 Welcome. My name is Mara Cecilia Asfeld. I am the Associate Director of Research Strategy and an Associate Research Scientist here at the Ford School and I'm delighted to welcome all of you here this afternoon for today's policy talk at the Ford School event hosted in partnership with Poverty Solutions of the University of Michigan. Tonight's conversation centers on the recently released book, Injustice of Place, uncovering the legacy of poverty in America, which links economic data, health outcomes, and local history and traditions. The Ford School's Luke Schaefer, the Herman and Amali Kohn Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy and Director of Poverty Solutions co-authored the book with Catherine Eden, a sociology professor and Timothy Nelson, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Sociology at Princeton University. The book explores America's concentrated use of systemic violence, resource extraction, and corruption among decision makers in certain communities to create conditions of virtually inescapable poverty and adversity. Today these communities live with severe environmental degradation, a lack of basic services, and a shortened life expectancy. And they are spread across a wide swath of the country from Appalachia to the tobacco belt of Virginia and the Carolinas, the cotton belt in the South and South Texas. The unfolding argument in the injustice of place is about what these places share, a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning with an unrelenting commitment to investing in and supporting these places in which our country has committed so many harms. A bid on format today, our own Luke Schaefer will share some insights from the book. He will then be joined by his co-authors and COO of the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, Nicole Sherrod Freeman, for a conversation. While the conversation originally included Congressman Dan Kilty changes to the House voting schedule due to events, I imagine you can all imagine, prohibited him from joining tonight. There will be some time for questions at the end, so please scan the question card QR code that you should have received in the front to submit your question throughout tonight's event. Those tuning in virtually, you can treat your questions to hashtag policy talks. We have two Ford School students here who will help us with facilitating the Q&A and a pomper. And Julie, I'm so sorry. With that, please join me in welcoming Luke Schaefer to present briefly on the book tonight. Hey, everyone. It's great to be with you and I really appreciate you coming out. So many people who have had an impact on this book are in this room from the great team at Poverty Solutions and of course my co-authors. Nicole, who read chapters early on. So many of the folks who are in the field are watching or online. And of course I couldn't be more grateful for the Ford School community, which I've always felt so embraced and loved and encouraged by and challenged to do better work and to do important work that matters. So Kathy Eden and I wrote a book called $2 a Day that was about America's very poorest families. So these are families surviving on very low levels of cash income. So they might have access to food assistance. Sometimes a housing subsidy, although that's pretty rare in Chicago where we did a lot of our field work, the wait list to get housing subsidy was 85,000 families long and it was closed, so you couldn't be 85,001. But there was also charitable nonprofit work, WIC, sort of other programs, but it was really about what happens when you don't have any cash. What does it mean to not be able to pay the utility bill or buy toilet paper in 21st century America? And that book was a change in my own career. So before that I sort of started out life as a case worker and that's what drew me to the work. But then during much of the early part of my career, I was strictly a quantitative researcher. That's through graduate school. I developed my love for charts and spreadsheets that make me feel really warm and cuddly inside. And so in meeting Kathy, she would do this thing, which was different from what I did, which was when she wanted to learn about poverty in America, she would go out and talk to people. And so this book, the first book really sort of helped us learn things that I think by going out and actually connecting and talking, we wouldn't have never known. The questions that we didn't even know to ask. But very quickly after that, we started to wonder about sort of a different level of analysis of maybe wanting to go and see in the poorest places in the United States. And we actually got an email from a program officer. It's like one of those wonderful things that you never actually imagine happening when a program officer actually writes you and says, hey, I want to fund you to do this work that you wanted to do anyways. So I expect that's a once in a career type situation. But this was a good one to spend it on. So she called and said, hey, what about a book that would not just look at America's poorest families, but would look at America's poorest places and try to understand what's going on with them. So we thought that was pretty interesting. And of course, there was William Julius Wilson's similar work that truly disadvantaged that really made the argument that growing up poor in a poor community had compounded effects. But much of that work that sort of came out of that explosion of research was really focused on neighborhoods, mostly in urban areas. And in fact, pretty much all of our research except one field site in $2 a day was in urban centers in the north. And then of course, Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hindren had work that was coming out that showed how stratified the American dream is by place. So there are some places in the United States where if you grow up low income, you are just as likely as anyone else to rise to the middle class. And then there are other places where if you grow up low income, you are likely to be poor as an adult as well. We could see more and more research from Angus Deaton and Case and others that showed the huge stratification in help. If you go from counties, you know, even just small units of geography right here in Washtenaw County, you can see differences in life expectancy that go beyond a decade. And very significant differences in infant mortality. And of course, poverty rates are quite different across place. So we wanted to bring together not just one source of data to think about how do we get to America's poorest places. And in fact, we really wanted to try to offer a new way to think about poorest. What does it mean to be poorest? The federal government has always used income to figure out who is the least. Who's least likely to be able to meet their expenses. But we've had this huge explosion in our data infrastructure and we can put these different factors into conversation with each other. So in our analysis, we used income. The sort of the standard official poverty measure is what we can look at for small units of geography all across the country. And in fact, it's actually a bit more correlated with hardships like food and security than some of our other measures. We looked at health and then we looked at social mobility. That sort of question of whether or not in a place, if you grow up without a lot, are you likely to be poorest as an adult too. And we used a principal component analysis. So postdoctoral scholar Sylvia Robles, who is here at the Ford School, was the first one to suggest this. Our student Jasmine Simmington. She was another in Sam Jubayed, one of my team members at Poverty Solutions sort of came on the idea of using principal component analysis that can sort of weight all of these factors and then sort of spit out a continuum of disadvantage for every county in the United States in our 500 largest cities. And when you look at the 500 largest cities, that gets you down to cities that are like 50,000 or so type places. And this was the map that it that it gave us. So we can immediately see one thing that was very striking to us at the at the beginning is on this map you have both every county in the United States, about 3,100 counties in every city. And what was striking was when we looked at that deepest disadvantage set, like the the bottom hundred on our index of deep disadvantage, they were really predominantly rural. In fact there are only nine cities, two of which happened to be in Michigan and Detroit and Flint, a couple of others here in the in the Rust Belt. But besides that you had these clusters of a deep disadvantage that you can see sort of going across the Cotton Belt, the Mississippi Delta and through the South Appalachia a little bit higher up, and then a cluster down in South Texas. And if we look out west you actually see a very few places that are among the most disadvantage, except for some examples which are all Native nations as you go out west. So for scholars who had spent almost our entire career studying poverty in in northern cities like Chicago or New York, this was a wake-up call for us right, sort of saying that you know we'd sort of seen some maps that had looked like this before, but this was the first Apple's comparisons of all cities, all 500 largest cities in every county in the United States, and it was