 Well, good afternoon, good evening, sort of on the cusp of those two. Welcome to New America, my name is Mark Schmidt, I'm the director of the political reform program here at New America, and one of the things that we've done in the political reform program over the last year or so, just by coincidence, if we'll put the timetable on that, is to really move, really make sure that we're thinking not just about kind of procedural and structural reforms to American democracy, but really looking deep at what it is that enables and encourages citizens to become active participants in self-government, you know, aside from just the act of voting. And that's a huge field, and we're very fortunate to have some colleagues here who really have dug deeply into that and have some great thoughts about it. And over the course of the year, we have folks working here have put out this paper on building civic capacity in an era of democratic crisis, which is available in the back and outside. And we hosted a workshop discussion of all these topics with about 50 people earlier in the year, and then we wanted to kind of bring that together with the paper and really do a more public and open discussion of some of these topics. And what I find really thrilling about this is somebody who's a little bit of a tourist in this field is that we're really bringing together some different threads of how citizens become engaged in government, whether it's government itself reaching out to help pull people in, whether it's community organizing around very concrete activist goals, and whether it's structured experiments like participatory budgeting, where you're really testing people's ability to go deeper than they sometimes do. And there are great strengths and weaknesses and things we've learned from each of those and bringing all those together along with technology innovations that make things possible that weren't possible otherwise really adds up to a much broader field, I think, than if you look at any of those alone. So I'm just gonna do real quick introductions here and then we'll get as quickly to the substance as possible. First on the farthest from me is really our host and organizer and to me an intellectual kind of guru about these ideas, Holly Russon Gilman, who is a fellow both in the Open Technology Institute here and in our program. She's worked in the White House as in the Open Government and Innovation. She's written, she has a PhD from Harvard and on the subject of participatory budgeting as her PhD and she's been a consultant on numerous topics whenever I talk to her. She's mentioned somebody else she knows and has worked with and has been engaged in a ton of things and I won't do the full list of it. Next to Holly is Dr. Risha Barry, who's a project management analyst with the City of Richmond's Office of Community Wealth Building which has been providing anti-poverty strategy and policy advice to the mayor since 2015, really digging into drivers of structural poverty and unequal distribution of benefits but really bringing in the citizens of Richmond to those conversations. Sort of in them, I guess really right in the middle. Shawn McDonald, Shawn Martin McDonald is the CEO of Frontline SMS and a fellow at Stanford's Digital Society Lab. He's been working on ideas that involve text messaging and other approaches to enable citizens to connect to government and both internationally and domestically and it seems a little like Holly to have a pretty broad range of experiences. Next to Shawn, Dr. Marcia Chatlane is associate professor of history in African American Studies at Georgetown. She's also a fellow here at New America. She's the work that she's been doing most recently which is one of my favorite of our fellows' projects has looked at the politics and economics of fast food in black America which is, we can't get her talking about it because it's just a little bit maybe. Fascinating topic but she's also focused on women's activism and has written a book called Southside Girls Growing Up in the Great Migration and finally Chris Nils is the Research and Systems Associate for the Governance Program at the Democracy Fund which has been an important ally and friend to us in thinking about kind of the same range of issues of structural reform and participation. He focuses on how work from their grantees and partners intersect with the congressional system to create meaningful progress and of course how people interact with Congress this week, previously. That's also an important part of civic engagement. So I'm just gonna turn over to Holly and let's have a fun conversation. We'll open it up and then we'll have a bit of a reception afterwards. So again, thank you all for coming. Wonderful. Well, this is an amazing group and thank you all for coming out on this sort of rainy evening. So we're gonna try to make this a really fun conversation about democracy and I'm gonna have each of the panelists share a little bit about their expertise and experience, have a few questions and then really open it up to be as democratic as we can be at this event. So very quickly, I just wanna say a few thank yous. Thank you to our esteemed panelists. This is an amazing group and I think as Mark mentioned, really speaks to the diversity of perspectives that we're trying to bring to this conversation here at New America. So thank you for coming. Right, another round of applause. And events take a tremendous amount of work here and so just a big thank you to the whole political reform team. Mark, you heard from Christian, Alina, Cheyenne, Heather and Lee, family centered social policy which is also co-sponsoring this event. Rachel is over here and they've been tremendous supporters of this work and the entire New America events team. Clara, Brandon, it takes a lot of people to put these events together. So thank you all. And I think part of what we've been trying to figure out here at New America is what does civic engagement look like beyond elections? With the caveat that elections can be a really shallow way to engage people in their democracy. And part of what we wanna do tonight is really widen the aperture. So if we say the current crisis that we're in, the president is a symptom, not a cause of the deterioration of democracy that we've seen. And part of what we talk about in the white paper is that this is a result of systemic inequalities in our system. And so this is racial, gender, geographic. And so in this network of people that we've been working with, they are all over the country. They're in Appalachia, they're from Alameda County in California, all the way to Boston. And the other big aspect of this is trying to think about new models and innovations that are occurring in civil society but also in local government itself. And a big thrust of this research is that we have to actually rebuild the infrastructure of democracy to really look at the modes and mechanisms by which we think about engagement. And so with that sort of as the broad umbrella, I wanna turn it over to Risha to talk a little bit about the work she's been spearheading in the Richmond government and the Office of Community Wealth Building. Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Just to give a little context about our work, our office is the first of its kind in the country. It's in city government, which is unheard of. We are charged with reducing poverty by 40% by 2030. And when we really think about that, that's roughly about 52,000 people. And so when you talk about civic engagement and thinking about that number, how do we have authentic community engagement? And one of the items that we have within our structure is a citizen's advisory board. And that was designed to ensure that families that live this experience on a regular basis, heads of households have a seat at the table to begin to inform the strategy for poverty reduction within the city. And there are mayoral appointments, city council appointments, but they give us the rich nuggets of the lived experience. And so one of the areas that we talked about recently was one of the members of our council talked about, wow, if we really knew what that number was to sort of move along the ladder towards what we call self-sufficiency, what is that number? What does that look like? Because that will help my family and I really begin to determine what the next steps are in our path. And so what we did was we really sat down and had a conversation about wages. What were poverty wages? We looked at the living wage. We looked at various rungs on the ladder. And that particular individual really changed how we approach this concept of poverty reduction. It's not from a census track level where we sort of look across our crystal ball and say, wow, if people only did X, Y, or Z, we're actually engaging with people who live this experience on a regular basis. And so what we've done is really began to unpack what we call civic engagement because there are many aspects of that. Within government, we say, oh, well, we've sent flyers out and we sent the press release and we've had like a PSA out in the community out in the community and wow, people aren't here. What is that about? Or we've held meetings at nine o'clock in the morning or three o'clock in the afternoon. And so what we've learned is that to be authentically engaging the community, we need to go into the community. What a novel idea, right? We need to knock on doors. We need to ask the questions that we wrestle with on a regular basis. So not to bogar that, but that's just a little nugget about it. Yeah, I think Sean, do you want to jump in here about some of the tools you guys have been deploying in the community? Yeah, well, I mean, I think so in the, in a lot of what we work on is very similar, but from a technology perspective. It's this idea that services and the services that we provide at the city and state level are another sort of way that we build institutional legitimacy and also alleviate poverty and get the full benefit of the government that we create. The way that we invest in technology is who we decide to listen to. And so we started with that as a thesis and developed a bunch of tools within sort of text messaging because it is the most used two way communication platform in the world. And so we've been working with service providers from humanitarian responders to legal aid providers locally to listen and operate more effectively using text messaging. So one great example, and one of my favorite sort of partners of ours is Cleveland's Legal Aid Society, which for the last year and a half or so has been opened up a text line and started to interact with legal aid recipients via text messaging. Not only does that enable clients to ask them questions that they wouldn't necessarily ask in person, but it also enables them to coordinate the logistics of the court system, which you may or may not know is an enormous source of inefficiency, which causes all kinds of imprisonment, enormous waste of money, often just for things like missed appointments. So with little bits of communication, we can kind of smooth the wheels of the interaction and enable people to sort of take advantage of services and also defend their rights more effectively. And I think that that's a really core way in which we start to build more credible institutions, essentially by enabling them to reach everybody as equally as possible. That's very compelling. And I think, Marsha, if you wanna jump in here, sort of thinking about where we think about this moment of inequality in a historical perspective. Right, so I think sometimes my students ask, what is this moment just like? And I say every morning I wake up in a new year and some years it's 18, some days it's 1877, not a good year, some days it's 1896 and sometimes it feels like 1968 and these are never like in a good way. And you know, some days it's 1929. And I say that because I think that when we think about how we orient ourselves in this particular moment as we see not only the failure of democracy but the limits of something we call democracy, we have this rich body of knowledge called history that I think for too long we thought about it as history is a tool to orient subjects to the state rather than history as a tool to help individuals imagine both the limits and the possibilities of the state. And so I think right now, we're not only in a crisis of democracy but we're in a crisis of moral imagination about who or what we think the state can provide for and what citizens can demand from the state. And so this morning, like I often do, I was reading a book about housing policy in the late 60s and early 70s and how states were going to deal with this issue of housing segregation and the lack of affordable housing, particularly for African Americans. And I'm reading about George Romney's Opportunity Communities Program. And he had this vision of using these kind of working class suburbs as a vehicle to not only bring jobs to certain metropolitan statistical areas but to also bring good housing and this is a possibility and policy papers are saying things like the ring suburbs are like a noose around the neck of Negro America, right? This is in a policy briefing. And George Romney was not who we would consider a far left liberal by any stretch of the imagination but what George Romney was was a person whose political orientation was about the capacity of the state to provide for its citizens at a certain level so that the idea that state governments in Michigan and Illinois would think about engaging this program because this is how you bring housing to your citizens. We are so past that that I think as a historian it becomes so important to say to people, you think you have a radical idea. Think about what people were imagining the state could do in 1960 or 1970. And so I think that we need to reclaim the fact that we have thought about this and I think that kind of the other part of this is when we think about anti-poverty crusades, when we think about the National Welfare Rights Organization, when we think about the Poor People's Campaign which Reverend Barber is trying to reignite that passion, we start to understand that people living in poverty, people who have understood the political identity of being poor are able to think about citizenship probably in its clearest form because they're the ones who are most alienated from the possibilities of the democracy. And when we shift ourselves to talking and engaging in that way, our ideas just get better. Risha, maybe you wanna just respond quickly before we get through the Congressional process. Yeah, I think one of the key features that came up for us with the Citizens Advisory Board was this whole notion of anti-poverty. And we batted that around because the citizens that were at the table said, that sounds like it's anti-poor people. And so immediately we started looking for language shifts and community wealth building was like sort of that epiphany for the group to say, wow, everyone can be a part of this strategy for wealth building. And wealth building is where you are in that particular state. And so we've had a lot of conversation about using language that really is empowering, inspiring and not deficit based. And I find that a lot of times within the work it is about what the person needs to do and not the system or the structure. And so it's people-centric. And so what we've been able to do is just to begin to disaggregate that and say, let's look at this as a lack of resource or access to wages so that people can move forward along an economic stability and mobility pattern versus something that's inherently wrong with them which is very complex and tied into race very intrinsically. Oh, very interesting. Chris, do you want to jump in here about maybe how we can think about connecting this to some of the work you're thinking about on the ground in Congress? Sure, yeah. Listening to these conversations you think of Congress as the place where all of these issues and community interests are supposed to kind of bubble up and be discussed and debated at a federal level to set that federal policy. And a couple years ago we started really launching our program in earnest to focus on improving how Congress is performing essentially. A couple of things popped out. Congress is oriented toward hearing particular interests and in a particular way mostly through partisan lenses so that's very hard for regular community like the groups that people used to think of as an interest group, a more civic society to be heard anymore and it's kind of more issue-based. And another thing we became patently obvious through if you look at the kind of Gallup poll number that Congress has been very unpopular