Hey Coach, welcome back. Today I want to talk about how to establish a better culture within your business. So this is going to be a shorter video and I hope this helps you out, okay? But here's a great way to think about the culture that you have within your training program and not only with the kids that you train, but with the clients they have, with the parents that are paying you month after month, right? So here's how you want to think about this. If you are just showing up to your sessions once a week and you're training Johnny, Johnny comes to the session, he does great and you say, all right, Johnny, I'll see you next week. And you don't talk to Johnny between that session and the following session. You don't talk to their parents. There's zero communication. All they're coming, the only reason why they're coming to your session is just to train with you.  You do not want to run your business that way, right? You want to have a higher level of service with every single client that you train. So here's what I'm talking about, right? Every day you should be in touch with Johnny, making sure he's being accountable to your program. What's he doing on his own? No, how's he doing at practice? How's he doing at his games? What's he struggling with outside of your session? That takes you from being the coach to being the mentor. And when you're a mentor, parents will trust you more. They will buy from you more and they will be in your program 10 times longer than they would be if you're just a coach. Anybody can be a coach. This is probably the fastest growing industry right now, probably in the world. Coaches who want to become private trainers or they want to do stuff in groups or cancer clinics, anybody can do that, right? There's no barrier to entry. You don't need a certification to become a coach. Anybody can do it, right? But if you want to become a higher level coach and you want more respect, you want to be the mentor and here is one way you can do that, right?  This way your clients are spending time together now, right? And there's nothing that's better than having all of your clients who don't know each other spend time together because now they share a common bond, which is your training program. Here's a very easy thing that I've done in the past. With my soccer, there's college teams in my area. There's pro teams in my area. I don't have to go buy tickets for all the parents and all the kids, but I can invite everyone to come out and let's go watch a game together. Let's go spend time together outside of our session. Again, this shows the parents that you are not one-dimensional just about your training. It shows them that you care about their kids, right? And I'm not talking about just doing this just to get more clients. I'm doing this because I know when I rally together kids and I rally together parents, I want to do that so I can spend more time with the players that I train so I can get to know them better. If I can get to know them better, I'm going to be a better coach. If I can get to know them better, they're going to be in my program longer, right? And I just see this problem over and over with coaches that ask me, they'll say, well, Ben, I don't have players committing to my program consistently. It's because they're not doing stuff like this. And I know it's because they're only focused on the session. If you're just focusing on the session, that's so short-sighted, right? That's like me going to get math tutoring when I'm in high school. And I'm only working on math during that time. And in the rest of the week, I'm not doing anything on my own. And I'm not getting any accountability from my math tutor. That makes zero sense. How would I expect to improve that way? And I see so many coaches run the program that way where they're just one-dimensional and how they help, right? So you want to be multi-dimensional and be able to rally together the players and the clients in your program, spend time hang out with them, and other things that are going to add value to what they're doing, right? So whatever sport you coach, it doesn't matter to me. There's going to be events. There's going to be high school games, college games, pro games that you can go to and just invite everyone to come hang out with you, right? That brings everyone closer and together. So I hope that helps you out. Again, if you are interested in getting my 101 help, head to my website. Just go to www.buildmysportsbiz.com. From there, I have a free phone call setup. You'll figure out how to do that once you get to that page. I'll see you guys next time.


فشرف بل اشتغالي بالعلم ولا تبغي به ما عشت يا بدا بدا وياله من شراف عظيم ومن م squats ومن اشتغالي بالعلم ولا تبغي به ما عشت ربما بالعلم وياله من شراف عظيم وياله من شراف عظيم وياله من شراف عظيم وإيماننا قول وفعل ونية من الخير والطاعة فيها نقيد Our iman is speech action and intention of all good things and for acts of obedience the intention we stipulate The author here says وإيماننا قول وفعل ونية Now the author is going into the definition of the iman What's the definition and the definition of iman And the author is Allah He defines that which iman is and that which it consists of iman consists of three pillars These are pillars of iman Without it iman will not stand وقول وفعل ونية So iman is not قول a speech without no action It is not قولون بلا عمل It is not speech with no action And it is also Action without no intention So with these three the iman stands Which is قول and العمل ونية and intention وذلك الإمام الأوزاعي رحمه الله He said as ابن البطة mentions in his كتاب الإمانة الكبرى He says لا يستقيم الإيمان إلا بالقول لا يستقيم الإيمان إلا بالقول That a person's إيمان will not be stood first لا يستقيم الإيمان إيمان will not be there Unless there is a speech ولا يستقيم الإيمان will not be stood first و القول وقول And a person's إلا بالعمل unless he comes with actions و لا يستقيم الإيمان و القول و العمل And a person's And his speech and his action will not be upright إلا بالنية unless he comes with an intention موافقة للسنة In accordance to the sunnah And the lozai goes on to say وكان عمال كانوا يقولون وكانوا من مضاء من سلفنا ومن those who have preceded us who came before us our pious predecessors لا يفرقون بين الإيمان والعملي they will never distinguish between الإيمان and actions والعمل من الإيمان and actions are of the Eman والإيمان is of the actions and actions are of the Eman وإن الإيمان is a term يجمع هذه الأديان اسمها it's a term that combines and gathers this religion's name ويصدقه العمل the Eman of a person your actions testified to if it's true or not فمن آمل بلسانه وعرف بقلبي anyone who testifies and believes with his tongue and he recognized through his heart وصدق بعمله and then he is truthful with his actions فتلك داريز العروة الوطق التي لم تصاملها that person is holding onto a rope that will not disconnect ومن قال بلسانه anyone who says the Eman and testifies it on his tongue ولم يعرف بقلبي but doesn't really know it with his heart ولا يصدق بعمله and then he does not want he doesn't back it up with his actions لم يقبل منه it won't be accepted from him وكان في الآخرة من القاسر and the day of judgment is going to be from the destroyed lost ones سفيان الثوريو سد ازبن بطة mentions in his كتاب الابانة الكبرى كان الفقهاء يقولون the jurists would say اهل السنة اهل علماء