really pointing us to these rural places that very that we hadn't spent a lot of time in and most of our colleagues hadn't either. So here you can see exactly what these clusters are right. So it's not just that you have small pockets of deep disadvantage, but they seem to be clustered together. And immediately we started looking for other maps and thinking about how the work of today connected with other things. We'd seen maps of poverty, you know, there's some places that actually have decent poverty rates, but terrible social mobility and terrible health. So we brought some new things to the table, but in another case maybe we didn't bring new things to the table. So one of our members of our research team brought this map that is on your right from 1860. So this is a map of the concentration of enslavement in 1860, and to your left is a comparison to our map today. And you can see there's not even a rough just rough correlation, but the very sort of gradation of this is deeply tied to each other. So that made us to think about sort of a third type of analysis that was going to be critical to our work. We have quantitative work, which is using all the data infrastructure we can to zero in on disadvantage. Qualitative work of wanting to go to these places and actually talk to families. And then historical analysis and understanding that all of the problems that we face today in society did not appear out of thin air. And I think much of the time social science comes to a place of saying, yeah, yeah, we understand history is important. And then we can just set that aside and go to basically doing analysis that assumes that our problems appear out of thin air. And obviously sort of these deep relationships, not just a decade ago, not just half a century, but one and a half centuries ago, tell us that history plays a much bigger role than we thought. So we wanted to actually get to know these places, and so our research teams started to set out. My wife who was here who's given all sorts of support and had to live with me through the process that this book said, your graduate students actually want to go live in poor places and study them. This is like fun for them. So we have Nora Johnson, of course. Nora Jones being a famous singer of my generation. I don't know. Do you have a singing voice, Nora? We'll talk about that later. Yeah. Karen, who is now the Associate Director for Poverty Solutions, Jasmine up at the top. And so we've got Princeton researchers, U of M researchers, going out in pairs, getting to know communities in our clusters. So we find ourselves in Clay County, Clay County, Kentucky, Marion County, South Carolina, La Flore County in Mississippi, and then Zavala County in South Texas. And one of the nice things about a research team is that most of them had some direct connection, some tie to the community that they were studying, having either grown up in the region or having family in the region. And so we were able to, I think, build on that familiarity. So what the book really tries to do is offer some mechanisms. So the quantitative work of figuring out these are the most disadvantaged places, doesn't really tell us the why in any way, shape, or form. And the history tells us that this is sort of tied to the past. But going to these places and interviewing a set of very low income residents, as well as a set of community leaders, and then being deeply embedded in the ethnography and as investigators, we were coming down and getting to know each place over and over again. And then Kathy and Tim went on this epic road trip where they actually visited about 75 percent of the nation's poorest 200 places in the country. I think probably visited more poor place in the United States than any other human in history. We developed sort of the sense of some of the mechanisms that were driving the sort of perpetuation of deep disadvantage over time. And I'm just going to talk about two. And these are two in particular that caught me by surprise. So I like to say that this project in this sort of iterative mixed methods inquiry often means that you come out thinking about and studying and writing about things that you never expected to going in. So it's a little bit different from when you go in with a research question and then you start to dig in. This is one where we sort of went in almost as a blank slate and maybe had some priest conceptions, but found ourselves driven in directions we never would have imagined. So the first is social infrastructure. So think about Clay County, Manchester, Kentucky. It is a place where the opioid epidemic is still raging and we're all sort of searching for answers of what exactly should we do. What are some of the causes that help us understand why the opioid epidemic continues to be really as bad as it's ever been as a country and particularly concentrated in these places. Well it turns out a lot of our respondents had some of these answers or at least had a hypothesis. So sweet piece says there's really nothing around here to do for kids. That's why they go to drugs. Dolly says I just want things to change. I mean better for the kids, better for the teenagers. Stuff teenagers can do instead of getting into drugs. Parks for the little kids. Down with crystal we have like we had the movies a long time ago and like I said it turned into a church and now there's nothing for folks to do. Time and time again we heard this and quite frankly the first couple times we heard it we didn't take it seriously. It kind of sounds like a non-serious answer, but with this type of inquiry when you hear it over and over again you're forced to say all right can there be something to this? And it turns out there's a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that there is. So just to give you three quick examples there is one study that finds the decline of civic organizations within a community is associated with the rise of of opioid deaths. In our own analysis with Mike Evangelist who was also postdoc here at the Ford School we find that the decline of things like the arcade and barbershops these are things that are associated with increases in opioid epidemic and the associations are as strong as rises of unemployment. So it's a it's a pretty strong association and we can't you know there's some sort of causal direction that we still have to work out but it looks pretty compelling. So what does an arcade do right? What does the local movie theater do? These are places where people can gather and form bonds and have cheap fun right and be together. There are things for people to do. One of my favorites is some research using laboratory rats. It turns out if there's a poor laboratory rep that's all by their lonesome and they're offered drugs they will probably get addicted to drugs and die and if the little rat has other little rat friends and fun stuff to do in the cage almost none will get addicted and none will will die. So there's like like all of these little things that sort of point to the fact that these social connections that we build by having these places where we can come together to have fun can actually matter. Volunteerism is another one of these maps that looks an awful like our map of deep disadvantage. All right so just one more and then I'm going to stop the presentation and invite my colleagues to come up. Corruption, another theme that I never expected to write about going in. I've never written anything about corruption whatsoever but it turns out Greenwood Mississippi is the epicenter of the Brett Farve welfare crisis. So as some of you may know Brett Farve got himself into trouble because he took 1.1 million dollars for speeches for underserved individuals in Mississippi which came from funds from the temporary assistance for needy families TANF which was supposed to be the welfare program that replaced welfare in 1996 and we all at the time thought it was a work-based time limited program but in fact it's it's more just a flexible spending block grant that states can use as long as they can justify what they're doing under one of the core purposes. They just have to say that it helps promote marriage or reduce out-of-marriage births or help families and their their children and so states have really pulled away from providing any cash assistance and are doing a lot of other things usually paying for things they were going to pay for otherwise like their child welfare system. In this case Nancy Knew was a non-profit leader in Greenwood Mississippi who worked in league with state officials to take 80 million dollars from the TANF block grant and do things like pay herself to run schools that didn't exist pay Brett Farve to give speeches that there's no record that he gave at any point and all sorts of other celebrities including one fellow who was a I think he was a former wrestler who was paid to give speeches about staying away from drugs and then he himself got addicted and TANF paid for him to go to rehab in California. So this is the biggest welfare sort of scandal in Mississippi history and it all started in the community like during the time that we were in during the time that we were there and it directly is taking money out of the hand you know the pockets of low-income families with children. Some of the other cases are a little bit more indirect so in Crystal City Texas where was