ive friends like it too. And so that's a problem, right? But I'd love to see teachers and unions marching in collective bargaining that integration is part of the deal. I'd like to see that. I'd like to see the Venn diagram of all my friends who are marching in LA. I was a union chapter chair in my school, so. So I supported their march, but I'd love to see the Venn diagram between supporting UTLA's march and repealing Prop 13. I'd like to see that as well. But I would love to see collective bargaining that says integration is part of the equation. Then you'll see the legislators in California Venn, which has the perfect sea of blue, by the way, and it's segregated. Yes, you must always point out, though, we're gathered here today to remote the educational and social values of school diversity and integration. Nevertheless, the majority schools are still segregated and low performing, and we can't leave them out. So we're like two wings on a bird of a plane flying in unison, trying to improve education. It's not necessarily either or, but we try and move people more towards the integration side of the needle. All right. It's getting to people. All right. Let's try to say one thing. I see that we've taken over, so I'll jump in, too. Muhammad, your point about the teacher collective bargaining is brilliant. I think that's a wonderful idea, to build it into the contract. A lot of teacher unions are now bargaining for the collective good, the common good. I hope Randy takes it out right now. And, you know... Randy Weingart. Yeah. Remember, I was mentioning La Crosse, Wisconsin, the small community in the middle of, I don't want to say the middle of nowhere, but the middle of Wisconsin, that it was the teachers who pushed for integration. They went to the principals who went to the superintendent, who went to the school board, and the teacher said, we can't do our jobs right when there are concentrations of poverty in certain schools that are overwhelming to us as educators, and these other schools have, you know, our seas of wealth. So there's real potential there. They can, I think we ought to work on that together. Okay, Rick. I want to use my gavel here, all right? All right. This has been fantastic. And now we're going to open it up for Q&A. And please, we've got some mics around the room. This is a pretty dynamic and fired up group of folks to be able to have here. So let's have some questions from the audience. Hi, Valerie Bram, I'm working with intentionally diverse schools in Los Angeles and appreciate all these comments and the piece about the union really is triggering for me, being in Los Angeles, with everything that's been going on, Los Angeles is at a real pivot point right now where they're looking at pushing down a path of unified enrollment, possible district restructuring, that's all been sidelined by fiscal cliffs and strikes and whatnot, but there's a lot of opportunity for leadership around this issue. And there's also a lot of silence in Los Angeles. I wish we were debating should or must. It's like the topic's not even on the table as far as I can tell. And so my question is like, what's the tipping point? How do we spark the dialogue about this in districts where they feel like we're broke, we got to fix that first, right? They think of achieving integrated schools as a luxury once you've dealt with the big stuff, but I know San Antonio doesn't have a easy fiscal profile either. I know San Antonio, you know, New York hasn't had any of this easy and they've still tackled it. So I'm trying to understand like, how do you get there as a system where this becomes important enough to people that they understand the interconnection between why we face a fiscal cliff due to declining enrollment and the need to integrate schools, for example. Anybody wanna grab that? My thing is you just gotta keep going, can't stop. If you believe in it and you believe at its core, it is gonna help us move the needle on a lot of things in our country. And I believe that to the core, to the day I die, then I'm gonna keep doing it. Even if that means I created, I started with one in Dallas. I started with one school in Dallas. And then when they went to go, and then now there's seven of them. And when they went to go undo it because the real estate agents were mad that they weren't zoned to the million dollar housing in East Dallas, those parents had to help, no, do not touch our schools. So I was like mission accomplished, so I'm good there, so I can leave now. And so, yes, do we have to pick between, do we have a lot of bottom 5% of schools in San Antonio, in a highly segregated environment? Yes, we do, and we have to figure that out. And we have to figure out how to get the best teachers in there, the best curriculum, and equalize as much as possible. But we also know that we have to disrupt the lines as well because disrupting the lines will also benefit these kids as well. And so, you can't just get comfortable. So it can start with one. It can totally start with one. You should get Alex Caputo Pearl in a room and ask him how he feels about that if the West LA parents will open up their lines and borders to the kids. Because that area can achieve perfectly balanced school that they wanted to. But you have West LA charters now that are low poverty and highly affluent too. Why are they affing out, right? So that's a problem as well too. So there's a lot. Can I say to this, one of the, one of the, you mentioned organizing teachers, we need to start in this country by recognizing the value of our teachers, the dignity that they bring to it. So they can feel empowered to take these things. They're fighting for their economic survival instead of fighting for kids because we don't value what they bring to the classroom and to our country as a democracy. So the first thing we need to do is start a campaign to talk about the importance of classroom teachers in the lives and sustaining our democracy. Yes, absolutely. If you go into a school that's high poverty, the teachers who don't get paid very much are buying food for the children and all sorts of stuff. If you want to jump in here a little bit. I think, and I agree with what Muhammad and Drewith has said. The other thing I'd suggest is, I guess it's piggybacking on your point, Muhammad. The problem can seem so overwhelming in a community like Los Angeles. That's what New York faced. I remember talking to Joe Klein about integration in New York. He said, integration in New York, there's no way we could do that given the demographics. But what our school diversity advisory committee in New York City is doing now is saying, okay, maybe we cannot integrate every New York City school tomorrow. But within New York City, there are 32 community school districts. In nine of them, the demographics are diverse enough to create the possibilities of economically and racially integrated schools. And some people on our committee said, well, that's only nine of 32 districts. We can't offer a partial solution. Those nine districts, community school districts, educate 300,000 students. I mean, that would be the fifth largest school district in the country if we made progress there. And the theory of change is that if you can create high-quality integrated schools in those nine districts, then it's possible that more people from all backgrounds will participate in the public schools and you could widen the circle. It's not inevitable that half of white people in New York City are gonna go to private school, which is the case today. So I think starting small as Mohammed has and then building out is the way to kind of address the naysayers who say, we can't fix it all and therefore we shouldn't make any progress at all. Good point. We have some other questions, other comments or questions. Hi, I'm Karen Dolan from the Institute for Policy Studies. Thank you so much for your presentations today and the whole morning's been really great. I'm wondering, we haven't talked a lot about it, but I'm wondering about your thoughts about not just school discipline, but the school, the prison pipeline and especially with regard to now this move to have more SROs in schools. And we haven't really talked about restorative justice this morning and the way in which black and brown, disabled, trans, we haven't talked very much about trans students either, are really targeted. So not only within segregated schools, but when schools are in integrated schools, if it's still those students that are gonna be targeted for expulsion, suspension, referral to the criminal justice system, because I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. I would like to start that one because just last month, the Board of Regents did pass a resolution unanimously passed the resolution rejecting the current Secretary of Education's decision to eliminate the guidance. We restored the guidance for New York and are