would say لا يستقيموا قولون إلا بعمل ولا يستقيموا قولون وعملون إلا بالنية ولا يستقيموا قولون وعملون ونية إلا بموافقة السنة The same thing that you mentioned which is a person's speech will not be steadfast except with an action and his speech and action will not be steadfast unless with what unless with an intention ولا يستقيموا and his speech and action and intention will not be steadfast إلا بموافقة السنة unless it's in accordance to the what to the sunnah same as ألمام الأجر in كتاب الشريعة he says he chapter a bab a bab a whole chapter in his كتاب الشريعة the first volume page 274 he says بابو the chapter القولو بأن الإيمان تصديقوا بالقلب وإقراروا باللسان وعملوا بالجوارح لا يكونوا مؤمنا إلا بأن تجتمعها في هذه الخصالة الثلاث that إيمان is what the testimony of the heart the utterance of the tongue the actions of the limb and a person is not a believer unless he gathers all of those mentioned all of those three that are mentioned which is التصديق بالقلب وإقراروا باللسان وعملوا بالجوارح and then he goes on to saying يعلم رحمة الله وإياكم أن الذي عليه علماء المسلمين أن الإيمان واجم على جميع الخلق هو تصديقوا بالقلب وإقراروا باللسان وعملوا بالجوارح ثم معلموا أنه لا تجزئوا المعرفة بالقلب والتصديق إلا أن يكون معه الإيمان باللسان نتقن ولا تجزئوا معرفة بالقلب والنتقن باللسان حتى يكون عمل بالجوارح فإذا كمولت في هذه الثلاث الخصال كان مؤمنا دل على ذلك القرآن والسنة وقول علماء المسلمين يقول أنه لا يجب أن يمثل على جميعهم هذا الذي علماء المسلمين are upon and that which they believe is أن الإيمان واجب أن الإيمان is obligatory or every creation in everybody and it is الإيمان is obligatory and everyone is what تصديقوا بالقلب the belief of the heart وإقراروا باللسان the affirmation of the tongue وعملوا بالجوارح and the actions of the limb ثم معلموا know know what that the knowing of the heart and the testimony of it will not be accepted and it will not be taken into consideration unless it is backed with what the utterance of the tongue and the knowing of the heart and the utterance of the tongue will not be accepted and taken into consideration unless it is backed up with عمل الجوارح the actions of the limb if these three are found and they are present the person كان مؤمنا he is a believer دل على ذلك وقال القرآن والسنة وقول علماء المسلمين and the speech of the scholars of the Muslims have shown us وقال شيخ الإسلامي بن تيميه سيس قال حمبل حدثنا الحميدي وقال وأخبرت أن الناس يقولون من قرأ بالصلاة والزكات والصوم والحج ولم يفعل من ذلك شيء حتى يموت ويصلي مستدبر القبلة حتى يموت فهو مؤمن ما لم يكن جاحدا إذا علم أن تركه في ذلك فيه إيمانه إذا كان مقرم بالفرائض واستقبال القبلة فقلتها هذا الكفر الصراح وخلاف كتاب الله وسنة رسوله وعلماء المسلمين قال الله تعالى ومؤمر إلا ليعبد الله مخلصين له الدين الآية وقال حمبل سمعت أبا عبد الله أحمد بن محمد أحمد بن محمد بن حمد يقول من قال هذا فقد كفر بالله وعلى الرسول وما جاء به يعني الله إبريو تايميو مكشنس here that حميديو said أخبرته I was informed that I was told that a group of people are saying anyone who testifies he believes only that's it he testifies and he acknowledges he affirms the Salah he says this Salah is wajib I believe that was zakat zakat I also believe it's wajib was sown and I also believe fasting is obligatory well Hajj and Hajj is also obligatory ولم يفعل ميدالك شيء but he doesn't do any of them I just say that he affirms the wajib but he doesn't do any of them حتى يموت until he dies ويصلي مستدب للقبلة and he tears any praise facing away from the qiblah حتى يموت until he dies okay فهو مؤمن on a group of people are saying those people are believers as long as they're not jahid as long as they're not doing it out of stubbornness and rejecting the ruling as long as they're not doing it out of that إذا علم أن تركه ودالك فيه إيمانه إذا كان مقرر بالفرائض استقبال القبلة as long as he's leaving of this is not due to him not affirming the obligation and also acknowledging that when Hamedi was told that there's a group of people saying that he says هاد الكفر الصراح let's click a kufr it's not just kufr it's a click a kufr وقلاف and it is up whole it's in a position to what the كتاب الله it's a ktab وصنة رسولي and the messenger وعلماء المسلمين استخدمت السلف قال الله تعالى الله says he says ومأمر إلى ليعبد الله مخلصين له الدين الآية لنشيخه الإسلام brings the statement of حمبل he said سمعت عبي عبد الله حمبل ابن سحق his name is he said أحمد ابن حمبل say saying من قال هذا anyone who says that فقد كفر بالله he's disbelieved in Allah ورد على أمره and he's rejected the command of Allah وعلى الرسول and on the messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم in what ما جاء به عن الله that which he has come that which he has come with from Allah سبحانه وتعالى then the author says وإماننا قول من الخير this is a jar أنا مجرور the meaning is حرف جاء أنا الخير is what اسم مجرور the jar and the مجرور are both connected to فيما سبق ذكروه that which has previously been mentioned which is what that our إيمان is speech which is good and actions which are good and intentions which are good so that's where the word good enters the word here من الخير the jar and the مجرور is connected to what that which has just been recently mentioned which is وإماننا قول speeches وفعل and actions ونية so it enters أقوال الخير وعمال الخير ونيات الخيرات الصالحات that is what أنا that is what إيمان is to us وطعات فيها نقيد وطعات فيها this is the word بمير this pronoun it goes and refers back to the intentions and what the author is trying to say here is that every action is accepted but it's accepted based on what to Allah as long as the intention is good as long as the person is doing this this action on the intention of obedience if he's doing it because everybody else does it that intention is not based on طع that's why he's saying وطعات فيها نقيد we restrict the intention فيها the intention we restrict it نقيد means we restrict it to obedience it's not just any intentions that you come with the intention here has to be why are you praying for are you praying because everybody else is praying it's not accepted then but what we restrict the intention to is that you're doing it out of obedience I'm a slave the master command did me and I am following the command of the master that's why you have to do it if you're doing it for other worldly gains this Salah won't be accepted from you that's why Allah says in the Quran ومن أراد الآخرة وسع لها السعيها وهو مؤمن فأولئك كان السعي هو مشكورة if the person is doing this and he's striving for it after after gain he wants جنة and for it he's doing it with obedience سبحانه وتعالى while in a state of belief Allah then says فأولئك كان السعيه هو مشكورة those are the ones who is striving is praiseworthy whose efforts don't go to waste they don't go to vain so that's what the author means وطعاتي فيها اي فينياتي مقايد we restrict it that's what he means نعم ويزداد بطعاتي مع تركما نها وينقص بالعسيان جزمن ويفسد it increases with acts of obedience while refraining from what he forbade and decreases by disobedience with all certainty and is corrupted the author here says ويزداد بطعاتي the word ويزداد do ail iman the iman is the one that increases what it increases with is obedience your iman increases and you know why it increases it increases with obedience every time the person increases in acts of obedience and it comes with it زاد the iman who is iman increases and every time that the person comes with sins