Welcome everyone in our space and welcome who is joining us from outer space. You might be watching this later on. It might be because of your access needs. And we just want you to know that we are so happy. You can connect with us. Feel free to throughout the course of the session after the fact even write your comments on the stream, ask your questions. This is just the beginning of the conversation every time is a new beginning for us to relearn and re-engage with what comes up for you. As we have these conversations and today we're talking about positive five-day scheduling and no more 10 out of 12s with three of my favorite human beings in this conversation who are actualizing it and manifesting it and helping us understand how that can be a reality. So in order to prepare the space for us to gather today I would like to pass the ball to Adriana who will read our land acknowledgments. Thank you, Rachel. We're coming to you from the land of the Lenny Lenape people who's historical territory includes the places colonially known as Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Long Island and the Lower Hudson Valley. For more than 10,000 years the Lenape people have been stewards of these lands as well as the river of human beings or the Delaware River. Over the past 250 years many of the Lenape people were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and dispersed throughout the country though some families remained. These families continue the traditions of their ancestors to this day. The violence that removed the Lenape from their homeland is a powerful part of the history of Pennsylvania and we acknowledge that in this moment and we work and live on these very lands. This is the story of our entire country. We encourage you to learn about the lands where you live and work and the history of the people who live there before colonization, many who still live there today. Though they are often starved of the very resources they protected for so long including access to housing, sustainable food practices, safety, clean water and the land where they once lived with their families. This information was provided in part by www.Lenape-nation.org. Thank you so much, Adriana. We receive and acknowledge that the statements and realities. And now it is my pleasure to offer into this space our community agreements. So this is something that we will all engage in together. We see you all as human participants even as listeners. As a session participants you commit with us to welcome all caregiving responsibilities and realities in the background or foreground of any meetups, phone calls and exchanges and embrace your life in our pursuit of productive and supportive practices. As a session participant you commit with us to creating a transgender and non-binary affirming space all language that includes but is not limited to mother, parent, dad, caregiver, et cetera applies to any individual who identifies with these terms. And as a session participant you commit with PAL to creating spaces rooted in justice and anti-racism in our structures, practices, policies, principles and producing. And as a session participant you commit with us to creating safe and supportive spaces for disability access and inclusion and all access needs present in the space. And I would also like to share the safety acknowledgement of our community and our community responsibility as we gather digitally before we engage in our conversation. And we want everyone to know with this agreement that we prioritize safety over civility. That means that if at any point in this session you feel unsafe, please speak up for your own safety using your voice, the chat or even private messaging myself or a colleague if that feels most supportive. Whether there's Zoom bombing or aggressions that may be seen as micro to the outside but are not micro to your experience, we will honor your experience and engage immediately. Your safety is more important than the flow of this conversation. So please absolutely prioritize yourself in that moment. And with that, it is my absolute pleasure to introduce our guests to this conversation. I will be doing brief introductions to honor the work that has touched Powell's work and touched our lives. And then I invite them to also self-introduce after that before we get started. My, as I do the introductions I would like to invite everyone participating in this session to please drop into the chat. Why you're here, what came to mind when you saw the title of this session? What's on your heart when it comes to scheduling? It can be even just one word like logistics or it can be one word like one phrase like crew payment or it can be I really need this in my life. Can you talk about how to frame this? We invite all those questions. If you would like me to read your question anonymously please share a direct message with me and I'm happy to be that voice in the space. So populate, populate that chat. Without further ado, I would like to first introduce Patricia McGregor who is a director extraordinaire. We first met at the Yale School of Drama. Her accolades are aplenty which we'll share later on in the space. But Patricia as a director has effectively executed five day rehearsal days. She rehearsal week, she has executed tech without 10 out of 12s and is a part of the PAL advisory board because of her fluency and understanding of this mission and this agenda as being part of labor equity and labor ethics and how we can all engage in a workplace that honors its artists and contributors. So Patricia, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me and thank you for the work you do. No, likewise. And next Clint Ramos who is a designer extraordinaire as well who congratulations on the opening of Slave Play recently, both UM and C. The reopening I should say, Clint is also a part of the collective design action that is advocating for a more equitable anti-racist and humane spaces. I believe it applies to all disciplines but it is engaging with the lived experiences of designers in the workplace. So Clint, thank you so much for being here. It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you. And yes, I echo Patricia. Thank you for all the work that you've been doing in that act. Listen, we can only do this together. Pal's theme this year is communal change. There is no single person who can enter a space and change it, enter the space and find your community and then change it together. Yes, Dan. And then my absolute pleasure to introduce Lindsay Jones, designer extraordinaire himself as a sound designer probably doesn't want you to know or does want you to know, used to be an actor, find his videos online. And some of the funniest Facebook posts, by the way, but in terms of professional credits, also congratulations on the reopening of Slip Play on Broadway. And thank you for starting No More 10 Out of 12s, which is a national cohort that is directly engaging with eliminating the 10 out of 12s as practice in our tech weeks and encouraging folks to find productive ways to bring the five-day rehearsal week into reality, into the regular standard. The trajectory has been incredible, how this movement has grown in terms of its surveys. It's lists of theaters who are actively engaging. At Pal, we always say, we don't talk in hypotheticals or theories, we talk in actuals. And No More 10 Out of 12s will drop the website in the chat is gathering those actuals of theaters who are putting into practice. So Lindsay, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. And I also want to echo Clint and Patricia that I'm so grateful for you. I feel like I learn so much every single time I'm in a room with you. So thank you for everything that you bring to all of us. A pleasure. That's what these rooms are for. And I just want to invite everyone on the chat too. We release our facilitators from having all the answers. We also release you from having all the questions. We're going to learn in this space, it's part of emergent strategy, right? That we're gonna find the conversation in this room that only the folks in this room can have. And thank you so much for our questions that are starting off. I would like to start with the few questions I have for our speakers, but then we're gonna dive in there. So just to start off with Patricia, my question to introduce for you is, could you just share your early relationship with five day rehearsal week, 10 out of 12s, your connection to your mother as an activist, which the anytime we can bring intergenerational realities in I'm so excited about. And then where you are now with your understanding of what it is, just like your timeline with this practice. Sure, so I may root it in my mom first in that my mom was an art teacher, she was a painter and an art teacher and a union worker. And so many of my earliest memories are being like dressing up my sister and I performing on picket lines at our school for better practices. And early on, maybe more around middle school, but the idea that the Fair Labor Standards Act happened in 1940, you know, Congress passed this school. The idea that the, oh, there's a little echo. Did you all hear that? I might have someone joining who's on double zooms. That's okay. That's all right. It's nice. Yeah. The idea that like the 40 hour work week and even, you know, it was interesting to hear Andrew Yang even question like maybe we should be at the four, you know, four days to five day. Anyhow, all of those, before I thought about it in terms of leadership as practices, it just felt like, well, this is the baseline that at least Congress has agreed to with a lot of work starting back in 1866. And I'm sure I'm before that, right? So like there has been a lot of people talk about, oh, this is so new. And I'm like, no, there's been an avalanche of people fighting for this and suffering against it for a long period of time. And that idea and the idea of collective action, you know, really is rooted in my mom's idea of what our best practices just across the board in education, in arts. So whenever she saw me in practices that were, you know, pushing against that, she would say, okay, well, it's a choice, it's a choice, but just know you all are making a choice. And I think that idea that we often inherit practices and we think that's just the way it is, but really being able to call into action that it's a choice. So I've always thought, well, as a workaholic person as well, and as a person who's inherited a culture that is kind of you've got to prove yourself and we want to have, everybody wants to have the best work. It was really in grad school, I started to think about what are the parameters? We started to feel the fraying edges. I started to see people very frayed by what was not chosen because I know sometimes you might choose to do something at midnight, you know, with a collective of people and that feels like a slightly separate thing, but what is demanded of you to participate? What hours are demanded? What is, you know, to participate? And so back then, I remember Nundimiso Tembe and I, her parents are arts leaders in South Africa and she said, you all should start advocating, why are you, you know, can you have five-day school weeks instead of six-day school weeks? What is the value? How do you, you know, what is the cost value analysis of this? And, you know, tragically around the time where we were advocating for looking at best practices, we had a student who died in a load-in that may have been completely, you know, it might have been a freak accident that had nothing to do with anything that we could prevent. And also it was at a time where we were not within a 40-hour work week. And he was a brilliant, you know, Pierre Salim, he was a very dear friend of mine. And I feel like that moment galvanized these things that I've been thinking about and I've been getting a lot of pushback on, but like this is, we have to work under best practices because the consequences can be grave, emotionally, physically, you know, in every kind of way. So that really lit a fire under that for me. And I just think, you know, a lot of people say I do think it helps if you're a caretaker, I think it helps if you're a lot of things, but I actually think it's just a better way to work. And I love somebody in their notes said 10 out