a field site that we had in south Texas in 2016 the FBI descends on to city hall and arrests every member of the city council and the mayor and the city manager saved one and they actually took all of the public records all of the records that had been used to run the government of everything that had been going on so that the next guy who comes in to try to run the town absolutely nothing about what had been happening in the town over the previous years. Of course Manchester Kentucky is the place where the history of this the history goes back of this sort of thing in every community that we're in over long term but it's perhaps not it's just unparalleled in in Manchester where finally in the early 2000s Daw White who is a direct descendant of one of the founders of the county from generations back is put in jail for racketeering there's lots of like taking money for bribes public officials that are in league with drug dealers over the over the period of time and one of my favorite stories is that there was a group that of reformers who came in because they couldn't stand the corruption anymore and they challenged Daw White and all of his his slate and they won but then they themselves ended up in prison because they were buying votes which turns out you can't do because that's what you had to do to win right and so it turns out Daw White who himself is facing charges his people saw the other people buying votes while they were buying votes and so they were able to testify against them so if we imagine if we understand corruption as sort of something that appeared out of thin air I think it's easier to blame communities for it and to say look there's nothing that can be done but when we take the historical lens and we understand every single one of these places for generations has been fighting a battle between the haves and the have-nots and usually the haves and in all of the cases in these places the haves are a relatively small set of elite who run not just the industry that dominates the place but social life as well and has been using every tool at their disposal to reinforce that social order right what became something that we might blame on the community themselves becomes sort of a long historical trend of a group of people who are controlling the towns sort of maintaining that control and oppressing a much larger group of people which is why in the book we come to term these places internal colonies their stories have been told but separately as individual places and in this book we don't say that there's equivalents at all across the places but we do understand that these are places where the large majority of people have been not have full had full rights of citizenship for for much of their history because of this extreme control of usually one industry that dominates the entire place and all social aspects of life as well so we are going to talk about policy solutions because this is a policy school but I'm going to invite my colleagues up and sort of start the conversation there and of course this is not a book where there's a single solution so our last book it was great like the solution was give people a little bit of money this is not one of those where you know one solution really fits the bill so I'm going to invite my my dear dear friend the culture art Freeman who is now the COO of the community foundation of southeast michigan but has spent many years as a cabinet official and the Mike Duggan administration running workforce development and economic development and Kathy Eden my longtime collaborator and Tim now my collaborator both faculty at at Princeton and and I think well known here so let's invite them all up you guys are in the middle testing testing so first so I have to start with a big thank you and shout out to the Ford School of Public Policy and to the poverty solutions team and to Luke and Kathy and Tim for inviting me to join you today there's a privilege and an honor to be before you this afternoon to help this conversation along so I was a huge fan of two dollars a day I gave away no fewer than 35 copies of that book and that I gotta I gotta tell you your approach to writing that book and this one has been life-changing for me so I am a big fan and I am deeply grateful to you for the index of deep disadvantage I want to start here in the conversation so for anyone in our viewing audience who cares at all about the conditions under which far too many Americans are living this book was a hard read and so I wonder if we could just start with you're talking about what it was like for you personally to write this book Luke why don't why don't we start with you so I think a number of things the first was how surprising I found every aspect of the work that I thought I knew things about poverty and I think I did but there was so much that I didn't know and sort of grappling with how easy it is to get stuck in one's positionality and stuck in where one lives and what one sees every day and sort of only know a certain set of problems this completely blew that open for me in a in a different way and then the fieldwork really was like the the housing stock especially in south Texas but across all of our field sites it it was it's fundamentally different we were in communities that had only gotten indoor you know plumbing in the last decade or so and so that was you know it's a set of conditions that was not familiar to me as someone who spent an awful lot of time in Chicago and Detroit and in other places Kathy how about you? So I'm from rural America I'm from a little town in the middle of Minnesota called Staples there's nothing interesting about Staples and I really thought I knew rural right I know what rural people like I grew up rural and my rural was not this rural and so when we think about rural we often think about white communities and our public discourse is all about white republican communities but the communities that we identified here outside of Appalachia were communities of color and I had no clue how these places worked you know it was stunning to realize in Manchester that the very the very first capitalist Hugh White who was mining salt using enslaved people for labor back in the 1820s was the direct descendant of the guy who was still running the town so these kinds of power structures really were very were very stunning and then the social cleavages were so extreme you know I grew up in central Minnesota during the garrison keeler years we know he's controversial but he did famously say that everybody's just a little above average and there were no people in the middle in many of these towns they were elite people and people without land or resources yeah I'd say that was so Kathy and I I should say that we're married that's why we get to go on these road trips together but so we have for some of our prior work we lived in places like Camden, New Jersey in the mid 90s and other places so we've been exposed to a lot of poverty and and so on but was different about this was as Kathy said it wasn't just a uniform level of desolation every town in the south that we looked at had like historic mansion had a nice store that was catering to some of the elites in the area and it was that sort of juxtaposition and the inequality that was operating here and doing the historical work and looking how far back this goes which was really eye-opening for me. You know what you've shared today in this brief and but thorough executive summary and then certainly what you get when you read the book uncovers a set of conditions and circumstances that are deeply deeply troubling that goes without saying. In $2 a day and I'll bring this back to a point Luke that you made just a minute ago you were able to conclude with you know it's not that that the child tax credit or give people a little bit of money was simple but it was an idea we could wrap our heads around pretty readily can you talk about how your policy recommendations have evolved at this point since $2 a day? Well the child tax credit I do think was a pretty good idea and seems to have seems to have worked for the brief moment that we had it and so out of $2 a day Kathy and I you know collaborated with like eight others scholars the only paper I'll ever write with eight co-authors but it was worth it and and that sort of rolled into the American Family Act that rolled into the American Rescue Plan and we saw a child poverty plummet we saw a food hardship hit the lowest level that it ever had for families with kids we saw the family number of families at the end of 2021 that said they could handle a $400 expense hit an all-time high and just many other metrics of financial health but that doesn't get at these place-based differences now it does in one in one way which Kathy was saying earlier which is we can actually get that money to everyone across place when we do a federal policy that treats everyone the same across the nation we can actually get that money to everyone and it's actually much more difficult and a lot of what we do with programs and grants and you have to have grant writers to get that money but I think more is needed to figure out how do we how do we help places where that have these huge disparities and and it doesn't really it doesn't really lend itself to one solution so so money and government policies that can treat people equally I