and that which Allah has prohibited سبحانه وتعالى the iman decreases and the messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم told us that he said اليمان بضع وسبعون الشعبة أفضلها قول لا إله إلا الله وأدنها إماطة الأدى عن الطريق والحياء الشعبة من الإيمان الحديث صحيح مسلم this wording which is that إيمان is of different branches it's of what بضع وسبعون 70 and odd branches the greatest and the most virtuous one of them is what the statement of لا إله إلا الله the lowest of it is what taking harm from the path taking harm from the road and then the author says sorry the prophet says صلى الله عليه وسلم والحياء الشعبة من الإيمان and shyness is a branch of branch of iman it's a branch of الإيمان so what this hadith shows us is that the branches of الإيمان are many it's not one it's not two it's not three it's many so every single time you can people are doing some people are doing إيماطة الأدى عن الطريق they are doing the lowest branches of an iman so that iman is not going to be of the calaba of the person whose إيمان is what is of the highest branch so this hadith shows us it and that's why the author says مع ترك إيمانها the iman it increases with obedience while leaving that which he has been prohibited from so the iman increases with what obedience whilst the person is staying away from that which is prohibited because some people think I'm doing acts of obedience but my iman is not increasing but you're doing things that are going against the acts of obedience that you're coming with are you with me it's like a person who is pouring water into a cup but the cup is what broken it is it's cracked or a glass or even a bottle and it's pissed there's a hole in the bottle so you're pouring in but it's going out so when the person is doing acts of obedience they have to stay away from that which they are prohibited from and that's why the prophet says from the goodness of one's Islam is what that he leaves of that which does not that which does not concern him so if that is something that is what that doesn't concern you it shows the goodness of your Islam how about if the thing is Haram this is just ملعني this is something that doesn't concern you really doesn't necessarily have to be Haram but imagine if those things are Haram your iman is definitely going to be of great also the prophet says لا يزني زاني حين يزني وهو مؤمن ولا يشربوا الخامر حين يشربوا ها وهو مؤمن ولا يسركوا الساريك وحين يسركوا وهو مؤمن that the prophet told us that the person does not do zina whilst he is doing zina in a state of iman and the person does not drink khamar when he drinks khamar in a state of iman and the person does not steal when he steals in a state of iman and what that means is that that he is true complete iman is not there whilst he is doing this action so from the hadith we can take the مفهوم الموافقة the مفهوم المخالفة is that if the person stays away from these things what happens he has true iman صحيح if this is saying that with this that your iman won't be there or the completeness of your iman won't be there it means that if I stay away from it and I don't do it my iman will be there and it will be complete it will be complete it will be complete و ينقص بالعصياني the sheikh says it decreases with disobedience جزمن جزمن means what يقينا with certainty حقا لا ريبة فيه there's no doubt about it that the sins reduce the iman and that the person's iman becomes affected by it و لذلك it was narrated from عمير ابن حبيب الخطم as أبو بكر الخلال narrated in this كتاب السنة that إيمان يزيد و ينقص that the iman increases and it decreases قيل ما زيادته he was asked what is it that increases it و نقصاله and what is it that reduces it قاله he says إذا ذكرنا الله عز وجل if we remember Allah و حميدناه and we praise him و سبحناه and we exalt him فتلك زيادته with that increases و إذا أغفلنا if we are heedless of him و ضيعنا and we forsake و أسألنا and we become sinners and come with shortcomings فذلك نقصانه with that it reduces then the author goes on to say و يفسودون and if the person sins increase on more what does that do it actually destroys his iman it corrupts his iman it eats through his iman و لذلك that's why the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم he told us لا تحقنا من المعروف شيئا don't ever be little a righteous deed even if it means even if it means to meet your brother with a smiley face and the علام I took from this do not also be little to sins لأن they say because the mountain that you see in front of you is made out of pebbles and it is from those small sins those small little things that you belittle and you see as that actually come together and make a person leave the religion it was a sin that you belittle that ate through your iman and it reduced your iman and then you did a lot of small sin over there that you thought it wasn't that big but one day you do come together what happens and that's why the prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم said a group of people come together and everybody brings a tweak with fire or it brings a my fire may alone not be able to do much but if we all bring our what happens it fires it burns a place it's nice if everybody look for example we say today you know we're fasting let's go and make iftar you know what you make chicken you make lamb you make this you make this everybody brings it to the table are we going to have a big iftar are we going to have a big iftar no so with the small things that come together they become big so when the sins come together they become big and at that time the person reaches a point but in reality it's hard for him to come back he leaves the religion he doesn't want to hear about it the problem is now it was how it was building up و لذلك the Prophet said إذا أدنب عبد يدنب النكتة في قلبه نكتة السوداء whenever the person commits a sin a black dot is placed in his heart the Prophet said if the person repents comes back back to his senses realize what he's done is wrong and he asks Allah for forgiveness his heart is going to be made clean it's made white and everything goes back to normal and if he doesn't the Prophet told us عليه الصلاة و سلام what happens his heart becomes tainted and black and that's where the Prophet recited the ayah كَلَّا بَلْ أَرَانَ عَلَى قُلُوبِ مَا كَانُ يَكْسِبُونَ with the people's heart it became black and darkened through what through the sins that they done الله says in the Quran فلما زاغوا أزاغ الله قلوبهم when they deviated so look they tend slightly they belittled a sin الله then says فلما زاغوا أزاغ الله قلوبهم الله says in the ayah و نقلِّب أفيدتهم و عظصارهم كما لم يؤمنوا به أولا مرة it's one ruling that you may belittle from the Quran and the Sunnah and say look I don't care I'm doing all of this but you'll belittling this


What's the weirdest thing a guest has done at your house? Once we moved to a new house and our neighbor decided to pass by to say hello. She knocked on the door around 5 p.m. Hello? I'm Yorn. I wanted to come by and say hi. We welcomed her in and chatted a little. And we thought she'd be leaving soon. We were wrong. She stayed in our house till 3 a.m. We tried everything. Literally everything, but she wouldn't leave. At the end, we went to bed. And we left her sitting alone outside until we had her leave. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to subscribe.


