Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us back here for the third issue briefing of this year's annual meeting of the new champions here in Dalian. Welcome also to our audience watching this live online at weforum.org. This issue briefing is about frontier research at the annual meeting of the new champions. We look far ahead into the future, into the disrupters of the disruptors of today. The title of this particular session is Ambitious Research, a key ingredient for Europe's growth I'm very pleased to announce my panel. On my immediate left is Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, President of the European Research Council, based in Belgium. Carlos Moedas, Commissioner of Research, Science and Innovation of the European Commission and a co-chair of this meeting. Welcome back, sir. And very pleased to be joined by Professor Panayota Puirazi, Research Director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the Foundation for Research and Technology in Greece. So a range of perspectives on European research. I'm going to start by asking Commissioner Moedas to give us your vision for frontier research in Europe and what it means, exactly. Thank you so much and thank you again for all of you to be here. First of all, I would like to say that how lucky we are in Europe to have the European Research Council. How lucky scientists are to have such an independent body that actually looks after researchers, takes care really of giving them the opportunity to do what they love, which is science. And so I'm very honored to be here just with the President and also the Vice President of the European Research Council because, for me, it's really one of the most amazing projects of Europe. And so when you ask me about my vision, the vision for frontier research, frontier science, curiosity-driven research, first my vision is that I hope that in the future politicians will give the right value to science and to fundamental science as the ingredient to innovation, as the main ingredient to growth. And for that, we'll have to have the scientists also helping us politicians to pass on that message, the scientists being more vocal in terms of the importance of the science they do for our daily lives. Because a lot of people in their day to day, they cannot relate to the fundamental science. They do not understand that science and they don't know that what they actually are doing, having every day in their lives depends or not on that fundamental science being done. Then my vision for science is that we would create the conditions at some point to have more and more politicians, one, lowering down the barriers for scientists to do science and secondly that science could have the same approach that we have in the ERC. Meaning for that that it's a total bottom up approach that scientists can pick what they love and what they want to do and then politicians will actually put the money for them to do it. And when I meet ERC grantees, they basically come to me telling me that this is the best thing that happened in their lives. Not because of the money, but because of the network, because of the experience, because of the people they meet and the opportunities that it creates for their lives. And so I see it as the model for the future. And then my vision, I'm not a scientist, I'm a politician, but I look at the future and what I see in terms of science and that's I think one of the subjects we should discuss here today is that science is more and more about an intersection in between different fields of science. And if we don't actually catch that opportunity of breaking the silos in education, that people can actually have the opportunity to work in different fields from humanities to science to social science to different parts and different disciplines, then there will be no new innovation, no science that will actually change the world. So I see it and that's one of the reasons that I'm here in this great country to actually try to make possible for Europe to work more and more with China to have more and more collaboration. And so I'm really happy that Professor Bourguignon was able to set up an agreement in between ERC and actually the Natural Science Foundation that will allow scientists to travel from one place to another to do science, to have and experiment different fields with different cultures and doing better science. So that will be just the introduction that I would make here today. Thank you very much, Commissioner. I just note for our audience here and online where the general tradition here for issue briefings is we ask one or two introductory questions, I guess, and then we open the floor to questions. We've also been curating questions and collecting questions from our social media audiences, so hopefully we'll have a free-flowing and interactive conversation. And with that on that note, Commissioner, that gave me a very good segue to the question I was going to ask that Mr President here regarding the globalization of science. You've recently concluded an agreement with China. Tell me about the globalization of scientific research. Well, first of all, I think the key point to make is of course that historically science has always been the international endeavour, and there were really no boundaries to the development of science. It's true that historically Europe has a very great tradition in science, but it would be a big mistake for Europe to close on itself and believing that you can just rely on this tradition. There are fantastic developments in science. Of course, America has been taking the lead in some areas clearly since the Second World War, but now Asia is also extremely developing at a fantastic pace, and China in particular, but not only China. I mean, Korea, Japan are really countries which now count very much in the development of science in many, many different disciplines. So it's very clear that because of the very nature of science altogether, but also in the way the scientists are functioning, in particular the fact that now it's available really technical tools to really share knowledge in ways which of course we are honoured of, and sometimes you had to wait for letters to arrive. Now you get it just the next minute on your computer, and so therefore we have to take this into account that this globalization has affected science very much, the circulation of ideas, circulation of documents, circulation of papers is going at a fantastic pace. And so from this point it's very clear that the European Research Council, which is one of the vehicles that the European Commission has built to develop science in Europe, as Commissioner Moedars said, it's really the bottom-up programme of the Commission which gives fantastic freedom to the scientists altogether, but also fantastic responsibility to the scientific council to really make the choices how to spend the money, how to do the selection. So it was very clear that from this analysis of this globalization, we must open it, the programme is open to the whole world, but we should make it very well known and should create opportunities for scientists from many different countries to really participate also in the teams that the ERC grantees, I mean the grantees people who get support from the European Research Council really are building because the whole point of providing them with money is of course to enable them to really bring around them the right people to achieve the programme they set for themselves. And so it was very natural to start this search for collaboration with the United States on one hand and then the next country was Korea and then came Japan and then China. And I was very pleased when I took office just 18 months ago that we could actually achieve signing formally and really getting to putting in place agreements with both the National Science Foundation of China and also the Japan Society for the Motion of Science in a very short time because usually international agreements could take years to really be completed. In our case it just took not even nine months so it was very, I was very pleased. We showed the interest on both sides to get through and also the understanding for the various people who had to look into the technicalities to make it happen. So I hope these exchange programmes will be functioning so it will mean that Chinese researchers or Japanese researchers or Korean researchers will be able to participate in projects in ERC in ways which we hope will be also for them if they really appreciate the kind of very special system that ERC is that maybe they will become themselves principal investigators. And the way it is set up is you don't have to be Europeans to apply, you don't have to have a full-time position in Europe, you have to be at least half the time in Europe. So I hope this will be a very good basis for science to be developed by researchers from all around the world with a base in Europe but also with a foot and collaboration in other countries. Thank you. Paniota, you are a practicing researcher, I believe in the area of neuro-technology. Correct me if I'm wrong. Tell me a bit more about the prospects for people such as yourselves, young scientists, you're also I should say, proud to be introduced as a member of our young scientists communities. What are your prospects, breaking new science in Europe at the moment? So thank you for this question Oliver. As a young scientist myself, I would say that I feel lucky. I feel lucky because we live in exciting times for science. The advancement of technology in many disciplines like medicine, biology and engineering now allows us to answer questions that we couldn't even think of asking 50 years ago. For example, now we can tell which neurons in a mouse brain contain a particular memory and we can identify the mutations that we pass on to each one of our children. So it's really a privilege to be a young scientist in these times. The other thing that our generation has experienced is a massive growth in the worldwide size of