investing in the training of classroom teachers because you can't just restore it and say it will be without giving teachers the knowledge and the skills they need. But we made a very deliberate effort that we've got to cut short this school to prison pipeline and one of the ways to do that is to help students acquire the knowledge and skills they need to successfully work through all of the challenges that they face and the traumas that they face. And let's be realistic, a lot of this behavior comes from frustration and the absence of support, but we can help them work through that in ways that don't have them ending up before a judge and having them send off to a jail. So that was an intentional decision at the state level to reject what DeVos has set out and to make it a policy that all school districts must. Yeah. John, did you wanna jump in? I just wanna second that, that in this era of the Trump administration with Ms. DeVos or Mr. Carson, we must look to our states and our local for more remedies and creativity to promote equality in education in particular. I think the question having to do with in school, sort of segregation along all kinds of lines is a powerful one we're talking about the future that really needs to be more developed. There are folks who have written about it, but if we don't deal with it within school, we may not get to where we wanna go in terms of the diversity and the effects of diversity. We've got a few more minutes for Q and A. We have some questions and thoughts. Hi, thank you. My name is Robin Ensum with the National Urban League. My question is for Mohammed and you may have touched on this. I'm curious to know what conditions existed in San Antonio to make possible what you accomplished. So what were the conditions and what was it that moved the will for this to happen? A bold superintendent first, that was important. I have a very unified board as they say, but in Dallas I had a swing board, also a bold superintendent. It was nine members, five, four on most nights. And in San Antonio it's been seven, zero for many votes. So that's important, that matters. They have to want it. If they don't want it, I probably would have been fired the first week or at the time, I mean I would have been, as soon as I said the word segregation. When I saw Pedro Martinez who grew up in Chicago and was CFO under Arnie Duncan who knew this well and when I interviewed I asked them, are we gonna do choice well? Are we gonna do choice equitably? Or are we gonna let the free market decide? Look at the magnets, they're all over the place right now. I wanna unify enrollment, I wanna do control choice. I want you to live in abject poverty attending a struggling school and if you wanna choice out, you have the best shot in getting into a new seat that is integrated if you want it. And so they all said yes. So that was very important as well. It's an urban city with affluence all around it every day, it's gentrifying. Hopefully San Antonio, the mantra in San Antonio it's always been slow to develop Austin Happen, Houston Happen Dallas, so hopefully they can get that right. The mayor campaigned on an inclusive San Antonio. So I quickly crashed the housing task force as well because they gotta get that right as well. So those matter, right? We have a policy task force who oversee our attendance zones. We have an enrollment office under a person who's obsessive about integration. And so that helps as well. And then we offer choice as well. So with all of those conditions, we were able to do it. So we offer open enrollment opportunities, right? Even before charters, magnets have existed. But now we're also talking about magnets segregating and we segregating, right? I mean, think about that. And then we have attendance zones, of course, the hardest one to do. There's 17 different school districts. There's people talking about it and there's a lot of energy. I don't have the nonprofit power and waves and student activists like New York does or LA. I really don't in San Antonio, but there are a lot of people who want it, right? And I'll just give one other piece. When I launched the brand new school, I learned in Dallas three conditions have to be true. One, you needed an attractive instructional model and location. You needed things that tapping to deeper learning. The peer effect doesn't work if you don't have like a deeper learning model, everything from Montessori dual language, project-based learning, et cetera. Obviously no selective admissions and no tracking and you've got to preserve that into policy. Location matter, as much as my progressive families want to believe that they believe in equal opportunity, they won't make the jump at that Montessori school in a segregated neighborhood with higher crime rates. But when I put it in the center of the city where it's gentrifying and the organic coffee shops are propping up, they'll make the jump. If anything, they'll fight me for wanting more seats. They won't have it, they can get up to 50%, but on most days I give more seats to the economically disadvantaged students so my schools are six-ting above. The second piece is transportation to the greatest extent possible. Choice without transportation is not choice for our families. So push the city to give free transportation to high school students. Develop a hub system, figure it out as much as you can. And the third one is you've got to control for it, you've got to design for it. If you want to do a 50-50 dual language school with emerging bilingual students being half of the school, then they get the seats, control choice. You have to design for it and I believe they provided federal guidance, one of the ones that has not been revoked. It's still published on the site. I hope I just didn't ruin that. But that matters. Texas doesn't have anything against it or anything for it. So recently the charter office told me, well I don't know if you can do this. I said I can do this and I actually have a purple backing to do this, believe it or not. That's been very interesting as someone coming from California, Los Angeles. And the commissioner of the Texas State of Education was my former board member in Dallas. So I use that card as much as I can to as well push for this work. So a lot of different conditions, right? But you can approach in many different ways. Mohamed mentioned the New York City students and Amy's part of the School Diversity Advisory Group with me and I know both of us have been incredibly impressed by the student activism in New York City. We had a chancellor under Mayor de Blasio, Carmen Perrinha who was not committed to school integration. She talked about creating pen pals between different communities. That was her version of integration. We now have a chancellor, Richard Carranza, who is deeply committed to integration is talking about segregation, naming it. And Mohamed and I were talking about this before. And what enables that transformation within two chancellors? Well, one has to do with whether the person is a leader and feels it. But also having that strong student support, activism from the community makes an enormous difference. You know, I think we've pretty much run out of time. I want to thank the panel and give them a big round of applause. Thank you all. Thank you Peter. All right. Gonna have a good or next event. That'd be great. Thank you. It was a pleasure seeing you, sir. Good seeing you. Good seeing you. I was in Houston trying to get the same thing started. You're doing now, and I was the dean of the School of Law that you're doing now. Is this the way a lot of work to do? I had a first African-American superintendent and he can do this for a little while. Okay. Hello, everybody. This is on. Great. I have the very, very, very deep pleasure to introduce to you our next speaker. There's just, I'm foaming around a little bit here. There are a few people as young as our next speaker who has made a huge impact on the policy and intellectual life of America, really, as Professor Kahil Jibran Mohamed. Want to introduce him. He's one of America's leading public intellectuals on civil rights and the African-American experience. He is a professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and he is a Suzanne Young Murray professor at Radcliffe. His scholarship examines the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality, and criminal justice in modern U.S. urban history. His book, The Commendation of Blackness, Race, Crime, and the Making of the Urban Modern America, won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book Award. He has previously served as a director of the Schaumburg Center for Research in Black Culture in the nation's leading library and archive of global black history and was an associate professor at Indiana University. In 2017, he won the Distinguished Service Medal from Columbia University's Teachers College. Professor