of 12 is a clotheism for 14 out of 18s. There are many people for whom they are working 18 hours a day. We are trying to do work that illuminates humanity, that hopefully moves us towards a better way of being. And yet we work against that so often. And I have, what I love about the work that you're doing and these collaborators here is, I do feel like we're working more collectively because I've been in a lot of spaces where I've gotten such major resistance and such major call out like, you know, you're such a troublemaker for banging the pan on this. What's so exciting to me is it feels like now there's a collective wave. And this thing that felt like it was an outlier, this idea of five day work weeks or no 10 out of 12s, it feels like it's now centering in the conversation, which is so exciting because then I think we get to collectively move that thing forward. And it's not about an individual radical thought, it's about this is the best practice and we just have to create the new way. And anyhow, there's a lot I could say about it, but that's, I hope I answered what you asked. Yes, Anne did more. Yes, Anne and more. And I feel like the head nods I'm seeing and feeling in the activity in the chat is just evidence of that. Just to uplift some takeaways there, this idea of there has been an avalanche toward this for a very long time. And so the nervousness of that anyone would feel of like, oh, we'll have to invent ways of doing this. It's like, no, we just have to listen and research folks who have been doing this and be willing learners and be willing students of what a new way can be. And then this beautiful offering of we inherit our practices, that is like such a revolutionary recognition because then we realize that practices themselves aren't inherent to the work, but that they've just been handed over and can you return a gift? And so what you're talking about now at the end with this collective, it just really laid the foundation for me to realize, oh, wow, when we gather together as a group we are creating a new inheritance for the generations coming in. The last sessions are talking a lot about students and how are we conditioning students? So yes, Anne, yes, Anne did that. Jumping out from there, Clint, I'd love to hear your relationship with the schedule and your timeline of either first inception of experience it, the source point for design action and how it's evolved to where you are now in your relationship. Hi, friends. First of all, I wanna acknowledge that I'm also on Lenape land, acknowledging stolen land and also acknowledging those stolen people who built this country, I mean. I, my, it's funny, I just thought about like what I just said, you know, I think it is a legacy of capitalism and this is the legacy of America, right? Like I think there's no other sort of metaphor for America than the American theater. I think, you know, that's more effective in a way of like looking at it, right? Like the way we've contorted ourselves into convincing ourselves that these are actually, that these are noble, you know, that these practices are noble, that it is a higher goal because for some reason we are actually doing something that is close to something divine. We are not, we are workers and that's why I always wanna say, you know, oh, we are artists, but I wanna ground us in saying that we are actually workers. We are talking about labor practices, we are workers, right? My relationship to this schedule has always been like everybody's schedule, but I think for me, I come from an immigrant background, you know, I am an immigrant to this country and particularly with, you know, I'm from the Philippines and I know a lot of like Filipino immigrants here are, the relationship to this country is work, right? And but in that, like there's always an inculcated culture that all you need to do is really keep your head down and work, don't complain, keep your head down and work and you will get what you want, right? But I don't actually, I think part of that has been cultural and then when I moved here, right? So I come into this country thinking this and like, you know, being inculcated, even in the motherland, right? Which had been an American colony for a long time. And then you come into this country and then I work for a lot of black folk who basically tell me, no, you gotta work twice as hard, right? And I believe that and because it is true, right? It is true and it is, so all of this comes to, it collides, you know, in this kind of, this feeling of like, I can't say anything about this. I really can't. This is just the culture. This is, if I want to be part of this community of which I get a lot of satisfaction, not only sort of like just work-wise, but a community, you know, like I get to actually commune with people who think the same way as I do, who believe in the same politics as I do, at least they declare it, you know? And who actually are, who want to solve problems the way I want to solve problems, then that's the price I have to pay, right? This is the price for community. And I think that's the thing that I think we have to slowly dismantle, right? And I just have to say that I think, you know, thank God for Lindsay, right? Because, and this is sort of a double-edged sword, right?  We were just troublemakers, right? Outliers, complaining, not grateful, ingrates, right? And so, you know, I come at this whole thing with a lot of rage, straight up, a lot of rage. And I am most effective when I disrupt, you know? And so that's, to me, it really drove home the point, right? When after we see you had written out the demands. And I had, I was having a conversation with Rihanna Yazzie who runs New Native Theater. And she really hit that point of like, you know, yes, it is oppressive to everybody. Just consider the baseline oppression, which is already immense, right? But when you think about Native people, are people who are recovering from genocide and you are asking them to literally participate in working conditions that do not promote family, then what are we actually doing? It is not benign.  Because I hear this rhetoric right now, right? I hear this whole rhetoric that's happening in theaters right now, where it's like, well, you can choose a five-day work week or you can choose this. These are what institutions are doing right now. But I wanna ask these institutions, are you actually considering the power dynamics of who's asking these questions? What are you gonna do to these actors who wanna succeed, to these designers who wanna succeed, to these directors who wanna succeed and just say, hey, choose. This is what we've always done and this is what the institution knows best to do or do you wanna do the other way? What do you think they'll say? I wish I had a tambourine. I wish I had a tambourine. I'm just saying, we've been saying this for a long-ass time.   Yeah, no, I, yes, I will throw the ball to you, Lindsay. I just wanna uplift. I just wanna uplift because we don't have to do sharp cut-offs. Like, yes, yes, and Paul's opening session was on BIPOC leaders and a legacy of care because we have, we've been lied to about all our equity work the whole time. When it comes to childcare funds aren't sustainable, you can't bring children into the space, et cetera, et cetera. We're like, oh no, white supremacy-centered organizations don't know how to do it, but there are BIPOC leaders who have been doing it for decades, who have been doing it forever who live as modeled examples. But that looks like an outlier and revolutionary because they're not centered and I just wanna honor that. Yeah, I keep on going back to what Nicole Hanna Jones, there was a great conversation that Nicole Hanna Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates were having, right? And it was really about like how we formed this country, right? Like how did we form this country? And in that sort of the way we actually approach work, the way we actually approach sustenance and the way it's been legislated, right? And for 12 straight presidencies, all of those presidents actually had, like we're full-time slave owners. They weren't part-time moonlighting as slave owners, they were slave owners, right? And in that, in the formulation of all of these things, right, while they were what allowed them to conjure up these ideals in their drawing rooms was the idea that they were being sustained by a labor force that was separated from them, right? And how are we different? How are we different than the American theater? When our leaders are actually on location, whether that's in their offices or somebody, you know what I mean, like how are we different? Yeah, Sam. 100%. And I also want to lift up your point so important in all of these conversations, all of our equity conversations about the power dynamic.  I had a conversation this last fall with someone when I was talking about lactation space, I said, oh no, we have a fantastic lactation space. And I said, well, how do people know? Because part of access is being forward-facing with your commitment to it. And I was offered that when people ask for it, they can receive it and we'll just know when someone is pregnant. And the way that that centers people who are safe enough in the space to even say they have an access need. We are putting the obligation, when you put the obligation on the person with the access need to ask for access, it is not equity. It might not even be legal in some points, but this idea of if you're the institution, we talk about identifying where you are on the power dynamic vertical and where you are on the discrimination horizontal access.  The further toward discrimination potential you are and the lower you are on the power dynamic, you're the one with the greatest risk and fewer resources who should be approached more about all the assets and access that we have. So if you're gonna do no more 10 and 12s, if you're gonna do a five day work week, then do it and commit to it and hold yourself accountable, not the people who have to see complainant from you. And on that, I'd love to throw the ball to Lindsay. Talk to us, tell us about your personal trajectory with this movement and this passion and where it started or how it formed and where you are now. So, yes, I feel a lot of pressure to follow these two people who are just absolutely incredible. I do think it's important for me to acknowledge that my journey on this is a learning journey and that I have definitely been navigating my own position in white supremacy and privilege in terms of exploring the situation. For me, I mean, to start off, I have spent many years working nonstop, around the clock, doing show after show after show. And the best that I felt that I could do was to just master this system that we are all in, this system that is about putting the show's needs above all else. And that is a system that I was introduced to and I did my best to master that system as much as I could. And really where I began to become aware of it was at the very beginning of the pandemic, I noticed that all of my colleagues, designers like me, I work with an organization called Theatrical Sound and Signers and Composers Association. And I looked around and all of us, and we were all exhausted. We were all overwhelmed. Many of us felt unhealthy physically and mentally. And also I have many friends who are in design positions in the business. They've had tremendous strain on their relationships. They've had tremendous strain on their family building possibilities. It's very stressful. And so I introduced the idea of like, what if we came up with a way to sort of discuss self-care for the designer of trying to figure out how we could do that. And really it became clear almost immediately that self-care is almost impossible in the current system of six-day work weeks and 10 out of 12s. Like you have no time for self-care. You have no ability physically to create that. So that's sort of the impetus that really got us thinking about it. And then thankfully we see White America, White America Theater came out with their list of demands, where they placed it as a priority. And I look at those lists of demands as a tremendous gift to all of us for us to really stop and just stop and think and think carefully about what have we been doing? How can we do it better? Just from its basis form. And as I began to explore this more and be inspired by that document, the coalition of no more 10 out of 12s started to sort of form from that. I have been so lucky to be in conversations with people like Clint and Patricia and others who have been gracious enough to give us their labor in explaining the positions of how it is exceptionally hard on BIPOC communities and how it is exceptionally hard for caregiver communities and parents, things like that. Things that I have known as a parent myself in a tangential way, but to receive again and again, firsthand testimony and experience from those who have had a different path than me because I am a cisgendered white male at the end of the day and my experience, I didn't know all these things. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to learn and I just feel like it's my duty to hear these voices, to respond and to honor them, to honor their labor by trying to bring a more healthy and sustainable practice to our entire theater community so that we really can make lasting change for our entire community as a whole forever. I really think that we owe that to ourselves. We owe that to one another and I really believe that we must all work together as a community to solve this and I think we can. I think it's really going well and I'm really excited about where we are with this. Yeah, absolutely. So that's my follow-up is I love that you identified being on a learning journey. I think that a lot of folks on this call and maybe even folks watching the stream, that's okay to acknowledge for yourself too. You may not be at the point of like experience, you may be, I have my own kindness to baby Rachel really misunderstood the assignments story that I will share confession where it's okay to be kind to yourself that you did not know or do not know, but the question is, are you learning? What are you doing with the learning? And that's my question for you, Lindsay. I wanna hear about no more 10 out of 12s. What have you done with your learning now? Where is the cohort and what is the cohort? Well, okay, so that part is really exciting. I mean, that is the part I'm super, super excited about. Just to talk briefly about the journey of no more 10 out of 12s, what happened was initially we began as sort of a collective of designers, just as a starting place, we almost immediately reached out to stage managers. We found directors, actors, producers, production managers. We wanted to try and find as many different parts of the industries we could to have everyone work together so that we could all have a sort of universal perspective of how these practices affect people within their individual job tracks inside of theater. We then began collecting data and research. We invited several health and safety experts into our group who have been able to inform us with all sorts of information. And then we created a website which you can check out now. It's nomore10outof12s.com. And there is all kinds of information on exactly the data of why 10 out of 12s and six day rehearsal weeks are harmful from a health perspective, from a safety perspective, from a respect and a fairness and equality perspective. All of those things are really important. They're laid out there. And then from there, we started to collect people's individual experiences through our petition and through our survey to try and understand people's things. And from there, we've begun to sort of branch out and say, okay, let's take all this stuff that we've learned. Let's share this with as many people as possible. Let's share this with as many people as possible. Let's get this conversation started, find a friend and sit down with them and say, I know you don't like having to do these 10 out of 12s. Here are some helpful reasons for you to understand why you don't like them, as opposed to just somehow you're lazy or you don't wanna work hard because I've never met a single person working in theater who doesn't wanna work hard. We all come to this life with a tremendous amount of passion and a tremendous amount of ambition. We understand theater is not an easy thing to make a living in from its basis thing, but it does not have to be exploitative. It does not have to be anti-family. It does not have to be anti-bipocket. It does not have to be anti-disabled. There's so many things it doesn't have to be. And by having these conversations, allowing people the ability to reflect on what these potential changes could mean, it's been so exciting to just watch light bulb after light bulb after light bulb, turn on for people who say, I can make a difference, I wanna start this. And so that has been our journey. And where we are right now is we have over 125 theatrical institutions who have made the commitment to either no more 10 out of 12s and or six day work weeks. We're continuing to add people to that list all the time. You can see that list on our solutions page of nomore10outof12s.com and we're continuing to push. And we want to be available as a resource for people to ask questions and try to understand how they can make these changes because I think the hardest part is saying yes. Everything after that is totally manageable. And we wanna help people learn how to say yes. 100%. I absolutely agree. Per transition actually to the chat because y'all are sharing some great stuff here. Thank you so much.  Thank you from Rebecca. I'm here because San Francisco Shakes has been actively humanizing rehearsal schedules since 2018, choosing a five day schedule and no 10 until since 2020. I wanna hear from others who are doing this and what best practices they've found, especially for directors, designers, stage managers and others since much of the focus has been on actors. And I'd love to refine that even further Rebecca, if that's okay, because Lindsay let's just dive in. Could you just like share briefly before we jump to the next question about your thoughts on centering crew and designers and folks who live in techs and how to make sure that the practice of just eliminating 10 or 12 centers, the folks who need it. Absolutely. So yes, as it has already been pointed out in the chat and thank you to those who have said that, a 10 and a 12 essentially just to break it down is a requirement from Actors Equity Association that is for actors and stage managers only that they work a maximum of 10 hours in a day out of a 12 hour span. That is currently the only theater union that has any type of mandate on how long a worker can work in a day. So for example, in my union, United Scenic Artists, I have no limit on how many hours I can work in a given work day or how many days in a row I can work. The same is true for those in the stage hands who are in IOTC and many other unions that are not Actors Equity. They all have no limits. So as a result, a 10 and a 12 day that we know the actors are working can frequently mean a 16 to 18 hour day for those who are working four hours before the actors arrive doing notes and frequently several hours after the actors leave at night, which is a completely unsustainable way of living. You can't really do that for that long. And I think Clint said this earlier, we're not any greater humans, we're mortals like everyone else. We only have so much physical and mental reserves after which we become to, we do too. So by reducing 10 out of 12s to a lower number what we're basically doing is taking those folks who work those 18 hour days and we're lessening those hours, hopefully by at least two hours. That's our start. In a perfect world, it could be less and there may be more ways to accept that, but we wanna at least make a good faith first step to allow people to have less of a longer day so that they can do their jobs and still have a life and have their health. Absolutely. Let's do a pendulum swing. Lindsay, I'm gonna do a quick play with you. And I'm gonna be executive director, really excited about making change in my organization and I'm gonna come to you and I would like for you to, as a designer crew advocate, ask for what you need. So I would like to say, okay, Lindsay, that's great, but then what do we do? What hours are you doing six out of eight? Is that still for the actors or is that for the crew? I mean, does the crew come six out of eight and then the actors come three? And this just sounds like a lot of hours scheduled. Do you have a template or do you have a format, a best practice or other organizations that are doing it in a way that's structured that I can write down on paper and the numbers? So yes, the great news is I have a list of 125 seniors that have already started doing this. They're all available to you at any point. They're on our, we encourage you to contact those theaters because the truth is all theaters work differently from one another, it's challenging to sort of say, like, well, let's work for this theater, so it'll just take their solution and paste it into yours. Every theater seems to have a different culture, house seems to have a different corporate structure, but those ideas, they can be shared. And so hopefully by contacting theaters that are on our list and saying, how did you do this? You can gain ideas from that and make your own ideas. No more 10 out of 12 doesn't necessarily have a specific template that we can hand to say, here's how you solve your problem, American Theater. And technically it's not really our responsibility to do that. We want you to own that solution.  If we just hand it to you, there's no way to know for sure how seriously you're gonna take it, but if you really put the time and the thought and the effort to explore these things and we've given you all the resources for you to do that, we believe you're gonna come up with not only the best solution for your organization, but the most long lasting and substantial solution. And it's also we're saying this should be an evolving idea.  In theory, you'll be listening to your artists. You'll be listening to the workers around you and saying, how is this working for you? What adjustments do we need to make? And this will be an ongoing thing which then hopefully might translate into other areas such as childcare and other things that I'm sure people in this room would be very glad to talk about as well. The idea of like once you start listening to your workers to make it a more beneficial place to work, perhaps there are other changes you can make to make it a sustainable environment over the long term. That's my hope in the future. 100%. There's a director question, Patricia, that I'm gonna throw to you in a hot minute, but just a huge yes, Anne, that the responsibility of self-education, anyone who wants like a quick template and answers, answers no. Do the research, invest in the work. Lindsay said, listen to your artists and here's why that's gonna feel scary and not as professional or as structured is because exactly that of what we've been talking about all week as well. You start saying like, well, if we provide childcare and those access needs, we'll set a precedent that we have to do more. And we're saying, that's exactly the point. We're not saying here's your one sheet on how to eliminate 10 out of 12s and still come up with a show that people buy tickets for. We're saying, listen to your artists, hear the resources you need to self-educate, prove yourself as a leader by how you invest in your immediate community first before you start talking about your donor community and your audience community. Thank you for that.  