the scientific community. More and more people continue their education in pursuit of a career in academia or the research sector. Unfortunately, in Europe in particular, we don't have the capacity to absorb all these people. Many of them are not able to fund their research, are not able to establish excellence and secure a job in the academic sector. And that's where the European Research Council comes in. And as the Commissioner Moeda said, it's an absolutely wonderful funding scheme in Europe because it supports young scientists in particular. Through the ERC starting and consolidator grants, young scientists are allowed to pursue their dreams. They are given their early-on independence and a long horizon of five years to pursue the questions that they are interested in. For me in particular, getting an ERC starting grant with, I would say, a life-changing experience. Coming from a country where the funding opportunities are very limited, I had to adjust my research according to where the money is. When I got an ERC grant though, I was finally able to do what I really wanted, what I loved the most. And I think this is really important, it's not just the money, it's the opportunity to pursue your dreams. And if you pursue your dreams, that's when the great discoveries come because you have to have passion for what you're doing. And it's really great to have been funded by the ERC and we need more of it in Europe and the world. So that's, I think, where we stand now. Commissioner, I have a message to receive reliable and clear more funding for young scientists. And now we'll just take a brief pause to see if there are any questions from the floor. Okay, well, we have a few from possession media. We like looking at what's hot and what's trendy and what's going to be big disruptors of the future. One of the questions we had, in fact many of the questions we had, were what are the key trends to look for in frontier research? What is exciting in terms of gaining traction for funding for new research? Perhaps Mr Bourguignon, you could give us an answer to this one. Well, I think, as it was said, I mean there are many, many areas in science which have been really transformed by the access to new technologies. But one has to be a bit careful with this, that is believing that technology alone is enough. Actually, what has really has been really transformative for the science has been the fact that new technologies allowed people to test new theories. So this balance between theory and experiment in a sense has also been moved forward in a very explicit way. In my own field, for example, which is I'm a mathematician, it's quite extraordinary to see the number of areas in which now mathematics is relevant and which was not the case some time ago. And of course it comes back to the discipline with completely new challenges that these problems people never thought about would become really extremely important to solve. And of course if you want just to have one buzzword which is clearly in many people's mind, you can think of big data as a new frontier. And of course it has a technical side because big data means having instruments which allow you to share data in a proper way. But it would be a mistake to believe it's a purely technical issue because actually the key element is of course to from this data that you are collecting, you need to confront them with new theories or new approaches. And again if you allow me to take my own discipline, of course it shows that the importance of statistics or of which has been sometimes a neglected subject which now is becoming again a very central subject for the development of mathematics. But in ways which is not separated from very deep and important mathematics, both from the part which is probability theory, the part which has to do also with combinatorics and the part also which has to do with geometry because a lot of the new statistics you have to deal with are actually statistics of images and nobody has been able so far to really come up with a good conceptual way of approaching statistics of images. So you see this, when as always to keep in mind that the development of science which always has been dependent on technical tools cannot go forward really in a significant way if it's not accompanied by new intellectual and sometimes very abstract challenges. Pallio, so perhaps yourself, your what's exciting. So I might be a little bit biased but I think the brain is the ultimate frontier. And if we're talking about frontier science we're talking about the brain. And this is already becoming evidence given the funding and the effort that has already been dedicated to brain research. I think for the next 10 or 50 years we'll be trying to understand how the brain works. And the other reason I think the brain is great is because in order to understand it you need many people to work together, many disciplines to collaborate. You need to develop the technologies in order to study it. You need to develop the people who will analyse the data so you need better statistics, you need better mathematics. You need the theoreticians that will model what we're seeing in order to get a global understanding of how the system works. So I think it's an area which combines pretty much all of the disciplines. It's still very far from being understood and it's also a reason for a serious economical burden in Europe and the world. And I'm talking about mental diseases. We can't really treat them because we don't understand how the brain works. So we have many incentives for going after the brain and I hope we'll see many discoveries in the near future. Commissioner, any strategic priorities for yourself? No, yes, but I just wanted to chip in here what Professor was saying that one of the major projects we have in Europe is actually about how you will map the brain. And it's a 1 billion euro, 10-year project. And so I just wanted to point that out because it's really, I agree with you, it's definitely one of the points and one of the major and important fields for the future. But you know, I'm not a scientist but what I see is that in the future you will really have a big opportunity that I would say it's big data but it's how you actually merge the big data with the physical world. And so you have been up to a point where you have amounts of data. You have amounts of information but so far actually the decision that you can take upon that data is not yet intelligent. Meaning that machines with machines are not taking yet the right decisions based on the data and the overwhelming data that we have. Why? Because probably we need more mathematics, we need more statistics, we need to get ahead to actually get basically to what we call going from the internet of things to the age of intelligent things. And I think that the frontiers would be in between these two worlds, the physical and the digital. But again, I think that you should listen to the specialists and the scientists and not to me because they know better. Okay, we'll take another pause if there are any questions from the floor. The gentleman, we have a microphone please, so could you just take the microphone and introduce yourself please. Hi, my name is Adrian from UCL, I'm one of the young scientists. And I'm just trying to connect the dots. I think I share your enthusiasm for the brain as a final frontier. I think there is some aspect to that endeavour which has intrinsic interest. But I wonder, just as a counterpoint, for those who would say we recognize that science is a global endeavour, a lot of people are interested in the brain. So somebody is going to investigate it and when we think about budget cuts for a particular area, how does one quantify the impact of investing in research on the brain in say the European zone and how can scientists contribute to the understanding of that economic impact from a purely financial perspective, why should a particular region invest in brain research? A very good question. And it goes a little bit back to what I said about the vision of having as a policymaker a more bottom-up approach than a top-down. Because at the end of the day politicians can make choices and have visions and look at the future. But I think that it's up to the scientists to tell us where they want to go. And so I agree with you that it's very difficult. It's probably one of the most difficult things as a policymaker is actually to decide on what are the fields that you should put your money. And so I think that one of the changes that we've done in Horizon 2020 is actually to go more into that field of having bottom-up approaches. And the ERC is the greatest example of that. But again, we in Horizon 2020, which is the big umbrella, we have an old pillar that we call the societal challenges. And those societal challenges is also a way to tell the scientists really tell us what you can do for those societal challenges and don't come up with an answer that is based on a discipline. Come up with a consortium of different disciplines to solve that problem. But absolutely that's what keeps politicians awake at night. That's that question. Okay, let's move on to the subject of public-private cooperation. I'm going to ask this question because we had another issue briefing this morning on the digital transformation of industries. And one of the comments raised was that whilst 80% of chief executives feared disruption, only 8% had a plan for it. And one of the other statistics we heard from one of the panellists was that too many businesses view innovation as digitising their existing business by not disrupting their own business and casting their mind into their future and reinventing their business. So, as an institution for public-private cooperation and as somebody who knows it's very close to your heart, how successful are you at fostering true collaboration between research and science and business and the policy space? Perhaps Mr Bourguignon. Well, I'm not exactly the right person to be asked this question, although we are quite