Mohamed. Good afternoon or close to good afternoon everyone. I want to thank Linda Darling Hammond, Learning Policy Institute, Janelle George, all the people who helped make today possible and for inviting me into the room. Until Mohamed spoke, I thought I might be the only troublemaker but I now know I'm in good company and so I'm grateful for this. So I'm gonna work for my laptop in part because I have taken the assignment here of closing remarks to try to digest some of what I've heard today and I'm gonna be faithful to that but I also have a few things to share of my own. So again, I wanna thank everyone for the contribution to today's event. I've learned a lot. So I wanna set the context of who I am and my work because this is important. I'm not probably the most common kind of interlocutor or contributor to such conversations and I think for me it's hopeful that one historians in the big age sense of things are becoming part of these conversations but also I heard so many amazing comments about the intersections of many sectors of our society that impinge and shape educational outcomes and to me that is also an incredibly fruitful and generative direction for the kinds of outcomes that we wanna see happening. So what happens elsewhere in our society matters and I pay close attention to that. It's also true that I do teach education students in a class that I teach at Harvard. Actually all my classes education students show up from the Harvard Graduate School of Education for the most part. They're usually about a fifth of the students and frankly as someone who mostly has been training people to become historians and now training people to think about racism and inequality and policy making I'm learning a lot from them as well. So what you hear from me is also a consequence of the lessons that I've learned from the students many of whom are practitioners. They've been in various educational doing various forms of educational work for a long time. One of the things that they've taught me is that they were educated in segregated schools. These are adults, 20 somethings, 30, 40 somethings and they are 90% white. They also didn't question their right to the quality and exceptional educations that they received as students who now getting graduate degrees in a policy school are at Harvard University. They were also educated that America is an exceptional nation and mostly gets it right. And so their sense of the deficits that exist in our society are the deficits of the students that they are taught to save.  That part of their obligation as well-educated people is to get back in this way, to fix broken people. They also don't know much about race or racism. They walk in the door thinking they do to some degree also curious about what they don't know and walking out more or less pissed. That we failed them. That we failed them as educators, as a society, as people who profess to be the greatest nation in the world and its caretakers have failed them in understanding the precise history of this country and not the one that fuels our civic myths. And for my black students, many of them still report getting to Harvard in spite of teachers and guidance counselors in public schools who track them or want to track them into community schools or lesser schools and they have their sites settled. This is just a little bit of what I've learned from those students but I think all of it helps us collectively today face squarely the facts before us. One of the history lessons that I teach my students, this is my contribution in a sense, is I tell them a lot more about the story of Kenneth and Mamie Clark. For whom we are here today in part based on the theme of this conference. And yet I worry that in the abstraction of who they were and what they did, we lose a little bit more of what they learned. And so part of my job as a historian is to keep the knowledge that we've gained in circulation to help redistribute it in ways that we may not make the same mistakes as those who've come before us make. I'll share with you a few highlights from that work. And so you know about nimbyism, not my backyardism but Clark in many ways coined what we might call not all my child ism, nomsieism. He didn't write this of course, but I think it's one way of thinking about some of the common things we've heard today. In the work that I think is most telling of how we have lost some of the central messages of Kenneth and Mamie Clark's body of work comes from Dark Ghetto published in 1965. We talk about brown, we've dissected brown and certainly many commentators over the last 40 and 50 years have looked and assessed brown. But Clark left us himself a message after looking at the dismal results of what brown had produced by 1965 as well as anticipating much of the struggles against busing and the desegregation that was to come. He had already anticipated a lot of the challenges that we saw in the 1970s, some of which were overcome, some of which have now been erased. He says in Dark Ghetto that the middle and upper class parents who defend their decision for private schools with the plea, quote, I won't sacrifice my child, gives perhaps less weight to their child's resilience than the evidence would support and certainly less weight to the importance of democratically based education than the times demand. But such arguments have little weight when parents fear for their child's future. And I think when he notes the democratically based education, he reminds us that in 1965 what was most important was not the simple need for literacy or numeracy, but that what goes on in our classrooms ensures that our democratic institutions will survive. That's a message that never left for the most part that generation of thinkers and most certainly did not impact much of the conversation about what was going on. It translated into integration and we've heard so many versions of that today. So let's think about that democratically based education in broader terms as the broader context of my remarks. I think it's also important to note that Clark was very clear for black children, schools hurt them, that their IQ scores by the standards of testing at that time went down the longer they went in school. And Clark called this, he said that the justification for these things were poor children can't learn, like their middle class peers. He said that people defended this that culturally deprived children come from incurious homes. This was the attack on black families. And he said of course that people said these children have psychological problems. He said all of these amounted to what he described as an alibi for educational neglect. Now I call this the problem of damage imagery. Because we've taken the evidence of the disadvantage as Professor Orfield described earlier, not as an invitation to rewire our society but as a way of doubling down on the notion that we've gotta fix those kids. But Clark was very clear there was nothing ever wrong with those kids. He made it painfully clear because the problem was that the assumption that something was wrong with them, the notion of damage to them would be the key ingredient to ensuring that they would have poor schooling experiences. I'll just use his words specifically. Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable. Children are quote not fooled by the various euphemisms educators used to disguise educational snobbery. He also noted they react negatively and hostily and aggressively to the educational process.   So let me reframe this. John King said earlier that we lack not guidance or wisdom, but political will and folks stepping up that we need an educational justice movement and I wanna endorse that 100%. But I also wanna say we haven't been honest about the complicity of both the Obama administration as well as various other education reformers who have not been committed to that work. So we have to match our talk with our actual action and there's a huge gap between those two things. I also wanna insist something that we didn't hear today is that segregation damages white people. I heard someone earlier refer to schools of mostly whites as racially isolated. If segregation is a problem it works in both directions. We're used to a long list of citing evidence of the damage that black people have experienced but we don't study nor talk enough about how segregation harms white people. It makes them feel privileged, it encourages their blind spots, it limits their moral imagination, it miseducates and poorly educates them. And this may sound divisive but it seems to me how else can we face squarely the facts that face us in this moment? Before Trump we had the largest penal system the world had ever known. Before Trump the overwhelming evidence of re-segregation was already presented before us. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. And part of what the Southern Poverty Law Center has been teaching us and I'm grateful for Amy Stuart Wells using the work and everything she described about the importance of racial and historical literacy. They tell us that if we were to learn something about Brown, oh my gosh, we've done a terrible job. When the Southern Poverty Law Center looked at every state in the country to determine how much civil rights history they were teaching, they found that 35 states by any stretch of the imagination were doing a very poor job, 16 of which required no teaching of civil rights history. Then when they did a sample of 12,000 high school students to determine whether or not they could answer the question, what was Brown versus Board of Education and why is it important? Only 2% could answer those questions correctly. So if we believed in the promise of Brown collectively then of course we would teach that to Brown. But the truth is that we didn't, we know that to be the case but here is where the opportunity lies. If we can focus on something that we might call civics education of a 21st century kind then we can begin to rebuild citizens who value these things because we've been doing just the opposite. It's also important for me to note that diversity, I have serious concerns with the way in which diversity functions in our language and the way that we try to communicate our values. Diversity for the most part as far as I can tell is a mask for reinforcing white privilege. It helps people, white people for the most part still in decision-making positions decide who they like to be around. But that's not democratically based education. All the evidence that diversity makes us smarter is not going to change things if white people don't believe it and don't act on it other than the cosmetic diversity that comes with living in Bed-Stuy or various newly gentrified parts of the United States. White affluent parents who like diversity are still counting how many black bodies are in the classroom with their kids to determine how good the classroom is. Part of this is because they have never had to listen very hard to understand the stakes of what it means to give up some of that privilege. And if you don't believe the degree to which that racism is real or the anti-blackness of even liberal and moderate parents, one doesn't have to stretch very hard to hear conversations about meritocracy, about excellence, or to even hear, again, the reinforcing cycles or feedback of the damage of black children. If a child coming from a broken home has these problems, why should I subject my child to that, even if I believe that the right kinds of black and brown children should be in this school? So we have to address that squarely. It's also true that the language of the achievement gap has been weaponized against us. As much as it has become a source and a useful source for pointing out the failures that exist systemically, it also essentially reinforces the myth of black inferiority. It's still very much with us in tracking, to one degree, and Trump's notion of low IQs, which he is so freely disseminated in his political rhetoric, but his free use of low IQ rhetoric comes squarely out of the ongoing conversations about the skills gap that exists amongst black people. When I talk to some of my economics colleagues at Harvard, they don't think racism is really a problem. The problem is skills. If the problem is skills and the problem is squarely back on those who lack the skills, racism is completely abstracted or historical or not existent. So let's think about what it means to change the standards of achievement gap. First of all, we have to acknowledge that whiteness cannot be the uniform basis for how we measure how other people are doing. This is exactly what Credo does at Stanford University when it tries to measure what traditional public schools white students are doing versus the charter schools. Well, it completely says, no matter what white kids are doing in school, they're the norm and we have to figure out how everyone else is doing. That's a form of white supremacy baked into the very standards of evidence that we use to move the needle. Let me just remind you, all of you know this. 2017 NAP scores fourth grade math, only 51% of all white students achieve proficiency. In reading, only 47% of all white students achieve proficiency. Now we often compare in our fluent school districts, 85, 90% achievement levels versus barely proficient for black and brown children, but we never talk nationally about the fact that barely half of all white children in America in the aggregate are proficient in reading and math. So why would we assume then that what's going on with white people is a standard by which we should close the achievement gap?  This is not just an old people problem, this is also a young people problem. The consequences of 50 years of desegregation, segregation and resegregation also means that black teachers have been purged from our nation's classrooms, something that we haven't talked about. Why would we expect black teachers to be purged from our nation's classroom? Because if the assumption is that black people on average have lower IQs or are not as smart or come from broken homes, why would I as a white parent want my students to be subject to white teachers? The irony of this of course is that the more that we've invested in white teachers through TFA and other programs that basically encourage white saviors like the kind of students that I teach to go into the classroom to save black kids is the more that we in the end reinforce the very forms of implicit bias that social psychologists now as Mazarene Banaji, one of the creators of the IAT test at Harvard told me, we have 5,000 audit study tests, we need no more tests to know that white people have anti-black racism as well as black people. And so we're not having a conversation about implicit bias among teachers like we are about police officers. So that's another area that would, as far as I'm concerned, shift the burden away from the damage of black and brown children to the damage that a poor or miseducated white teaching force brings into the classroom. Some of the work that Amy Stewart Wells is doing also. Okay, so how did we get here? We got here through a civil rights revolution as Gary Orfield described it. There was an attack on this structure. I'm almost done. Since then there has been a deliberate, consistent effort to attack the civil rights movement as Professor Orfield said, but I wanna remind you that the relationship of that attack on the civil rights movement is also a relationship that runs through everything else. So let's connect the dots. Let's connect the dots between Milton Friedman's, the University of Chicago economist, who essentially has established 40 years of economic policy where morality has no place in the marketplace, also was one of the earlier advocates for school vouchers and choice. Which of course, when he went into the Reagan administration, then adopted as a plan that by any stretch of the imagination was an effort to kill public education. Because if the government was the problem, and public education was one of the biggest expenditures and footprint of the government, the goal was to get rid of public education. Let's make no mistake about it. Now, of course, black conservatives joined into this. I won't go into the details, but I want to remind you that the discourses that that kind of conservative attack on the civil rights movement took place in that moment has affected all of us. It isn't just in the minds of conservatives. So when we start conversations about broken black families, we have accepted the terms of the conservative revolution about why it is that there is a quote unquote achievement gap in the first place. We are still not talking about the damage that it does to our society. So I will close with saying that when the former New Jersey justice described the problem that New Jersey faces, my wife is an elected school board member in an integrated community of South Orange and Maplewood. I live with the challenges that she faces that affect that community every single day as our kitchen table conversation. I lament the fact that we didn't give him a good answer directly. And I think that part of the answer, both in terms of what Muhammad talked about in terms of collective bargaining agreements is a step in that direction. I think that I heard legislations to stop using property taxes from Judith Johnson is a wonderful step in that direction. I think a lot of the design plans that are working, I would argue at the margins, which is not to say that they're not meaningful and they shouldn't pile us towards something better, is productive, but I will say to the justice and to all the rest of us, if we don't reframe this not as a civil rights issue, which is how Senator Murphy, as well as Congressman Scott did, I think we have to reframe this as a democracy