As a director, thinking about how to advocate for the needs of my actors and creative team to producers. As a programming manager and a nonprofit, thinking about the toll that tech performance has taken our part-time staff and non-exempt full-time staff who might have to manage comp time. So Patricia, I know you've had these conversations with producers. So yeah, sharing kind of sharing what that dialogue is like. I feel like, A, I love that you put the matrix of where you sit on the vertical and horizontal in terms of access and all that. And I think people now see me coming and they're like, she's gonna ask me that five days a week. And in the rehearsal room, it's actually easier. A, because it's just the way I work. I feel, okay, a couple of things you can use to advocate. A, the labor does not end when you're in the room, right? So everyone, my expectation is that, or my knowledge is that people outside the room. So if you wanna just count numbers, count the amount of hours it takes for an actor to learn their lines. Count the amount of time it takes for a designer to build a thing. Count the amount of like, so say you wanna go by the numbers. There are so many numbers outside of the numbers in the room. So if you are dealing with somebody who has an abacus in front of them, move those beads around and you're gonna find a different formula and maybe you'll respect that formula, right? That's first of all. Second of all, this formula that we've received that almost any play, maybe there's more time built in for a musical. But whether you have a one hour solo show or like a three act play, it is all generally expected to rehearse in the same amount of time and tech in the same amount of time. That is arbitrary. So it's already a problematic formula because it's not being built based on the specific pieces. So let's already admit that it's flawed. It comes from capitalism, it's arbitrary. So in terms of how to advocate, A, acknowledging the amount of labor that happens outside of a room outside of meetings, I think that's one way. B, and I really do, it's even recently, I feel I failed on, I came into a room saying, I do five day work weeks, I blah, blah, blah, and I didn't look at the schedule all the way down to tech. And even though I want five day work weeks, including tech week, there is so much more pushback, which is part of why I appreciate Lindsey and Clint and the work that you do with the knowledge that you have, because I can control the parameters of my rehearsal room more easily, there are less voices. Whereas, I've been really pushed very hard back on, where they say, well, we can't do it because of this, we can't do it because of that, you're not gonna serve those groups. So I'd say making sure that those, the holistic conversations, because both are important to me, five day work weeks, 10 out of 12s, making sure to like look rigorously at the calendar from toe to top feels really important. And I do think this opt-in option is highly problematic. I think it will, there is an elite club element of what we do. And that elite club element means that even in problematic, even in times where people are, the hours are problematic, there are a lot of people who can buy their way out of some of the levels of discomfort, right? There are people who can have like full-time nannies and this person's gonna do this and I can Uber that. And that just reinforces this culture of elitism, which is also reinforces white supremacy, which also reinforces patriarchy. So I think if you really look at, what are your core values? If you really value these things, you have to undo the system that you've inherited and you have to acknowledge the amount of labor. Thank you, Clint for centering this idea in that we are workers. You have to acknowledge the work that is happening radically. And still, even as I advocate for these things, I still, I usually wake up at two in the morning from two to four, I do work. I started to just send the emails at two in the morning because I was like, I actually want you all to know that in order for me to do this work, I have to be up at two in the morning to make that thing happen. So it's okay that you see, you're actually seeing my labor, my outside of the traditional rehearsal room labor. So I think ways in which we acknowledge that and ways in which we really, you know, and it's hard because I want to be as gracious as I can. I want to, but there are times where you say, you've got to take a hard look. And if you are calling that you value these things or don't pretend you value them. That's one of my conversations. Now like, let's not pretend that you value them. Just like do something else. But if you're saying you're valuing them, these are some of the steps that you need to take. And I love that this whole conversation was is framed as centering humanity. And I think one of the things, because our time is one of the ways in which we share how we value humanity. And even in rehearsal rooms, I tend to start rehearsal rooms and even tech sometimes with everyone answering these questions, I am, I want, I need, I feel. And you sometimes feel producers or people being like, that's a waste of time. And I say, what, acknowledging everyone's humanity? Because we have to fight against this capitalist system that just wants us to produce, without valuing each other's humanity. So like Lindsay said, we don't have all of the quick answer cheat sheets, but there are people who are doing it well. And I always say, find the people who are doing it in a way that inspires you. Ask them how they did it. And pull yourself back when you get ruffled and think to yourself, what do I need to learn? How can I be a part of this continuum? Yes, and what I love about that is we've so many of these sessions this week, the idea of communication as part of dismantling structures that are oppressive has come up. The fact that we can acknowledge, I'm in a learning place. I don't have it figured out in the beginning of that perfection. Will you teach me? It's so important and necessary. First of all, Clint, I saw you writing a few things down or having some thoughts. I just want to offer the space to you before I move to a question. Yeah, no, I just wanted to build on what Patricia and Lindsay have been saying in those questions actually. Like, how do you advocate? How do you convince people? And that's always been sort of the dilemma, right? And particularly for people who operate on a different level of advocacy because we all advocate differently, right? And for me, I think part of where I'm most effective, as I said, is disruption. And then how do you actually, you know, how do you, most of the time I just get tone police, right? And none of that goes through. And so I've found that I think for me, the best, one of the best things was to release, you know, people love data. You know, they're like, show me the data. Show me the data, show me the science. And then so like for me, I think the biggest thing really is like, you know, going back to this idea of what this is about, which Patricia said, which is humanity, right? Like, and really looking at the fundamentals of science, right? And I think, you know, I remember Stephanie Ibarra, like, you know, she and I were talking about this and we were talking about like how like Octavia Butler, and I know that you mentioned that Edwin Marie Brown and other black futurists have actually said, we have not seen the world that we are reaching for. We have not, we have not, we have not, we still have to actually find out what that world is. We have not experienced it. And I'm gonna tell you why, right? Because this country and time immemorial, we have actually been functioning, we have been operating on a very lessened and decreased cognitive performance level. And I say that because we have been functioning on a culture of scarcity. When I first listened to this whole scarcity thing, I thought it was like, are they talking about? Like what exactly are you talking about? Right? And it took me a long time and I like, you know, like really digging into this. And it's scientifically proven, right? It's just science, right? That when you operate on this level where you are of want on a daily basis, right? It's inculcated to yourself on a cellular level. Your cognitive performance is so lessened by almost like 40%, right? So when we talk about like these labor practices that promote a being where when you wake up, the thing that you think about immediately is I didn't get enough sleep, right? That's the number one thing. And then you go through your day thinking we don't have enough time, right? You end your day in your bed thinking about the tasks that you failed to do. Every single step of your day is about how you are actually failing, right? And this relates to like the studies that have been done on scarcity mindsets, right? And we can think about this in like any resource, right? And particularly what we're talking about, like what we're talking about here is time, right? But you can transpose this in any sort of resource, right? And so when people in like countries where and developing countries where all they think about is not having enough, right? Psychologists have tested these cultures and literally cultures where they actually have a glimmer of hope, right? They have figured out a way to kind of disrupt that thinking. Cognitive behavior actually rises. And this is proven like when Brazil, there was a point in Brazil's trajectory where they actually dismantled that. And almost overnight the economy went boom, right? And it was because of leadership that it actually plummeted back again. So all I'm saying, I'm gonna put this study in the chat, right? And so we have to really think about it scientifically, right? We have been functioning in this country on that level. But when we look at our resource, IE time, right? Rehearsal time, tech time, production time, when we really look at it as just time that we have as opposed to not enough time, we have not imagined how a fully functioning cognitive performance being actually could solve these problems, could actually create art in a way that we've never seen before. We've not imagined that, we've not experienced it because it is not in our psyche. We actually don't know what that is. Can you imagine just creating art fully 100% loaded? I cannot, that to me is profound. Yes. I just wanna build on something that Clint is saying which I think is so important and so inspiring, which is we're no longer talking about the theoretical anymore. We're not talking about like if A plus B equals C. Like it's not, we're talking about the honest truth of what's happening in this moment. If you look at what's currently taking place in the American theater right now, we are looking at a labor shortage. It is a real thing where people left theater during the pandemic and they will not be returning. And in many cases they left for better working conditions. I mean, it's as simple as that. And when now we are looking for labor in theater, particularly in the technical end of the field, it's a real struggle to find those people. They're just not, they're not there as much as they used to be. And we as an in working environment now have got to look at ways to be competitive. We have to look at how we can lure workers to our environment. We can't just take it that, hey, we're in show business and everybody wants to be in show business. So therefore we never have to worry about taking care of people. We're learning the hard lesson right now in this moment, which is that we must do this for our survival as an institution. This isn't just about like doing the right thing. Although God willing, I would love for everybody just to do things because it's the right thing. But let's say you're not interested in doing the right thing, even if you're not. You still have to do this because otherwise down the road, we're gonna be in trouble. We're gonna, you know, the theater makers are gonna, generation's gonna age out and there's not gonna be another generation to replace them in the same way. And then you think you're gonna have to make financial adjustments now, just wait. You'll find out how you're gonna have to make adjustments in a really difficult and unfriendly way. And you have the opportunity now to work together as a team. So take advantage of things like the article that Colleen has posted is a fantastic article on really understanding why these changes have got to be made right now. Don't wait because we need this next generation of theater makers and we need to bring them in rather than tell them that they either have to accept it or leave because they'll leave. And then where are we? I wanna, I wanna co-sign on what's been said. I also wanna pause myself back and acknowledge that I'm on the Cumae land in San Diego. I feel like often we rush forward and we miss the most important thing. So I will acknowledge that I rush forward and miss the most important thing. So I wanna start with that. I wanna also call out that often this idea of equity and excellence are pitted against each other. And I wanna put an example and it