keen at the level of scientific counsel to make sure that some of the researchers we are funding, ERC grantees, are really... We help them to get in this direction if they feel that they should do. So we have a specific programme which we call Proof of Concept which helps researchers if they feel along the way of doing their research that there is something they are doing which can branch off to either something more connected to industrial development or something more connected to societal challenges, we want to help them to look into that direction and to do it in a very simple way. And so, of course, the amount of money we dedicate to this is not so huge but what we can say it's much bigger than we thought we would be dedicating because actually quite a significant number of researchers are interested in this and we get a very, very good project from this and actually they are in the room some of the ERC grantees who have been very successful at getting the proof of concept grants and who are developing their companies and actually really passing to the next stage of really having a true industrial development or direct connection to industry for their development. So I think certainly the issue you are raising is a very, very important one because that's the connection between new knowledge and actually new economy and how do you make the link and how do you make the link successfully? And of course the only way it's well known is by taking risk and by trying a number of things and some of them develop fantastically well and some of them less well but it's very important that actually also on this we accept the concept of taking risk which for the scientific community is not so obvious because it tends to be conservative and wants to bet on the things which are sure and definitely that's why at the level of ERC we do encourage the evaluators to really take risk and look for ambitious projects. Yes, sir. Would you like to work more or less with the private sector? What's your view on this? I think if we look at the places like the US where they are very successful in incorporating the private sector into the economy, they have the scientists developing their way of thinking if you like towards what can be helpful for the society. So I think it's for the benefit of both sides to work together. Absolutely. What is a little bit risky I think with Horizon 2020 for example is to ask everybody to be in the same part. I think that what the ERC is doing is better so you have the basic research being developed first you have an idea and then you think about how you turn this into a product. You separate the two processes and I think that's more productive in the end than trying to do both things at the same time but definitely we would like to see more of the private sector getting interested about science and funding basic science with a goal to ultimately get a product out of it. And just to stay in your area please Commissioner forgive me there are obviously your folks from Neary technology but are there any industries that are seeing value in your research that you may not think are particularly obvious? Are there any? Well if they are I would like to know. How would I know? I mean there are many companies, big companies like Google for example who is investing a lot of money on artificial intelligence and understanding the brain speaking from my own experience. So there are these companies and I don't know really how how are the opportunities for people young people in Europe in accessing these companies I think they are very limited compared to people in the US or other places where this culture of collaboration between the industry and the academic world is much more developed than it is in Europe. So we have a disadvantage there that we need to work on. Commissioner. No I was just saying that's the crucial the 10 million dollar question or 10 million euro in this case of me which is basically how you create the conditions for the private sector to invest more in research and development. When you look at the target for research and development in Europe that was set as to get to a level of 3% of GDP invested in research and development. The idea is that 1% would be from the public side and 2% from the private side and what we see that is happening is that actually on the level of the public side I mean we're not that far but on the private side we are quite far and so what are we doing wrong? Why are companies are not investing more in research and development? Why are the European companies not somehow investing in hiring scientists? So that's the question that we have to answer which has a lot to deal with Europe that is actually on the making a Europe with a labour market that works better than it works today that is not fragmented in 28 different countries a product market, a judicial system that is more alike in between the different countries because in these age and time if you don't have speed and scale there's nothing you can do and so companies need that speed and scale and for that speed and scale they really need for a flexible way of looking at the market in general and so that's one of the biggest challenges we ever had but times are changing and I think that in Europe times have changed in terms of countries getting at least the awareness of the need for those reforms and those reforms are going ahead very quickly and the numbers yesterday from Europe show that Europe is growing that on the second quarter basically all the countries except for one that had zero growth all the countries are back to growth so something is changing Thank you and this meeting being itself at the intersection of business science and technology I'm hoping that we'll have more answers or insights into that very tricky 10 million euro question over the coming two or three days I'd like to thank you all very much for joining us here on the panel and thank you for joining us here in the room and online this issue briefing is now closed


Our research has shown that urbanization and agricultural intensification have been reshaping landscapes, leading to a decrease in the quality of habitat for honeybees. This has resulted in lower colony weights during the fall season, which can lead to higher mortality rates when winter comes around. Additionally, our findings suggest that certain land uses may be more beneficial than others for honeybees, such as herbaceous land cover, which provides better nutritional resources and a higher colony weight. This article was authored by Rodney T. Richardson, Ida M. Conflitti, Renata S. Labeshain and others.


On Day 5 of the 50th Street inaugural tour, there's more DragonCon, plus a lengthy interview with Silver Age Comics artist Frank Brunner. A complete series of videos and interviews will come later this month after the tour is over. Meanwhile, follow 50th Street for tour updates every day.


The founder and pastor of Citadel Global Community Church, Pastor Tunde Bakery, has reacted to the burning issue surrounding the choice of the Muslim, Muslim ticket of the all-progressive Congress Blackberry and running mate ahead of the presidential elections. During a Sunday service in his church in Lagos, Bakery says, Nigerians should focus on things that unite the country rather than what divides the nation. Our correspondent, Paul George, has more. He is electrifying. The choir sings praise and worship songs to Almighty God as the congregation responds. Immediately after, Pastor Tunde Bakery mounts the podium singing a song of victory to God. Again, the congregation sings along. The members anxiously wait for the pastor's special sermon titled, Nations Pre-Appointed Times and their Times of Visitation. Bakery uses scriptures to encourage the worshippers that there is time for everything. For 400 years they were in Egypt, not so. Kate got's mind for that season and endured. Every trial, every affliction, if you look at the bottom, you will see expiry date. Linking the message to the burning issue. He advised the people to be cautious about over-eating the polity, wanting that the country is now fragile. Following the announcement of the former governor of Borno State, Alaji Kashim Shetima Mustafa, as a running mate to the presidential candidate of the APC, by the candidate himself, Alshuadju Bola-Amentinumbu, another Alaji, the national discourse has been set on a tailspin with vehement opposition to this choice coming from members of my constituency, the Christian community. Bakery hopes that the federal character principle will be a thing of the past, as Nigeria gets stronger and better. We dream of a Nigerian, where there will no longer be indigent or settler, but only a Nigerian citizen. We dream of a Nigerian, we are a state of residence, we replace state of origin in our official forms and we as zoning of federal character will become archival aspects of our journey into political maturity. Going forward, ahead of 2023, we must learn from our mistakes. Christian leaders must at this point bring the candidates and their running mates to the negotiation table. Here, I must say, Christian leaders must ensure to build the nation, just as they request the people to continue to pray for the country. Paul George, plus TV News. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