problem. This is about a country that is teetering on the brink of destroying itself and Trump did not get elected on the basis of an argument of a big tent. He got elected on the very same exclusionary policies that the Republican Party has been advancing with far softer and more gentler language for almost 50 years. He got in office from a majority white electorate, a majority white electorate, a majority white electorate on the basis of various prescriptive forms of racism, more of it, an insistence and a retreat against the notion that diversity is a good idea, against the notion that together we are stronger. Now we can play the game of simply arguing politically that that's not our values and therefore we all believe the same thing, but we don't. We've lost those arguments. We've been losing those arguments. So the way to correct that is to be intentional, to be explicit about the fact that we had this problem, we have this problem and we're gonna fix this problem which is not fixing the achievement gap. We should expect more of white people, of their children, of their attitudes, of their beliefs and in the process, my guess, my guess is if we can center black humanity better in all of this work, we will be a better nation for it because if we remember the legacy of black contributions to American democracy, if we remember what the slaves accomplished, we'd know that the 14th Amendment, the basis of all our equal protections, the basis for every claim of civil rights, it did not come from on high. It did not come from a kind of thoughtful moment of moderates and liberals getting together. It came from the fact that black people forced the nation to reconcile its beliefs and ideals with the reality and everyone, everyone, everyone has benefited from that. So if we believe in that, then we cannot tell black children that simply being literate and numerically smart is good enough. We have to tell them that you are part of a story alongside white allies who helped to make America truly great in the first place and if we wanna keep it that way, that story can no longer be optional. Thank you. I don't know quite what we can do to end it on that. That was fantastic. It was also just a very deep learning experience. So thank you very much. Patrick Shields, who's the Executive Director of Learning Policy Institute with more than 25 years doing large social science research, just gonna wrap it up. Yeah, yeah, we can't do much. In fact, if I could cede my five minutes back to Professor Muhammad, I would like to hear some more from you. Thank you very much. We were concerned when we put together this program that we looked at the data and Linda showed that chart before of resegregation and Gary talked about what's happening. We have the New Jersey case about the difficulty of implementing things. And we thought it might be a little bit of a downer. But I really have been invigorated today, not only by the concrete examples of controlled choice and inter-district choice, but also the thoughtful remarks that Professor Muhammad just made about sort of trying to rethink basically how we take this on as a matter of the values of a democracy in our society, and not just a matter of our schools and who sits next to who in the classroom. So with that, I'd like to thank you all for coming to remind you that these reports are on our website, LearningPolicyInstitute.org that you can find easily. And thank you, and we'll be continuing in this series of events.


재미免ful to the series of Videolectures on the Subject Digital Techniques for Secondary IT students. I am Dr. Sri Shal Sharad Kashbar. In this video lecture, we will continue the last point of our previous video i.e. Circuit Description Wayes on V Everybody Log with an example. At the end of this session, you will be able to write a very log module for Digital Circuits through behavioral-structural approach. So as mentioned in the previous video in very log there are two widely used approaches for describing a digital circuit and those are behavioral and second one is structural. Now let us see the behavioral description approach in short. In behavioral approach a circuit can be described using its logic expression and very log programming constructs. Here desired behavior of the circuit is described but not its actual structure in terms of logic kids. Behavioral description approach is the more abstract way to define circuits and in this case statements like assign are used. Let us take one example for illustrating the concept of behavioral approach. Here the problem is to write a very log module for implementing the logic expression x is equal to a into b plus c and we have to use the behavioral approach. Now in this case x is our output a b and c are the inputs. Now in this case we will start with the module keyword here the name of the module I have given as a b1. x is the output a b and c are the inputs and do not forget to give the semicolon at the end. Then the next step is to define the inputs and outputs for this circuit. So here our output is x so it is defined as output x then the inputs are three namely a b and c. Then the next step is to write the logic expression in terms of the very log programming constructs and those are in this case this AND operator and this OR operator. And in this case the expression on the right hand side is evaluated first and that is assigned to the output x in our case and that is taken care by this assign keyword which is written here. So in this case a is ANDed with the b and its result is ORed with the c and after its evaluation it is assigned to x and at the end we will write the AND module keyword. So this is the module definition which implements x is equal to a into b plus c. Now in structural description approach a circuit can be described using very log construct that describes the structure of the circuit in terms of circuit elements such as logic gates. Here a larger circuit is defined by writing code that connects such elements together. Here what we mainly use are the instances of built-in primitive gates such as AND gate OR gate NOT gate etc. Now let us take one example. Now in this case suppose we want to write a very log module implementing the previous equation that is x is equal to a AND b ORed with the c using the structural approach. We have seen the bHRL approach previously. Now we will do the same thing using the structural approach. So for the given logic equation x is equal to a into b plus c we can draw the circuit diagram using the interconnection of in terms of gates as follows here. This is the AND gate and this is the OR gate the inputs here are a and b and its output we have renamed as the t1. And this t1 is input to this OR gate and another input to the OR gate is c and at the output you can see here the symbol name is x. So this circuit implements what x is equal to a into b plus c. Now let us write a module definition using structural approach. Now in this case once again we will start with the module keyword. So module here the module name I have given as s1. This is the list of ports so x is the output port a b and c are the input ports. Then we have defined the input and output so output x and the inputs are a b and c and those are defined using these keywords output and input. Then we require an intermediate output namely t1 which is the output of the first AND gate and we have defined it as the wire data type. So wire t1 we have defined this wire here indicates this t1. Then next we describe the circuit in terms of logic gates. So first statement which we have written and the instance name is a1 and inside the bracket we have provided the list of ports for this logic gate. Now in this case t1 is the output which is written first then its inputs are a and b which is written here. Now the next statement will be OR o1 in bracket x,t1,c. Now in this case you can see x is the output for this logic gate. Then the first input to this OR gate is t1 which is written here. Then the second input is c which is also written at the end. So we have defined this circuit in terms of logic gates and we will close the module definition with the end module keyword. Now pause the video for 2 minutes and write down the answer of the given question. So these are the module definition using both behavioral approach as well as structural approach. Now let us describe one more example using both the approaches and in this example we will describe a 2S to 1 multiplexer in very lock using behavioral as well as structural model. Now this is the block diagram of 2S to 1 multiplexer. a and b are the inputs select is another input and out is the output in this case. Multiplexer by its definition it is many inputs and one output circuit. Here depending upon the select input the output is equals to either a or it is equals to b. Now using behavioral approach we require its logic expression and that is equals to out in this case is equals to a multiplied by select bar plus b into select. Select bar in this case is nothing but the complement of select input. Thus the very lock code can be written as follows. The module definition start with the module keyword followed by its name. I have given it as mux to 1 b e h in bracket we provide the list of ports.  