for quite a number of decades and to the point where people have just lost trust in it. Like people don't think it's relative to their lives and that's kind of dispiriting to us. And so part of the work that we do is to try to think about how do you create a better Congress that entices more participation and more trust and rekindles kind of interest in engaging with it. Now that's a challenge because right now the systems that Congress has to hear from people are really kind of oriented towards the one-to-one conversation or to be gathered up by mass advocacy groups and blasted at you. So if you were to be in, if you were a person in Richmond Virginia you'd have to basically throw your name in with a petition or something like that. That mass bulk email is really what Congress is hearing right now. It's very hard to surface those conversations with local groups. It happens. People go and visit their member of Congress and have good constituent conversations with staff or increasingly member districts but that regular contact, the systems are kind of breaking down to have that. I was at an event this past week where the House in 2014 developed a system where all the mass, all the advocacy email would come in through one kind of pipe and it started up in 2014. This year they've had 23 million pieces of communication come through that. That's about two thirds of all the communication that that system has ever had since 2014. So the volume is just spiking. The phones literally melted this year when they were revealing, they're debating repealing ACA. So there's kind of a breakdown, not just of like the public's part of this but the systems that Congress even has to hear what people want to tell it. And so we're working on, a lot of what we think about and work on is how do you rebuild kind of the infrastructure for those conversations to take place? It's really interesting because I'm hearing a few commonalities here, right? It feels like the beginning of this is a question about trust. And I think language is a very big component of this. Then I'm hearing about sort of tools. You know, you could call it process, you could call it mechanisms, you could call it tools. And then I'm hearing about sort of just sheer policy, right? What Marshall is talking about, sort of this policy governance question. And I think maybe we could try to unpack each of them because they seem like they're all part of coming together for this stew of democracy life going. Sean, maybe you want to talk a little bit about, because you're sort of at that intersection. Where have you sort of dealt with this maybe trust deficit? Like you're coming into Cleveland, you're introducing this tool. How do you sort of get buy-in or get some community support for it? Yeah, I mean the great thing about working with service providers, as opposed to sort of elected decision makers is that their value is really tangible. And so actually we really prefer to work with service providers because to an extent, people know what to expect. Whereas like a lot of times when you're trying to feed into a decision, it's like, yeah, I called and I left a message, but I'm not sure how that's gonna break down to their tally and then how that gets weighed against email versus like administrative consultation. Like it's the complexity of it is so difficult. And actually the point about, a lot of what we end up doing is trying to help people articulate how they listen and service providers to articulate how they listen. And to be able to reflect an honest assessment of the influence and the amount that they really will respond to what they hear as a way to kind of build trust. And so much of trust building in my experience has actually been about self-limitation, which is... We've gone existential very early in the night. It's like not super easy to explain to politicians like why you have to advocate power to get trust makes you more legitimate power. Anyway, so with service providers and with Cleveland it's dead simple because people need legal aid and they are in the unfortunate position of having so few resources that they're turning people away. So the value proposition for someone like legal aid is very clear. I think, I worked in the Senate for a little while and some time in the mail room and so saw a lot of how we dealt with incoming communication. I think the part of the policy conversation that I feel like that needs to be had is about what weight do we attach to the individual expression versus aggregated expression and how do we countenance the value of that aggregation. Because the tool side of it, if you have a clear set of definitions around that, pretty straightforward. Right, I mean that's very interesting and I wish I'd love to get your thoughts about this because I think you hit upon what I've been calling the two-way trust deficit, right? People, if you look at especially all levels of government but if we're looking on local, state and local and in Congress, they don't trust citizens and citizens don't trust the state and they're as concerned. I mean, there are marginalized communities for whom they don't want to be a part of the state for a lot of reasons. And so I think when I think about the work you've done, how did you get the trust of your committees and also of the mayor and that team? Well, I think we started off mayor Jones, Mayor Dwight Jones, really focused on commissioning a task force and just to say, what are the complexities of poverty? And let's just not look at it and just sort of pontificate about it but what are the strategies that we can come up with in various domains, transportation, economic development, housing and education? What are the areas that we can really begin to look at this and develop strategy around? So I feel like that was sort of a starter but we started at the top, right? So all of the think tank groups and the anchor institutions and business leaders, we started there but what happened was the community started coming in with this innovation to say, wow, with our Kellogg branch that we received, community members, we were looking at access gaps and barriers to early childhood services within a high poverty community and community said affordability, accessibility and trust. We can't afford the high quality services that are out there. We are unable to access them because we need them in a two mile radius and quite frankly, we lost trust within the system and so that was an epiphany for us to really say, wow, we really need to unpack that more but not just to have a conversation about it. What our director, Reginald Gordon did was actually open our office up on Fridays to have the entire community come in. All we ask is that they call and enhance to sort of help us with scheduling and people come in and have great ideas just about what's happening in their communities, what ideas they have about new business ventures. There are other people that need money or buildings or new opportunities for thinking about housing but that has been the best opportunity to really have this two way dialogue so it's not formalized, there's not a red button that's gonna count down and say, okay, your time is gone. It's a moment to have that human touch with the community to begin to have this conversation. One of the things that I was thinking about earlier was just with our budget. Last year we were in an interesting situation where we were before city council, there was an expectation of the previous mayor asked our former director how many people would it take to get out of poverty by 2030? And so he answered the question mathematically. He says, oh, it's about 1,500 people every year that we would have to move out of poverty. And so people were like, yes, we know the number. This is something we can rally around. No problem done and done. We got the number. But at the same time, there's a complexity around that. I mean, there's a reason why this hasn't happened and our new director stood before city council as a five member team and they asked him how many people have you moved out of poverty? And he said, 75. Oh wow, 75 families. And one member of council said, that is unacceptable. That's unacceptable. But when we really think about it, our funding, we had asked for $500,000 to really begin to have additional resources to help people navigate job services and new training. And Rachel had invited