If you housed all of your army's chief strategists in just one armored vehicle, would it be a think tank? Okay, so first, on a channel that's mainly dedicated to the idea that thinking is an enriching, entertaining, and important pastime, let me just clarify something. I don't think that thinking on the whole sucks. What I'm actually addressing here is more about a particular aspect of human reason, which does suck in a very real and measurable way. So just keep that in mind. Let's start with speech recognition. The first implementation of a speech recognition device was built at Bell Labs in the 50s, and it was built around recognizing formants, or the cadence of words. Like when someone says the word 7, there's a certain rhythm to that, which kind of looks like this. So intuitively, to translate a spoken 7 into text, you tell your program to look for a waveform that looks kind of like this and output a 7 whenever it saw it. The initial forays into dictation software were exceptionally inaccurate. Human beings are much better at determining whether a particular word is 7 or 7, because we understand things like word choice and context. So, most programmers figured, in order to make dictation software better, they should sit down with somebody who understands language really well, stuff like syntax and grammar, and develop a way of recognizing and interpreting that structure.  Like in this sentence, each word has certain statistical relationships to the words before and after it. A speech recognition program evaluating those statistics doesn't need a formal rule about how to use verbs around plurals. It just figures it out based on those statistics. So, how did this new approach work out? One of the most famous quotes from that time period was from an IBM project leader named Frederick Jelenick. He said, Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up. While the linguists were tweaking complicated verb conjugation algorithms, the statistical programmers just fed transcribed conversations into their databases and got better results. Today, voice recognition software, from Cortana to Dragon to Siri, is primarily based on those naive statistical methods. You can actually see them at work if you watch Google's voice command app closely. The initial words that it processes will change dramatically as it processes later ones. We've discussed software being better at figuring stuff out than we are before. That's old news. All hail our big data overlords. But what's especially interesting to me in this example is that the best efforts of the greatest minds to construct a supposedly well-reasoned method for the analysis of speech by computers did nothing but hold back the development of that analysis. We tend to think of reason and thought as some of the most powerful forces known to humankind. And as a designer and an engineer and a guy who makes a YouTube show called THUNK, trust me, I do too. But I also think there's a definite tendency to value answers that we get from careful analysis simply because thought was used to get them in a way that we understand. Even when blind empirical methods might give us better results. Another example, Deep Blue, the chess computer that beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, wasn't programmed to be unpredictable or creative. It just brute-forced its way down a search tree of possible moves. Kasparov remarked on how often he was surprised by the inventiveness of a search function, something that had no clue what might be considered clever. The first chess programs suffered the same fate as the first speech recognition software, namely that people were really hung up on trying to make them work the way that humans thought, instead of just optimizing a really fast and really naive search function. This sort of blind empirical approach has also entered science. We all learned the scientific method in school. You create a hypothesis, you create an experiment to test it, you look at the data and examine it for patterns. But a relatively recent trend in the sciences has been non-hypothesis-driven studies, which basically skip everything except for the gather and evaluate data bits, basically shoveling numbers into a computer and telling it to look for correlations without any clue as to what they might be. Genome-wide association studies have gotten a lot of attention in the last few years, searching for genetic similarities between people with certain diseases. There have been a ton of very interesting developments in research prompted by these studies, which have discovered potential genetic bases for everything from blindness to obesity to Crohn's disease. There's also been a fair amount of criticism for the results supposedly discovered by these methods. You probably know how modern scientific papers generally report the probability that their results are just flukes of measurement, even if that chance is just one in a million. Well, genome-wide association studies and non-hypothesis-driven research in general test millions upon millions of correlations, so the probability of encountering a one in a million fluke is actually pretty likely. Nonetheless, non-hypothesis-driven research is still regarded as an important source of scientific information, not the least reason of which is that it operates in a space outside of human intuition, which, as we've seen in the past, isn't always the best predictor of scientific laws. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Genetic algorithms, deep learning programs, there are no shortage of these sorts of processes which benefit from getting reason out of the way and letting brute force or random trial and error just crank through possibilities. That's not to say that reason isn't still king. Evolution can do a lot of amazing stuff, but it needed to come up with animals that could do math before it got life onto other inhospitable planets. Still, you can't help but wonder how many systems we've attempted to formalize and generate flow charts for that would be better off without them, with blind empiricism running the show instead of reason.  Maybe a naive OKCupid search program would be better about figuring out who to set up on a date than the actual users. Maybe the absolute best designs aren't going to be dreamt up by visionaries, but spit out by search functions. And maybe we need to be thinking a little bit harder about when we're the linguists who need to be fired. What sort of systems do you think would benefit from a random statistical approach? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and don't stop thunking.