think is one piece of the puzzle it goes all the way down to things like local journalism so we wouldn't know about the Mississippi welfare scandal if it weren't for Anna Wolfe who was at Mississippi today now is on the Pulitzer Prize was writing about it for years before anyone noticed so thinking about how do we actually support local journalism to follow their does and not not die as so many are is sort of one policy solution that I think can help so there are both these are huge problems and they require sort of a martial plan type solution on the one hand but on the other hand there is a lot of low-hane fruit so for example the federal government is actually prohibited in investing in social infrastructure keeping these third places that where people build social bonds but there's nothing to say that our 130,000 nonprofits hands come alongside of local government and begin to really think about ways to restore the kind of social infrastructure in a community that builds a net that can catch people when they fall we saw powerfully that when that net was rent people were we're overdosing from opioids at very high rates and so I think that's that's a little insight that a lot of our nonprofit partners have been very excited about a way to to really invest we also write about separate and highly unequal schools so something you could advocate for you especially if you're from one of these states is that universal vouchers which are being implemented in more and more states where everyone can use a voucher to go to any school are show very little if anything in the way of educational gains but can act further southern school segregation and in fact are being used right now across the south to to support kids who are going to the very segregation academies that were stood up in the aftermath of brown to basically undo integration in the south so so that's that's sort of another puzzle how do you really think about ways to prevent your state legislature from and you're in your governor from from taking you know voucher programs that are targeted and have been showed to to work well and and transforming them into universal voucher programs which allow white parents to take their kids out of integrated schools we learned a lot about violence in this book and i uh tim and i both study violence along with this work but nowhere in the violence conversation do we really talk about the fact that the one of the strongest prediction predictors of violence in fact we do this empirical work in this book is the rate of social mobility now think about that for a minute the whole reason social mobility is very low in the south is because everything about the economies and the and the social situations in the south was orchestrated to keep the working folk down right and so uh we asked the question in this book to the extent to which that vial and of course violence was the tool violence was ultimately the tool used to keep the laboring class down so we asked in this book to the extent that a community is successful in pushing the working folk down and keeping them in their place does that then lead to further violence and we find very strong evidence that indeed it is so if you're trying to fight violence in a community and you're not paying attention to opportunities for real meaningful social mobility you're probably putting a band-aid on the problem sometimes i uh say that this is the only book we've written that actually has villains in it and the the villains are really unfortunately the local elites as you've probably been able to to capture so i think sometimes there's this idea of well we're outside this community they're all homogenous there and that's definitely what we found was not the case and it makes me understand and actually appreciate the when johnson launched the war on poverty one of the more controversial things was the the stipulation for maximum feasible participation among the poor which was not always followed and actually quite violently resisted in some of these places but you do need some kind of mechanism to to give aid to these places without the going into the pockets of local elites i want to if i might just take a moment to talk about your point about a a marshal plan kind of approach and in being able to get resources to places i mean i think we saw that play out with the american rescue plan act so i had the distinct privilege and heavy burden of managing about 200 million in american rescue plan act dollars in the city of detroit for a combination of small business development and workforce development and economic development and blight remediation both at the you know not at the residential level but commercial and industrial blights are really making these places places where investment is possible and part of what we did with that funding in detroit was spend a little bit of time talking with community-based organizations and making investments where possible to help rebuild the social infrastructure that you're talking about i mean we felt very intensely the impact of not having that in the community you can see how it starts to fray the edges and then really you know decays the very center yeah one of the programs that you stood up that i like the most and maybe is a model here it's a community health corps so a group of detroiters who were were paid to help other detroiters navigate systems and so through doing that there was this building of human capital of a set of long-time residents who are working in the program so not social workers but long-time residents building a lot of actually research about community health workers that was done here in and at university of michigan and providing a direct benefit to other detroiters so i think that's the type of model that maybe can help us avoid the elite capture of not seeing any of those dollars actually go down to the residents on a large scale so one thing you'll notice about these places is and i love the fact that luke has these phenomenal local examples that you too know so well but one thing that we saw in all of these places was that after these internal colonies that had really ruled these places began to fall apart in the 1960s many of these places did begin to industrialize you had the what rustle stover planted in um maryon county you had just all the bouldering piano and the floor counting of this all of this nascent industrialization uh it was almost like you know being in philadelphia in 1900 all these little businesses just bringing up all over providing a variety of places for folk to work and if you talk to poor people in these communities today many of them worked in those places and losing those businesses in the face of nafta and other trade policy changes which literally wiped them out after 1990 is like a psychic wound you know they really took their identity from a former work that at least in relative terms was much more dignified than the sharecropping and and cotton chopping that they had been doing for for generations so you know we we talk about the fact that if we're going to help the if we're going to help these programs rebuild we really need to to realize that these trade policies really had losers and uh when you have losers um it could be that the country benefited i don't know that we know that that's true but when you have a region that is lost so deeply and that has still so many of our country's most vulnerable people in it uh there has to be some uh reparation there has to be some compensation and so in in some ways um we we um pull the rug out from under the feet yes the local elites are a problem absolutely but you know you have to have something to build on so one big idea is to really rethink trade policy in the united states uh yes perhaps we've reduced policy in the rest of the world but but still you know 60 of african-americans live in the south 40 44 percent of hispanics live in the four border states a very large swaths of white poor people live in the south and uh they need to be compensated in and these economies need to need a chance to grow uh this one thing i will say is oftentimes uh through an rfp process uh it is either no one in the community who writes the grant to get the goods or a local elite and we have many examples in the book of utter boondoggles of economic development that get funded as a result uh we need to bring experts together and i think local universities extensions uh local federal reserve regional federal reserve banks really need to put um their shoulders to the wheel and think deeply like what is the scope of this problem we're we're kind of picking around the edges at the moment we're making ourselves feel good through these little programs but this is this is a big this is a big problem that needs a muscular i've just been in chicago so i'm thinking of the city of big shoulders a you know a muscular response yeah so uh each of the policy suggestions in the book really focus on the different mechanisms that luc laid out in the slide so we really go through the violence and the corruption the education and so on and sort of as a proof of concept that these are actually you know the mechanisms that are achieving these things we went part of our road trip was to go to the most advantage county so on that list if you look at the other end of the list and we looked at the 200 most advantage places which