me up and I said, Rachel, I can't come, our budget's on the line. We were already funded for our level funding but we were asking for additional $500,000. Mayor approved it. City council had a paw up there. And so what happened was it was fascinating. We galvanized the community. And we said, we just did these little flyers that sort of looks like that little number 10 on the table there and we did a hashtag, I am CWB. I am a community wealth builder. And individuals that were impacted by workforce development center stood in line and stood before city council and said how this particular decision would impact them. And there was an array of community voices from people who, there was one gentleman who said, I've been in and out of the prison system for years. There's nothing that they can particularly do for me because of my record. But guess what? I had my rights restored. That's what changed my life through community wealth building. And so story after story, case after case, it really pulled upon the heartstrings and we were able to hold on to that funding. But Providence happened. The state actually had a TANF grant that we went after. So we were wrestling for $500,000. We were awarded 1.9 million. And so now it's that momentum, that hope. There were people in the audience that said, I've never participated in government before. I was so nervous standing there. And I think you can see the footage on the website. People who said, but this meant something to me. This changed my life and we did it. And we have so many members. There was a gentleman that stood up and he said, I'm gonna come back to you city council and I'm gonna run for mayor and I'm gonna have my platform in my community. And oh my gosh, we got a couple of calls to say, well, did he actually say that he was going to run for mayor? Like you can't say that like in a public forum. It has to be, you know? And so, but he was just so excited about the power of the citizen voice that was open up. Now, are we perfect? No, absolutely not. There's question about are we woken up? And for our African-American community, is American like awareness, awareness? Are you aware of our circumstance? Are you really aware? Are you aware that you can really touch the things that we're encountering? So are we perfect? No, because we need to continue to be infill by the stories, the authentic voices of the community. Now the community is coming back and saying, we are the owners of our story. You see, if you're something like this, Marcia, and I want to figure out, what year are we living in? You know? So that story is, for me, very 1970, where you have this moment in which the state is saying, we can actually make thoughtful interventions in raising the kind of financial quality of people's lives. And we may even have a few dollars to do it. My concern is that it becomes 1983, and that a taxpayer revolt says, wait a second, you're giving my hard-earned money to poor people who have felony records, who can't take care of their own kids. And I think that this is why, I think, at the heart of any kind of impactful social movement is a real attention to history to say, OK, we've got wealth building, but what we're going to keep our eye out for is the taxpayer retrenchment or the new regulations about who can be in programs or what happens when the social services system says, now that you're out of poverty, you can't get that voucher, right? And so I think that what this moment has taught us is that every day, I think, the loudest constituency can shift. And it could be the group of people who decide to park it in an office and say, we're going to move this issue. And it could be, in some days, it's the lobbyist who has the strategy that they dump $10 million in, but there are days where they lose, too. And so I think that this past year, I think the strategy that has helped to undermine democracy the most is the forgetting. We were playing a little game in the back, and I said, I'm going to say five things that happened in the past 11 months and try to remember what month that happened in. James Coney got fired. What month did that happen in? Very good. Our panelists could not remember, right? Why couldn't they remember? Because then they remembered when the decision was made about DACA. And then they remembered when the tax bill was on the horizon. And so that kind of legislative and emotional exhaustion is one of the reasons why our movement's more than anything else needs to have the person who is there for the remembering to remind us what we were able to do and to remind us what the fight in the backlash looks like when we win. Chris, what would it take to do this in Congress, to take some of this energy or innovation? Well, how would you do it? Wow. Yeah, unfortunately, Congress, it's 1910. Oh, wow. Both from a kind of political polarization standpoint. There's these great kind of graphs of how polarized Congress has been, and this is about as bad as it's been since the early 20th century. Technologically, it's like, you know, I'm not that much farther ahead of 1910, but it's over. What would it take? Gosh. I think there are a number of things. I mean, from kind of our, I mean, obviously the political conversation is for another place, but for our forum, I think a way to restore trust both ways. I think Congress, I think there's a bunker mentality right now in the many offices about the incoming from constituents, particularly because of the completely legitimate, but somewhat kind of unfocused way of the constituents have mobilized kind of anti-Trump to kind of yell at the institutions and no, you know, when you talk to staff, or when Lorelai Kelly out there who's at the VEX Center and we're funding some of her research, goes to talk to district staff, like, you know, there's not a substantive conversation going on. The staff actually do want to hear, all right, what do you want us to do? Like, you told us no, what do you actually want, you know, and or from the flip side, you're telling us, you want something, we agree with you, but is that really necessarily what all the best policy that our other voices are going to be heard there too? I think the key is in part creating kind of safer places for those conversations to happen. If it's online, it's fine, but it should be person to person too, or it should be kind of in live in person. We sponsored some research, funded some research by Congressional Management Foundation to look at teletown halls, and if you can innovate a teletown hall format to make it less like, you know, and sound actually like a Robocall, like, yeah, I'm Congressman X, tell me what you think. All right, thank you, goodbye. Like, and make it more of an actual deliberative forum. That's one possibility. I think there's also the energy that's out there around kind of civic engagement, I think has to be connected to relationships in communities. There's good research out there that said by Professor Cornel Adam Levine, who says, you know, if you just talk about issues, you actually make people kind of despondent about it. If you ask people, hey, mobilize on poverty, you actually remind people like, how the deck is stacked against them, they actually are more likely to disengage, like not actually less likely to vote even. So kind of the cure for that, one of the curators of that is actually to try to connect people in a kind of shared sense of community and not make a bet just about them. But, you know, I think it's a complicated situation, but I think for Congress, remembering that it's fundamentally a human institution and that you're trying to build relationships with constituents and there's gonna be a variety of ways to do that, but they're kind of reinvest in that that relationship in this part of it. I'm gonna ask each of the panelists the same question I asked Chris about, sort of if you could do one thing right now in this moment, what would it be? I think a lot of problems can be solved with lots of money. I mean, really, I mean, money will not make you personally happy or like it won't improve the quality of like, you know, your thing with your parents or your spouse, but boy, does it have to solve a lot of problems. And I say that because I fear that we have a generation of young people and I get to teach them that are so excited about civic participation. They've started organizations like Rise