makes sense in some ways why this example is here because of who was in the room. So I had an assistant director who came to see this production of Hamlet I did at the public touring production and he said, what happened? What was the drama? What was the like, what was the thing that made that thing so big, you know, good? That thing was good, what happened? Which is the inherited culture of like hazing and that something terrible had to have happened to make that right. At that time, Stephanie Abara was the head of the mobile unit. And Stephanie and after a long time of working with Oscar and then the things that Stephanie was advocating for and many people were advocating for, she just said, what do you need? I said, I'm gonna do five-day work weeks. I wanna do this, I wanna do that. And they said, great. The amount of love, I often say rigor and love, you know, that's how I wanna work is rigor and love. The show was excellent because equity was centered. Yes, people were excellent. Chakwati was excellent, all that. But we had such a joyful time and worked so hard and made this beautiful thing that was centered in all the best practices we could think of and continued best practices that we couldn't even think of. Like I see Garlia is, you know, on this call. And I remember when I was working on the mobile this summer, she said, Patricia, you didn't, you know, we have care. We have childcare. We have care, you know, to center it in some of this PAL stuff. I know I've inherited trauma about what so many people said, listen, you're a female director, like don't talk about having kids, don't talk about any of that stuff. And I've inherited, even as I advocate for all of these things, I've inherited this idea that it's my job where I had for a long time to just like suck it up, figure it out, you know, move things forward. And it's in these, I've found that in these spaces where best practices are really put in, the work can be excellent and sustainable and a space to Lindsay's point where people want to be and a space where more people are allowed to show up.  And I say, you've got so much more power. You know, I don't mind losing things. I don't mind people saying, you're not gonna work here if you wanna work in that way. And I've taken that hit. There are people who don't have to take that hit, who could get on the front lines of these things and create best practices and excellent work. So that's one of my biggest things is like, let's stop pitting excellence and equity against each other. And the more power you have, the more power you have in the room, the more on the front lines. I might, you know, next year I might take, I want my voice to be, you know, advocate, but I also wanna like recede from some of the front lines and have people who, you know, it's like, we've been doing a lot of the on-roading. If you believe in the thing, can you take the front lines of it? And it can lead to a more equitable, more excellent and more sustainable into the future because a lot of new, you know, upcoming generations are like, no, we're not trying to have that flawed thing that you all just decided you could go through that hazing process. So anyhow, I just, I appreciate so much this idea of collective learning as well because we all may be trying to move things forward in our lanes, but then it's so refreshing to be with people who've been thinking about these things. And I also hope that people who are listening to these things will be fed by it and then might also find themselves on the front lines more often, especially the more power you have in the game. Yes, and yes, and this is a real call to action. Folks may have come in here or joined to be like, I want my call to action to be my one sheet in my template, but no, the call to action is your advocates are tired, they're making your art better, making the space better. Your call to action is like, now it's time for you to step up and be better and do a better job using your privilege and your platform and your leadership to say yes to people when they tell you what they need in order to make that art that you say you're begging them to make in your space. I also wanna uplift that phrase that you shared Patricia that excellence and equity are often pitted against each other. That is such an important anchor point in framing this whole conversation because I think that's part of the shame surrounding it and part of the guilt surrounding it and asking for what you need because we've been conditioned to feel if I ask for childcare, if I ask for five rehearsals, if I ask for, can I take my kid to the doctor they might have been exposed to COVID, if I ask for these things, I'm gonna be seen as difficult, it increases exponentially depending on the intersections of your reality and discrimination and you will be seen as less of an artist, less of a contributor. You will be making the play not as good. You will be making the work not as good and the audacity of that lie, that myth that if you do not, in earlier today, Tamanya Garza, she's our National Director of Community and Justice Initiatives shared the phrase that institutions cannot continue just making a sacrifice at the altar of performative change or performative justice because the collateral damage is real talent, it's real people, it's real art and I just wanna continue to drive from this idea, thank you, Clint, that you introduced in the space of, imagine the work we could make with sleep, with food, with coming into the room saying, what do you need instead of where have you been? That entitlement is not gonna bring anyone's best forward Clint, feel free to jump in, I also have some questions we can try to get to in the chats, thank you all again for being so engaged here. Yes, this is a question from Facebook. I love all my design opportunities but logistics and this kind of hearkens a bit, I'll do a comment and then pass on to anyone who wants to answer but I love all my design opportunities but logistics, too much work needing it all to make a living. I'm a freelance designer, adjunct professor, working at multiple schools and community theater, not enough time to see my kids, I would love a 40 hour week job with reasonable hours, still making a living and grow my career, but how? And I just wanna offer that like so much of this is centered around this idea of this reality of exhaustion that you introduced in space too, Patricia, of yeah, how can we all gather together for let's say this one comment on Facebook, if all of us became advocates together, we wouldn't exhaust our advocates who are making change and we wouldn't lose the people who are asking this question on Facebook. So yeah, what is your response when someone comes and he says, in this present moment, in this time of change, I wanna make a living and grow my career but how? What is the offering that we can make to these folks? It's hard, right?  And I think it's gonna require a combination of hard choices. It's gonna be hard choices for the people who make these institutions, who are all around these institutions about creating a more healthy work environment, a more sustainable work environment, but it's also, this is the hard part. It's gonna require some discipline on us too. And that, that's tough. And I think that's one of the things that we've tried to do in No More 10 out of 12s is, this is not an us versus them problem. This is not one group of people have this and another group of people don't have that. There is elements of that. But the reality is, is by changing our schedule, it does mean that we'll be committed longer to a show. It means that we might have to, we will work less hours in the day. And if you are paid hourly, then you will be paid differently as a result of that. The theory is, is that we're reallocating these hours. So the same hours you would have worked within a certain number of days, you will work in a longer number of days to make it sustainable. But you may have to make choices. When people say, but I might make slightly less money if I do it that way, it's possible. It's not entirely, it's not a foregone conclusion, but that could be a thing that happens. And I wanna say to those people, we're making these decisions as a community because we are prioritizing other things than simply capitalism. We are prioritizing our health. We are prioritizing our family. We are prioritizing the future. And so I wanna be clear with everybody who hears this argument. All of us will need to compromise the way we have done our business in order for true change to happen. We can't just say, oh, okay, other people will make this change and then we're good to go. All of us are going to have to transform in some way and become more aware and become, understand that these working conditions take into account more than just money. And that's a difficult thing to get your head around. But once you do, you'll understand that these are the things we have to do to move forward. I'll also say some of the work that art equity is doing is interesting to line up. And one of the things that art equity does, and this is like bridging to political, how do we advocate for national support as well? Art equity has, to Clint's point, gathered some of that data and presented it and said, this is why senators and governors and Congress people, all kinds of people should be advocating for the arts and allocating more public funding for the arts because arts actually an investment in the arts exponentially grows our economy. So for those who are, I always say, this is why I'm doing it, but I know not everyone is built that way. So if you wanna make the case in this financial way, look at some of the art equity work and help to advocate. I also have to say, I was sustained, there was a Van Leer fellowship at second stage, which for two years paid me $700 a month and then $1,000 a month. And I am here now partly because that sustained me. That was an outside thing, but the organization supported it. So I say for these organizations, cause I feel like we are often as individuals trying to figure these things out. And I feel like now is the time, more and more the organizations and institutions and people with the most power need to be really working hard to figure those things out. I think the distribution of wealth and whether that's, if we're not growing the wealth that comes in, I think our equity is helping to try grow the wealth that's coming in. We've got to look at how these things are distributed. So whether that's like, if we only have this in the pie, what are some of those, what are some of the budgets of a, how do we value the labor versus just the product? How do we, and that is also, let's be clear, some of these folks, artistic directors, executive directors are making $500,000, a million dollars a year. If we are looking at the whole pie, I think everything from how we distribute, what's going to be on the stage to how we pay each hourly labor to like, what are the people at the top making? And how we examine all of that so that we can say, how do we want to divide this pie in the most equitable way? And that, my husband always says, the budget is a moral document. The numbers don't lie in terms of what you are valuing. And if I look at your budget, I don't need to hear what you say. You are speaking to me very loudly. And I think that awareness is becoming more and more transparent. So I'm like, get it together, people. Absolutely.  