that it meant that I was going to get criticized and I accept that because you need people who know what we know in those conversations and if, if nobody who's experienced it who understands the issues goes into government and tries to make a difference and those decisions will be made by people who don't understand. And we won't get anywhere. Yeah, so I accept that that's part of what part of the responsibility you take on when you serve. And I, one of the women I interviewed Jodi Archambault, Native American woman said something very poignant. She said she, when she served in government, she tried to think about her grandmothers. And she would think, all right, if my grandmothers are would be good with what I'm doing, if I'm doing this with integrity that they would be able to see, then I'm good. And I, I don't have to pay attention to whatever other people are saying about me. One advice I give is to, to get your love at home, right? If you're, if the people who are your people, whoever they are, know who you are and know that you're doing your best, you can rely on that. And you don't need the people at work to love you. You know, you can do your work with integrity and not worry so much about whether or not, you know, what people think. Absolutely. So for those of us who struggle with also doubt and fear and all of that, you talk about that beautifully. So I just want to also let listeners and viewers know this book is also just full of nuggets, just like what you provided that I think will be comfort for many people who are thinking about how to do this work and how to do it with integrity and how to do it with love of community. Right. And also to bring the brilliance and the training and the education to bear to deal with some of our most pressing issues. So let's, yo, you're welcome. Let's go to audience question one. So how can a new presidential administration or future administrations build a state department and DHS willing to support immigrants and asylees refugees while adhering to our laws. So that's about personnel. Right. There's a saying right personnel is policy you what you want a next presidential administration to be thinking about and being deliberate about the people that it hires being having the expertise, but also the kind of the values that are that are fundamental to our country. And it is entirely possible to build these agencies into agencies that, you know, that best reflect our values. And a lot of that is a lot of that is policy right you want to be asking them to do the right things. But a lot of it also is personnel and I have to say, you know, if there is a change over the government, I obviously have a perspective on that I worked for a Democratic president and I'm working for the vice for vice president Biden now. But it you know anytime there is a change in government, there is an opportunity to serve. This is a public policy school so this is a good moment to be thinking about, about, you know, where you might belong in a government at any level including at the federal level and then Lord knows we need. We need well trained service minded, good hearted hands and hearts on the job. Absolutely, absolutely. Let's go to question to our diversity efforts missing the mark. If so, why and what policies, both in government and in private industry, do you think would be most effective for creating change in this arena. I think about this all the time. We are not nearly where we need to be I think we're making progress but we are not nearly where we need to be. And it is incredibly important one to understand why you're doing diversity with this is not altruism. It's because you you you make better informed decisions you get better outcomes if you have diversity around the table. So it's not like something we're trying to do for somebody else it's a thing that we do in order to actually do the work well so that where you start is tremendously important. And then you have to be relentlessly intentional about getting there. It is not enough to say, we got a committee that's working on it at our office and so that's, you know, so those people are going to think about it and we're all going to get about our business. You have to be asking at every stage of your work at every stage of a hiring process. What are we doing with in our outreach. How are we designing the position description so that we're maximizing the pool. If you come back with a pool of candidates and they all look the same. What are we doing wrong what else do we need to be doing like it you have to consider and reconsider at every stage of the process in order to get it right. Absolutely. And I like that idea of being intentional and really not just stating the goal, but putting the work behind it and also the resources behind it. So often, these efforts get stated and then severely under resourced, and it's get gets put on one person or a committee to basically make fundamental structural and cultural change within an organization, which, as we know, is not how you do organizational change or societal change, but for some reason, for diversity, we try to make that happen in that way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So question three from the audience as a woman of color ready to elevate into a leadership role. Yes. How can I be taken seriously for those roles? What advice would you give to your younger self based on what you know now? You know, what a great question what a well worded question. Yes, being taken seriously for role is more is harder than it should be. So I say this I talk about this a lot in the book so I am a relatively soft spoken Latina I'm also five to right so I don't take up a lot of physical space in a room I'm not a particularly physically imposing person. And I went through what I kind of describe as sort of graciousness training right at this is that's culturally how I grew up. And so I started my career and continue my career very aware of this notion that I have to I have to work to portray authority. I have I have to convey authority I have to work to convey a sense of power and and capacity. And, you know, early in my career, this is not a recommendation it's a story early in my career I took up swearing to convey toughness that I thought that my physical presence didn't convey. And so that's an illustration of one adaptation that I made I don't necessarily recommend it. But what I do recommend is, I'm not a believer in fake it till you make it I'm a believer in. And I just think this is true, especially for women and especially especially for women of color. There's no question that that there are barriers there's no question that the mountain is higher that you got to climb. And we have to be prepared. Right we are mistakes are costlier than other people's mistakes. And so the way that I the place that I get confidence from is from knowing that I've done my homework and that I've like I've got that I've got this that I can walk into the room knowing that I know my stuff. So doing you doing the work is a big piece of it, but also getting feedback. And I'm, I am a person who relentlessly asks for feedback and that's a recommendation that I also that I, that I give in the book, and that I really believe in fine people who are who it's safe to ask. Right, and it being safe to ask is an important element of it, but then don't just ask them to be cheerleaders, ask them to be truth tellers. I used to be able