includes kathy's home county of minnesota um but and we also looked at the numbers for these and so these are the least corrupt places these are the places with great social infrastructure uh and so on and if you trace back the history it often um it seems to go back to the to the very like the homestead act of 1862 which actually laid out a very even set of uh parcels for different family farms and so on of course those were all taken from you know the native people who live there but establishing this kind of equality um seemed to have really echoed across the generations in creating these very healthy sustainable types of communities so i'd love to press into that point because there there came a point for me personally in reading the book where i had to like i don't know maybe it was in the middle of a couple of chapters just before we start talking about what do we do um and it was just too painful to keep reading it i i eventually went back and finished the book but there there came a point where when i had to fast forward past some of the discussion of the impact of history and current context on violence in a place because it was just too much and i um i moved forward to the chapter on uh healing uh internal healing america's internal colonies and it builds on the point tim that you just raised and there's a passage there that luke i wonder if we could get you to read for us that sort of lays out i think put some structure around kathy what you and tim were just describing with important caveats about the most advantaged places in mind the key lesson we have taken from our exploration of these places is that people seem to thrive maybe not in wealth but in health and life chances when inequality is low when land ownership is widespread when social connection is high and when corruption of the kind seem in some of our field sites is virtually unknown and violence is rare the social leveling that is characteristic of these communities in the upper midwest is more than just a quaint cultural feature it is the engine that drives the social and economic processes from which its citizens derive benefits i wonder if you could thank you luke i wonder if you could each talk a little bit about what what our risks are and what there is to be gained from caring about building places of advantage or or i don't know dismantling some of the disadvantage i don't i don't i don't even have the language for for what you've uncovered but i wonder if you might each talk a little bit about that i was thinking about um the political context uh then the political costs of doing nothing so right when we were writing this book um a visiting speaker came to michigan and presented this amazing paper am i right about the camps which one are you thinking of which one are you thinking of any way we discovered a body of research um the david autor is one of one of several scholars writing this vein really showing the political content consequences of nafta and uh you know prior to nafta many of these southern places voted blue and presidential elections trusting the democrats to deliver the jobs and to care about um labor uh after nafta what you can see is for those counties that were most affected by trade policy and they were are very counties i mean literally you know zeball texas the list is is astonishing and really marking which places they were these are the places that you saw the shift um from democratic to republican voting patterns in presidential elections so one answer i would give is um these processes are changing our politics in dramatic ways and uh the cost of so this leads to feelings of alienation feelings of being left behind uh all you know resentment of the kind that um that our great ethnographer kathy kramer university of Wisconsin has written about it really leads to the sense that politicians don't care we know that americans are more disengaged and more disposable of politicians than maybe anytime anytime since we've started measuring these kinds of attitudes so so some of these policies may be really deriving some of the political dislocation um and change that uh that we're seeing today and so that's that to me is a pretty big cost for doing nothing i would go back to uh what tem was mentioning in the historical legacy when we look at the places of greatest advantage which we were a bit surprised to see according to our index up in the upper midwest in minnesota north dakota and wisconsin this deep concentration of places that were affected by the homestead act of 1862 the homestead of the act of 1862 that actually couldn't get passed before 1862 because uh southern lawmakers blocked it for that same uh before that and so they were able to pass that in 1862 they didn't want the common person to have land so it it like uh causes this explosion of widespread uh property ownership but you can think of it as widespread asset right inclusive sort of asset ownership across an entire region where we can trace the legacy of that ever since and in the south after the civil war we started down that path actually sherman and i think sam and chase uh go down to savannah and talk to a group of black leaders and say what do you want like what should you know what they were talking about was reparations and it was uh black leaders who said we want land and some assets to get going and that's what they did they started to confiscate you know a set of land from they they took it from the plantations and and started you know building 40 acres in a mule the mule being the asset and then linkin gets shot and then uh andrew johnson comes in and all of that gets reversed and even so actually black americans in the south build like property ownership at a like an astonishing rate over the next few decades and then in the early 1900s like forces across um you know from during the great depression who's available uh to get you know agricultural loans uh from from banks you know from local uh uh the federal regulations a lot of that land is against stripped but 94 so uh this is i mean to me i think there's like two lessons in that in the first is that i'm an i'm generally an income guy right i like to get people money and let them decide what to do with it but wealth and assets right has the seems to have this role in providing sort of the leverage point for people to to build and think about you know the better life and the united states has sort of systemically uh you know supported some people in that and systemically worked against other people particularly black americans over a long period of time so um i like to think of uh one of the contributions of this book is is being a book about the nuts and bolts of structural racism as well as like structural classism in appalachia of how how government has been using very specific ways when my favorite passage is is uh on the segregationist academies after brown and how all the assets of the public schools were you know literally converted overnight in a lot of these places to private schools um that were all white and so they were able to sort of replicate the system that they already had so i think understanding how government can be used in that way and then understanding the opposite which is to endow citizens with assets so that they can thrive in the other direction so we had some of this book was excerpted in the atlantic and then in usa today and i was the only one brave enough to go and see the reader's comments um but it was interesting that a lot of people said well if these places are so terrible why don't they just leave like why don't they just move and of course they did move right this little thing called the great migration happened in you know for most of the of the 20th century also um actually a larger number of of appalachian whites moved to northern cities which there's a new book out called the hillbilly highway which really kind of looks at that um but a lot of people then returned back because of the reception that they were given in a lot of northern cities but also just because of a deep attachment to the home place um so what when we give the sort of longer presentation here we often end with slides just showing the children in some of these places and saying you know these kids that are growing up in these areas who have deep roots here they deserve our attention they deserve our coming together to think about solutions that will allow them to stay where their families have have been and have really you know great roots and tim to that point and this question is for all three of you but what what gives you hope what did you see or what do you know through some other way or what do you believe that gives you hope that our electeds and or our civic leaders and or other community leaders or that just residents in the places where you were like what gives you hope that we care enough about justice in a place to actually do something about it yeah so um so we talk about the local elites many of whom have been problematic for decades and and have operated as extractors not investors you know in the midwest you invest in the soil so you can pass it on to your children and grandchildren but this is really an extractive way of thinking um so so the local elites are a problem but they're also hometown heroes like pastor ken bullen who led the opposition against the white clan and all of the corruption