We're thrilled to have Garryl Perowitz with us back after having been with us a couple of years back. Gar has over the life of SoCAP and someone who has shaped our thinking and this year he is back to introduce some of the new work that he is doing as co-chair of the next system project and introduce Gar. We have a video and then he and a group of folks who are working with him will come to this stage. So let's look at Gar's video. Society's civilizations in some sense are like our bodies. If there's something systemically wrong, it's manifesting all over the place in all our organs and that seems to be what's going on in our world at the moment. The system is failing all around us. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Our jails are full and can't hold more people. Our young people are burdened with a trillion dollars in student debt. We're in a heap of trouble. When the temperature of the earth is starting to rise, that's a very bad sign. Our earth is running fever and it's running it because it's sick in many ways. In a country like the United States, the fact that anywhere from 45 to 50 million people are hungry, this is a problem. We can't go on like this. We can't keep moving toward climate catastrophe, nuclear war, persistence of inequality, poverty, famine. There is a systems problem. These are not one-off issues. They are interconnected and we have to look at the system as a whole. It's time to talk about alternatives. It's time to talk about what's next. We need to be aspirational and be clear about the vision of the world that we want. What is the system that humanizes us? What is the system that opens up our imagination of possibilities of cooperation? Nothing is more important right now than to discuss How can we bring about this change? As systems fail, individual and community creativity explodes. And that's what we have seen. People in this country are solving the problems themselves. They're coming up with new models and strategies. And within those models and strategies are the kernels of a systemic way to move forward. Land trust, cooperatively owned businesses, sustainable energy, state-owned banks, urban gardening, urban farming. These small successes taken together are a proof of concept that this can happen on a larger scale. We're compelled to search for alternatives not just analytically but in how we live and what we do. How we organize our daily lives. And that has tremendous potential. Our actions and our imagination have to match the magnitude of this problem. We have to get out of our comfort zone. We must think with courage. All bets are off in terms of our previous thinking. Our ways of thinking about economy and our ways of thinking about politics have proven an abject and utter failure. The good news is we have no choice but to adopt revolutionary thinking. I like that. That's the exciting part about this moment. When there are no rules, then people have freedom to invent and to create new things. I have no doubt that we can create a better. If the people who cared about these things really joined together to do something about them, anything is possible. The biggest worry for me is that we don't try. Is that we don't push for what we know is right. For what we know is possible. It's time for everybody who cares about this country and the future of the planet to do something about it to get involved. We can actually do better. We can build a better system that's not impossible. It's a very American thing to do to build a new system. It's a challenge. We can do it collectively. Neighborhood by neighborhood, step by step. I think that the world that we're on the verge of is bright and beautiful and interesting one. Complex, local, interconnected. I hope we get there. It's time to talk about what's next. Please come and sign our statement at thenextsystem.org. Good morning. I'm Garry Alpervitz. I'm co-chair of The Next System Project. We've produced that film. I'm here to pose a question to you. Why would it be that Kevin asked us to start this plenary session about changing the system? What in the world does that mean?  Why in the world are we talking about changing the entire system over time? And then the second question is, are we up to that? Can we move from projects and strategies and new adventures to the system question? Now, there's different ways to get at that, but my favorite way of looking at it is the people who started Davos have asked the question publicly, is capitalism over? Other people are saying, is socialism over and getting a definite answer? The Academy of Management, the US Academy of Management, 10,000 management specialists, professors of business, advisors of major corporations last year held their major conference on the question, are we ending reaching an end both to capitalism and socialism? Well, that's what used to be called a heavy, heavy question. But I want to throw it to you and let it sit in your lap again. And the question then is, what does that mean for our lives? And specifically, looking down the gun barrel of the next three decades, what might be the evolution of the work each of us is doing that might move from where we are over time to larger and larger issues and scale. So just that's the question. And I think if you look at what Kevin's been doing, the whole progression of SOCAP has been moving in that direction. And I think he's going to be talking more and more, for instance, about worker owned companies and transformations of a different kind. That's step one. Step two is recognition a little bit of some of the reasons people are talking that way and just a few statistics. I used to be a college professor, so you have to allow me. There are a few things. And here they go. These are United States, but they're paralleled in many parts of the world. The share of income of the top 1% has gone from 10% of the income to 21.4% of income over the last 20 years. It has doubled the 1% on top. The 1% on top has something like 400 people at the top. 400 people. You could get them in the front half of this discussion, have more wealth now than the bottom 180 million people taken together. The concentration of wealth in this country is technically medieval. But I said that once and a medieval professor came up to me and said, no, you're wrong. It was never that concentrated in the medieval era. That means we're living in a system, the whole larger system, in which something is going wrong that has to be corrected by building somehow from what we're doing over time to another level. And the trick here is whether we can actually ourselves begin to see it that way rather than what I call projectism. I am strongly in favor of projects. We get nowhere without projects. And if they only stay at projects, we don't develop. So that again is another way to ask the question personally, where might we take this over time if we got serious about the next direction and moving the ball forward. So let me give you a few more statistics and not many more because I'm going to stop very quickly. Prisoners in American jails are eight times per capita more than any other country. We are more concentrated in prisoners in jails now than the Soviet Union was. And the number of blacks is six times the number of whites in those jails. Again, an indication of the depth of the problem that is a systemic problem and not simply a problem of projects or policy or politics. Those are the kinds of questions we need to scale. And of course, and I won't get deeply into this, you all know better than I do the climate challenge and what it brings to us. Where does that take us? How do we begin to think forward? There are two analogies that I'd like to suggest to you in terms of how individuals might grapple with this problem. My heroes, my real heroes are the people working in Mississippi building up the