You do not have to visibly parent or visibly care or visibly advocate if it puts you yourself at risk. Please know that you have the right to care for yourself. But if in the space, you're at a point where you cannot continue on that professional path with that organization, we're encouraging folks to say, hey, in order to continue this, I need more support because I love contributing here. What's your caregiver support plan? And we have to keep flipping the script instead of, hey, I've got all these ideas of how you can help me make your organization better. Remember that you're adding value to them by your existence, by your contribution. So say, what is your caregiver support plan? Or how are you engaging with supportive scheduling in this next quarter? Because I know that I have more ways to contribute, but right now your scheduling is prohibitive. Your scheduling, not my access needs are making my work prohibitive. Your scheduling is making my work prohibitive. The responsibility is on the organization, bringing about that power dynamic. Yes, thank you to both of you. A couple of shout outs in the chat. Apologies for the mispronunciation and Clint is welcome to correct me, but a shout out from Regina. Yes, Kababayan, Pinksy Pride there. Thank you for representing that, Regina. And then we have some folks here. I think there's a solidarity here about labor in hours between artists and freelancers and those who are working in full-time arts admin and positions with producing institutions, disrupting and creating our expectations around scheduling for all of us, really leaning into how we need each other and how we can work to our collective liberation. Yes, thank you so much. Yeah, just a lot of affirmation that when folks have felt more supported in their organizations, they felt that their work was much better. And then there will always be a financial component to this. You're going to have to buy two weeks or more tech to your show and pay your artists enough not to have to work two other jobs in order to be in your space for that longer time. So the money has to come from somewhere either way. We just had a budgeting session and a fundraising session here at Pal. And when we're honest, the budget is arbitrary and there's a lot of guesswork that goes into it. So what values are you guessing through? And then when it comes to fundraising, you fill the largeness of the glass that you create. How can you use access needs? It was beautiful, Jenna shared. You engage in access needs, you have to believe it yourself, but engage in your donation and fundraising as capacity building, drawing more people in to support the work of your artists and talking about centering humanity even in the values of how you fundraise. So thank you all for that. We just have a few more minutes, but Clint, I felt like I saw you writing a few things down and I want to offer the space to you for any thoughts on your mind now. No, I just wanted to, I can't take that. Whoever asked that question, I think she was, or they were a designer, about that litany of things that they had to do. And then the last part of that question is about how, right?  And I think part of, and I want to say I understand exactly where you are. And I actually really understand what it is, right? And I want to say that that question always lingers, is like, but how, how, how? And I don't, and this goes back to my point about this mindset, right? Like we've not actually, we do not have the cognitive capacity yet to answer that question because it's impossible right now, right? And so to me, I think the challenge becomes, and it's always on us, right? Like how do you imagine, this is our job, right? To imagine, like how do we imagine a path forward, right? And how do we actually imagine dismantling what we always say is unrealistic as impossible? What are you going to do to make it possible, right? And I know you're tired right now and I'm going to share with you what I've done. I've actually taken a lot of stuff out. I've actually, and yes, I am losing that income. Yes, I am losing this. Yes, I am losing that. But here's what I've noticed. And I'm hoping that this is true, right? That I'm just not like on this trajectory to something that's like not true. But I've noticed that I actually am able to imagine ways to, how do I say this? I've realized that in letting go of a lot of things, I've also let go of the things I thought I needed. And I am, so the amount of things that I want and I thought I needed has lessened and it's almost a direct proportion kind of like relationship, right? And I know this sounds like really hokey, right? Like how I have kids, I have to be an adjunct like this and I have to be all of that, right? But that to me means that the way you're, the capacity you have to imagine your future is actually very, because everyone else is taking it away from you. I don't know what the specifics are. I don't know what, and I am not offering this as a solution, right? But like this is where I am in my life. I'm getting rid of a lot of stuff. You know, I have to say no to a lot of stuff because I wanna, you know, there are things that I want to have capacity to imagine. I wanna imagine how to be a better dad. I don't even know what that is, you know? I wanna imagine functioning and being a good person, you know, to my husband. You know what I mean? I wanna imagine that. I wanna imagine things that even my parents didn't imagine, you know? And so I get it. I get it, like I, you know, I buck up against the way we're educating theater artists right now. Like I've had a big sort of philosophical shift about that, right? Because right now basically we're charging like $80,000 a year in undergrad for theater education. And how are those students actually, how are they not asking?  They're paying $80,000 a year. Of course they're gonna ask me. And I'm gonna be like, and my initial impulse is like, I'm not a customer service representative. But of course they're gonna ask that. We're charging that money. Institutions are charging that money. I mean, that's the same with MFA's. Like what are we doing? What are we doing? To piggyback on what Clint is saying, I feel like there's the personal look at how I'm engaging what I value. And the, I've recently been, we haven't brought boards into this conversation. And I feel like in many ways, all the way up to like the people who have the final say about what is approved, not just for a moment, but sustainably are often those boards. And I'm excited about where are the places that are putting the visionaries on those boards? So that everyone from the student that you're talking about Clint who's wrestling with how do I deal with this to the mid-career artists to, they are being supported by people with vision all the way up to the boards. There is a radical nature of like, I feel like we're always trying to, from day one, trying to figure out how we make this passionate thing that we're about how do we make it work? How do we sustain? What do we hold on to what we let go of? And I put, I love Clint that this, you've awoken in me this idea of like, yeah, what am I valuing? What am I letting going in this point in my career? Which is easier to do than it was 20 years ago. And I'm also looking to those people who are in those positions and saying, how do we get board members on? What do we value in those board members? Who will help make this work? And who understand that the value of time, when I do that, I am, I want, I need, I feel, 50% of the people say I need time. Which to me says that that is the biggest commodity in addition to finances, which allow us to, you know, make everything work. But I'm really interested in how do we, how do we radicalize the onboarding and the valuing of people who will make it easier for us to answer these questions for ourselves and for each other? And I feel like I want to ring that bell of that challenge to those folks as well. Because the first to ask is, who has money? Who can we approach who has money? Right? And that to me is always weird. You know, and we're like, oh, we're about community. We're having an institution that's going to do this cultural transformation. But are you asking your, like, your first ask should be when you try to attract board members is like, whose morals do we actually feel important? Who might have some money? It's- And you might have some skills. But also like it goes back to all of this idea, right? Like there's this Washington Post article of like, who actually gives more money? Black folk actually give more money than white folk. But here's the thing. Black folk give more money to institutions that promote community and faith. If that tells us something, we're always like, oh, theater is about community. But why have we not? Why don't people believe that and give that, right? When your first asks are to these big sort of like conglomerates whose values are actually transparent to us? So you can build another theater? Like, you know, like what is it? If the people in leadership thrive on transactional relationship, the community within that theater and the product in that theater will be founded on transactional relationship. There's the formula. It's not an hours rehearsal formula. That's the formula. I think you all broke something open there. That is gonna be sticking with me for a long time. Boards came up this morning too and came up yesterday. And I just also want to use this as an invitation if you're in leadership and you're resisting this idea of eliminating 10 out of 12s and resisting this idea of a five day rehearsal week, please check in with yourself.  I know you don't have the power to change all of that right now, but if you can at least check in with yourself and relieve yourself of that stress and pressure to perform for them, you might be hearing solutions better if you can let go of that. And just a huge yes and who are we inviting for our board? That's a question that keeps coming up and thank you for that, Patricia. Are we inviting folks into our board who want to see this radical access happen? Because folks are gonna give, we're gonna attract folks who make donations who believe in our work if the work we do is something worth believing in as well. Plus one second all of that, we're so ready for change but we need voices who center social justice, caregiving, human practices and leadership, we need that. Of course, have been discussed so, so much in this summit. Yeah, 100%. We're at time, so I wanna respect everyone's day and time. And I wanna first say a huge thank you to these panelists for your hearts and souls and checking with yourselves in the way that you take care of others. Centering humanity at the Pell Summit is about caregiving is parenting, elder care, other care, but also community care. How do we take care of ourselves and others? And this conversation brought so much soul to that. Oh yeah, and totally what I'm hearing with AEA producers is sure we'll do a five-day work weeks if we can do all the allotted hours for the week on those five days. So you don't need them. You don't need them. Take those hours and put research in the field and like say that they're on the schedule for folks to take on their own independent study and showering might be an independent study because we're all dealing with the human experience and our own care is part of the research for this work. Oh, hallelujah. Okay, just so going back to saying thank you. Yes, and I feel so fulfilled by the work that you all are doing. So hopeful about what's coming up. Thank you to everyone who engaged with us in the session on the chat, for everyone watching online, for everyone whether you have been an advocate for decades if you're feeling tired. Thank you for all the work you're doing that maybe we don't know about and you feel nobody sees. I just want to call that into visibility and say thank you. If you haven't been told thank you today. Thank you to everyone who's in a learning place and who's here ready to learn. What are you doing with that learning? And with that gratitude, we'd love to send us on our way and invite Adriana into the space to close us out. Just thank you. Thank you so much, Rachel and to everyone who spoke this morning as well as everyone who has been chatting away on Facebook. This probably has been the session that has had so many comments on everything that you've all talked about. And for those who are watching also on HowRound, thank you so much. We are going to take a small break between sessions. The next session will be our closing session for the summit. This has been an exciting three days. And as Rachel said, we are all grateful that all of you have been here. So I welcome you to take yourselves off camera if you wish, take a small break, go stretch out, have a drink of water and we will be back in a short time. Thank you so much. And I just want to shout out, please go to www.designaction.com to see the work that they've been doing that's important to designers and check out their five principles. Thank you so much, Clint. We will be sending all the links mentioned in the session today to all participants and be sharing on social media this week. Thank you all.