Hurley, thanks for joining. Looks like Rachel just joined, Ty Rachel, and Ashley. All right, we are three minutes after, so I'm gonna go ahead and get started. For anyone who's just joining, again, please put your name in the chat so we know who's here and tell us where you're coming from, either geographically or in terms of organization so that we know our audience and obviously we would really love to hear questions as we're talking. So please type your questions into the chat box so that we can have a more interactive discussion than us just talking at you through the cameras. Want to thank you all for being here. We're really excited to be at SoCAP this year. Our organization Make on Capital has a session today and another one tomorrow that you can check out. We are an impact investment fund that's exclusively dedicated to something called outcomes financing or you may have heard the term pay for success. We're a $50 million fund which makes us the largest pool of capital dedicated specifically to this kind of financing. And our anchor investors include Steven Connie Ballmer, Prudential Bank and the Kresge Foundation. So welcome to all of you. Again, thank you for being here and thank you for being part of SoCAP. We're delighted to be here. I'm joined today by two esteemed colleagues, Ayanna Oliver-Taylor and Dave Mead. So I'm gonna turn it over to you guys and let you introduce yourselves please. Ayanna, why don't you go ahead and start. Hi, I'm Anna Oliver-Taylor. I'm a director of development with LNM Development Partners. LNM is a full service affordable housing developer that's developed approximately 20,000 units primarily in the Northeast. And that is inclusive of both new construction and preservation. My role within LNM is managing our preservation department primarily with a focus on the company's NYCHA preservation platform. Thank you, Ayanna. And our other presenter Dave is trying to get in. So I'm gonna give him a minute to do that. And then when he joins, he will introduce himself. The joys of technology and the multiple SoCAP platforms. So what we're here to talk about today in addition to taking your questions and hopefully engaging in a conversation with all of you who are here is something called, as I mentioned before, outcomes financing are often referred to as pay for success. But before we get into that, I just kind of wanna set the context for why we're talking about this at this time and why we're talking about it specifically in relation to construction jobs and in relation to workforce development. So construction as many of you know has been among the first industries to sort of reopen as we recover across the nation from this pandemic. And across the country, many different states and local governments and even the federal government have this interesting thing where they often require the developers of construction projects to hire locally or to hire people who are within a certain radius of the construction project. There are other government entities that also require hiring people who are low income or hiring people who are under employed or unemployed. So we have, as everyone on this call knows, massive unemployment in a way we've never seen before. And yet we have construction coming back and then we have this interesting mandate from our government partners to hire people who have either live in the communities where the construction is happening or are low income or both. And so it's a really exciting opportunity potentially to help people find jobs at a time of high unemployment. And one of the things that excites us about this is that these are not just any jobs, construction jobs are actually fairly high quality jobs. They require skills, but once you're there, the wages are good and the benefits are good.  So despite the fact that there's this incredible opportunity to potentially have new people working on construction sites, there's also what we think of as sort of a coordination failure. So while there may be a mandate to hire folks locally or to hire folks that are low income, often developers and construction companies don't exactly know where to turn. And they often go to the same folks that they've gone to before. And then you have job seekers that maybe don't have the training they need to work on a site but are interested in it or they don't have the connections to the construction industry that they would need to be successful. And so what we're here to talk about today is sort of how we could potentially solve that coordination project problem with a project that we're working on here in New York City and how we could help people who are living near construction sites benefit from the economic development that's happening in their communities. So we really see this alongside real estate development and the sort of private capital and often public capital that goes into real estate development. How could we also invest in the human capital? How could we also bring the economic development to the communities where these projects are happening? And so I'm joined by, as I said before, Ayanna Oliver-Taylor who's from LNM which is a wonderful mission-driven affordable housing developer. And also our friend Dave Mead who I still don't see but I'm hoping we'll join soon. Dave is the head of a workforce development appropriate organization that really helps groups like Ayanna connect to job seekers and they work through community-based organizations to identify people who are looking for work who may need training and then once they're ready they can match them to these construction jobs. So I don't see Dave, I'm gonna quickly, I'm gonna ask my colleagues if they can potentially reach out to Dave and help with some of this IT while I continue to talk to you all. So I'm gonna start with Ayanna because Dave's not here yet. And just a question for you, can you tell the group a little bit about hiring requirements and how they work? I sort of touched on it but it would love to hear from your perspective and given you're steeped in this field a little bit more about how local hiring requirements or hiring requirements typically work. Yeah, no problem. So while the city encourages local hiring the goal itself is self-identified and oftentimes part of negotiations with the community boards as part of the development review process. So the ask of the community boards is typically is focused on the aggregate number of hires and not necessarily specifically on duration type wages and the like. So, but with the exception of like a prevailing wage job all of the individuals staffed are like Davis Bacon in a prevailing wage job. And so L&M we actually have implemented our own internal goal which is based and scaled dependent on project size. And so there's not really sort of like a city goal for this but I think we as a double bottom line developer have realized that there is a real necessity. So I mentioned the sort of double bottom line part of the company. And so in order to fulfill that mission we take a multi-pronged approach to bridging the economic gaps and promoting equality. So one aspect of this includes