civil rights movement that became the civil rights movement in the 1930s and 40s. You don't know their names. Most people don't know their names. Those are people who risked their lives in the quiet, unknown doing projects, developing forward, laying down the groundwork upon which the great civil rights explosion occurred 25 years later. So if you can see yourself, if we can see ourselves not only as doing projects, but asking the question how we might build forward over time, laying groundwork step by step, changing ourselves as we go so that the next great explosion becomes transformative of the system that's producing those kinds of numbers. This is happening all over the world. The numbers are different, but the same question. It is a problem not only of hard work, it's a problem of self-identity. When you look in that mirror in the morning and see that brick lying in your lap about the system, how do I build and see and think through that? Another way of thinking about the system problem that gives a different handle on it. If you look at the great reforms of the civil, of the New Deal era, the things that changed social security, labor law, pensions, all those things, they did not come out of nowhere. They came out of the work of people like the people in this room, 10 and 20 years earlier, who were working in the state and local quote laboratories of democracy, building forward over time, proof of concept, one of the people in the film said, beginning to refine and developing new concept, expanding and transforming, and laying groundwork so that when the time was right, much larger change could occur. That's another way to think about how we relate to the system crisis, not just the problem that we're facing in the projects that we're doing and the exciting work that's going on. And it is, again, strange to say, a problem of self-identity, who are we in the matter? Who is the person in your seat in the matter, how do we self-identify, how do we expand, and how do we move in a way that I think is interesting that Kevin has moved both from this direction, the whole SoCAP direction, and backstage, he just told me about a large venture in which they're transforming to worker ownership, not just social investing. So there are broad, broad perspectives on all this. It also means going to scale and considering difficult things happening around the country. Our own group, the Democracy Collaborative, has been heavily involved in a big project in Cleveland, Ohio, where there are a number of worker-owned cooperatives. One has the largest urban solar installation in the country. Another one is a huge industrial-scale laundry, uses less water, less heat than any other laundry in that area. And the third one is the largest urban greenhouse in the United States, three million heads of lettuce a year. So we're taking it to scale, and also we're finding support from big universities, anchor institutions, hospitals, who are now more and more willing to come to play and begin helping develop a scaled-up direction. That's only one. We're going to hear about several other directions that are now happening from the rest of the panel. But I want to give you the sense of scaling. And tomorrow morning, there is a very interesting group going on that will be speaking on this subject in the impact investing and what universities and hospitals are doing around the country. And hospitals are doing around the country. Pallie Norris will be there speaking as well. And I urge you to go to that afterward. And you'll get a sense of what's happening with the big institutions beginning to move in this direction is supportive. And I'm sure many of you know about that. But the issue of scaling up becomes part of it. And laying down that groundwork step-by-step, pre-New Deal, pre-Mississippi, building towards where another leap can happen. And again, it goes back to what is it we're doing. Are we doing projects? Yes. Are we doing good projects? Yes. Are we self-identifying with the sense of changing that entire system that's producing these kinds of statistics? That is the large order question. I want to take you one further step down that line. I think there is some possibility also ultimately of moving this into movement politics, movement development, politics in general. And that too is part of the larger direction that's beginning to build. And you find it this conference as well. SOCAP did not actually have movement building and politics as part of the discussions. That too was entering the range of what might be possible. At the national level, let me also remind you, and again, thinking down the line, I'm a historian and a political economist, did you happen to notice that at the last big crisis, we nationalized the big banks and we nationalized Chrysler in General Motors? Somehow very large institutions are likely to be in play. No one knows what to do with large institutions. What is it a system that has big, big institutions? And how does what we learn in the projects we are developing allow us to think forward to those moments that are going to happen? And how do we think about the prototypes that might cast the vision of a system design, something that takes us beyond the failing systems of socialism and corporate capitalism? That is the big, big set of questions that if you stand back from this kind of a gathering, pose themselves inevitably if you allow that to happen. If you would look in the mirror in the morning and say, is that what I personally am up to? Is that how we might go forward? Is that possibility real? So I ask you that both as a historian and a political economist to consider what we are doing here today and particularly this panel. Well, you will hear some very exciting work going on that takes the next step down that direction to pose it in the largest frame and to keep stretching it out and always asking the question, with that big brick sitting in your lap, the system as a whole, really? Us, maybe in our time in history, allow that to seep in. And I'm confident knowing what's happened at SOCAP and knowing the kind of people who are already in this room that that kind of a challenge is the kind of challenge that begins to move the ball forward in an exciting way, taking all of this to a whole another level so that five years and 10 years out, the meetings at SOCAP will be 10 times this big and we will in fact be a movement that's beginning to rise to that particular question. Thank you very much. I want to introduce Angela Lover Blackwell, who is CEO of PolicyLink. Thank you, Gar. Thank you all for being here. Thank you for whatever it is that made you think this is the place you need it to be. We have to begin to talk about changing the system because if we don't change the system, we'll be back at this point again no matter how much incremental progress we make as we try to redefine the way that we think about investment, the way that we think about business, the way that we think about the future. Gar mentioned a couple of things. I don't know if he mentioned the GI Bill, but something he said made me think about it if he didn't mention it. The GI Bill, when we think about Social Security, when we think about FHA and all it did to build housing in this nation, those things had many wonderful qualities. In fact, they made the middle class that made this nation and allowed it to stand on the world stage with such pride. But there was really a huge hole in all of those things because they didn't get to people of color. The GI Bill really was for white veterans. Social Security left out people who were picking vegetables and doing domestic work. The FHA actually explicitly excluded black people from being able to take advantage of it and it allowed neighborhoods to develop in middle class areas that created middle class areas in this nation and locked so