time, let's give it up for the Verdigree Music Ensemble. Thank you, guys. It's not lost on me if you were listening closely that the hook is Die Rabbit Die. So we're not killing any rabbits this afternoon. That's my promise to you. Verdigree is performing this weekend. They are Dallas' most innovative choir. They sing the Legacy of the Dust Bowl as part of the Elevator Project. And those performances are going to be this weekend at Hammond Hall Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, the 27th of February through the 29th. Again, at Hammond Hall is part of the Elevator Project. So one more time, give it up to Verdigree. Thank you, guys. We're going to have a few more of those surprises through the course of the afternoon. So get ready to do some more hooting and hollering. My name is Clyde Valentin. Welcome to Arts, Culture, and Community Investment in the afternoon of what we hope will be a shared learning experience. As we explore one question together, a question we've been asking ourselves for the past 18 months, what does the act of true community investment look like? I'm the inaugural director of Ignite Arts Dallas, an initiative dedicated to people purpose and place out of SMU's Meadow School of the Arts. We formally launched five years ago, and time flies when you're having fun and working hard. We do our work centers around arts and experiential learning for our students, the residents of Dallas, and the wider national arts ecosystem. We have co-hosted and collaborated on a number of national convenings that have taken place here in Dallas over the last five years, bringing people who've never been to this city for the first time and changing their perspective on what's happening here on the ground in a positive way, I want to say, in a good way. Today in many ways is also designed as a convening, and we reached out to collaborators across the city to create an intersectional space of participants with multiple perspectives. That's you all in the room. I'm grateful for the support of the Trinity Park Conservancy, the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce, our colleagues from Yebabuena Center for the Arts, the Business Council on the Arts, and our colleagues also from Culture Bank National. Particularly grateful to TACA for working alongside us over the first year of Culture Bank Dallas with all their operational and logistical support to help us get off the ground. So thank you, TACA, for being so supportive. We awarded the Meadows Prize to Culture Bank with the goal of spurring additional investments in the arts in Dallas. Investments that will transcend traditional philanthropy and diversify where and what types of resources become available to arts organizations and more importantly, individual artists. We'll talk about the emphasis of artists a little later with actual artists during our Culture Bank Dallas cohort session. This afternoon is meant to stimulate and invigorate your own possibilities within your purview of the city. Maybe spark new ideas for possible collaborations. And if I can invoke a metaphor to you all, in your seats there's a flyer for playwrights in the newsroom which is a piece that we call commissioned which is also being presented by APAC as part of the Elevator Project. And the playwrights asked the journalists that they've interviewed through the Dallas Morning News tell me a metaphor for your job, what it is that you do. So in being inspired by that prompt, a metaphor that I wanna share with you to visualize one of our goals is to imagine all of us as weavers and tailors. We have the tools to sit together strong long lasting materials and we also have the tools to amend and make adjustments to see when a stitch is becoming frayed and needs strengthening. This is my hope for all of us doing our work to make the city a better place for all of its residents. What else can we weave together to enable stronger places? We'll be moving at a rapid clip between our segments with a few additional surprises. As I mentioned along the way, we'll be reserving questions for the final segment of the afternoon, the happy hour featuring DJ SkinPolitik. For housekeeping purposes, restrooms are out to the back on the left just before you get to the cafe. And finally a note about place. I think Rev Joel's in the back right there. I see you by the booth, shout out to Rev. We are in life in D. Bellum. Life in D. Bellum is a faith-based community. How many people have been in this space before just out of curiosity, quick show of hands? Okay, so maybe under 40%, that's good. So you're here for the first time. So why are we here? Life in D. Bellum is a faith-based community. We're sitting in a church right now. It's also a gallery, the one you pass through on the way in. This space is also an event space. It's a coffee shop, really good coffee I might add. And it's a shared workspace here to the left. It is flexible and economically sustainable because of its diverse income sources and volunteer-driven ethos. And most importantly, it is a trusted place by so many in this city. It's one of the first places I came to when I moved to Dallas and it told me that there was home here. So I extend to you this. Innovative forms of collaboration that center arts and culture for long-term community impacts are not just theoretical in Dallas. They already exist in our city because this place exists in our city because the Pan-African connection exists because our cultural centers exist. So why couldn't we have five more life in deep Ellums across our city? Places that grow organically and reflect the fabric of each local community that informs and fills the space with needs the community itself defines. So that's what I wanna leave you with and with that, let's begin. I'd like to invite my colleague, Lex Lifehite, out on the stage to, from the Economic and Workforce Development Office from the city of San Francisco. A warm welcome, Dallas, welcome to Lex Lifehite, please. Thank you. All right, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much. Oh, we're in Dallas. You answer back. Thank you. Thank you so much, Clyde, for inviting me here today. So my name's Lex. I work in the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development and in my role, I am usually a very persistent and sometimes effective advocate in City Hall for non-profit, for arts and culture. Normally when I'm out in the community, I'm there to listen and learn. And as I approach five years in my role, this is one of the first times that I've been presenting the work externally. So don't be shy about questions afterward or even helpful suggestions. And thank you for listening.  I'm gonna do one more time because I'm curious who I'm talking to. How many people in the room are artists? Raise your hand. How many people here are arts workers, but don't identify as artists? All right. And how many people here would consider yourself somehow an investor of other resources in the arts? Philanthropist, other type of investor? All right. Thank you so much. So what I think I'm gonna touch on today is San Francisco people and demographic trends because I don't think you can talk about community investment without acknowledging people in the community briefly. I'll talk about economic development and small business assistance that we're doing in our agency and how that work connects with arts and culture. I'll talk a little bit about our cultural districts and that strategy and what that looks like in San Francisco. And then I'll go a little deeper into some of the work that I've been stewarding with nonprofit capacity and capital and by capacity and capital I mean organizational effectiveness, how to deepen and extend impact of organizations and capital, largely I work on real estate but also working capital, that kind of money that you need to take risks and to be resilient. This is San Francisco. For some people who might not be familiar with the shape or size of the city, it kind of looks like a fist. And it's seven miles by seven miles. We have about 883,000 people living in San Francisco proper. It's a city and county. So the city and county are together and we have a $12 billion city and county budget. When I was preparing for this and thinking a little bit about comparisons to Dallas, there are, well, San Francisco's about two thirds the size in terms of population, just of Dallas city. And while we've had growth over the years, Dallas is growing faster, right? And our growth lately has been constrained due in part to affordable housing. The people in San Francisco, this is just a snapshot from dating back to 1990. So in 1990, you could see that, I think reading the monitor is about 47% white and that has gone down. Our Asian population has grown steadily from 1990 until today. Between 1990 and 2015, the Latinx and Hispanic population stayed about steady and the black and African-American population between 1990 and 2015 decreased by over half. Over the last two years, that's the Latinx and black population in the city has stayed about level, but the populations in different neighborhoods all together have changed really rapidly. And so the city has prioritized racial equity and economic stability strategies. Some of the, so that touches on some of the work of OEWD. Getting back to OEWD informally as we were gathering before the presentation today, I was talking with people just asking if they had a relationship with the Office of Economic Development here or sort of if they had a relationship to an ongoing economic strategy and most people did not yet. When I was leading a cultural center called Somarts as an executive director, I was aware that some arts organizations got funding from our Office of Economic and Workforce Development, but I really didn't know what that meant. It seemed very daunting. It seemed like we would have to completely change what we were doing, do it completely differently in order to access that funding or be a partner of the cities to help connect immigrants, communities of color, low income populations with good jobs or to help start up businesses and do that kind of work in our city. But it was meaningful work and in the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, we have many different divisions. We have a film commission, we have an office of small business, we have a joint development team. And the common thread with them is that we're all trying to advance equitable and shared prosperity in our city through many different types of grants and on the ground strategies. I'm just gonna touch on a few that involve arts and culture. And I'm gonna take a breath. All right. So this first one is Mission Loteria. And I need to give credit to my colleague, Diana Ponce de Leon, who leads