So output and input are defined in the next two lines. In the following statement we have written the assignment statement. Here assign out is equals to a ended with the not select. And this entire output is odd with the b and a c l. So this statement basically implements this logic expression. Now let us describe the same circuit using the structural description approach. Now in this case we first need to draw the circuit diagram in terms of logic gates. As you can see here a b and select are the inputs. Other than that we require two AND gates and one OR gate. We also require a NOT gate. The NOT gate has input from the select line and its output is connected to the first AND gate. The another input to the first AND gate is a and its output is given to the OR gate. The second AND gate has two inputs namely select and b and its output is also given to the OR gate. And this OR gate has the output namely out. Now before the very lock code for the circuit is written the circuit is redrawn with the necessary labels as shown in this figure. The output of the NOT gate is named as k. The output of the first AND gate is named as t1 and output of the second AND gate is named as t2. Now let us write the very lock module for this case. For your reference the circuit diagram is shown here. Now in this case we start with the module keyword. The name in this case I have given is mux21str. This is the list of the ports. In the next two lines we have defined the output and inputs. We have defined t1, t2 and k as the wire data type. Then in the next statement we have written NOT. The instance name is n1. In bracket we have given the output as k and the input is sl. In the next statement we have written AND a1. In bracket t1, a, k means we have defined the first AND gate. The inputs in this case are a and k which are here and its output is t1. That is written here. In the next statement we have written AND a2. a2 is the instance name in this case in bracket t2, b, sl. In this case t2 is the output, b and select as the input. You can see here b and select as the inputs and t2 is the output. And in the next statement finally we require to describe this OR gate. And it is described in this statement. So OR instance name is o1. In bracket the output in this case is out which is written here. The two inputs to this OR gate are t1 and t2 which are written here. And finally we have written the AND module keyword. These are the references. Thank you very much.


This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. My name is Stephanie Mock and this will be my last show hosting Hawaii Food and Farmers on my own. We are ending our show on December 5th only because we have so much work to do in the agricultural community and field that we wanted to dedicate more of our time to the field. And I have a very special guest with me today for a show called Elemental Accelerator, innovating from the ground up. And we're joined today by Dania Hakim, who's the Agriculture and Water Portfolio Manager for Elemental Accelerator. I first met Dania at the Hawaii Farm Bureau Farm Fair, which is held by the Hawaii Farm Bureau every year at Kualoa Ranch. And I was at our outreach table for Wahuar Sandy talking to people about conservation planning and business workshops and how farmers can be supported by the community. And through shows like this, and Dania came up to my table and I handed her some, a packet of weird black seeds. And she was, and she was like, what is this? And I was like, oh, this is called Sun Him cover crop seed. And that really started a conversation talking more about her work with Elemental Accelerator and my work with Oahuar C&D and how it's so important for us to really support our local community initiatives so that we can support Hawaii's food and farmers. So I invited Dania here today to talk about her role in agriculture here in Hawaii, but how more globally or broadly Elemental Accelerator is helping startups change the world. So I'd like to extend a warm welcome to Dania. Thank you for joining me. Yeah, thank you so much for having me, especially on your last show on your own. Yes, yeah. You're my pinnacle guest, right? So thank you so much for joining me. I must admit, I've been trying to cultivate this for a while to get you on the show. And you've just been so busy working with Elemental Accelerator and getting out there in the community. I'm thankful that you can spend some time with me here today. Yeah, glad to be here. Yeah, so we're talking a little bit before the show, just getting to know each other a little bit more. And not everyone had that pleasure of seeing you behind the scenes. So I thought we could talk a little bit about you, Dania, as a person. Where are you from? Do you have any experience in agriculture? And basically, how did you get involved with food and farmers? Sure. So it turns out we're from the same place. I know. In Maryland. The best state, right? Of course. After Hawaii. Yeah, of course, after Hawaii. Both grew up in Maryland. I am from the Washington, D.C. area. And schooling-wise, my undergraduate degree is in communications and business management. I actually worked for about five years in storytelling and media. I produced documentary films for National Geographic and Discovery Channel for quite a while, which was a lot of fun. I ended up getting my masters in resource-based conflicts. So I studied conflicts around climate change, drought, deforestation, and how that impacts humans and migration and other violent and nonviolent conflicts. So heavy topics, but actually, funny enough, that's what got me into the food and agriculture space. In my travels with National Geographic and through my research in my master's program, really realized that in these really heavy conflict zones, food is such a connector. It brings people together. It breaks down barriers. It's what people, if you can't speak the same language, if you actually have histories or generations of conflict, you can connect over food. And it really drew me to the issue. The second thing about food and agriculture, it's an issue that we make a decision about, probably three, maybe more, depending on how hungry you are every day. And so it's an issue you can have a really direct impact on in your everyday life, unlike while there's still incredibly important issues, let's say wildlife conservation or drilling in the Arctic, really important, but you're not making a conscious choice. And in that way, you don't have so much direct power over shifting the global food industry or environmental issues. So that's kind of what got me into it. Background in the ag sector, I volunteered a lot of farms growing up. I worked on a farm. And in Hawaii, I actually came to Hawaii to come lead the, co-lead the Hawaii Center for Food Safety, where I was the program director for three years. And that's an advocacy organization that really focuses on education and policy change to really promote alternatives to large scale industrial agriculture. And I also worked for one of our portfolio companies, Canola Cattle. Oh, okay, wow. You have quite the background in agriculture, not only on the East Coast where we're from, but also here too. I really like what you were talking about through your studies, your master's studies, you were discovering this conflict around food and how it can bring people together and really telling the story of food and how that affects civilization and conflict resolution and that kind of thing, bringing that consciousness to our food choices and our agricultural scene. Like you said, people make that choice every day and they don't quite equate it with how that choice can affect food and agriculture on a larger scale. So I think it's really interesting. I really appreciate that you're taking that storytelling aspect and with your background and communications, you're able to better advocate and share that story with others.  