many people who were black out of home ownership or out of home ownership that actually could build any value for them to pull out if they needed it. We're a nation in which racism has been baked in. Exclusion has been baked in. And if we don't have a system that changes that, whatever system we come up with is going to be flawed. It is so wonderful that you are here having this conversation because we really need for investment and business to drive the change that we need. We won't get the change without power, politics and policy. But in order to get to power politics and policy, the nation as a whole needs to change. It needs to change. Let me tell you what I mean. There is really nothing more valuable at this moment than the diversity that defines this nation. That what could be more valuable in a global economy than a world nation that has all of the diversity that is needed. But we're not valuing it. We're not using it. We're not dependent on it. We're not using it to define how well we're operating. Once we start doing that, we're going to push for policies that allow all to participate prosper and reach their full potential. Once we start doing that, we're going to recognize we need to have elected officials who are committed to the change that we need. Once we start doing that, we will be able to marshal the power that it's going to take to transform everything. We're living in a nation right now in which two things are defining the moment. One is the toxic inequality that's hollowing out the middle class, baking in poverty, and making it very hard for the mobility that this nation has prided itself upon to be able to still act. That toxic inequality threatens everything that we believe in. At the same time that we're starting to deal with that, recognize that we have to address it, we are undergoing an extraordinary demographic shift. We know that by 2043, the majority of people who live in the United States will be of color. Many people don't know that since 2012, the majority of babies being born in this country are of color. And by the end of this decade, 2019, the majority of all children under 18 will be of color. By 2030, the majority of the young workforce will be of color. As we think about the shifting demographics, as we think about the economic imperative, it's clear that the way forward is the way that we'll bring these two together, allow the shifting demographics to be the asset that they actually are, to be able to fuel a new vision for what it can be to all be in this together. But we've got to have a plan for doing that. We've got to grow good jobs, and we have to do it with every investment that we're making. It's not like we make an investment. It's not like we engage in a big thing like the transformation of the Oakland Army base in Oakland. You can't do those things without thinking about how do you create good jobs in the process. Every time we spend money, we have to figure out a way to create good jobs and make sure the people who need them are going to get them. That includes creating entrepreneurship for people who are of color, because people of color hire people of color. If we need to get people of color employed, we need to make sure that the employers are of color. We need to build capabilities. We know that we don't have the capabilities for the work that has to go forward. We have to consciously invest in it. And we have to remove barriers and expand opportunity. Remove barriers like the disadvantage that is placed on people when they come out of prison with a record. We have to remove those barriers. We have to stop people from being able to be cut off from opportunity just because we have had a scandalous criminal justice system and the scandal of incarceration and the label that we have put on people who haven't deserved that label. We have to move that barrier. We have to expand opportunity. We have to make sure that this is not true anymore where you live in America is a proxy for opportunity. You live in a poor neighborhood. Your chances are fixed before you even get started. That should not be in a nation like this. Thank you. Thank you, Angela. Brendan Martin, director of Working World. Hi, Ms. Hahn. Great, thank you. So I want to talk a little bit about, span a bit more on what this next system looks like. It doesn't look like the current system of centralized blunt answers to our global problems. The next system is local. The next system is based on people in power meeting the needs of their communities and solving our problems. Now, in the video that we watched that Gar put on, there was some examples or some stories told about people in power of their local economy. Well, these stories are real, and I've seen them over and over again. I lived in Argentina for seven years, working with factories that had been closed, not because the factories weren't working, but because the global financial system was in default. And workers didn't decided not to care about that logic, and they went and took over their factories, and they started running them again. And with the production that they were able to do in those factories, they met the needs of their communities, and they themselves solved the problems of this global financial system. It was in Argentina that I started the working world. We are an organization that finances, that brings capital to worker and community-owned enterprise. And I've met hundreds of such enterprises who worked directly with hundreds of enterprises that pragmatically functioned to control by their workers meeting their community needs. We made over a thousand investments in these enterprises. I've worked directly with tens of thousands of workers, and we've invested millions of dollars. Over 90% of the people who are owners in these enterprises are people of color. Now, one of the greatest things about people-controlled economy is that taken as a whole, it's extremely effective. 98% of those 1,000 investments we've made have paid off in full with proper sharing and interest. In Chicago, a factory that was closed, but workers used to be making minimum wage. With an investment we gave those workers, they reopened the factory. They're now helping to run that factory themselves. They're making twice what they used to make. My late dear friend Ricky Macklin, he was born picking cotton. He spent time in our nation's penitentiary system. But when he died, he died owning his own business. The year that he died, he helped sell over a million dollars worth of windows. Recently this year, we joined together with about 20 organizations around the country that represent people in the front line, people in front line communities, grassroots organizations, and we created a network to disperse investment, not just where we can reach, but where all of these front line communities can reach. Together, this peer network can scale 10 to 100 times what we've been able to do so far. But what does all this have to do with SoCAP? What does all this people control have to do with this room of impact investing? Well, if there's one thing that defines our current system more than anything else, there's one thing that governs our current system more than any other force, it's finance. In our current system, we have record corporate profits and yet a record share of those corporate profits. 