 set the stage for SoCAP 18. This next speaker is equally part of setting the stage for the amazing week that we have ahead. Ben Hect is the president and CEO of Living Cities, which is a collaborative of 18 of the world's leading foundations and financial institutions that are all working together to address economic and racial issues in American cities. Ben has a new book, Reclaiming the American Dream, which focuses on some of the known solutions to these recurring and very systemic issues. And I think his message is an amazing one to kick us off because it's equally one of hope and one of hard work that all of us will enjoy. So please welcome to the stage Ben Hect. Thank you, Lindsay. Everybody hear me okay? Great. Thank you for having me and thank you for that introduction. I wanna tell you a little bit more about myself. I've actually lived the American dream. My grandparents were immigrants. My father fought in World War II and when he came back, he went to college on the GI Bill. He bought a small home in suburban New Jersey with FHA financing and he put all three of his children through college. Growing up, I actually thought that everyone had a chance to claim the American dream, to have a life that was better, fuller, richer, regardless of birth or position. In fact, oops, I actually believed what it said in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights of including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. However, when I was about eight years old, I had an inkling that this was not universally true. I lived a few miles from Newark and in the summer of July of 1967, every time we'd go out and play in the streets, black smoke would bellow down Bloomfield Avenue from the riots that were happening in Newark. But I believe that President Obama said that we were actually committed to creating a more perfect union. However, if we're honest with ourselves and we really look at the data, we know that that just is not the case in America today. That over the past 40 years, the disparities in our country have gotten worse, not better, and they've become more extreme for people of color. So today, blacks make 59 cents every dollar that a white family makes, Latinos 72 cents. Education, which we know is critical to long-time, lifetime earnings. Whites have less than 40% of whites have a college degree, but the college degrees of Latinos and blacks remain stubbornly stuck in the teens. And even worse are the wealth disparities. Today, whites have a dollar to almost only a dime of wealth that whites, that black and brown people have, and if black and brown people have wealth at all, it's from equity in their homes. Looking back over the last 40 years, I really have to realize that I've looked at America through rose-colored glasses. And those of you who are young, that's the beavers and cleavers in looking through those glasses. That looking through those glasses and that vision actually kept me from coming to terms with harsh realities, that the stain of racism and slavery from the days of our founding and the writing of the Declaration of Independence actually continued to pollute our groundwater and remain the root cause of the disparities that we face in our country. Well, I believe that addressing these disparities is a moral imperative and actually threatens our very democracy. It's also a fundamental economic imperative. We, like most Western democracies, are reliant on consumer spending to drive our economy. And in fact, more than 70% of our GDP is driven by domestic consumer spending. And unlike other Western democracies, we actually have the opportunity to have our population growing as this data from Brookings shows you that by 2050, we'll have almost 225 million Americans. And that growth is coming from people of color, a new majority. But that growing population won't be able to sustain our consumptive economy because our current systems simply don't work to produce the income and wealth for them that our economy needs. This isn't about tweaking the current systems that we have or building a new program that might work around the edges. This is actually about building a new normal, a new way that we work to educate this new majority, to get capital to this new majority to build companies and the like. What's promising and little understood is that we've actually been building these new normals for the past decade. Local leaders, public, private, philanthropic, nonprofit, frustrated with the dysfunction in Washington and also sometimes in their state capitals have actually been innovating, often with seed money from philanthropy to build new systems that work and that work for this new majority that it turns out work for white people too. And with technology, many of them have been able to take these ideas, spread them, adopt and adapt them to their own communities. So I wrote this book, Reclaiming the American Dreams so people could see what I've seen. That over the past 10 years, we already have many of the solutions that could bring economic mobility to literally millions of Americans right now and to show people how to do it. The book is a blueprint for overcoming barriers to doing just that, to addressing the mutually reinforcing issues that we have to address in places. How do we ensure people have the education for today's economy? That they increase their income, that they build wealth, that they're actually able to connect to opportunities wherever they exist. And maybe more importantly than all of those is that they are part of re-knitting our social fabric so we make a commitment to the greater good so we see these improvements consistently year in and year out. These solutions are not just one offs. They've literally landed in tens or hundreds of places already impacting hundreds of thousands of people. They've all been done and they can be done together without any changes to law or regulations. Let me say it again. All of the things in the book and the few I talk about here can all be done by us without any change in law or regulations. They simply require us to change our behavior, whether we're an executive, an elected official, an investor, a grant maker, or a citizen. So let me give you