and organized a march against all of this corruption that a quarter of the county's population showed up at on a rainy day in may we also see people who from the laboring folk who managed to get out they go and they get advanced educations they get incredible experience and expertise uh in the big cities in the north where so many migrants went uh but then they decide to come home so uh tamela boy chah as one example she comes back to greenwood mississippi uh to to start a charter started charter school that will floor legacy academy uh there's another couple um deborah adams and i'm forgetting her husband's name he's actually earnest um they've been running program programs for youth very successfully in a large city but they come home and they resuscitate the very community center the catholic community center where the priest uh pastor mcculski actually during the civil rights movement um bales stokely kike car michael out of jail after the black power speech and so everywhere we looked we saw folk with expertise i mean mike sb was an early example of this where people are coming back to these hometowns and they're saying this is my place and uh you know so tamela boy chah and uh deborah adams went to the cotton bowl the all white event where the cotton king and the cotton queen are crowned every year and they're the next year um they brought a whole table of their associates and friends and so all across these places you're seeing uh sort of a new cadre of leaders if we can get rid of gerrymandering some of these states we could see more of these leaders uh at the national level and and they've got something to say the other thing i'd say is there's an air of desperation among the the white elite uh there's a sense that if we don't change we don't we die and so we did see some real openness um in several of our sites among longtime local leaders who are saying you know why did we say we wouldn't go to school with these people way back when what if we had you know gone to each other's weddings and been in each other's weddings and and been friends wouldn't our town be better off so that's that's what gives me help is i i think this is that there's a change is a common in these places and people people know it i think we've got our students uh who might have some questions so maybe you'll introduce yourselves as he thought that's you hi everyone my name is julie v carry and i am a dual masters of public policy and a masters of business administration student here and super excited to um have the opportunity to ask ask some questions yeah um i'm anna pomper i'm an mpp here um do a little bit of work with poverty solutions and um got to read some of this book in an exclusive pdf offered via professor shaffer's social welfare class last semester so really excited to ask questions as well do you want to go first okay um all right so i think our first question is the pandemic laid bare in striking terms the inequities faced by people faced by people based on where they live and how race and other identities are related to place based oppression what is our way forward take it away yeah i mean i do still think we're we're at a little bit of a fork in the roads in this country so uh in in my own professional life i was utterly panicked at the start of the of the covid crisis about the economic crisis i totally underestimated the public health crisis but i knew what happened to folks without a lot of money and um a divided government actually responded with a safety net that i think we can argue around the edges uh could have been better but like fundamentally it was different from anything we'd ever done before in expanding like understanding that our unemployment insurance system was broken and and making benefits available through economic impact payments and of course through the expanded child tax credit um through other programs that took a bit longer to roll out like housing assistance but also did a lot of good so um you know that was just an incredible moment like to lose 20 million jobs and actually see poverty decline and see all of these sort of indicators of economic hardship improve uh just was something i never imagined what happened and now we seem to be sort of turning around and going the other direction again and just saying okay well um maybe some people didn't work because of the benefits we actually have more americans working now than we ever have before and you know after you um turns out the retirees new retirees you're our problem as you're all retiring if you i don't know if i have any new retirees in the building but uh that's what's driving down our labor force participation right but there is just the sense i partly because the economy was so strong there were so many jobs around that like it was impossible to find anyone and my social demographer colleagues like natashal i think will mention sort of the decline in the you know more recent populations workers like the numbers are just not there so um we seem to be just going back in that direction and i think and similarly with like an understanding of like the deep inequalities that we have um we seem to be moving in the other direction so it it seems like this is a moment for us to to try to say let's let's not go back to where we were before and and i do think we see this in every single one of the communities that we're in is that there are people who are willing to look and think differently about what kind of policies what we should have and so it's really i think a matter of building that and just continuing sort of the drumbeat of saying let's let is let us let's use this to go in a different direction as a country and we already saw some of the benefits of of that in michigan we have this incredible other policy success of like very early on because um the coals former colleague jonay caldoon became the chief uh sort of medical officer for the state of michigan and she put up data on uh on sort of rates of covid cases and covid deaths by race and so michigan was actually one of the very first places where we saw this incredible disparity um by race and by zip code and and the state government responded and they put together a group that was led by lieutenant governor garland gilcrest that actually put together you know put some policies into place um and uh and we erased that disparity and and not so long a time and there's been some analyses that tell us how many lives were saved by that so you know even even in this moment of incredible hopelessness where it's like they you know they can't even congress can't even figure out who the speaker is like how can anything good be done um like like remembering that actually good things are possible and like holding on to those like figuring out how to lift those up at the local level and at the federal level is is the only answer i'll just add that that i want to hear from from you uh that um i'm always reminding my students that most policy is local policy and so uh yes absolutely great i also want to thank the audience for thoughtful questions that we're getting in um uh so uh we talked about you talked a little bit about um uh the most disadvantaged communities and the most advantaged uh communities um you say that the most advantaged communities have the least corruption great social infrastructure etc um are those places that are most advantaged also the most homogeneous in both race and class are there places that are advantaged but don't rely on either exclusion or homogeneity to achieve less corruption greater greater social infrastructure or other markers of wellness yeah um so there are few communities among the very most disadvantaged that are in places like alaska that are majority um native alaskan most advantaged yeah so there are some real surprises in the data that we have yet to fully explore people in my class in my npa classes at princeton have been like tackling these places and trying to figure out now what's going on in these areas that that leaves in and there's often a story of of good government of good tribal government in the case of in the elastin case that has really taken advantage of a natural resource in a way that has created a diverse economy so there's all kinds of goodies in the data and you can go online and look at the day to yourself it's all publicly available and and begin to uncover some of these stories yourselves and and if you do please let us know we'll we'll put you up on our website and and begin to build this story together i will say that though that there are a lot of very homogeneous white places that are not advantaged at all you saw parts of michigan uh main um where you see very deep disadvantage of course we've got apalacha parts of pennsylvania so there are many being being majority white uh is is uh not sufficient um but of course we shouldn't be shocked to see that white places are more advantaged because of all of the advantages historically that that white people have have gotten this you know by virtue of their race thank you so much um another question from the audience in these disadvantaged places did you see impacts of environmental hazards or climate change for example um for example increased health risks due to heat or extreme weather events um as well as impacts on infrastructure so uh we have a chapter on maryon county south carolina and uh that when we