40% of all profits in our country are going to finance. It is the most powerful force in the world, which makes this room perhaps one of the most powerful rooms as an agent of change, a room full of people interested in changing the nature of capital, changing the nature of finance. This room has the power to bring that tool of capital to those people. So there's no really soft way to say how the role that capital plays in our system. Essentially, people, our communities, and the planet on which we live are tools for the profit of capital. The system we're building with people on the ground, in that system, capital is the tool. It's a bright, shiny, powerful, wonderful tool, but it is a tool in the hands of those people who use it to meet their community needs and to solve the problems of a global system. In the last year alone, the working world has moved a few million dollars into the hands of grassroots organizations who are pragmatically employing it effectively to solve their problems. But this is just scratching the surface. With a room like this, we might really be able to make a dent and move toward that next system that Gar is talking about. Thank you very much. That's great. Great. Perfect. Let me introduce Aaron Tanaka, Director of the Center for Economic Democracy and the Boston Impact Initiative. Is this on? Okay. Very happy to be here with all of you. This is my first SoCAP. It's a shiny, beautiful-looking room, and to be up here with friends and colleagues is a great honor. I'm here from Boston, and over the last three years, I've been working as the first managing director for the Boston Impact Initiative, which is a place-based private impact investment fund. We started off as a small pilot, $5 million fund, and have been making equity investments and doing loans and giving grants to small businesses and cooperatives in Boston, and in particular have been interested in innovating around what we as private investors can do with this capital to really leverage and build community power, as was spoken about earlier. And one of the exciting things that we've been doing is experimenting with a strategy of making private equity investments, but then selling our shares to workers as one of our exit strategies as another way of using finance capital to build employee ownership and control. Before I started working at the Boston Impact Initiative, though, I was a community organizer. I was the executive director of the Boston Workers' Alliance for seven years, which is a grassroots movement-building organization that represents low-income residents, particularly people of color, people who are unemployed, and specifically, as Angela was speaking about, people who are coming out of prison and have barriers to employment. And in that work, I became truly dedicated to the question of how do we not only deal with broad-based inequality in this country, but specifically working with those in communities that are already marginalized, who are even at the edges of those communities themselves, people who are homeless, people coming out of prison, folks who aren't able to get a foothold in the real economy. And in that work, one of the major things that I started to learn about was the connection between global capital, the transfer and the globalization of capital, the subsequent exportation of labor, and the way in which that exportation of labor from this country has made a broad group of people, particularly black Americans, or particularly young men of color, no longer necessary for the functioning of this economy and how the criminal justice system has been built for the first time over the last 40, 50 years to maintain a system of white supremacy in this country and to control a new group of unemployed workers. And so as we were working in the Boston Workers Alliance to work against discrimination and past policies like ban the box in Massachusetts, we also started asking the question, how can we start creating jobs, worker-owned cooperatives that are run by, owned by people of color, and specifically folks coming out of prison? And we started building cooperatives. This was very, very difficult, as some of you know, and the first co-op that we built was a veggie oil recycling company that unfortunately failed after about five months of operations. But we got the bug and started believing in the possibility of entrepreneurship and capital and the need for capital. And so as I moved over to the Boston Impact Initiative, was able to make the first loan to a 2.0 version of this cooperative called Sero. We were able to give a $20,000 zero-interest loan to a business that had no collateral, people had no personal assets, and there were no sales. But because it was so mission-aligned, we decided to make this loan. And Sero worker owners, folks who are part of my former organization, then went on to raise $17,000 out of the Indiegogo campaign. They used that money, then, to pay for the legal fees to launch a direct public offering. Where then, over the course of a year, we're able to raise $350,000, selling small shares of equity to members in the community. From there now, I'm working currently with Brendan to actually structure another loan in which we'll be able to give them $300,000 more for them to fully capitalize and launch our business as an organic composting company. This speaks to me what some of the possibilities that are available to us as private investors as we start to think out of the box and ask ourselves what role we're playing in the broader ecosystem to help leverage and engage community members to help determine their own economic destiny. And at the same time, I've started to ask the question, although I see the benefits and the possibilities of what we can do with private capital, through our new organization, the Center for Economic Democracy, have been asking the question, is that enough? And this is something that I want to raise to you all. And this might not be super popular, but as one fund manager to many others, in the community organizing world, we have an ethic that says our goal and our job is to put ourselves out of work. That is, if we're doing strong leadership development, we're helping build transformative policies that the role of professional community organizers shouldn't be necessary, and in fact, communities can take that role and build their own power. I want to ask the question to us as people who are playing this role in finance capital, what is our conception of our direction? What is our ethics as people who control all the capital that Brendan is talking about? It's my belief that we have the possibility to be transformative in our terms, and this is something that many of us are talking about, but I also want to raise the question, what role are we playing in democratizing the decision-making to set those terms in the first place? Right now, I think many of us think of ourselves as benevolent, almost philanthropists who are using favorable low-interest terms that help spark economic development. However, in Boston with the Center for Economic Democracy, we're starting to raise the question, what does it look like to give everyday people the power to make decisions on the allocation of their own finance capital? We're taking this question of how do you take participatory budgeting, which has been a process that's been used across the world to allocate municipal tax dollars and instead start to apply this very same process where we say we believe in your capacity to make good decisions and believe in the truth that you know what's best for your own community, and from that standpoint, our goal and our question for ourselves is how do we devolve our power so that communities can make those same decisions? I often say that if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there. I hope that together this week that we decide that we're moving towards the collective liberation of all people, and through this week in the conversations we have, we build that path together. Thank you. Great, awesome. And last is Michelle Long, who my good friend, the director of Bali, Michelle. Well, I feel so excited now. I'm not really a morning person, you know, that I just saw a poem, but you guys got me woke up, you know? I mean, I just saw a morning poem recently, and it said, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee.  