a few examples of what I'm talking about. And when I go through them, I wanna show you the low hanging fruit we're talking about, the millions of Americans right now who we're talking about. So we all know that every year of education beyond high school adds $250,000 to a person's lifetime earnings every year. So if we had proven solutions that we knew would give people a year or more, you'd think that they would be everywhere. Well, there are. In fact, different decisions made by many more superintendents and university presidents today could be helping 15 million kids to be able to get college degrees while they're in high school. In the early 2000s, the Gates Foundation funded a bunch of schools who were trying to solve the problems of high school, where you had huge number of dropouts, most of them black and brown kids. And what came out of that were early college high schools. So now superintendents and college presidents work together to ensure that when a kid graduates, they graduate not just with a high school degree, but college credits and often an associate's degree. 260 high schools in 23 states already serving 100,000 kids have done that, but there's 26,000 high schools in America and 15 million kids who could benefit from it. Let me give you another example. Different decisions made today by many more private investors could be getting capital to entrepreneurs of color to grow their businesses and increase the jobs and increase jobs, but we're not doing it enough. So much of the conversation around the country is about job destruction from artificial intelligence and from robots. We've always had job destruction in our country. Our real challenge in America is about job creation. So many of you may know that more than 90% of all new jobs in America come from companies less than five years old, which means that we need to be building a lot of new companies that are less than five years old, but our data shows us that in fact, the number of startups has been steadily going down for the last 40 years and that a couple of years ago, the number of startups was actually exceeded by the number of companies that failed. There's a number of reasons for that, but one big reason is who starts those startups historically in America. So in 1996, more than 75%, three quarters of all jobs, all companies created were created by white folks. A few years ago in 2015, that was down to 60%, and now it's down into the 50s, which pretty much is following the demographic change of America. The challenge is the number of companies started by people of color while it's increased. The sheer number doesn't come close to the number that we used to get. So what we need to ensure of is that we have new ways of getting capital and revenue to entrepreneurs of our fastest growing population, the new majority, so they can grow their companies and jobs when they don't have friends and family, which is how we've historically relied on companies to be started. Again, if the disparities are a dime to a dollar, 59 cents to a dollar, it's no wonder that people of color don't have the resources to start up companies at the rates that white folks did. And in fact, we've worked with Gallup and others who've actually looked at the science of what it takes the entrepreneurial characteristics and in fact, what they found, which is no surprise, there's no correlation between the characteristics of a successful entrepreneur and race, income, geography, gender, and the like. In fact, studies show that if we had filled those startup holes from blacks to people of color, we'd have a million more jobs a year. And so what's promising is that there are already private investors who have invested more than $300 million into 30 venture capital and private equity firms that are owned by black and brown venture capitalists and private equity folks, including Keisha Cash's Impact America Fund, who I talk about in the book. And they're intentionally investing in the kinds of people and looking at how do you underwrite the kind of people we know need to be able to grow and create these companies and jobs. But 30 firms out of the now 800 venture capital firms, it's clearly we have a long way to go. We need a new normal for how capital can fuel American capitalism for this new majority. And finally, different decisions by many more mayors and many more philanthropists can strengthen our civic fabric and commitment to the greater good that we need by attacking the groundwater that's polluted by racism and by building a new generation of leaders of color. So more than 100 leaders around the country have already put a racial equity lens on their government operations to identify the structural and institutional racism and begin to take it down. And in more than a dozen cities around the country, mayors and philanthropists have built boards and commissions leadership institutes where they've able to find community leaders of multiple colors and races, train them, and then mayors place them on boards and commissions. There's been more than 1,000 leaders who've been able to experience that, including Elon Omar, who is about to be the first Muslim member of Congress. Yes. And she was one of the first graduates of the class of this boards and commissions leadership institute in Minneapolis and St. Paul. With only 3,500 local government units in America with more than 10,000 people, we actually can transform these places. They can become and should become a pillar of how we strengthen our civic fabric commitment to a greater good, but we have to make very different choices. It turns out that Margaret Mead's quote is right. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. We only need us to make this real. You, me, elected officials, CEOs, et cetera, to change our own behaviors and finish what our nation's founders never really started. We can reclaim the American dream, this time very intentionally for all, but we need to lean into our own power, into our own agency. But what's clear is we need to just do it. If you're interested in getting into a raffle for a free copy of my book, please text Reclaim to 474747, and we're picking winners later this week. Thank you very much for having me.