went to maryon county what we weren't expecting to write about there was uh that they had been hit by three severe weather events and you know a small number of years so two uh hurricanes that had come up to eastern seaborn in one severe flood uh it's a community that sits at sort of the meeting point of two rivers and so flooding is a is a major issue and so in that chapter that's called the invisible hand we learned all about what happens when a community gets hit by these uh severe weather events which are coming with increasing frequency uh on the eastern seaborn it looks like floods in the west it's fires but a lot of the eastern seaborn also has like floods and a lot of wetness and then severe dry spells as well so just the extreme nature is growing so uh you know I think a lot of times and in our analysis we think of something like home ownership as a as a binary right a dichotomous thing you own a home or you don't but so many of the residents in these communities actually have clouded title or properties have been passed through from generation to generation referred to as air's property and uh when you have that for uh for the long sort of course of history it's very difficult actually then to get help for a home that's been flooded out because you can't prove that you own the home and and also if your home is monetarily essentially worthless before if it's sort of deemed monetarily worthless uh they're not going to give you any help to build it back and so our policies that actually help families after a severe flood they have the effect of of higher income communities where people have clear title they have homes that are you know in reasonably good shape they're able to navigate complicated bureaucratic systems and these tend to be predominantly communities they actually end up financially better off in the long term for having been hit by a flood because they get things fixed up in their house and maybe things weren't perfect before the flood a lot of the time right um and uh communities of color and low income communities actually end up poorer after because they're not able to access um the help so we have a policy that's actually meant to help people with a crisis that's coming with more frequency that doesn't just like keep inequality where it was but actually makes inequality worse right it stratifies communities and you know there is this connection to the history that I was just talking about of um sort of land ownership among black americans going back for centuries and sort of white authorities uh that we're using many different means to sort of strip that land that I think sort of plays into you know why like a huge fraction of black americans in the south had they own the land they own through heirs property so again you can't divorce it from history but that gives us sort of a very clear policy window of what can we do to make those systems work better and the biden administration to their credit after hearing from us and others um now have a process in place where heirs property isn't going to keep you from getting help it still remains to be seen if that's gonna actually work or not if that's gonna if it you know it just is another bureaucratic layer that has its own impact or not I would add one other one other point and I want to build on your earlier point Kathy of all policy is at some point it becomes local policy because the other thing that gives me hope and is a point of like what what can we do which I think is the the the sort of the core of the question there is in local systems when you are sure that local government isn't corrupt and when local government is competent and focused and uh eager to make not just practical solutions but also affect policy where that's possible you end up with policy opportunities at the local level that can happen irrespective of what happens at the federal level so in Detroit for example Mayor Duggan is working on a policy called Tangle Title which will untangle uh the the uh the conditions that Luke and Kathy and Tim have named in the book right is there a way that locally a city government can address that issue so that no matter what happens more broadly or federally you get some relief at the local level and you know I'm just really grateful to poverty solutions for all the ways you've helped us uncover where those possibilities are so that we can build on them yeah yeah and uh they can do that whether or not we have a speaker yeah that's right yeah so so building off of that you mentioned um land ownership and assets as a way to combat racial inequality you also referenced the omni shambles of congress right now um I'm wondering given and the audience is wondering I should say uh given the current political climate in the United States how realistic do you think implementing a national reparations program would be what responsibility or role does the U.S. government government the federal government have been implementing this you know uh there are certain lessons to be learned from other places doing reparations we spend part of our time in northwest Ontario and of course um their reparations have been made to people who were as children stolen from their families enforced to attend residential schools there is a reservation just north of where where our little cabin is and it is astonishing how many people locally there had been forced to attend these schools and the impacts on families are are terrible but also of course they found evidence even in this tiny little town the school these children attended of of more than 170 human remains from children living in these underfunded and horrific places so we should be learning from these places there you have your own expert I think right here at the University of Michigan Earl Lewis who is doing some really creative work on how to actually build maybe on on the expertise of local local people but also local universities in building programs of reparation uh there it's early days I think you know we've got the example of of maybe places who have done it and not done it not so well I'm thinking of Georgetown and Evanston Illinois that both have instituted reparations but this is something you all should be looking at really really carefully and again the the Canadian example this is one of of you know maybe short term but quite meaningful reparations the politics of these little towns around these reparations as you can imagine is is interesting and something we should be learning more about too I think the local uh the local drives on reparations are the most interesting thing going on in the space given where the federal government is and the Center for Social Solutions here in Michigan it's been a part of efforts in many different places all across the country and the Detroit Metropolitan Area Community Survey and Mara have some really interesting publications on like Detroiters views of reparations there's now a task force an official task force for the city of Detroit that I know Trina's been working with that are looking at this and there's lots of other policy stories where local initiatives actually end up with federal policy change right they sort of change the conversation so I think you know to me that's that's where the momentum is great actually going off of that in your research did you find any other inspiring examples where local programs or community-based efforts were helping correct the structural inequities embodied in the space so just quickly this is a question people often ask you know I had an economist friend say to you why didn't you find places that were identical in 1950 and made different decisions and you know the world doesn't actually offer those cells because they're empty ones so I think you know I teach in a policy school and in one of the things I tell my students is this is your work this is your work and we will do everything we can to inspire you but you are the doers the implementers and the visionaries that's the only way to answer that question yeah I have like three three questions I want to ask off of that you mentioned at the end of the book public libraries and funding public libraries and I'm thinking about Julie's question about you know local organizations that are sort of doing the work and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what public libraries do for for this issue well we we actually got the term social infrastructure from a sociologist named Eric Kleinberg who wrote a book called palaces for the people and it's actually a phrase taken from I think Carnegie who funded a lot of public libraries and so what he really writes about that book and we saw it in the communities that that we looked at is the the libraries to the extent that they have programming and they have other things going on that they become really central places of social infrastructure and one of the key things about social infrastructure is it brings people of all kinds together there's no price of admission that people are not that people are excluded from or in the case I often get the question about well churches what's going on with the churches well it's complicated so in Kentucky for example a lot of the poorer folks really felt like they were looked down upon by the church folk and like you know if they had any kind of you know if they've been divorced or they just didn't have the right