this work in our agency in partnership with the Mission Economic Development Agency. In San Francisco, we have many small mom and pop storefronts who struggle to get started, stay in the city as rent goes up and grow. And along Mission Street, tactic that we're trying is Mission Loteria. Mission Loteria is working with artists to create a bingo card of sorts with cards designed by artists that reflect the icons and imagery of the Mission District. And it's a six month strategy and different businesses will hand out different cards. And we're hoping that it will increase the business there. They'll help people discover new businesses. And as it's going on now, we're gonna measure it in six months to see how it works. But so far, in addition to helping connect people with the businesses along Mission Street, because of the talent of the artists, we have really gotten a lot of positive press for this. So it's the kind of press and marketing that would be hard for businesses to afford. And so far, it seems like it's been a good investment. Another multi-agency partnership is the implementation of our cultural districts. So San Francisco has a number of cultural districts and it looks a little different in our city than it has looked in other areas. In other cities, sometimes cultural districts can be created or intended to drive growth in business. And the way we've envisioned cultural districts, we have a heritage and economic sustainability strategy that is intended to put the heritage and visual storytelling of a neighborhood, the character of a neighborhood and the strategies for economic inclusion into the hands of the people who are living there. So we work, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development works with our planning department on a community stabilization strategy. The Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development works on capacity building once a cultural district is created. And our office connects the dots between businesses and nonprofits, artists and individuals living in a region who might be interested or ready or looking at the creation of a cultural district. And then as it's being created, we help with capacity building and business planning for the individual and collective businesses within that district and also connect them with resources such as our SF Shines program, which would help business owners make facade improvements or improve the accessibility to their business. Oh, I don't have a back button, but maybe I do. Real quick, thank you. So lastly, I have a joint development team. So joint development is one of the hardest things to describe, but basically our joint development team works with real estate developers on big projects, projects that would take between five and 30 years to fully build and implement. And what they're working on is trying to leverage the resources and investment in those projects for things like job training, economic inclusion, quality of life, open space, child care, affordable child care and arts and culture. And the joint development team is really focused on the staging of that, sort of the order in which it happens and also things that are not required by administrative code or they're not required by code. So we're trying to get more out or as the former head of that division would say, milk the cow, but don't kill it. These are some examples of arts and culture organizations, both permanent and temporary, that have been supported through community, through developer agreements. And we have, just to name a few, although they're not perhaps familiar to you, the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Mexican Museum, the California Historical Society, ArtSpan and Bindelstift. These organizations range in size. They are focused on the Filipino community in San Francisco, African-Americans, obviously the Mexican Museum. And we've had varying levels of success in many lessons learned from these, from negotiating these agreements. And often they have to do with capacity and readiness and the sort of calibration of funding, like how much funding goes into the quality of the space initially versus maybe affordable rent over time. There are always tensions and trade-offs because we're, in addition to including arts and culture space, we're also focused on other competing priorities like affordable housing, like transportation, like childcare. And in a perfect world, that would be not competing, but in the real world, there are some choices to be made. And again, it goes back to that milk the cow that, but don't kill it, we often think that the developer can pay more than they think they can pay to have a project still move forward. Does anyone here not know what a developer agreement is? This is something I get asked by artists often in San Francisco. Everyone knows. Great. Just to touch on that really quickly, when office space or housing is being built in San Francisco and we're negotiating community benefits along with that, there is a contractual agreement between the developer and the city and county of San Francisco. It's approved by the mayor and the board of supervisors. It runs with the land, so when a developer makes this agreement, even if they sell off the project, the agreement would still stay with the land. They can't sell off those responsibilities. The developments are five to 30 years. And so those are some of the sort of basic factors that go with the development agreement. At the time that San Francisco has been growing and booming and population has been growing, one of the challenges we started to see really intensely around 2013 was that nonprofits were being displaced. Particularly in a central neighborhoods like South of Market for us, Mid Market and the Mission District, organizations were finding that either their price was going up or when it was time to renew their lease, they weren't being offered anything because the property owner wanted this space to be vacant so that they could sell it for a higher price. And because of that, the human services providers and some arts leaders came together and went to our elected officials and said, we need to come together and we want to work with city agencies and make some recommendations to the city. And that's how the nonprofit displacement mitigation funding was formed. It was one time funding to just get through this pinch point where no one had realized rents would go up that fast. But what we came to find was that rents got high and they stayed that way. And organizations have longer leases. So what we were really looking at was for the next 10 years and maybe the new normal for us is just much, much higher rents, which in turn create a new business model and that impacts the city because we have about 700 nonprofit partners who provide things like legal assistance, youth development, arts and culture, job training who help entrepreneurs every year. And there are partners. So the agencies, particularly the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, the Arts Commission and the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development were looking at an ongoing strategy. And we came up to the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative which is what I steward with many partners. Thinking about data in case you were making a similar case for investment in space, deeply rooted in communities where you're trying to advance racial equity and business growth. This is just some data we used to make the case. We looked at how much money the city was spending on nonprofits. And really the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative is just a tiny piece of that for organizational reinvestment. And it's also really just gap funding. There's already some funding for arts and culture. There's already funding for human services. This is just funding to cover that gap, created by a sudden increase. We looked at generally what nonprofits receive, really what the size and scale of that partnership was. And we also looked at the data from the one-time investment because sometimes it can be hard to get a city or any funder for that matter to make an ongoing investment. They'll do one-time thing, but then getting it ongoing, getting it permanent, having that stability you can reach for, it's much harder. To get the permanent investment, we looked at our two-year funding results. And what we found was that nonprofits could secure a seven-year lease, that they leveraged $10 for every dollar that the city invested in grants and financing, so that includes loans and other types of financing. We had wonderful comps, comparable pricing for neighborhoods and uses that helped the city better understand whether nonprofits were coming to us in the future with a good deal, whether the price in that neighborhood was higher or lower in general than what they were being offered by a property owner. And we discovered a lot about cross-sector services. That means a youth development organization or a senior center that has ongoing arts and culture programming, for example. So many examples of that. Organizations doing arts and culture work who maybe historically weren't able to access arts and culture funding that was based on quality versus merit or working in low-income communities, of color immigrant communities. I'm gonna skip these examples because I'm a little low on time, but these are just some of the beautiful spaces and services, pictures that reflect the wonderful organizations who have found long-term homes through the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative. These are some of our partners who I'm happy to talk about one-on-one. We have many national and local partners who are focused on real estate readiness, grant writing, leveraging and finding volunteers to help your organization. And then these are some of the shared knowledge that's come out of this work together with agencies and nonprofits, things like Backfill and shared space opportunities, all the pro bono services who really is good at