You did a great job. Yeah. And you're... Thank you. The studio does a great job and, you know, I think the more advocates and storytellers we can have, not only for food but just sustainability in all sectors is really important. So do you find that your experiences, you know, either on the farm or national geographic, does that translate well with your work with Elemental Accelerator? It does, actually. I've learned a lot. I have a really great network for my work in Hawaii over the past four years, but I will say that Elemental Accelerator, I'll share more. We take a different approach than if we really, I mean, in my opinion, I think to really transform our food system. We need innovation. We also need policy and education. My last role was really focused on policy and education. This role is much more focused on innovation and we also do some policy work as well but really focus in that space. So I'm really in a listening and building phase. I want to learn. I realize that I have a set understanding, but I really want to be open to different perspectives and so that's kind of where I'm at too. It's a great network and a great baseline, but I'm really learning so much in this new role too. Yeah, and that's a great thing about Hawaii agriculture right now, right? We're in this huge transition period from plantation agriculture. I know we've been saying that the past couple of years, but that kind of huge monumental transition is going to take a couple more years, right, and maybe even another decade. We really need as many informed players on the ground and innovators innovating from the ground up, our title today, to really direct that transition in a way that makes sense for Hawaii, but also on a larger scale for the globe. So, you know, listening, advocating is great, but also stepping back and listening to everyone who's out there really working to promote our local food systems here in Hawaii. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I'm going to read some of your National Geographic documentaries and we can show it. Yeah. Do you have any notable titles people should check out or anything you assisted with that maybe you want to call attention to, or just tell me and I'll go watch them. Yeah. It's funny. I worked on a series called Explorer, which is the longest running documentary series on TV. And so that was a much more focused on investigative journalism, and I worked on a series of topics there, the ones that come to mind are so irrelevant to this topic. No, that's okay. It's okay. As we know, everything can be connected in some way, right? Yeah. I suppose so. Even wildlife conservation is important for agriculture. Yeah. One of the series I worked on right towards the end was actually related to my master's education. It was really focused on, it's called Conflict Zone. It was focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Okay. I was trying to tell the individual stories of people, and one of them was actually the story of a Christian farmer in Palestine who's had his water cut off. Oh, wow. Really, like, frequently, and so his ability to grow food, which is really his passion and intention in his livelihood, has been at risk. A lot of the challenges are around water in that area. Not having access to springs in order to feed and grow food and also just to have in the household. I was a really interesting one, but man, we did so many different shows on rock climbers, on volcanoes, on prostitution, on quite a range of content. Yeah, quite the storytelling of the documentarians. National Geographic has quite a range of content, not just lions and tigers. And not just the magazine itself, too. Yeah. Like, it's really spread across media platforms, which I think Think Tech is really working on, too. You know, we're a web show, but how can we extend our network and be on more media facets so that people can have a voice, but also they can hear other people's voices, too. So now you're with Elemental Accelerator, which in my intro, basically the tagline is helping startups change the world one community at a time. And I thought, very briefly before we go to a commercial break, you know, as Elemental Accelerator, a non-profit, is it a business? What is it in itself? Yeah, it's a non-profit. Okay. Yeah. So we've been around since 2011. We were originally founded out of the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative, which was an initiative around 2008 that ultimately has led us to 100 percent renewable energy goal by 2045. And the organization has kind of shifted and molded since then on the way that we give out funding and the kind of services that we provide, but yeah, we are a non-profit. Wonderful. And then, you know, are you supported by local community here, like is your office here in Hawaii? Is it a global office? What does that model look like? Sure. We're based here. Okay. We have about 20, 25 staff. Nice. Good size. Yeah. We have an office in Palo Alto in California, which is a recent addition this past year. Yeah. Wonderful. Okay. Yeah. We have a lot of local partners, businesses and deployment partners we call them, but really partners that work with our companies to do projects. And then we also have lots of connections on the continent, but even more broadly, a really extensive global partner network of corporates that we work with that are interested in potentially an acquisition of our companies, but also in deploying projects with them as well. And those are mostly on the energy side. Our program has traditionally been really focused in energy. About half of our companies that we've funded are in energy. So a lot of the global connections that we have are in energy, but we're really building out in the other sectors. I'm happy to share more, but I know we have... Yeah, we're going to take a quick break. Yeah, commercial break. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're going to see a short video about Elemental Accelerator and their mission, and we're going to talk more to Dania about her work as an Agriculture and Water Portfolio Manager for Elemental Accelerator. We'll be right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. When I was growing up, I was among the one in six American kids who struggled with hunger. But with the power of breakfast, the kids in your neighborhood can think big and be more.  If you're not in control of how you see yourself, then who is? Live above the influence. Do you want to be cool? If so, watch my show on Tuesdays at one called Out of the Comfort Zone. I sang this song to you because I think you either are cool or have the potential to be seriously cool, and I want you to come watch my show where I bring in experts who talk all about easy strategies to be healthier, happier, build better relationships, and make your life a success. So come sit with the cool kids at Out of the Comfort Zone on Tuesdays at one. See you there. Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed those short messages. We're joined in the studio with Dania Hakim of Elemental Accelerator. Her role is as Agriculture and Water Portfolio Manager, and we spent the first half of our show talking to her about what her background in agriculture is, and she shared her experiences in communications, media, storytelling, her jobs working on a farm as well. And so the second half of the show, we're going to talk strictly Elemental Accelerator and what she does now in her role and how she helps support startups around the world and builds up our communities one at a time. So we're going to watch a short video that talks about Elemental Accelerator's mission in the world. Here you go. This tree produces seeds from which we extract oil to produce biodiesel. Come in elderly families. We had someone come into our home and we have devices installed that helps us to monitor the use of electricity. Cutting 25 percent off those bills, people were really appreciative. It was awesome to hear that. I feel like we're making a different start small and then people start to catch on and then you get a lot of adopters. Hawaii is 10 years into a 40 year energy transition. In 2045, our lives will be powered by 100 percent clean energy. Just watch that video about Elemental Accelerator. And I want you to talk about, I think it used to be called energy accelerator, right?  