to Run. You see all these young people running for office. They're amazing. I think one of the ways that Black Lives Matter is appearing in this moment is the number of young people and people of color who are running for office for the first time because their sensibility about their relationship to the state has changed. And so if it's not on the street mobilization, it is really these great local level elections. It's so exciting. And at the same time, I fear that there is a generation of young people who don't think anything is possible if it happens within the confines of the state. It's like when I tell my students that there was a time you could watch Sesame Street and there were no corporate underwriters. When I say if you were going to solve this problem, you know, where would you go? And the idea of, you know, taxpayers paying into a system that we all enjoy. You know, even our young people who are at public universities, they're not public universities. And so I think that we have the energy and we have the capacity. But again, I'm very concerned about our ideas or sense that, but it happens outside, as an extracurricular activity outside of direct engagement with the state. And that as citizens, that we also don't have a responsibility to invest our, you know, to full capacity. And this is the thing that I think about this moment. For me, I fear that it can be confusing about what it is to have a strong state. Sean, I want you to jump in. Maybe you could also just speak to, you know, I think Chris made this point about the online offline. I think for a lot of people who've been in this space through the last year, have been really a disillusioning moment on some of the tech utopian opportunities. And so, I mean, I think what's always been great about the work you've been doing is that text message is so lightweight and ubiquitous. But if there's any thoughts you want to share on that, and also what you would do to help out. And also what I would do to save the world. No pressure. So I should confess a little bit that I'm a lawyer. And so I believe in structure. And I think that a lot of what concerns me, a lot of the things that I see building trust effectively is about building expectations that institutions are capable of living up to. And so much of what I care about and so much of what I do professionally is essentially taking the small amounts of structured service-oriented architecture that we have and expanding the number of people who can get into it, while also hopefully equipping the service providers with the tools to listen effectively. So much of what I see and I'm really enthusiastic about, of course, is how many people are able to, there's enormous growth and expression. Like you were saying sort of 60 something percent of the incoming pipeline in the last two years, the last year, is so heartening. But we're not teaching institutions to listen. And we're not teaching the people who are supposed to be on the other side of that message. How to, I feel like how to respond in a way that is ultimately representative. Like you don't wanna lock someone into a direct voting system, but certainly we want probably more direction than we're getting now. Particularly on really important issues like gun control or healthcare or any number of other things. So I guess I think that the offline organizing matters. And I think that it's the trust relationship that I think as echoed through everybody's comments is impossible to overstate. But I think that that has to come from people consistently delivering or overperforming on the expectations that they set with the people who need them. And for me, that comes down to articulating, okay, if I get a petition of 500,000 people, is that different than eliminating an email campaign, deleting it because I don't wanna look at it? How are we taking these sort of unstructured bellwether indicators and turning them into things that people can trust? Because how many town hall meetings do you show up to to lose the vote with the person you showed up for? Again and again and think that the system is gonna work for you. Not just the individual, like the ideas that will punish the individual, but I think that there's a lot working against that. So for me, I think that in the same way that I love civic participation and structures of civic participation, I think investing in the very basic logistical mechanics of public services is just such a valuable enterprise. And it's not better appointment systems, organizing things so people can communicate when they have families or when they have jobs that they can't get out of during the day or in the evening. That kind of altering the format of interaction with public service providers so that the system is empathetic and also responsive. I think that would be where I would focus. That's not super specific, but it's a way out. It's a way out, but it's interesting that we have these very diverse viewpoints that there really are commonalities about how you build trust and how you need to rebuild these structures. One of the people we've been working with in our network is Regina Schwartz, who heads up the first office of public engagement in New York City. And to your point, Sean, they are taking tools from Analyst Institute, tools that are used on campaigns and now they're moving them to governance. They're actually going door to door like a grassroots campaign, talking to constituents, telling them what services they're available to them and then following up to your points about actually connecting people. But I think part of why it's so exciting to have a conversation that is broad with all these diverse viewpoints is it kind of is like a thousand flowers bloom. We don't know if it's a student in Marshall's class, if it's a member of Congress trying a new technology or a service provider in Cleveland or Richmond, Virginia, where you're going to see an idea that really can have exponential scale. And so I think final question for Risha about what you would do if you could do anything and then I think let's open it up. We have so many experts here in our audience at the time. Wow, if I could do anything. I mean, I think for us right now is we're not listening for listening's sake. So we've hosted a series of listening sessions. We're formalizing that into policy recommendations. Something that's tangible that we've heard as a culmination of having these listening sessions. We're also developing a living wage campaign. So we'll kick that off in January with our mayor and really beginning to incentivize businesses at different levels like gold, silver, bronze. And so where they'd have little stickers to say, you know, I'm an aspiring living wage entity and this is what this looks like. And so really beginning to say and incentivize our business community, our corporate community, while at the same time sort of really lifting up this notion of community wealth building so that it is sort of a holistic model. So it's not just the haves and the have nots that all of us are working together so that there's equity. Let's jump in with some questions for this incredible group. We have a mic. Hi, I'm Richard Siener. I teach at Johns Hopkins University and my question's for Chris. And I'm gonna put on my political scientist cap here. A lot of the studies of congressional interaction with constituents were done back in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s at a time when Congress was a lot more individualistic. It was a lot less partisan. They found that members tend to have these sort of nonpartisan service oriented images back home, but now we're in an era where Congress is much more centralized, it's much more partisan. I imagine that members have a much more difficult time reaching out to people on the other side simply because the gap is so big. Like in the 1970s you could say, well, I bring home the pork. I take care of your local interest groups. I may be a Democrat representing a Republican leading district, but everybody likes me. Today I think that's probably a lot more difficult. And so I'm wondering how do you address those issues of engagement in an atmosphere that's just a lot more conflictual, a lot more fraught than it once was. Those are great points. And is why our job is much more difficult than it would have been for sure. And we think about it in a couple of ways. Can