This study examined the distribution of soil organic carbon, nitrogen, cation exchange capacity and specific surface area in different soil particle sizes. It was found that as the particle size decreases, the soil organic carbon, nitrogen, cation exchange capacity and specific surface area all increase. Additionally, it was discovered that there are strong correlations between these parameters and the equivalent diameter of the soil particles. This research provides important data on the distribution of soil properties in relation to particle size, which can be used to better understand soil properties. This article was authored by Xiaojian Bai, Hanzhu, Mingming Fu, and others.


For kids and adults suffering severe allergies, a single peanut or a single garden bee sting can be be fatal. That's why millions of Americans, including my sister, they rely on epipens. They shoot life-saving drug epinephrum into the body that can make a difference between life and death if there's a severe allergic outbreak. Now these pens, which are almost all manufactured by the same company, Myland Pharmaceuticals, have skyrocketed in price. A pair used to cost about $100. That's just seven years ago in 2009. Now they are setting families back as much as $600. This massive price hike has prompted several lawmakers to call for an investigation. That segment was published on August 24, 2016, and the individual responsible for that price hike is Heather Riesch, the CEO of Milan. Now this individual isn't just the CEO of Milan. She also happens to be the daughter of Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia. Now at the time when this news broke, Joe Manchin actually had the audacity to defend his daughter and claim that contrary to what you're seeing, she's actually really compassionate. He said, my daughter is my daughter with unconditional love, and she's the most amazing person that I know. He continued, she's so compassionate and generous in how she's always lived her life. Yeah, doesn't really seem like it. The former West Virginia governor said that ever since Brech has been at Milan and he's been in politics, we made a point to keep those parts of our lives separate, except everything that he said there is literally backwards. His daughter is not compassionate because if she were compassionate, she wouldn't have hiked up the price of this life-saving drug. People may die because of what she did. We don't have the numbers. It hasn't been quantified to my knowledge, but what she did, she knew how catastrophic that could be, but she did it anyway because she wanted to increase profits for her company. And he says that when it comes to her life as the CEO of Milan and my life in politics, we try to keep those things separate, except that's not the case because executives at Milan donated a combined $180,000 to Joe Manchin. So it's not separate. There's a conflict of interest. He's representing them as a donor and also because this is his daughter. Now in 2018, after he said that in 2016, he was asked about this during a debate between him and his Republican opponent. And as you're going to see, he totally sidestepped the question, refused to answer. Senator Manchin, 2016 Milan pharmaceuticals became embroiled in a controversy. After the cost of the life-saving EpiPen had shot up 500% in just a few years. Your daughter, Heather Bresch, Milan CEO was grilled on Capitol Hill for that price spike. You defended her and said the attacks on her salary of $19 million were quote unquote sensational. Records show Milan employees and executives have contributed over $180,000 to your campaign. You also said the real problem was the convoluted system that drove up the price. Why Senator was Manchin justified? Why was Milan justified? In charging $600 for a two-pack of life-saving drugs that cost about $20 to $30 to make? First of all, Hoppe, the system is broken. It has been broken. Patrick Morrissey helped break it because he profits more from being broken than fixing it. Next of all, I can't tell you on a publicly traded company how they are very, very convincing. Senator Manchin very, very convincing. Now the reason why I'm talking about this again is because we have an update. Thanks to the phenomenal reporting of Ryan Grimm at the Intercept, we now know that for sure his daughter, Heather Bresch, was directly involved with this scheme to hike up the price of EpiPens. So he explains, Heather Bresch, the former president and CEO of the drugmaker Milan, worked directly with the CEO of Pfizer to keep prices of the company's EpiPen product artificially high according to new documents released as part of an ongoing lawsuit. The documents also show Bresch approving a scheme to force customers captured by the company's monopoly to purchase two EpiPens at once, regardless of medical need. The EpiPen is an auto-injectable device that injects epinephrine into the body and can be the difference between life or death for a person suffering a severe allergic reaction. The documents were released as part of an ongoing antitrust suit in federal court. In June, Judge Daniel Crabtree issued a summary judgment partially siding with Milan and partially siding with the plaintiffs, meaning the case goes on. Late last week, the judge unsealed some of the documents underlying the plaintiff's case. Among the documents is an email sent on behalf of Bresch, who was the daughter of Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to her counterpart at Pfizer, then-CEO Ian Reed. In the email sent in January of 2011, Bresch confirms a previous discussion with Reed in which she says that the two agreed that as part of a deal, Pfizer would disinvest from its EpiPen competitor AdrenaClick, eliminating its main competitor would then allow Milan to continue raising its prices. In 2007, when Milan acquired the rights to market the drug from Merck by buying its specialty pharmaceutical subsidiary Day, a two-pack cost less than $100, a tiny fraction of what it costs today. The result of the deal with Merck was that Milan manufactured part of the EpiPen delivery system, but not the medication itself, while owning the brand name and the right to distribute the whole product. The drug itself was produced by King Pharmaceuticals, which manufactured it exclusively for Milan. King in 2010 announced it would be purchased by Pfizer, which was licensed to sell AdrenaClick, an EpiPen competitor the previous year. The deal between Pfizer and Milan led the former to withdraw its competitor from the market and partner with Milan on EpiPen, locking down a monopoly. Following the deal with Pfizer, Milan drove the price above $600 within five years. Meanwhile, Gail Manchin, Brecht's mother, lobbied states to require schools to stock Epinephrine as the head of the National Association of State Boards of Education. Gail Manchin was recently confirmed to serve as co-chair of the Federal Appalachian Regional Commission, a government agency tasked with promoting economic development across the region's 13 states. So this story isn't super surprising, of course. This is what his daughter did as the CEO of Milan. These sorts of price-fixing schemes, this is actually a very common occurrence in the pharmaceutical world. It's why we have to utilize antitrust laws, and we need to get serious about nationalizing these pharmaceutical companies. But really, I'm sharing this information with you, because, I mean, does it not really explain everything you need to know about Joe Manchin? This entire family has been a blemish in America. Just awful, a plague on America. And Joe Manchin is basically blocking what little progress we might be able to make. He doesn't support the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that Bernie Sanders is pushing, which would expand Medicare, because his donors, they don't like the idea of public insurance even being expanded a little bit. He is against voting rights, which allow Republicans to continue to rig elections effectively in their states and win using voter suppression and gerrymandering. I mean, this man is a tool of the industry, and it's not just that he's corrupt. His daughter was a part of that. His wife is a part of that. They're all working together.    Why do we put up with this? Why do we put up with this? It goes to show you that politicians are super comfortable. CEOs are super comfortable. They know there's not going to be any accountability legally for them. And if there is, it'll be a slap on the wrist. So it's easier to just like do what's bad and pay the fine because you're going to rake in billions in profits.   And this is why nothing changes.  The fact that he has a daughter in the pharmaceutical world when he's a lawmaker in and of itself is pretty gross. But when you consider the fact that this company donated to his campaign, I mean, it's just, it's so corrupt. But all of this is legal. Now, when it comes to the price fixing, we'll see, you know, depending on the result of this case, if they get away with it. But my prediction would be that there's going to be basically no consequences for, you know, his daughter. She should be in prison for doing this. She should absolutely be in prison. Joe Manchin should resign in shame. But of course, you know, nothing is going to happen. But at a minimum, the best we can do is equip ourselves with knowledge of said corruption. So we know how to change the system. It's just a matter of whether or not there's a motive to do that. And, you know, I feel like people are just a little bit too comfortable and they just, they've just accepted that corruption is the norm in American society as it relates to politics and business. So they just let it happen. But this really is not normal. Even if it's common, this isn't normal. And this shouldn't be allowed. It shouldn't be acceptable. But here we are. Now, I would encourage you to read the full article because it is very, very long and detailed. So we didn't even scratch the surface. But Ryan Grimm is very thorough. There's also some email receipts that he shares. So yeah, you know, check it out. I don't think you're going to be too surprised. But still, I do think it's important that you know about this, like you know where Joe Manchin is coming from. His entire family is just terrible.