to go into Valerie Jarrett's office at the White House and close the door and say, Oh my gosh that meeting that happened just now, tell me where I went off course, help me see what I didn't see. And I knew she would tell me the truth. And I tell a story in the book about Tyra Mariani who until recently was the president of New America she just left for an amazing job. She was told early in her career. She had one of those jobs that you do over the summer that's kind of a tryout to work at the firm, and they told her that they didn't see her as management material. And she is, has gone on to become one of the best managers I've ever met by the way, African American woman, and she wishes that she had a cohort of people who she could sit down with and say they just said that to me, help me process it. And I told her, you are 23 years old how I think just known you for two months, how do we know whether or not your management material like that's ridiculous. Right. And if she says you know that experience cost her years of confidence. And if she had had people she could process that with that she could get feedback from that you know she might have not taken quite so long to get back on her feet. I'm asking for feedback having a cohort of people that with that you can take this stuff to who you know will tell you the truth is a super, super valuable. Absolutely. And in the book I have to say you, you do an excellent job kind of giving some kind of insider stories from the White House of, you know, Valerie Jarrett and others who were kind of the people that we know from the national generation and perhaps had worked with in the past for some of us and then to be able to hear about some of the inner workings of the White House the book is fantastic for for that reason as well. Let's go to question for how do you stay motivated and inspired when facing bureaucracy funding challenges and other barriers when fighting for change. Yes, to really be in love with what you're doing. I've learned over and over again, and I think this applies now to where in a time when there's so much to do and it's all important. Right. There's so much important work that needs to be done. So, if your standard is, is this work important. It's not kind of enough of a filter to help you decide kind of what's yours to do because what you don't want is to end up in a job that feels like it's important work but the setup of the work doesn't work very well for you. I tell, for example, I tell a story from early in my career that I, I thought I was destined for a job in direct service, I found a direct service job, serving immigrants actually in Chicago, and discovered that I that the job for me was completely draining that I wasn't and we did a good job, and it was important work, but I described it to a reporter as it was like watching people get pushed off a cliff knowing that you can only help some of them. And that those are not the words of someone who's in love with what they're doing. So that important work was not my work to do I wasn't energized by it. Your job is to find the important work, which does energize you which you even though there are obstacles you wake up in the morning thinking about it and, and, and it, it kind of fills you up. So I think of public service or, or kind of, I don't know, service kinds of jobs along a continuum. If and maybe government services over here and being an organizer is over here and there's a lot of different points in between. Your job is to find the place on the continuum that where your voice is strongest where you, where you feel the most engaged as you know where your violin string is fully in tune. Because that's the, that's the way you'll stay motivated. Yeah, yeah, such a great point and such great advice in terms of finding the best fit. So our final audience question. Number five, can you talk about the pay gap, especially why black women are paid less than white and Asian women and what can we do about it. Yeah, well, so there's a gender pay gap for starters, right between women and men and it gets worse for women of color, particularly black and Latina women. There's so many, so many reasons that so many ways to address this, the individual way to address this is to make sure you are aware of it as a person in the workforce make sure that you invest in negotiating understanding pay scales in the places in the fields where you're going to work. That part of the explanation for the gap has to do with our insisting on being paid what we're worth which I find very, really, really hard to do, frankly. And some of it is there are also policy levers here to be pulled. The part of the explanation for the pay gap has to do with with as a as communities that kinds of jobs where we tend to congregate right if we are in communities where a number of us are in low paid jobs are in, say service sector jobs or retail jobs that are African American women are disproportionately likely to be in those jobs or Latinos jobs that don't pay particularly well. And that's big, big reason that there's a disparity so it's not just equality of pay in the same job. It's also the fact that we tend to be clustered in jobs that don't pay very well. And that is a matter of public policy that's a matter of education that's a matter of making sure that as we were talking about before the jobs that we depend on in our economy are actually, you know, come with wages that are that are liveable. Those are all things that we need to be fighting for and part of the way part one of the ways that we will close the wage gap is to fight for each other to fight for low income women in our communities. Absolutely. I want to close by reading a quote about the legacy of your work in the Obama administration because it speaks to your work as director of the domestic policy council but it also is very aligned with what we see as our educational mission here at the Ford School. And you write, as proud as I am of the policy achievements of the Obama administration, I'm equally proud of how we achieve them. We were inclusive. We were respectful. We did our best to reflect not only the brilliance and decency of our president, but also the goodness and decency of the people we served. We developed creative ways to engage the public in our work to honor regular people doing extraordinary things and we conducted ourselves with honor and integrity. We built teams and we focused on keeping them healthy. I take great comfort in knowing that we've taken these values and qualities with us. The extraordinary people who are part of the Obama administration, including Team Latino, are now working in foundations, corporate America, government and the nonprofit sector. Some are even running for office. We have taken what we have learned into the world and I am confident that the world will be better for it. Cecilia Munoz, thank you so much. Thank you for your insights. Thank you for the gift of this phenomenal book. Thank you for reminding us, regardless of our political persuasion, that we have much more in common than we realize and that there are solutions to many of the problems that we face. And thank you for writing about it so eloquently. And thank you for doing the work to help us all. Please stay tuned to our website and social media pages for more information about upcoming virtual events at the Ford School. And I say to everyone, thank you and good day. Thank you. You are welcome.