you turn members into advocates for better behavior themselves in that? Can you create kind of incentives for them to run, not necessarily as bipartisan deal makers anymore, because that's very hard, or as, because there aren't any deals. Or they don't get the Dutch legislation until the handwritten notes show up on their desk. Or there are, they're actually punished for reaching out across the aisle. But can you, when they're in a primary or they're running as a challenger, can you say, can you incentivize them to say, I'm running a different kind of campaign to represent your voice and I'm gonna be kind of, take on a mode of civility and not maybe be as partisan. That's one avenue that's much more difficult, especially for a foundation to support. There are good actors and there are opportunities and I think it's incumbent upon the entire culture of D.C. to kind of elevate those moments, where a will-heard will write a bill on modernizing the federal technology procurement process and it's bipartisan. It's not gonna be the big chunks of big deals, where I gotta see those bills anymore, but the smaller kind of lower hanging fruit that are still substantive and show evidence of good behavior that leadership don't take for themselves. Leadership has taken all the big issues off the table a lot of times. I think if you can kind of, it's a weird answer because it's kind of discursive, but I think that it's there. Do you have any other questions? Fabulous, okay, I don't think. Good evening, who's this on? I'm Sakina. I do federal nutrition work here in D.C., specifically related to the SNAP program. So my question's for Risha and for Sean. So the SNAP program can be viewed as a program that lifts people out of poverty according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure and that's based on 130% of the federal poverty line. In D.C., they use 200% of the federal poverty line to qualify families for the program. And Sean, I'm not sure if you've heard about any issues with DHS or the Department of Human Services in D.C., but they are currently under, there's a lawsuit putting against them because of poor services and people being cut off from their benefits and appropriate correspondence not going out to clients. And so for Risha, with the Poverty Commission in Richmond, have you guys thought about how SNAP can play a role in getting families in Richmond out of poverty or setting markers for how many people you want in the SNAP program to see if that would be an effective measure. And for Sean, have y'all partnered with any state agencies to experiment with text messaging for appointments or for benefits or to just improve communication because in D.C., we don't even have an online application. Everything has to be done by hand. And a lot of times that's literally my job, especially for seniors. And so I wonder what sort of communication can happen between a commission and a frontline SMS to see how we can get people into the program, but also how we can use it as a measurement to see if a family is at least on paper, according to the SBM, if they're actually out of poverty. Oh, that's awesome. Oh, really? Wow, it's all coming together? It must be so hot. It's been so hard to be on this channel. The questions were brusque, but really they were brusque. Risha, you should jump in here. Yeah. I'm so proud of you, but I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's a very important question. I mean, when we look at like, one of the things we wrestle with was that, like what's the poverty line? 100%, 200%, 400%. And so it was just sort of driving us crazy internally, like really looking at that. The access that we have to the Department of Human Services within city government is they're actually just right a few floors down from us. So our DCAO for Human Services is at the table and she's like, yeah, we really need to have a conversation about this and what does that look like? And so what's exciting for us is that it's just not the office of community wealth building on the 15th floor of city hall. It's sort of like the entire city government we're beginning to charge each other with what are the goals and outcomes that we could really task each other's department with to begin to look at this across the scale. We are really beginning to peel the layers back on what it means for a family to move up for movement. So to move from a poverty wage to a minimum wage to a median wage to a living wage, et cetera. And so what we are finding is that there are certain points in the ladder where SNAP benefits are decreased or TANF is gone away or your housing subsidy moves out of the way and what people typically do is, I'm gonna quit my job because technically that $1 increase in their salary will cost them hundreds of dollars in subsidies. And so what we're trying to do is really have a courageous conversation about give us two years, that's what we're finding. Two years wrap around supports, benefits, a case manager, what we're calling now sort of life coaches because really it's about how do you manage all of this and moving people forward. So I don't have sort of like the antidote for that but it is something that we're looking at to help inform people to make better decisions. So no, you don't have to quit your job, hang in there, but you may need to make a choice. So it might be, okay, instead of taking that $1 raise to lose $600 of subsidies, there might be some other workarounds that may need to happen before you can move to that next level, but it is that reality check that we have both with the clients that we serve but also the service providers in the field. We really try, isn't a sort of short answer there. We believe in it. I mean, we're successful sometimes and those are really good days. I think honestly the procurement relationship between a small business like us, a social enterprise like us, and a city of like DC size is very expensive. And so it's hard, you know, it can be hard to go in with we try and we work in 200 countries over the last 12 years. So we work in rural Malawi, like South Sudan. Like we're in all kinds of places where pricing matters and we try and stay as low as possible. It is very hard for us to essentially invest in a big lengthy procurement process for a client. So it's the kind of thing where we end up being forced into being very opportunistic as a technology partner with organizations or with service providers who already know that they want what we have to offer. And so we've worked a fair amount domestically. We have the kind of statistics you'd want to show for it. But it's a lot of the mechanics of doing business in the cities is sort of one of the pieces of this. They think we don't always talk about as much but has a really big influence on what kind of surge capacity a city can call on. We're local and want to help as a DC resident. Like I would love to set it up so that you didn't have to fill out so many forms basically. But it's, you know, I think it's navigating that business infrastructure and how technology investments are made inside of a city that can be really, really difficult, particularly if you're not, if that's not like all you do. You know, I really appreciate that comment, Sean, because I do think it speaks to some of the larger challenges and you think about, you know, we've talked today about the values, the trust, but also about the tools and the policy and the governance. The Knight Foundation recently put out a report on civic tech and future models and some of the exit strategies. And it's very challenging in this space. And there were not that many given in this report. One of them was data monetization, which you can understand for marginalized communities, why that doesn't make sense. And, you know, when I've seen the work of Frontline, you know, been working with you guys for maybe a decade and you guys are really out there trying to do, you know, tools for the public good. And this is, I really think, indicative of the challenges. Marcia or Chris, do you have anything you want to add in this conversation? We're going to keep on going. Any questions? I would just say the one thing that Sakina's question also surfaces is about how, you know, before the technology revolution, this would be the job of a civil employee who is, you know, the man or woman at the office. And those were the opportunities that