making local residents direct participants in our work and the work within their communities with the ultimate objective of creating durable and sustainable employment opportunities that are supported by organizations such as building skills. And hopefully my colleague Dave will be able to join us so that he can talk about sort of how building skills helps with the job creation that we provide like at the outset that they can sort of translate that into more durable long-term employment based on sort of how they provide support on the back end. And so am I right that there are federal like depending on the project there are hiring requirements or local hiring requirements that sort of differs job by job. Right, so like with the NYCHA projects that I manage there are federal requirements. Those are section three and sometimes those can also be Davis Bacon. There can be a prevailing wage requirement associated with that. But on the city level there is not a sort of like similar mandate when it comes to construction unless it's sort of like dependent on like the financing source but for the typical city job that we do within New York City it's a self-identified goal and not a city mandated goal. And so that's why I mentioned that L&M we've sort of acknowledged that we have a responsibility to create holistic benefit to these communities and that's why we have our own internal goal. Great, thank you. If folks have questions about these hiring requirements please put them in the chat. Both Dave and Ayanna will be able to answer them. I imagine or at least point us in the right direction. So while we're waiting for Dave I think it would be good. Let me think about how to do this. Let's see, did he join? It looked like Dave joined but he's not on our moderation panel yet. Okay, well I'm just gonna take Dave's role. Hope everyone will bear with me because I'm not gonna be nearly as eloquent in talking about his work as he is. But Dave works for an organization called Building Skills New York and what Building Skills does as I was mentioning before but I'll just repeat for folks that are just joining is they kind of, I think of them as sort of a bow tie organization where there's construction companies and developers that may have a mandate or an interest in hiring people who are in the communities where they're working and may have an interest in hiring people that are low income and that haven't been connected to the construction industry before. And then there are community-based organizations and training programs whether it's community colleges or private companies that train people in construction management and construction skills and there are different laborers that they train in. And so connecting those training programs and those people to the construction companies and the developers is the sort of special sauce that Dave's company which is called Building Skills does. And so that's why we've partnered with them. One of the issues that Building Skills and lots of other folks in this space is that it's kind of difficult to work with government. And so a typical contract that Dave might have to help hire people to help make this match between the developers and the construction companies and these training companies, the grants or the contracts that a group like Dave's might get are often tied to cost reimbursement. And so the incentives for Dave are and the sort of reporting that a nonprofit has to do is around the services that are delivered and the cost to deliver those services and less about the outcomes that are connected to those services. And the outcomes that we all care about in this case and many others are usually connection to a job. So job placement, retention in that job whether it's three months or six months depending on the job site or even a year. And then also increases in wages is another thing that we look for as an outcome. Another thing that we all care about and probably everyone on this call cares about is people having training certification that could help them advance their career so that they continue to be employed and they continue to have the potential to earn a good income. So just to sort of recap there's these local hiring requirements that exist. There's some funding for workforce development services but it's often connected to outputs or services and it focuses really on cost reimbursement. So how much did it cost in terms of to deliver the service and less focused on the outcomes that actually come from those services. And so that's sort of the context that we're working in and the solution that we've come up with is often called taper success or outcomes financing. So I'm gonna go ahead and try and share my screen. Let me see how this goes. Since we're not having the best of luck with technology might as well just go for it. Okay, now you can see me and Ayana twice which is not that helpful but I'm gonna shrink this and this spinning wheel of death not what I needed right now. Okay, everyone should nod if they can see this. That was a bad joke. So this is a structure chart that we'll just explain a little bit about the way that building skills, LNM and the community outcomes fund are planning on working together. And again, if there are questions that come up about this I will close this out and go look at the chat and take your questions in just a moment. Oops, okay. So the way that this really begins and sort of the proposition for government is government could enter into a different kind of contract a contract that's more aligned with the impact we wanna see in communities that's more aligned with outcomes and less focused on exactly how much somebody spent and reimbursing them for those costs. So the government starts by enters into a contract with a group like building skills and they say in that contract instead of here's X amount of dollars to deliver training or recruiting.  So that's kind of a new kind of contract for government and a new kind of contract for most nonprofit organizations that have worked with government to deliver human services. We're really excited about that because it really shifts the emphasis onto the outcomes. The challenge with that for a group like building skills or for any nonprofit is that there's gonna be a there's gonna be sort of two key problems. One is there is going to be a lag in payment because they may start enrolling people recruiting them and screening them and it may be months and months before actually anyone is placed and before there's retention job retention outcomes. And so that creates a working capital problem for a nonprofit organization. Another issue that comes up is risk. So if Dave or other groups like building skills or other nonprofit organizations aren't able to hit the outcomes that they are contracted to hit then they don't get paid for those outcomes and so then they've spent the time and they've spent the resources and they've allocated staff to doing this work and it hasn't worked out as they hoped and now they're stuck sort of holding the bag. And those of us in the investment space and the impact investing space sort of know that small