Is that correct? Yes. OK. Could you talk about why was that nonprofit started? Like, what was the need and how do you guys fulfill that need? Like, why was it created? Absolutely, yes. It used to be called energy accelerator up until last year. OK. We were founded out of the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. The goal to get to 100 percent, we really need innovation. And we needed to support businesses to help us reach that goal. OK. And why I think we're uniquely important in this like in the innovation sector is that we fund companies up to a million dollars to do projects. OK. That's our sort of bread and butter, although we fund different companies in different ways as well. But we fund them to do projects to really help them commercialize their technologies to get over what we call this commercialization value of death, where you have early product market fit, but you really need to get those commercial contracts. Yeah. And we fund companies that might need a little bit of a longer timeline. They might need funding over a couple of years. And so when we initially started, we provided just the funding and that was that and realized that that wasn't enough. We needed to have additional coaching and resources and provide companies with a broader ecosystem of investors and corporates of mentors and coaches to help them really scale. And we've really built that out since then. Yeah. Building that network and that support system, you know, we always talk a lot about on the show, the funding opportunities for farmers and agriculture here. And, you know, sometimes I think it does get lost in the mix. Like, yeah, I could throw a million dollars at you. But if I don't really coach you on how best to invest that or utilize it for your company, it's kind of a waste of my money and it's kind of a waste of your time because you're not making the smartest choices that you could. And so, you know, so it sounds like Elemental Accelerator, previously Energy Accelerator, you've brought in your scope, it sounds like, to focus on all sectors that impact society, right? So I know you're the Agriculture and Water Portfolio Manager, but Energy, you talked about water transportation as well. And so I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the companies that you worked with specifically. I know you've been in the job maybe a year now, but I think you're drawing on that network and talking about the work that Elemental Accelerator has done specifically with agricultural or water companies here in Hawaii. Sure. So we work with companies in a couple different ways, and I can share an example from each of those. Wonderful. So one is our go-to-market track. That's a little bit of an earlier stage company that really wants to assess product market fit. OK. One of those companies is Kunoa Cattle, which you may have heard of. They are an amazing company that I spent some time working with on working with them, but also helping them. And they are really trying to solve the challenge of, you know, we import all of our beef. If it's grown here, it's imported here after it's been processed. Right. And so they're a vertically integrated cattle company, and they have about 2,000 head of cattle. They operate the largest USDA certified processing facility, and they process about 15,000 pounds of beef a week. Wow. Yeah. I didn't know it was that high. Yeah. It's really, really great. They're doing amazing. There are over 200 stores now and online. I just saw them at the Mana Up event, right? They have their beef bars and their beef jerky, lots of different products now, and we really help them with that, like product market fit work to really build out their business so that they could then get out to all those different stores and really have a clear value proposition. Another company, Teraviva, which you saw on the video, those guys are awesome. We work with them on a demonstration project. So that actually started in 2014. But as you know, trees take a long time to grow and plant. They are really solving a few different challenges. One, we have thousands of acres of degraded agland from sugar and pineapple that we want to. That transition, right? Right. And they're right in that sweet spot of the transition, but they're also solving challenges around feed. So they grow a tree called Pungamia. The seed pod can be used for a biofuel or vegetable oil and also for a livestock feed or meal, vegetable meal.  Livestock feeds one of the biggest inputs and costs for ranchers. Extremely costly. Extremely costly. Yeah. So we work with them to plant 200 acres on the north shore of Oahu with Pungamia schools. Wonderful. And actually, interestingly enough, we funded them together on a second project. This sounds like a perfect mix. Yeah, exactly. It's like, this is my next question. I was like, they are working together, right? Right. Actually, so we did a prize. We opened it up to our whole portfolio and actually all of the entrepreneurs in the portfolio chose the proposal that they wanted to win. Oh, OK. And it was a proposal with Kunoa Cattle and Taraviva. Yeah. And it was, as you can imagine, to test the feed with Kunoa Cattle. And so that actually, excitingly, is just in process right now. OK. And so we'll have the results of that early next year. And we're going to have a big party. Yeah. Big, big-ass party. Burger party to follow. So it would be interesting to see the impact that that project can have. That's amazing. And so like, you know, you're talking about creating this network, right? So, and you're part of that network. Are you doing a lot of the, I guess, like innovation or business coaching? Are you helping them get their documents in order and partnerships in order? What, what, and maybe you do all of this too. What, what kind of multiple hats do you wear in your job? So we really build a personalized customized program for each company. OK. So depending on the stage they're at and what they need, we build that program. And then we find the right coaches or experts for them to work with. So it might be stuff that internal to our team we can help with. But we really have, we work with a lot of coaches, one that can be really helpful. We also have a cohort approach to all of our work. So it's really about peer to peer learning. So we bring the companies together frequently. They don't have to be based here. Most of our companies aren't based here. About 10% are, but we bring them to Hawaii or we get them online together to talk and to learn from each other. And so we've found that, yes, we could bring in experts, but many of those guys, while they may be really well known, they were at this 10, 20 years ago where the entrepreneurs are facing these challenges daily, yesterday, today. And so they have the ability to work with each other and help each other. And because we don't take competitive companies in our portfolio, there's a really neat opportunity for them to learn. To really bond across sectors, right? There's so much cross-learning between sectors. That's what's really blown me away about the program and this gathering. So you're talking about this portfolio. How many companies do you typically fund a year? I know you talked about up to a million dollars, but what kind of a portfolio do you have right now or have you had in the past? Sure. So we have 82 companies in our portfolio. Oh, okay. We've funded about 30 million. That's deployed about $30 million in project-based funding. It's actually grant funding to these companies. And we take 15 to 20 a year. Okay. It's our biggest cohort yet with 20. And yeah, we fund, we usually work with the companies from nine months to many years, four or five years. And they're just sort of alumni for life. We have lots of opportunities for our alumni to continue to engage. Yeah, and they've built that network so they can, you know, you guys have helped build that network. So even though they're alumni, they can call on them for assistance, right? It's not like door slam. They never talk to us ever again. Yeah, absolutely not. Wow.  And I was wondering if you had any requests or calls to action that the audience listening today can help, you know, support Elemental Accelerator's mission, but maybe all of those portfolio companies too. Is it checking out your website? What can the audience do to help you guys so that you can help a broader scope of people? Absolutely. So we really take a place-based approach to our work. And so we wanna make sure that we're solving the key challenges here in this place. And Hawaii is our primary place. Is where we're really focused. And so I'm in the building process of this program. We have some amazing companies thus far, but we're really like thinking through what are the key challenges we wanna try to solve. So if you have input on that, if you're a producer, distributor, or you're just a subject matter expert, please reach out. I think my, oh, there it is. My email's on there. You can reach out to me there. If you wanna work with one of our companies, check out our website. If there's a company beyond the two that I mentioned that you wanna work with, reach out as well. We'd love to have that. The companies are always looking for commercial opportunities. Awesome. And then I would say, if you wanna be more involved with our program, we're also always looking for pipeline companies. So for companies that might be of interest. So if you know a great company that you think we should be working with, you can go to our website and refer them on there. And you can also sign up for our newsletter. We host quite a few events throughout the year, both in Hawaii and in California. If you happen to be over there. Yeah. So take a look at that, sign up, and then you can stay in the loop for any upcoming events. All right, wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. We've been joined in the studio today with Dania Hakim, the agriculture and water portfolio manager for Elemental Accelerator. Talking to us about how they help innovate from the ground up and support our local startups and communities. We'll see you next time on Hawaii Food and Farmers. Mahalo.