working with nonprofits on space and on organizational effectiveness, financing, nonprofit executive directors or small business leaders don't necessarily have to know about real estate or have that knowledge on their boards or in their heads until they have a real estate crisis and of course, lifting up what's worked for others. So far, we've had nearly half of our funding go to organizations that offer ongoing arts and culture resources in San Francisco, which is amazing because it would have been common before to see no funding go to the arts at all necessarily that it would be focused on other services, safety net services that were considered to be a priority. And moving forward, we're working on this year, long-term, below market space for organizations on the ground floor of affordable housing. We're so excited about connecting people to services and resources and many of these are arts and culture organizations. I'll talk about that just a little bit more in our Q&A and we're gonna do a Q&A with Jennifer Scripps who is the director of arts and culture here in Dallas. That's my contact information. Thank you. Good afternoon. Lex, thank you so much for that presentation. And for everyone here, my name is Jennifer Scripps and I'm with the city of Dallas, Office of Arts and Culture. We so far are not doing all of the cool things that you have been able to advance in San Francisco. So even from our conversation last week, I take this and thank you to Clyde for connecting us as a huge learning opportunity for our city. We talk a lot about the ecosystem but a lot of times I think we mean within the arts and our reach into economic development or talking about the value of our workforce sometimes does not necessarily have those advocates quite yet. We're building them across city silos, so thank you. But I did have some questions for you and we'll also leave some time at the end. We'll make sure for audience questions. So selfishly, city halls all over America need more people like you and your bio coming from an arts background running art spaces where it sounds like you did everything as art space leaders usually do to starting the, I wrote it down, ABBA, Arts for a Better Bay Area Network in San Francisco, you were really an activist. So how has it gone from that background day to day to working at city hall and dealing with real estate developers who care about maybe a different bottom line? Sure. While I do have some contact with real estate developers, most of my work is still with non-profit leaders. I'm so lucky that way. And when this position was created at city hall and they first advertised it, the job description kind of looked like a kitchen sink. You couldn't really tell what it was. It was everything. It was just working with the non-profit sector. And I was at the time an executive director of a cultural center with a operating budget of about close to $2 million, but in a free space that was 25,000 square feet. So really it was a bigger operation. And what I had found through doing advocacy for access to arts and culture for everyone was that I loved running a space, but as I was growing my family and getting older, I was really energized by working on policy and working more broadly within the city. So originally I just made a decision to explore the job and everyone I knew, everyone I talked to who worked for the city was like, don't work for the city, it's horrible. Which is why we don't get great people sometimes in places like the city. They're live streaming this, so I need to finish that sentence and say, and say that I was very, very pleasantly surprised to talk with the people at the Office of Economic and Workforce Development and discover that while there is a lot of red tape, a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of building public will for any type of initiative that you're doing municipally, that there's still, I really enjoyed it. I love red tape. I love entangling red tape. I wake up in the morning and that's what I wanna do. So it was the right thing for me and I'm glad I listened to myself and did not listen to other people who have different strengths and different things that energize them. Yeah, we're glad for it. So thank you. I found it really interesting that your work explicitly in our initial conversation called out both social services agencies and arts and culture and obviously for people like myself, I think one supports the other. But sometimes people do see arts as, well, they're not starving children. So they are maybe below in a priority. Can you talk about how the needs have been different or similar and how it's broadened the support for this effort? I mean, is that something that arts should be doing more explicitly on the policy level? That's a great question. I think we have a very broad arts community in San Francisco, but because of our arts agency's longstanding focus on cultural equity, there are many, many organizations who are focused on immigrants, on Muslims, on different Latino communities. And so there was already a lot of connection happening on the street level where there wasn't connection was on the city level because I think when it comes to advocacy, the people wanna know what they're able to get and access. And so the temptation to just get funding for the arts or get funding for legal assistance is pretty strong. And I think that makes sense when we're talking about services, even in your own, you know, how you are making a case for the money. You say if we get, you know, $100,000, we can provide this much legal assistance to keep people in their homes. But when you're talking about organizational capacity and real estate, having it be in one bucket can make more sense because the way real estate opportunities play out is just not a perfect microcosm of what your nonprofit sector looks like. It's not perfect, everything doesn't happen in a perfect formula across all the neighborhoods in your city. And you mentioned readiness. It makes that many more organizations and their boards and who they serve, you know, eligible when the opportunities arise. Exactly. Yeah, so I think that's interesting. And I think some of the articles Clyde sent through, if y'all got them, explicitly talked about health and other markers of well-being in the arts. So thank you. And then we were gonna save some time for questions, but I also always love to end on the magic crystal ball. So you've had success. You said you're coming up on five years. Sure, yeah. And I'm coming up on four. So it's, you know, I feel like in city worlds, sometimes I'm still considered new. Where do you think your work will go? And obviously, I guess it's impossible to know if the economy or other trends, but in the next, say two to maybe five more years, where do you think this could go if you're in your portfolio of arts, culture and community investment? So over the next two years, as I mentioned, we're focused on some opportunities on the ground floor of affordable housing sites and that will take a lot of coalition building and fundraising together to get into those sites. It takes a lot of readiness. It is extremely complicated to work with, not just one, but two housing developers. You know, they're often in partnership and figure out what is a fair and achievable price for those spaces or to either rent or to own those spaces. So that's going to be a lot of work over the coming years with the nonprofits themselves telling us, and they already have told me what they need. They need more pre-development funding. They need more funding to, you know, build and plan for their capital campaigns and get their architectural renderings and all the stuff that happens before they even start to break ground on construction. So that's big. We also recently did a nonprofit sector economic study, which we're still finalizing, but when we did that in partnership with San Francisco State University, we got a lot of valuable data about which sectors tend to be smaller, the financial health of arts and culture, of social services, of education providers and the way I hope to begin to use that in the coming years is to now take that back to the nonprofits and say, hey, look, you know, it looks like you're working capital, the day's cash on hand for education providers and I don't have it in front of me, so I'm not sure that's true, but that's going down and what can we do to help that our nonprofit sector, for example, is more mature and we know that more mature nonprofit sectors tend to just be wider nonprofit sectors. So what can we do to help nonprofits start up and grow to reduce barriers to growth? We're also focusing a lot on talent recruitment and retention because after many, many years of low unemployment, nonprofits are having a very hard time filling vacancies when they come up and the time it takes and the number of vacancies at any given time in a nonprofit is getting in the way of the work. And succession planning. Yeah, it's a huge issue. I mean, some of these organizations that have been successful now have to backfill on top of that for key leaders. So, well, should we open it up for questions?  