nonprofits are not necessarily well positioned to take on that kind of risk and that kind of cash flow issue. So that's where the community outcomes fund comes in. What we do is we provide a working capital loan to a nonprofit organization or to a service provider that's providing human services of any kind. In this case, there are workforce development services and we make a working capital loan to that group. They then have the capital they need upfront to deliver services to in this case under an unemployed individuals who are looking for jobs at construction sites like the ones that LNM has around the city here. Those results are then the sort of outcomes that are achieved are then validated by a third party and then that triggers a payment from government. The payment from government goes to the organization that received our loan and then that money flows back to us as the community outcomes fund and pays back our principal and our interest. One of the unique things about our loan versus going to a bank and getting a loan is that we have a forgiveness cause that says that if an organization does sort of everything that they promised they would do and everything that they intended to do, there were no sort of bad acting and they don't hit the outcomes they achieve, which as you can imagine has been happening a lot given COVID and sort of all the things we expected would happen last this year that haven't happened. We have a forgiveness cause and so we forgive the portion of the loan that is still owed and that makes us different than a normal bank. So let me, I'm gonna close out this screen and try and get back to you guys. There we are. And hopefully, all right. So now would be a great time to type in questions. If anyone has questions, I'm just gonna go through the chat right now and see if anything came up. Okay, I see Elizabeth has a question. How would the future system handle the presence of many undocumented and non-English speakers who are interested in construction? I wish Dave was here to answer that, but, and Iona maybe you could speak to this. I honestly, I couldn't. Okay, from what I understand, Dave works with community-based organizations. In this case, we're in New York City and they're across the city. And depending on the communities that they're in, they have the language skills that they need to train folks to be able to do construction. We also have the luxury here of having job sites that are multi, multi, multi-lingual. And so there's part of the matching process that a group like Building Skills will go through is helping to identify if they're gonna be language barriers and how those might be addressed by either other folks who are already on the site and maybe could sort of be act as a translator or through training and specific training that would give someone the English language skills they need to be able to be successful in a construction job. So that's the sort of non-English. In terms of undocumented that I'm not familiar with. So I'm gonna have to punt, but I would, my colleagues are on the line and we will make note of your question and get back to you by the end of SoCAP. We have three days, two hours and seven minutes. So you can count on us, Elizabeth. All right, so let's, or Christine Fry has a question that I'm just gonna read out loud. California prohibits public contracting from taking into account race, ethnicity, national origin and sex. So I'm not sure if this would be allowed here. That being said, we're voting in a proposition this year that I think would reverse this. Have you seen philanthropy contribute to housing infrastructure financing? But Ayanna, I don't know if you have anything to add to that, otherwise I can try and tackle that one. Yeah, I think that on the sort of private equity fund side, foundations are definitely getting involved in housing development. We operate a fund and there are sort of foundation level investors that are part of that. And I guess I'm not sure Shelby who your investors are, but we're definitely seeing that where we are. Yeah, great. Yeah, I think you're right, Christine, that the public contract can't take into account. And that's true, at least in the markets that we're working in as well, where they can't take into account race or ethnicity when they're thinking about who they contract with. In this case, they would be contracting with a group like building skills or any other. And we would be sort of agnostic to who that group is. But the hiring requirements that maybe come from the developer or maybe come from government often do speak to things like zip code or income level. And those are often not necessarily exactly the same, but they're often could be correlated with race, certainly. And so we have a very strong interest in addressing racial equity and on construction sites. Black and brown people are often underrepresented. And so we're really excited about this possibility of, I mean, the idea of basically the requirement to hire locally can sort of work as a proxy if you're developing in a community of color and then you have to hire locally, that's one way to address the hiring. In this case, again, the hiring is happening with the construction company or the developer. It's not a government hiring. So hopefully that answered your question. And if not, follow up or put more in the chat and clarify. And to your point, I guess just one other thing to mention, you said, your question about philanthropy just got me thinking that we often go into projects with a co-investor. We like to do 80% of a project and then have a co-investor who does the other 20%. And so that could be a private foundation. That could be a CDFI. That could be any sort of local investor, even an impact investor in the communities we're working in. And that could be a way to sort of to help advance this issue. And I guess I'll just say sort of like from my side, when we see impact investors, it's sort of, it's more so associated with the composition of our developments and not necessarily like the workforce requirements that are associated with it. And that's why sort of like filling that double bottom line by partnering with organizations like Make Home makes a lot of sense so that we can further expand upon the work that we're interested in doing in these communities. Great, thank you. All right, next question I think I'll take. So Evan asked a question about our diligence process, which is a great question. So our diligence is really focused on the organizations that we're lending to. And so in that structure chart, in this case it's building skills. And so what we really rely on is looking at the track record. I would say that's the number one thing that we are looking at. Most of the organizations that we're lending to don't have a ton of experience as borrowing at all. And so we're not looking at that part of what they're doing. We're really betting on their ability to deliver outcomes that are based on the fact that they've delivered outcomes in the past. So we had a project in Massachusetts where we looked at where they were providing English contextualized English language