Good afternoon, everyone. First of all, thank you for being here and thank you to the local organization committee and the committee in general for this invitation. It's a pleasure for me to present this job called Gender Labor Earnings Gap in Costa Rica over the last decade, what drives it and the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. As you may see in the title, this work has two parts. One is measuring the gender pay gap during a decade and the decomposition, identifying the main determinants of this gap. And the other part is related with the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. This work was conducted with three more colleagues who are in Costa Rica and in the World Inequality Lab in Paris, France. Okay, regarding the motivation and contribution, as you may know, gender pay gap is a reality in the entire world. According to the last report of the ILO, there is a gender gap of 22%. The salary, the pay is 22% higher for men than for women. There is bad literature assessing this gender pay gap in developed countries, but it is really scarce in developing countries. It's scarce and at the same time, there are least literature analyzing inequality between groups. There are more literature analyzing inequality in the entire nation, but not between groups. Most of this literature is concentrated in countries with largest populations, like India or China, are more based in cross-sectional data. There is also more literature using traditional models like mincerian earning functions and the composition methods. And also, despite GDP, GPG gender pay gap has been decreasing, as you may see, is remaining in favor of many in the entire world. As part of the motivation, there is a concern about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in gaps in general, in socioeconomic gaps, but definitely one of the main concerns or one important concerns is about gender labor gaps, specifically in my country. We have a problem, a structural problem, because women have less access and less pay than men, and it's been a situation repeatedly during the last two decades with no solution. There are previous studies doing this kind of studies analyzing the effect of the COVID-19 pandemics. One of them is in India with an OLS model, and they do an analysis pre- and post-pandemic, and they analyze the differences. There is another study, recent study, analyzing this gender pay gap doing micro simulations based on previous data set they have like two to three years previous the pandemic. What is the contribution of this work? First of all, we are adding new literature to the major and the composition of the gender pay gap in developing countries by using a large-scale data set in a decade and using a vast set of human capital and job-related predictors. We have a really good data set, it's a survey, as you may see in the next slides, and we have fortunately good controls to conduct this research, and to the best of our knowledge, for the first time, we use panel data to try to estimate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic in the gender pay gap. Definitely it's good for you, also it was really good for us to study the context. What is the context not just in the pandemic crisis, also during the period of analysis? What is the evolution of the market, and what is the evolution specifically in the differences between men and women? As you know, in the majority of countries around the world, the pandemic produced a truly difficult situation. One of these situations definitely is the decrease in the production, especially in some specific activities which depends entirely from, for example, tourism, which is an activity which depends on a broad tourism, also on other activities like commerce and transportation and storage, which are activities who were really affected because of the lockdowns we faced. Sorry, you may see also, this is just informative, the first part, maybe the most important part is the decrease during the COVID-19 pandemic, similarly maybe to most of your countries. And this is more specific to the labor market in Costa Rica. Our country has been facing definitely different structural problems. One of them is the unemployment rate, another one is the under-employment, the rate of informality, and also differences in participation, not the optimal participation, like the natural rate and unemployment definitely, and maybe the most important problem is the differences between groups. We are talking about women, youth people, people who live in rural areas, people who are employed in occupations with lower levels of skills, etc. And this is really important for us because most of these variables we have to take into account to understand the results we obtain. What about the data? As I said before, we have a cross-sectional dataset from 2010 to 2020. This is around 1 million observations and our final sample of 300,000 observations. Also, as you want to measure the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, we took advantage of a panel dataset we have during this period 2020-2021, specifically the first quarter of 2021. With 100,000 observations, 140,000 observations, and our final sample of 40,000 observations. As you may see, most of these observations are concentrated in men, not in women. And as you can imagine, this is because our dependent variables are salaries. And this is the people who are into the labor market, and in Costa Rica, as you see. Before, there is an important gap in the interest to the labor market. Because of this, there are more men than women. Oh, sorry. Well, about the empirical strategy, we use also two different measures, two different empirical strategies, but related. Because the first we use is the Oaxaca Blinder, the composition, which is, as the majority of you know, well known, the composition method to analyze gaps between socioeconomic groups. And also, we make a correction using the Heckman correction bias term, which corrects for the characteristics which influence the entrance into the labor markets between the groups of analysis. Regarding the main predictors we use, which is this component, the Z, we use some of the predictors already the colleagues explained, like the skill levels, we use occupations, we use, if the person works in a public or private sector, we use the traditional mincerian function predictors, education or schooling, we use experience tenure. And we also use another particular predictors for our country, which is the difference if a person is working full time or part time is important, particularly in our labor market. We use another controls also, like if the person lives in a rural or urban area, etc. And regarding the second method we use is an extension of the Oaxaca Blinder, the composition. It's a really up to date command in 2020-21 around August was released. And we took advantage of this new command to, because it is specialized in measuring cross sectional data, analyzing pre and post event, and it's also suitable to analyze panel data sets. Because of this we use this method, which is almost the same that the Oaxaca Blinder, the composition method, but this method adds this term, which interacts the group variable with time variable, specifically with the time zero or period zero in which we suppose is the chalk in this case, the declaration of the pandemic crisis. And we use another predictors of variables who affects this relationship. Based on previous literature and also in the characteristics of our labor market, we use if the person were working in a public or private sector on coving sensitive or not industries full or half time. And after that we obtain the results for both parts, the analysis during the period of during the decade, and the part in which we analyze the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is more the equations properly. And you can see maybe just to put attention on the meaning of the Oaxaca Blinder, the composition methods, with the differences in the means between the salaries of men and women. Women is the base group. And then this method analyze which part of this different is explained and which part is unexplained. The explained part is related with the endowments or characteristics of the population. And the unexplained part, there is a debate in literature, but it's more related with productivity and also with discrimination. There is a discussion, but maybe both of them are important to explain or to, yes, to explain the unexplained part. And related to the identification or the main, yes, the main point of this equation is that we suppose that group zero has the same characteristics of the group one and is the same with the endowments, with the vectors, the vector of coefficients, which we suppose exactly the same, trying to have like a counterfactual. Perfect. Regarding to the results, here we have the evolution of the estimated earnings of men and women, as you may see. There is a gap during all the period analyzing favor of men. And this is of around 0.105 lock points, remembering that our dependent variables is the logarithm of the salaries. And this is the result of the first part. We have a consistent gender pay gap in favor of men. And in the second part, we have the results regarding the effect of the COVID-19 pandemics. As you may see, and this is important to mention, to highlight, based on these results, there is a reduction on the gender pay gap during the COVID-19 pandemic. But not necessarily there are good news, because most of the explanation behind these results is because the women who maintain in the labor market wear women with higher salaries. And all the women with less salaries were out of the labor market. This is the explanation behind these results. And all these results is especially significant during the periods closer to the initial shock, which is also an expected result. Here there are some rubbleness checks we use. We compare the results of the part of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic with the conventional WAHACA blinder estimation. We also make some estimations splitting our sample in specific groups who may influence the results. Fortunately, we have that these groups didn't affect the results because their results were pretty similar. And also, we have pretty similar results using the WAHACA blinder, the composition method, the traditional, which was a good news for us as well. Regarding the conclusion and discussion, definitely these kind of words contributes to leadership, especially for developing countries, and also for public policy. Because in Costa Rica during the last, I don't know, maybe five years, we are talking about the bridging of the gender pay gap, but using the data not necessarily corrected for controls who change completely the results. At the beginning, we have the same results, but then correcting for the predictors the necessary controls, we have the reality. And maybe this reality is underestimated because, as I explained before, the more vulnerable people in the labor market in Costa Rica during the pandemic were women or youth people. Also, it is important to understand that this is not the final. We have to analyze more in depth what happened later. We have more data, and we are conducting new analysis trying to understand if this bridging of the gender pay gap was something in a specific period. This is our hypothesis, and then the gender pay gap returns to this situation, which is a consistent gender pay gap. Just to finish, I read this phrase last week, and I want to read for you. The gender pay gap is rooted in systemic inequalities. Equal pay is essential not only for women, but to build a world of dignity and justice for all. Equal pay for women are nothing less. Thank you.