Well, thank you. Yes, so as we had discussed, we finished our cultural plan at the end of 2018 and have had a few big wins last year in 2019. The city of Dallas has been going through an economic development study and is focused on four key industries. Unfortunately, creative industries was not picked as one of the key targets. And so we are trying to find other ways to insert the healthy. And from our perspective, we have been focused on creative industries. So the notion of enlarging that to a broader nonprofit industry is really interesting to me personally, but is new because my main day here before has been very much arts and culture. But working specifically in housing, Dallas has a huge crisis for affordable housing, housing that shares our need for housing across the city so that we don't concentrate low income populations that are already concentrated and create more problems. And we are luckily starting to get invited to more of those conversations. So I think that that's going to be an opportunity. And then these themes of capacity building, strengthening boards is something that is ongoing and it needs to be a larger percentage of our work kind of in the future than it has been. So now that we might have some more bandwidth. So should we open it for questions? Okay, who wants to go first? We have a hand. Could you put your contact information back on the screen again? I'm not that fast. There you go. Good question. Easy. Lex, I'm interested in the business community's involvement in what you do. In other words, you talked a lot about your engagement with nonprofits. But how do you interact with the business community and how can they help? Because I think that's one of the key ingredients in this town to making it successful. That's a great question. Did you say your name? I'm so sorry. I'm Brad Todd. Okay. So when nonprofits advocated for my position to be created within the office, well, to be created, there was some conversation about where, okay, but where is it created? Do we put it over in the mayor's office of community development? Do we put it in the neighborhoods team? And where they decided to put this position, and I think it, I'm biased, but I think it's worked really well, is they put it on the business development team, which means that I'm in a team with my colleague who works with corporate headquarters in San Francisco, and my colleague who works with mechanic scratches and manufacturing, and my colleague who's working on recruiting international business, and so they have more day-to-day contact with, say, our Chamber of Commerce or our advocacy groups for different business sectors, but there is a ton of crossover of information, and so when a film comes into town, and right now we have the Matrix filming in San Francisco, when a film comes into town and they have a lot of valuable stuff that they've used in the production that they wanna get rid of, but maybe they wanna give it to community benefit organization, I'm right there with the data at the same time that someone else on the team's talking film sector, or we just borrow models from each other, so the way that the Nonprofit Sustainability Initiative was structured is being borrowed by our manufacturing sector lead who is looking at how we can preserve space for manufacturers and mechanics graduates who provide good jobs to people who maybe have a high school level education, and we took so much time to design that model and think about risk and think about how we make the grants and how we award them, and now it can be replicated in other industries, and I guess getting back to like, what about businesses we wanna give back, right? Part of providing the capacity and real estate readiness work is that because that is ongoing, we tend to know really early on when a project is coming along and might be well suited to other types of investment, and I really try to avoid picking and choosing because I wanna be an advocate for everyone, but when a business has made clear what their philanthropic interests are, whether it's education or job training or supporting immigrant communities, then I can at times provide them with like, well, here are the 80 nonprofits who do that. Here are the ones right in your neighborhood, for example, so it's just having that information at the ready for people who are ready to give. Hi, Lex, it's Jerry from Dallas Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation. I spent a lot of time in San Francisco for work, and particularly I'm thinking about the comparison of Dallas to San Francisco is really not a good comparison because Dallas is effectively getting rid of its cultural districts and really this ethnic enclaves are gone, so I think about a comparison is more so to Austin, particularly because Austin, just like San Francisco, is kind of like pushed out this black residence. And culturally, I was at the Fillmore Arts Jazz Festival and I think about race-based policy, like redlining, and my question to you is does San Francisco have like race-based policies that I really think about like race-based policies like redlining, which really particularly talked about different communities, and as a combat to that, you know, having like cultural equity or something that's not race-based, can it really combat what's happening in cities like Austin and San Francisco? Yeah, tell me your name again? Jerry. Jerry, okay. So that's a big question. Our elected officials just created an office of racial equity and part of what that office is tasked with is providing guidance and monitoring and measuring the progress we are making or not with our race-based policies and advancing racial equity in the city. One of the things, I touched on cultural districts and the cultural districts really are a container. I don't, it's hard for me to articulate, but it's like a container for resources, often for communities of color in our city. And it's also a container for policy and just to say one example, so in Caioventi Quatro, which is a cultural district in our mission district, some of the, they form the district first and some of the policies that have been made around conditional use approval of changing the use of a building or a business are focused on another program we have, which is the Legacy Business Program. So it's a really, it's a complex tool, but basically we've taken businesses that have been in continuous operation or 30 years or more, often businesses that have been nominated because they reflect the racial community, the community of Mexican and Latinx immigrants in that neighborhood, and they are protecting those businesses. Then with this other conditional use and legacy programming, they're saying if you're gonna change that business or that business goes away, in order for the new use to be approved, it has to meet these five, some of these five priorities for serving low income communities and communities of color in that neighborhood. We have to work with state laws that prevent commercial rent control. So we have to work within that. And it takes a lot of creativity and it really takes the feedback from people in the community to say, this works for us, this doesn't work, this makes it too hard to start a business, this is not doing enough. And that's where I think our Office of Racial Equity comes in. I could probably talk more about that. We should just talk after this, okay. Hi, I'm Adrienne with the Cedars Union. I had a question about the actual real estate development deals. In order to make this work, does the city by property from a developer or does the developer have to agree on making less money than they might on a commercial market? How close is this to sort of the way square footage lease might work without a nonprofit, if that makes sense? We could maybe, I don't know if it's possible to go back to that, the developer agreement slide. I'd say both things happen. When we're building affordable housing, the city usually has a ground lease, but not always. At times the city will purchase property. For example, right now we're consolidating a bunch of different agencies because in the past to do your pre-development planning and get your permitting, you were just running all over downtown to different buildings to do it and that was hard for businesses. But with development agreements, normally it is a private developer who is purchasing that big piece of land and they're building so much. This isn't like a four unit housing thing. This is like a big thing that's gonna take five to 30 years is when our office tends to be involved. It's more than a permit. It's a plan from five to 30 years. I'm not fully sure I understand it stood the rest of your question, but the way the process kind of works is the developer already has contacts in the neighborhood usually that they're talking to. They maybe have one or two nonprofits, maybe elected officials, maybe business owners who they're in conversation with and they're saying, here's what we're thinking. Do you support this? If so, why? If not, why not? Then they'll be in conversation with our joint development agency and also our invest in neighborhoods team who's really on the ground in the commercial quarters. And in the early stages, we maybe play a little more of like a validator slash sniff test role and say like, oh, it looks like you're talking to all the right people or oh, we noticed you haven't reached out to United to Save the Mission and this advocacy group that represents a lot of nonprofits in the neighborhood regularly comes to the planning hearings and offers their feedback. So you might want to consult them before you get your hearing scheduled. So we're playing a connector role in the early stages to ensure that they have broadly done their engagement before they get to a planning hearing. Does that answer your question? And the reason why is that we do not have as a right development. There is no, you can't just buy it and build it. You have to go through planning hearings, have your project improved, get it entitled. If you could just buy it and build it, they wouldn't be consulting the neighbors. Hi, my name is Sasha and I'm with Big Thought. And I had two part of question. The first is how do you ensure that the voice or what steps do you ensure that the voice of the community in which you're shifting for the affordable housing is represented in the room for planning? And then the ripple effects of that specifically come to mind like the police departments that are in those neighborhoods, in those areas, how do you ensure that they are also aware of the shift that happens in those spaces? Yeah. So this is probably more of a question for our mayor's office of housing and community development. But when our office of housing and community development issues a notice of funding availability or funding to build affordable housing, some of the things they're looking for in that score in addition