services. And the idea was to give folks the English language that they needed to get jobs that would help them make a living wage. And so in that case, we really looked at, this was an organization that had been around for many, many decades. And so we looked at what had they done before and what were they planning on doing now and sort of trying to think about what were the potential risks that would happen because there were some new programs and there were some new populations and some new geographies, but sort of looking back at what they had done, what could we count on them being able to do in the future? And so that's sort of the key part of our diligence process. We are not, yeah, so hopefully that answers a question to some extent, but Evan, if there's more follow-up, feel free to jump into the chat or if other folks have questions about that. We're really just to reiterate or put a finer point on it. We're really betting on the organization and we take a lot of interest in sort of who they're, like we look at their entire workflow process and we look at the staff that they have and we wanna make sure that they're in a position to continue to deliver services. And at the same time that they're also nimble enough to be able to pivot when things like a global pandemic happen and that they'll be able to be good thought partners and roll up their sleeves and continue to try to achieve outcomes even when circumstances are really tough. All right. Julie's question, only nonprofit, what metrics do you use to validate the working capital recipient? I'm not sure exactly, the only nonprofit, I think the answer to that is no, we would make a loan to any organization that's providing services and sometimes we make a loan to another organization that sort of sits on top of many organizations that providing services, but whether they're nonprofit or for-profit were agnostic on that. They have to be, yeah. What metrics do you use to validate the working capital recipient? I'm not totally sure what that means, so Julie, if you're still there and you could clarify, I will revisit that question. So many questions. So many questions. Okay. Oh, thank you, Julie. I'm glad I already addressed it. Okay, so why outcomes financing is valuable for building skills? So again, I'm gonna speak for Dave. He's probably gonna be rolling his eyes, but no, I think I've known him well enough that I think, and Ayanna does too, that I think we can cover for this for him, but the benefit to a nonprofit organization, there are several. One is that, sorry, just to address Julie's question, not a nonprofit organization, but the benefit to a service provider, that's sort of the blanket term we use to talk about an organization that's providing workforce development services, like recruiting and screening, training, retention support, barrier removal, which is helping folks that have issues getting to sort of keeping their jobs or getting to jobs like childcare transportation, helping remove barriers. They call that barrier removal work typically in this field. And so those organizations are often only focused on outcomes, and they often get money from lots of different sources, individuals, foundations, government, and everything in corporations, and they're often reporting to a lot of those folks on the outcomes that they're achieving. They're in this work because they want people to get jobs. And so when we talk about outcomes financing and an outcomes-based contract, it's basically a contract that reflects the work that they're already doing and reflects the mission of their organization and what sort of gets them doing the great work that they do. It's different from their other contracts where they're often having to sort of keep track of receipts and submit invoices around that just show how much they spent to deliver the services. And so working in this way sort of matches the mission of the organization with the reporting that they have to do to their funder and reporting they have to do to government. And it gives them another, so that is, I would say one thing is sort of aligning the funding and the reporting with what they're actually doing. Another thing that it does, as I mentioned before, is it addresses a working capital issue. So often government pays late. I'll just say that seems to be happening. When we've talked to workforce development organizations across the country, and this is just a consistent theme, I spent 10 years working in government, so lots of reasons why I think that might be happening, but government often pays late. I know from talking to Dave that government sometimes pays so late that folks actually have to take out loans to cover the cost of delivering services while they're waiting for government payments to come in, even if those payments are just tied to cost reimbursement and not even tied to outcomes. So working with us, we give them the capital they need as they need it. So if they need to hire someone in two weeks, if they need to ramp up services at the beginning of a new contract, we basically distribute our capital in a way that matches their operational needs.  What are you gonna need when and when do you need our capital? And we make sure that they have that capital at the right time, so they aren't in a situation where they're having cashflow issues. So that's another big advantage of working in this way. And then the other one that I mentioned before is really the risk. So if something happens and they're not able to reach the outcomes or it looks like outcomes won't be achieved, we're at the table with them and we roll up our sleeves and we pull in everyone we know and we try to address whatever's going on to make sure that we're hitting these important outcomes for communities and our focus is on low-income communities. So tons of need and we all wanna make sure that those needs are addressed. And so we roll up our sleeves and help them. And if for whatever reason, we can't hit the outcomes that we expected to and government isn't gonna pay them back, we take a loss there. And so as private investors we're better positioned to take a loss than a small nonprofit organization that just does not have a balance sheet. So I would say those are some of the reasons why a group would wanna work with us instead of sort of going it on their own. I have a few other notes here, let me see. Iona, if there's a question for you. Yes. There's several for you. Oh. Sounds like Ellen. Take whichever one you want. I see the one from Ariela. So I guess reading it aloud. It sounds like LNM is a special kind of developer. How does outcomes financing help you make the case to NYC or NY State to pay for human services? Would they pay for workforce development for public housing residents without outcomes financing? Are they more likely to do it with it? I honestly can't say. I think that we take the approach of wanting to sort of introduce the concept first in terms of being able to figure out innovative ways to address the issues that are sort of like at play. And as Shelby mentioned, one of the issues is the funding for these jobs and for the