was allowed that allowed for a precariously situated African-American middle class to live in a place like Washington, D.C. and to send their families to college. When we talk about the racial wealth gap, we are not necessarily talking about an educational gap. We're talking about the ability to convert generations from, you know, at the margins of the middle class, you know, closer and closer to the wealth building. And so I think that, you know, this is the part that becomes very complicated because yes, there's more efficient ways of doing this, but we also have an entire employment structure that was able to bring some mobility. And I think like most experiments in the United States that have been about a kind of racial and economic closing of gaps, we try it for maybe six good years. And then there's something that just explodes the whole model so we don't even know what's possible. We don't really know what school integration could have been. We don't know what it really meant to diversify colleges and universities. We don't really know what it means to have a diverse electorate, you know, robustly in elections over a long period of time. We have these glimpse, you know, of what it could be like. And so I think that that is another layer in thinking about when we make these transitions to make the bureaucracy more efficient, what do we lose and what do we still need to consider to hold on to? I think that's a great point and some of us have done this before. I mean, I only have a question up here. And then, Seth. Hello. Thank you so much for this inspiring and provocative, robust conversation and especially the last round of back and forth. When, I can't remember your name on the far right, when you talked about leadership taking big issues off the table, it really helped me close a, I don't know, maybe not close a loop, but it helped me connect a thread that initiated in, for me, at the beginning of the conversation because you, the push off the table or sort of the taking or the pulling off the table reminds me of what gets pushed off the table. And at the, so this is a long comment but a question is gonna come in there for real. But when you started, when you opened the panel, I thought immediately about Arundhati Roy and her comments about NGOization. And the question of what gets sort of pushed off the table raises for me a question about what happens when so many of the forms of democratic participation become supplanted by the kind of public engagement that's sponsored by private parties or the sort of privatized nonprofit industrial complex. So I guess the question inside of this long comment is how do we increase democratic participation when the language of social entrepreneurship, the B-Corp, is so profoundly seductive. And I linked that to Dr. Chetland's comment about money, right? The feeling that the state isn't robust enough to handle civic needs because you get in this current moment, right? The people who are most empowered to handle that is a kind of privatized NGOized sector. So how do we balance that to loop back to your question about trust? That's a great question. An unanswerable question, but thank you. It's actually not unanswerable. I don't know who that was for, but I've been like... Everyone's gonna get a shot. It's a panel of democracies, Sean. So that's how it works in democracy. It works out for everybody, right? Exactly. So the thing that I'm... So I've been wrestling with that for a really long time because I'm a technology company that inserts myself into public processes. And I have one of the most fascinating things to me about corporate governance is that actually companies are not designed to keep promises. So no matter what they tell you, right? Like if they get bought, someone rewrites those promises. And you see that from WhatsApp to, I mean, any number of other things, right? There are lots and lots of ways in which it is very difficult to build the kind of citizen accountability that you're working on inside of corporate infrastructure. One place where I would offer a very small ray of hope is in the way that we build data systems. So I've been working on something called the Civic Trust for a long time. And a Civic Trust, so trust is a legal document by which we convey property. We have been building land trusts in the United States for a long time and actually had a pretty dark day for a good land trust very recently. But trusts are this incredibly flexible legal construct that enables us to take things like that we own, things that represent us, or things that we have control over like data and put them into collective bargaining and to fiduciary infrastructure that can give us a voice in the way that increasingly private decisions are made. And so it's an interesting way to use private law to bring public governance into private infrastructure. And it's already actually starting to get really incredible traction. The UK government, for example, in the way that it is prioritizing its investments in data and AI is looking at data trusts as the number one governance recommendation. So they're gonna start building citizen consultation into the data brokers that they use just inside the government for how they train AI into public services. And I'll stop after this, but I was in Pittsburgh the end of last week. Also the Silicon Valley Regional Data Trust is very similar work, but you're starting to see these kind of multi-stakeholder groups come up out of building more holistic, more coherent, more citizen-centered service architecture and inside basically trust models where you have multi-stakeholder governance that votes on individual use. So communities maintaining their own sort of very granular census data and then using access to that data as a bartering system as leverage into conversations they might not have otherwise had access to. Not the only or even close to a perfect solution, but there are lots and lots of really interesting ways in which movements, co-ops, and trusts are all becoming private infrastructure that is starting to really pull on the need for public investment and public voice. Michelle, I think your comments are so helpful. Cause on one hand, this is the whole point of me being here to say, but the state, it could be so much. And as an historian being very clear that this is not a new invention. I think what has happened is that once you have more and more people who are once at the margins, particularly people of color, being able to access the benefits of the state as a citizen, those benefits are the doors closed on those benefits. And so there has always been corporate influence and there has always been a sector of benevolence that manages kind of the relationship of the citizen of the state and the state. So I can't say that we're out of history, but I do believe that the tolerance and expectations and the standards for those relationships have shifted the more and more vulnerable communities are kind of brought into the fray. And so I think where we are right now is a negotiation process in which we have to understand that we can't lose sight that the state is still a powerful actor because we are powerful actors. And I think that state resources have been a bargaining chip as has been a tool of exclusion versus a tool of possibility because of the racialized nature of access to them, right? So I think that in this particular moment, the thing that I am also concerned about is that we are in a moment where perhaps we imagine the corporate citizen as being held accountable by the number of parks they donate or the number of scholarship funds that they set up rather than the amount of taxes they pay, right? And I think once you start to confuse those two, we get in trouble because we say this company has opened up five schools and you're thinking, well, shouldn't a community be able to have a school based on taxpayer funds? You know what I mean? I think we eliminate that question and we say, well, this is good. They're building schools. And so I think that is the kind of shift that concerns me the most. It was such a rich comment. I was like unpacking it as you guys were talking and just kind of hooking it back to the state. Congress is obviously part of the executive branch but it's part of the state too. And back to Holly's question of what would you do with Congress and speaking as an individual, not