to the capacity of an affordable housing developer is also their partnerships in the community that reflect the people in that community. And it's a really important part of the NOFA in order to succeed, you really do need to have true connection to the neighborhood and the community that need the affordable housing. And in some cases when that NOFA is issued, it is also articulated from, usually from a community planning process or a planning, an area plan that has already taken place. It might be articulated what the ground floor use is. So for example, a NOFA that happened not too long ago for affordable housing, it was already clear that they wanted a community serving art space on the ground floor. What I think our office of housing has learned over time is that they no longer say who exactly is gonna be in the space because often the most grassroots organizations might have a leadership change or we don't have a crystal ball. And so tying that into the developer agreement that's approved by elected officials, exactly who's gonna be in that space can lead to problems down the line. They can't force the marriage, they can only introduce people to date. Yeah, exactly. But another thing that I think is important is our community development piece, it's an office of housing and community development for a reason and with the community development piece, there's been a focus and a new five-year funding allocation that just went out that really focuses on funding the conveners in our different communities because the city's not always the best person to be getting together the residents and the small business owners. So we rely on the cultural competency and on the ground knowledge of conveners and we know that in order for those groups working in neighborhoods to be sustained over time, the city has stepped up to provide some funding to support that. Hi there. Hi, I'm Emily Hargrove with Social Venture Partners Dallas. Firstly, thank you for being here today. So Jennifer and her team do a really phenomenal job in promoting arts and culture and getting and advocating. The fact that creative industries isn't part of the city's economic development plan shows that the city has a long way to go to really understand the importance of creativity and arts and culture. So from your experience in San Francisco, what would you say to our city leaders to really get them to look at that differently and to really say this is crucial in order for the long-term humanity and for the success of the city? You want me to tell Dallas what to do? We're all ears. That's how we learn. I think it is very rare that I'm not telling Dallas what to do, but it's very rare that I hear people in my community say, you know what we need? We need another city worker. The city needs to have one more staff member. Like that is really what's needed. That'll solve everything. That rarely happens, but I will say that having, being sure that you have advocates, whether they're new or they're already existing within the government, who somebody in the creative industries is consistently speaking on behalf of the creative industries to listening ears at City Hall. It really doesn't take that many people to make a difference. What it takes is consistency and the fact that whoever is your ally is accurately and broadly representing your interests and that you're organized. You hold together, right? When someone at City Hall calls other members of that coalition and asks if they stand behind it that they do because that can really move forward when you say these are our priorities. You're doing some work that is needed. And also, getting back to why this role mattered, when it was created as a nonprofit advocate, people were really surprised that it was someone from the arts who was hired and not someone from the human services. That was kind of a big deal at the time. But not only me, but many people I have seen at City Hall in many different ways have made sure that arts and culture had a seat at the different tables. And to be always thinking about that has really made a difference. And just maybe two examples would be, or maybe even just one example, would be we have a, a CDFI that awards new market tax credits. And for many years, the director of our local arts agency was on that board that made the decisions. And that meant that at times, arts and culture organizations could find out about that resource and just get to the table a little earlier and that there was someone in the decision seat who really was looking at it with an arts and culture lens. And so that's been beneficial. And let me add one thing, thank you for your question. Two and a half years ago before the cultural plan, we would go talk to city council members and they would say, oh, I don't have any arts and culture in my district. You know, it's all downtown. The arts district, you know, let them do their thing. And by highlighting the cultural spaces all across the city and we identified over 600 spaces like this where arts and culture are that sometimes were overlooked but now raising the importance and messaging that and then also a real culture of valuing artists. We used to tell city council people you know the most important real estate developer or business owner in your district. You know the most important dedicated artists or artists collective and you'd get this blank stare. We didn't do that then publicly to embarrass them but it is important that you introduce them to the people doing this work. It's not always necessarily the thing that's going on there from Burner but over time I would say and we're again we have a new council and we have a new mayor so the political world changes but we have made inroads and so I know that this group is doing that work and I want to say thank you but as we push towards economic development and getting a seat at more of those tables for this workforce work and potentially aligning ourselves on things like housing and plans at the neighborhood level it continues to be important and the work is never done. Maybe time for one more question. Oh hi. Yes another thing we did do at City Hall is did our, we're on round three actually of what we call micro residents and Sophia is here. We've had a few of our residents embedded if you will in different city departments. So the library's department planning an urban development office of environmental quality housing which was, we got some great press. It's been invaluable I think of again that culture of value at City Hall. Thank you Tino. In letting artists that really are not even part of the part of government at all be at the table to help solve some of our mispressing problems that those departments face. So yes it's been great and I think the artists have found it to really stretch them as well because it's working in a different way. So thank you. You wanna do one more question? Is there another question, final question? I could probably make it available. I'd be happy to. Yeah. If we have 20 seconds I'm gonna go back and stumble over Jerry's question a little more and say that I just wanna bring up two examples. So with the nonprofit sustainability initiative from the very beginning we had five priority criteria for that program and we designed it was a very different way of grant making for the city where it was like a two tier thing where we were scoring for like readiness and capacity and feasibility of the project. But then we were also scoring for whether the organization was deeply rooted in a low income or historically underserved community, whether they had funding constraints that were unusual for their sector and whether they had taken some steps to mitigate risk to name just a couple. And so as we've made grants and we make grants up to a million dollars for acquisition of property so they can be pretty large. But for those million dollars and those acquisition grants eight of the nonprofits who have received those grants are led by people of color. And through that whole program which this year is 7.7 million dollars it's a multi agency program with a lot of intermediaries. Every time we do a request for proposals we look back at who applied, who couldn't qualify, who didn't apply and we really look at the different neighborhoods. We look for district parity and we also look for the communities that are not represented in a different round. So in the engagement piece if we didn't see engagement from say the African-American community or particular neighborhood then the next round we go out and we do workshops in that neighborhood. We make sure that we talk with the elected officials in that neighborhood to get suggestions. We talk with other nonprofits about why they didn't apply when we know they have real estate there and why it's not working for them. So it's really a living process of trying to continue to improve and make sure that we are achieving or that we're advancing racial equity through that program. Okay well thank you and one more time can we thank Lex and then we'll turn it back over to Clyde.


But when someone says, like, Alan, you got to rise and grind, no, I don't.  And I'm going to do what I love to do. And I'm going to do it to the best of my ability. But there's no grinding going on. The man who loves walking will walk further than the man who loves the destination. So what's happened along that process? You've learned to love the journey. Man, when you love the journey, the goals just happen. You hit milestones as a side effect, right? People coming up now and they say, you know, well, we want to be able to do some of the things you do. And I said, well, you can't do what I'm doing now. You have to do what I did 20 years ago when I was in the same position. And if you're not willing to do those things, then you're not going to be able to do these things. I was dead broke. There was no time to relax, go hang out, party. No, I was broke. I needed millions. I saw even when I had negative money in my account, which was very often I saw millions in my future.