support and infrastructure that exists to support these individuals who are like under employed. And so I think that I guess I would say that I think, yes, they'd be interested in this because it's also a way to expand beyond sort of a low touch like hiring will and expand that and provide training beyond sort of what a project can support on its own. And this is, I think this is what's important to New York City and the state government as well is creating real opportunities that, you know, are not necessarily discreet to, you know, a one-off job but providing a scale of opportunities across like sort of like several like parameters in terms of like duration and wage. And so I think that outcome in this model allows us to be able to achieve that and, you know, sort of like coalesce all of the various issues that exists like from an implementation standpoint from both our side as developers and also the city side from wanting to, you know, achieve goals that they don't necessarily have to independent financing for. Great, thank you so much. I see another question from Ben. Wait, actually there was one I was gonna scroll up to. Jeff, I didn't wanna miss yours. It was 13 minutes ago, I hope you're still here. So Jeff, you asked if there's infrastructure that can provide retention outcome signals that community funders and others can tap into so we're not reinventing the analysis and reporting wheel for every initiative. Yes, we do not wanna reinvent that wheel. I would just say a couple of things about that is we try to keep it very simple. We usually are talking about three to five outcomes on a project like this. So I mentioned the project in Massachusetts, it was job retention, job placement, job retention, an education credential and an increase in wages. The project that we're working on with Ayanna and Dave here in New York City is also the same outcomes. So it's not a massive reporting agenda and there's not a ton of data that needs to be captured for the sake of the outcome payments. Of course, in terms of performance management, there's a ton that has to be managed, everything from the very beginning of sort of how many people are you doing outreach to, to intake, to enrollment, to screening and then all the things in between that. But we really try to keep the reporting as simple as possible. I think a lot of organizations are, often have a person whose full-time job is reporting out on metrics and different funders will count things in different ways and we try to keep it very simple so that we're not spending any unnecessary resources on measuring and we're really spending our resources on delivering the best quality services to the community. So I hope that answered your question. Again, if not, feel free to type more into the chat. Okay, I got a yes from Jeff. Thank you, hopefully that's an agreement. Now I'm looking at Ben's question, which I'm not totally sure. Ben, if you're still there and can clarify, integrating the delivery of multiple services for workforce development. So in terms of multiple services for workforce development, I think workforce development is a sort of broad field and as I was mentioning before, in some cases it is training someone and that could be sort of the extent of what an organization does and in other cases it's really addressing some of the social and family issues that someone might be facing before they can even think about going into training before they can even think about getting onto a job. And so we work with different organizations that are working on different things and then we want to think about the outcomes that they're actually connected to. So I do think the world of workforce has gotten a lot smarter over the last decade and sort of realized that like one trend that we're seeing is this focus on retention. And so workforce organizations, it used to be all about placement and in some cases payment was tied to placement. In other cases, as I mentioned before, it was just about cost, but either way there was a focus on placement and it kind of ended there. We're seeing across the country a focus on six month retention and in some cases a focus on even further out than six months. And I think we're seeing also resource allocation that way. So people hiring up what they call retention specialists or something along those lines where they're continuing to stay part of sort of the new employees support team and helping them as things come up because often folks, as we all know, like coming out of poverty or just kind of on that threshold, like one flat tire or a child getting sick or something happening to a lease in their house, like all of those things could really throw things into disarray and affect their ability to keep going to work. And so we're seeing a real interest and focus on retention services and a ton of value coming from that effort. Another thing we're seeing is a focus in the workforce development space on replacement. And so sort of what does your career path look like after six months or after 12 months and sort of where are you going from here? And so I think that's something really exciting about the workforce development space. I'm not sure if that totally answers your question but in terms of the breadth of workforce development services, those are some of the things we're seeing and excited about. Oh, you just clarified, I have heard coordination between agencies need online tools to coordinate. I'm not sure what agencies and services. Okay, I'm gonna come back to you, Ben, in a second because I see a couple of new questions from folks that we haven't talked to. Have you looked at things like social success and incentive notes or outcome space pricing or in-cap black bonds instead of a simple two-party outcome space contract? Sounds like maybe not, so feel free to ignore. I'm not sure if we looked at those, I'm not sure about all those terms exactly but I will say that are sort of one of the things that we try to do is keep things as simple as possible. And so we really feel like this financing mechanism is the most simple and most efficient and but when I say efficient, I mean in terms of our capital. So we have like a boilerplate language, boilerplate loan terms and templates that we rely on and we think that all of the time and energy that we're saving on getting this, helps us get the money out quickly and helps us sort of reserve our capital for the work instead of thinking about different kinds of structures that may be more complicated. So I'm not sure if that totally gets at your question but I would say our whole sort of goal is to try and keep things as simple as possible. One of the reasons we even got into this space is because social impact bonds were getting quite complicated for those of you who have sort of been following this field for a while. There were often lots of folks at the table for many, many years and what we're trying to do is get more projects launched to get more services out into communities more quickly. And so our whole thing is how can we make this more simple and how can we use our capital more efficiently and effectively? Ayanna, do