And I thought that was me, but now I feel good. So I'm the sum it up speaker. I'm the bring it home, what couple of points here. And we're hearing that the system's broken. I think we all know that the system's broken, a new one is being called for, a new one's being born. The thing is, systems don't change overnight. It's not like we went to bed yesterday with one system, we wake up tomorrow with the next. There's always sparks of the emerging future that are amongst us here now. At Bali, our role is to accelerate the emergence of this kind of economy that serves life. So we find those sparks, connect them with each other, because we're always fighting an old system, we're trying to create what's next, and it's really hard. We resource them, nourish them, and we tell their stories so others can see a path to follow through fellowship programs, communities of practice. There's three points I would share now. The first is what has already been highlighted. The next system, the one we're moving toward, must fundamentally recognize that the path we've been on of building big transnational corporations has done a really effective job funneling wealth into very few hands. But the data is very clear now. The best path to the most jobs and the most wealth for the most people is directly correlated to the density and diversity of local ownership per place. The second thing I would say is the public markets have done a really fine, are unhealthy. We're having unhealthy results from the public markets. There's a study done by the International Labor Organization looking at 71 countries, and they looked at what were the biggest corollaries to inequality in a society, and they looked at the offshoring of production. They looked at mechanization of jobs. They looked at the suppression of minimum wages. But what they found to be the number one corollary was how much what they called financialization, or they also called it how much Wall Street activity was in that economy. That's important to know. It doesn't have to be that way. In Quebec, for instance, they 30 years ago took their pension funds and started to invest them in local companies, in regional companies, and they have estimated that they took it out of Wall Street, started investing in their own community, and they estimate that in that time, they have created almost 90,000 new jobs and kept 85,000 jobs, people, households, from having to move away. The Pope said something recently about we've got a lot of problems. We've got a lot of things we need to fix, but most of all, we need to fix ourselves. And so that'd be the third point I'd make. One of the people that we work with is one in our local economy fellowship program works in New Orleans, and there 52% of African American men are unemployed and for all of the reasons that Angela named related to institutional racism, historic, and current. And the number one employer of African American people in this country are other African American people. And yet she's working with lots of African American small businesses, and this is just one example. A lot of little plumbing companies, and there's going to be a big new airport coming, there's going to be some new hotels coming, she was getting them licensed and bonded and ready and able to access more investment and growth, and they had promises that they were going to be able to have these jobs. And then in the last minute, somebody inside the city had a friend he got his Harvard MBA with and outsourced that whole plumbing contract to somebody who didn't even live in that town, and that happens all the time. You know that the kind of transformation of the system that we need, somebody said to me once, when some people talk about transformation, they mean vanilla to vanilla bean, and I mean vanilla to chocolate. And she said, but what we really need is vanilla to music. You know, that's the kind of transformation that we need right now. And I've heard the past few years of people talking about quoting Einstein's maxima, no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it, that what we actually need and what's been called for is an evolution in our consciousness and how we are with each other. And the evolution that we need right now is the ability, every era has a kind of leadership that's necessary and the one today to solve the complex crises of today, like climate change and inequality, we can't do that me versus you. That's what works for all of us, including me. It's the ability to act from interdependence, to see and feel and act from interdependence, and that can be cultivated. I'm going to actually share with you guys. I had a epiphany at SoCAP two years ago, and so I appreciate that. But it was, I don't know what you're going to think of it, but I started to realize a lot of the things I've been working on for 15 years, local food systems, community energy, community investing, were becoming a bit trendy. And I started to realize people were competing with each other here to save the world. I actually saw people sort of jostling with each other, you know, I'm going to be the top of the green building pile. I'm going to crush the food market. I'm going to own the cooperative market and dominate the love economy. And I was like, wow, well, you know, we're not going to get anything different then. And the people that I've known who've been the innovators loved something. They loved people, they loved place, they loved land, they loved animals. And from that place, they innovated. And we can see what happened. And we can see what happens, you know, when microfinance or free-range chicken, you know, when it comes into the wrong hands, if you're not motivated from that place of caring, if you're just going to be the letter of the law of the free-range chicken, you can do horrific things to animals and land and people and farmers in the name of that. If you're not coming and motivated from that place of caring for each other. So you may say, well, that's all idealistic, Michelle, you know, we're not caring people. But in fact, we are. We are, in fact, we are. You know, the Greater Good Science Center has done research the past 20 years. And others have, too, that, you know, for a long time we just looked at depression. What makes people sad? But we started to look, what makes people well? And as it turns out, all people, regardless of demographic, four things make us all well. We feel well deeply inside, deep wellness. When we feel meaning in our lives and purpose. Everybody has a purpose. Everybody's here for a reason. Everybody has a gift to give. We feel well when we feel that. We feel well when we feel deeply connected in relationship with each other. We feel well when we feel an awe, some reverent connection to the larger natural world. Like, I can't believe that tomato plant gave me a tomato. How does it even work? You know, when you feel that awe, and we feel well when we've been compassionate, when we see suffering and we meet it with love, we all feel good after that. That is who we are. You know, the study, so interdependence is who we are. That's who we are deep inside. And so we want what we need, which is really awesome. They've done studies that show that little babies, oh, I'm over time. Okay, I just realized. Okay, no, I can't. I can't go over time. I will just say, join me. It is, in fact, the largest piece of land transfer that's ever happened in history, happened from Vinoba in India, who is one of Gandhi's disciples, who he just walked door to door and asked people who had a lot of land. He said, hey, brother, these people have no way to grow food. Could you give them a few acres? And they did. You know, that is actually who we are. So let's go for that. And that's all I have time to say. Thank you. So thank you all. Join us. We'll see you building the next system together. Thank you.