as an employee. One of the things that I think would be great for a new Congress that might have new leadership would be to pledge to rebuild the institution's internal independent capacity, which has been chronically underfunded to the point of like barely functioning and say, we're gonna actually invest X million amount of dollars in rebuilding the legislative support offices, paying people. So it's not entirely analogous to the state in which you were saying it, but the legislative branch has seated so much power and authority of knowledge and increasingly to even constituent communications. That Facebook wants to manage this communication to harvest the information that constituents are gonna be providing. So I think kind of keeping a firewall of this interest around the data that constituents are going to share with the institution. And vendors are good actors that say we're not selling data. Popbox is one of them, like we're not selling this data. But also in conjunction with that is rebuilding at least the legislative part of the state is incredibly important. The legislative part and then also the local governance, sorry. Well, I love your idea of talking offline about this because I think there is a question about who owns the data. And like because it becomes monetized so quickly and it could be monetized for good or maybe not so good and it has different impacts on the community. And so I think that is right at the central core of what we're wrestling with in our community as well. Just really, there are a lot of, there are a number of community agents and activists that are saying these are our stories and we want to monetize our stories in such a way that we can impact change in our community. And so just sort of hearing what you said you take that back home and really begin to do that. It's so interesting your question how it really cuts across all these areas. And I just finished a great book called democratizing inequalities. And it talks a lot about the corporatization from the public engagement, industrial complex to also just corporate social responsibility. Empowerment campaigns, Walmart, Wells Fargo. And I think as you'll see in the Jackson case study that Family Centered Social Policy put out and we have our white paper, to me the only kind of countervailing power it's not a panacea but is to really have genuine civic voice that leads to civic power. And I think citizens know when they're being duped and when they're being engaged for lip service. And a lot of us in this room have been involved in participatory budgeting which is a process where you empower people with monies and they allocate them. And people get that that's real power and that's not just advisory. So I think it's a really important question and I think it's very hard to have countervailing power. I think we had one more question up here and then we get to all be together for a reception. How fabulous is this? So my question was actually going exactly where you went Holly on the question. So returning to the first question on the matter of how do you get Congress to do this? How do you get Congress to be more participatory? I think the question is one of their incentives, right? And Sean, you said it was sort of a blip in the conversation but sort of selling them on developing power actually gives them more trust from the government or more trust from the citizenry. I'd love to hear more from you guys about how you make that sell, right? What are the talking points for elected officials but importantly also their staff and sort of the agency staff around this matter? And to Holly to your point to make sure that that argument doesn't become only about their self-interest and only about getting themselves reelected which I know ends up creating really shallow processes that ultimately disempower communities. Let's just go down the line. I'm gonna pass and then I'll think about it. How do we make the sell? We couch it usually in a lot of other things. Everybody lives a day, right? And so you try and figure out how to make someone's day a little bit easier, how to make them more effective. How to, I think to points made earlier most of the time many people mean well. It's hard to talk about I'm not an expert on Congress so my opinions are different. But I think that where I make the sell is in being able to do more with less. And I think particularly for service providers but also frankly people who live in the communities they represent that's more than enough. People wanna do more, they wanna reach people and they wanna feel as though they're doing a pretty good job. It's a super, it's a terrible answer to your question. But I think that the real benefit of using text messaging is that you invite more people in than you would otherwise be able to do. And that you're able to do it within structures that help them get to whatever the answer is faster in a way that they're more comfortable with on their schedule, on their timeline. If that doesn't work then it's hard. I think the converse of something like that is looking at what's happening what's recently happened with the FCC's comment process. That they administrative law generally tries to frame like this is how executive agencies listen and we're learning that lots of different people are looking at ways to kind of leverage that to their own end. So it's not easy but I think the sell is to be good at your job. I'm not good at making these cases. The only thing I always, the only thing I have is to say you wanna be on the right side of history and here are three ways you can do that. And I've been trying to make this case a lot in this political moment and has not been working. But I try to give people example, I grew up in Chicago under the regime of a kind of machine politics that was terribly problematic but so compelling. Like you could be that alderman, like there will be five parks named after you. You go to six churches, you eat whatever you want. I mean, I think that on the congressional level that is a hard case to make but if this is about meeting a kind of narcissism where it's at and using it for the greater good I do think that there is a way in which particularly in this moment clarity about legacy building can be an effective tool because we are desperate and I think we use whatever we have available to us. Yeah, that's a good point particularly about legacy building because you're not gonna have most likely you have your name on some land markets legislation anymore. This is one way. And maybe the sell is just to remind them how shitty it is to be a member of Congress right now and how all of them are running for the exits, right? And nobody, you know, have, I can swear at New America, right? That's right, I can get worse. The, you know, the number of retirements for people not facing a difficult reelection is really the kind of canary in the coal mine. And if you can give them a sense like, look, this is gonna be the one thing in your day. You gotta make the phone calls, raise money, you gotta do all the bad stuff but this is an opportunity to do what you came here to do. Whatever that thing is, that's, you know, pour a little bit of time and maybe it gets bigger and bigger as you get better at this. Like that's maybe the sell you can possibly make right now. And hopefully you get different kinds of leaders elected to office that can take the picture a little better. That's really a weak way to end that, sorry. Sorry, can I say anything more optimistic? I was just thinking about the economic case for poverty reduction. So we know that the city's bond rating is tied into poverty reduction as well as with regional transportation. So there's a case there for everyone to have a specific role and why does poverty matter? Because it matters because our bond rating is impacted by that. It matters because we will impact regional transportation. So all of these three features sort of work together. And if we sort of isolate them, we're not gonna solve this comprehensively. And so that's been sort of our level playing field where we were working from. He's been an amazing panelist and you know our own version of a courageous conversation as you were talking about. And thank you for these incredible questions. And I hope you guys will continue the conversation outside. So please join me in thanking this fantastic panel. Thank you.