you have advice for other affordable housing developers? I think implicit to the work that we do is an understanding that it's, we have the responsibility of creating holistic benefit to the residents of the communities that we're developing in. And so I think a lot of times like we as developers are worried about the cost implications of some of the requirements that we receive from external parties, be that government or in the like. And so I think that the private markets to effectually the sort of holistic approach that we're looking for in terms of workforce development I think is important. And I guess to Ariel's question around like, is it scalable around the country? I think yes. And I think we sort of have a responsibility to figure out a way to make employment accessible not just within New York City, but as we approach sort of one of the worst economic crises of our time, figuring out a way to leverage the capital that exists to benefit the peoples who are most at the bottom. Thank you, Ayanna. I see another question from Evan about if we find this approach simpler than a social impact bond or if we need a third party. So just a couple of things I want to clarify. We are not a consulting firm. So we are actually paid management fees by our investors. And so all of the work that we do to develop these projects and in terms of developing everything from like, what are the right outcome metrics to the due diligence that we were asked about earlier, which often before COVID involved going and visiting places and really getting into the weeds of what they do. All of that work developing loan documents and building the financial models, that's all part of what we do as part of our service as an investor. We're not paid a consulting fee for any of that work. And so that often makes it also faster and simpler because an organization or a government doesn't have to go out and procure our services and then think about how to procure an investor later on or find an investor later on. And so we do not charge a consulting fee. I saw another question about social finance and third sector. So they're what we call intermediaries in this space and so often we work with them if they have done sort of that work of helping to find a project, find the government partners and brought them along, identified the right outcomes. We can come in as the investor in those projects and we often do, we have a great relationship with both of those organizations, but our role is a little bit different. They tend to serve as a sort of intermediary and the project builder and we are often a builder and an investor. So hope that that clarifies things. I know we're running up on time and I wanted this to be 45 minutes and we're two minutes over. So I'm gonna attempt to wrap up. Ayana, let me ask you one more question and put you on the spot. I guess thinking about sort of COVID racial equity, you know, fires and cows, like all the things that are happening in the world, what does this approach feel like more important than it did when we started, and this is a loaded question, then we started when we started talking about this like a year ago, or does it feel like too complicated and yeah, obviously with that, sort of given the state of how the world has changed, do you think this is helpful? Oh, you're on mute, Ayana. I would say yes. I do think that this work is useful and I think what's interesting about this time is that we're in a moment of heightened awareness and increased conversations about the lack of equality and need for racial and social justice. And because as I mentioned, I think this understanding is implicit to our work. I don't know that there's necessarily sort of like an evolution to like our thinking about the necessity of collaboration here. I think it's more of a realization that like, we've shined a light on the fact that the current efforts aren't enough to combat systemic issues that communities of colors have endured for generations. And so a collaboration of this kind, I think reinforces the need for double bottom line solutions to address these issues of equality. And so I think I'm more excited than I was because I think that this, and as we've discussed Shelby, this is an opportunity for us to go beyond sort of the initial idea of this collaboration and expand it to provide sort of like a deeper or a larger aggregate need. Thank you, Iona. Thank you all so much for participating and for listening. If anyone has follow-up questions, we are available. I'm sorry Dave couldn't join us, but he does exist and he is available if anyone has questions about the great work that his organization does, helping people find and keep great jobs. As I said, we're the Community Outcomes Fund. We are available in a round. We have a session tomorrow afternoon as well where our founder Andy Phillips will be joined with one of our investors and should also be a great session. So encourage you to check that out. Hopefully there'll be less technical issues tomorrow. And just want to say that we appreciate all of you being here and look forward to continuing the conversation somehow. Thank you all so much.


church, but the founders still wanted, they didn't want freedom, they wanted freedom of religion, not freedom from religion, okay, so they wanted there to be religion in society. If we had religion in this country, but it wasn't Christianity, would you go down on this list? Well, I'd have to see why I have to see what the faith was, okay, I don't want to ask questions. You have a topic you want to talk about? Let's see, politics?  All right, all right, do you believe in Bigfoot? Is the U.S. better off without religion? We can talk about that. Okay, okay, what do you think, is the U.S. better off with religion? Do I think the U.S. is better off without religion? It looks like it's just religion, period, so that would also include... No, I think the U.S. needs religion, because I think a capitalist society, as a moral check on capitalism, needs values and ethics and morals to say, hey, there's some things that, while we promote free enterprise, there's some boundaries that we don't think you should cross. And I think that the only thing that can really put the check on that is people's faith and their values. And that puts a hold on, maybe run, it'd be like, I don't support a godless capitalism. You should have a capitalism with values and faith and ethics in it. Okay, how about this? Uh-oh, I gave him something he wants to talk to me about. Is U.S. better off without religion? Let's just say this is absolutely yes, absolutely no. What would you feel like on this scale? I'd be right now. So what you got? Right there? Yeah. With religion. Yeah, should have it. The country was based on faith. I mean, the Declaration of Independence says the laws of nature, nature's God. I mean, there's certain rights that we have from God that government can't take from us. God gives them to us. Government doesn't have the right to take them from us. And thus, the government is instituted to protect those God-given rights that we have. That's a declaration of independence. This is