kind of clothes or whatever so if you have a place of potential infrastructure that really sets a lot of boundaries around it either moral or financial or otherwise it will never really receive you know get its potential libraries and I used to be a librarian so I'm really happy about this but libraries are like designed to be really welcoming to people and so yeah so libraries are key and we've talked to I guess it was the FDA folk about one thing that the government oh yeah the USDA can fund our libraries and so so we really were cheerleading that with that group Nicole did you end up working on libraries in your time in the city or other social infrastructure yeah that's a that's a great question so libraries are actually not controlled by the city in Detroit so there's little we we leveraged CARES funding which is something you may remember was the funding before ARPA to ensure some programming where possible and certainly libraries are an active part of discussion around the district Detroit which is the Stephen Ross Mike Illich uh I shouldn't say that the Illich companies investment in midtown so certainly we we believe as you saw and said to him that libraries are central to rebuilding community fabric we um we you know we have good relationships with boys and girls clubs and yeah you know our summer youth employment programs are all designed around community and so we're thinking about infrastructure but often in city government what ends up happening is you are because you are firefighting and you are addressing dumpster fire after dumpster fire after dumpster fire there's a little opportunity to pull up and think about how do we rebuild how do we thoughtfully and proactively rebuild infrastructure thank you I'm going to take a little moderate moderators privilege and ask a question I've been wanting to know the answer to um so you know I think about social impact a lot and I was wondering you know is there a role for social impact minded investors to fill gaps left by government policies and programs I'm for example I'm thinking about the expiration of the child care stabilization grant and the large gap in funding left by the expiration and the political kind of upheaval that happened so my question is is it ethical for social investors to garner profit while also addressing these gaps or is government always the answer you know I I know that Jeff Lieben for example is at the Kennedy school coming in two weeks yeah I've done a lot of work around this so you better put that question to him but I will say that I'll make the controversial statement that so in areas of child support and other social services even TANF uh for profit players have increasingly played a role and of course if you talk to people at the state levels don't shoot me they hate that they hate the contractors the vendors they call them the vendors but if you talk to people you know who are heading the national office they'll say the vendors are the vectors you know Ricky Tureski used to say this and like what does that mean so there's a lot of there's innovation that can come from from non-governmental actors so rather than paint you know I was converted by some of the stories I heard from for-profit actors at least in the child supports in TANF spaces it's kind of amazing when so one program I observed in Oklahoma takes TANF recipients and actually puts them in a beautiful building with with lovely chairs and pictures and and you know there are lovely things to eat and so this is a this is a contract right DHS gives to this for-profit organization and so they have to send state workers to supervise and the state workers over and over again so this is my favorite thing to do and because it just somehow there's something about of these degraded government bureaucracies for poor people I mean we did this we made them the way they are you know we write about a god-awful welfare welfare office in Chicago they're mostly all that way so we made them that way but then it's really demoralizing for people to access these these programs and so sometimes the for-profits have come in and done some real innovation I think especially around producing or trying to create a sense of dignity around the receipt of services so yeah I mean just to take that to the logical Kathy next up I would just mention tax prep so many families go to for-profit tax prep and you know most of our discussion about that is like how do they not know they can go to Vita you know they can do non-profit and save money and they need financial budgeting classes or you know they need they need help learning what to do I think it you know it's not like M4 which is Kathy's book with Sarah Helper-Meakin and Mara Tach I think makes the argument that people go to tax prep because you know what was the what you've got people right the H&R blocks real American yeah it provided a sense of dignity that that some of the other services don't I actually think the same is true for payday lenders too like that it it's not just that people are desperate for the money that they go to payday lenders but of all the institutions in my experience poor families distrust banks is right right up there and payday lenders treat people with dignity and they treat them like customers so I do think there are lessons there a lot of times when services become privately funded I'm thinking of child welfare I think the outcomes are pretty poor in the aggregate but we can learn things about like the messages we're sending the families I think we can do one more question so professor Eden you you mentioned that you know this is our work so my question our question the audience's question and my question is how do we do that work what can students at Michigan do to combat this form of injustice I'm thinking about the opportunity index that poverty solutions has and how that illuminates injustice of place what are the concrete things that we should be doing what are the organizations we should be looking for what's the kind of work that we should be identifying the call you should weigh in on this question too but she started with you Kathy so you should start so I teach a course like Luke does in poverty and social policy and we it's been one week discussing the problem the next week discussing the solutions and what you generally see is that the problem is like this the problem is like this and the solutions are like this and and you know so then we look at all the RTCs and the evidence on these little programs you know and my charge to them is the whole point of this course is that our efforts are ridiculously small and your job is to keep that big picture in mind and even if you're doing something incremental it doesn't mean that's bad but to keep in mind that that's not the goal when I've worked with policy people have gone back and forth from Washington as many of my colleagues are it can be easy and I don't know what what you would have to say about this Nicole to to focus on a win like okay I'm in this God awful job where I'm working too much and I'm getting paid too little and I want to win and so sometimes what I see is and we do this too right if we have a policy when we exaggerate its importance I don't think that's true of the child tax credit but because you want to sort of reward yourself psychologically for all of the work you're putting in and so to keep those wins in perspective and to keep the sort of the big picture in line to read read history think deeply about I would say reading history and doing ethnography are two of the most important things anyone can do and if you can't do it read it get a sense of get a sense of you know David Alwood who used to be the dean of the Kennedy School he ran a lot of government agencies and the first thing he would do with his staff is he'd send them out into the field to talk to people I was a part of this big initiative he led funded by the Geese Foundation called the U.S. Partnership for Mobility from Poverty we went on field trips to community after community after community all over the United States just to listen to people so keeping your ear to the ground keeping your eyes focused on history and maybe a little comfort from big data you know I think that's just a good that's just a good tripod to keep at the back of your work yeah I would add to that Kathy get in the trenches find government that works well near you somewhere near you and get in the trenches your understanding of the problem the scale and scope of current solutions and what's possible will only be enhanced like you think you understand it by reading it you have got to get to the front line and bring your ideas and your energy and your enthusiasm and another pair of hands get into the work in a public-private partnership to understand what's really happening come alongside a unit of city government that works well or find a philanthropic partner Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan like we're gonna start really leaning into this notion of where where can we form more public-private partnerships and get policy students and universities involved so that we are hacking away at these wicked problems together that's well said well on that note we're at 5 30 I think there might be some cookies out there donuts oh okay so thanks everyone for coming in don't forget that yeah no I think all the books are gone okay