sort of like a level of certainty. Not so much like whether or not it feels good. So like, you're absolutely certain that we should have religion in this country. Absolutely. Yeah. Even if it's not Christian. Yeah, we can have different faiths. Okay, we can have different faiths. That's what our country is about, right? It's not about. I mean, though it was predominantly founded by people of the Christian faith, I mean, it was never intended, well, I mean, it was never intended to exclude the Christian faith. I mean, the reason that some people think that they had the separation of church and state was not to protect the state, it was to protect the church. Because they were afraid the politicians would corrupt the church. Okay, they didn't want the politicians corrupting the church. Okay, because at that time and time and age, you'd always try to say, I'm a politician, I got the church backing me, and then the politicians would corrupt the church. But the founders still wanted, they didn't want freedom. They wanted freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. Okay, so they wanted there to be religion in society. If we had religion in this country, but it wasn't Christianity, would you go down on this list? Well, I'd have to see why I have to see what the faith was. Okay. I mean, I'd have to understand what it is. Well, they think there are some things that are incompatible with the other faiths that may not necessarily work with the idea of Americans. Sure. That it's more of a free country. I mean, we have free thoughts. And if a faith told you that, hey, you can't think this ever, I wouldn't support it. Because in our country, we have the idea that you have the right to practice your faith. Regardless of whatever faith it is. Yeah, as long as you're not hurting anybody. Okay.  Too lad. No, man, you can't do that. I mean, we're not going to let you hurt other people in the practice of your faith. Yeah. Okay, we're not going to let you hurt people. What about the options to not have a faith at all? Not having faith at all? Yeah. I don't think it works well in a capitalist society. Oh, like as an option of like where people can choose whatever faith they want or religion they want. I don't think they, I don't you think they already can in our country? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like any faith they want. Yeah, so I'm like in a situation where you can like kind of like how it is right now, where you could be whatever religion you want. Also have the option of none of the religions. Figure out something on your own. If you want to be an atheist, that's your right. Yeah?  I mean, I don't think you can force the religion down the throat. Okay. So you can't forcibly take it away from someone. You can't forcibly add it on someone. You can't forcibly take it away from someone, but you can't forcibly add it on someone either. I think we see eye to eye. I mean, if someone wants to live in life and they want to say, hey, you know, I mean, I don't really want, you know, I agree with America, but I don't really believe in Christianity or Judaism or even any faith. Sure. Yeah. You know, but I want to live my life in the United States. It's fine. Yeah.  Yeah. Yeah. You can't say I can't believe either. Yeah. Let that be a personal relationship regardless of whatever it is. Yeah. It's my decision. Okay. You know, I am. So, yeah. So what's the next subject? We solved the problem on that one. Are we creating more? I don't know. Do you want to flip through this? Can you be, can knowledge be rough? I don't know what that, do men and women have different talents and interests on average? Oh, that's a tough one. Oh, do you want to do that one? I don't know, man. That's going to be hard. Let's do it. Let's do it. Do men and women have different talents and interests on average? How about this? We'll just say absolutely yes, absolutely no.


Personally, I'm not a fan of the null object design pattern, and here's why. It's too broad, it's too open to interpretation, and you can drive yourself crazy doing this. So the intent of the null object is to encapsulate the absence of an object by providing a suitable alternative that offers suitable default do nothing behavior. What? That makes absolutely no sense. So if you have no object, you would have no behavior. But what they're saying with the null object pattern is have a behavior even if you don't have an object. Vastly open to interpretation, and you can see junior developers going crazy trying to figure out how to get around this pattern and how to make it work. So there are some general rules of thumb, but we're going to cover the cute way of doing it. So when I say the cute way, I have to kind of back up and say, I'm not really telling you the truth because this is so open to interpretation, you can do it millions of different ways. For example, in the queue object, right in the constructor uses this design pattern. If there's a parent, then cute is going to assume the memory management. If there's no parent, then the default behavior is that either the stack or you are going to manage that memory. So if this were created as a pointer, we would not be responsible unless we set a parent. Okay, so there's one interpretation. This logger class, which is very, very simple, is another interpretation of this. So we just simply are saying we're going to log some string value, but we also have to set a file. Of course, we're going to go ahead and check to see if that file even is in memory and if it's even writable. But then what is the default behavior? So let's look at our code here. So we have our logger, logger log, we have not set the file at this point. What's the default behavior? Okay, here we've set the file, but the file is not writable because we have not opened it. So we have different levels of default behavior we could really look at. And this is what I mean by you can really over engineer this if you wanted to. So we could take the easy route and say, okay, if there's no file, then let's go ahead and grab this and say queue warning, no file set. And then go ahead and return it out. And we could, you know, again, do it here, file not writable. And we could have done this a billion different ways. So for example, we could also move this up here and say the default is we will always print something out on the screen, but we'll also give a warning if we can't write to the file. Or we could actually open the file on the behalf of the user, like we could say try to open a file here. And then we would have to define what's the file name, where are we going to put it, what are the permissions, things like that, and we could do all sorts of craziness. You can drive yourself absolutely bonkers doing this. So in short, the null object pattern is not my favorite because it's so open to interpretation, but you need to be aware of it because Qt does use it. Now, general rules of thumb when you're using this, my personal preference, yours may differ. I try to avoid this. If there's no object, I take no behavior because what you're really relying on is the lack of object defining the behavior.