So, my name is Steve Glickman. I'm the founder of a consulting and advisory firm called Develop Advisors. My background is having served in the first term of the Obama Administration, focused on economic development and policies coming out of the recession. And then I ran an organization called the Economic Innovation Group with Sean Parker. We were the co-founders of it that sort of created the architecture for the Opportunity Zones program, which is an incentivized investment program to drive capital into low-income places. I hope folks have heard about it, and that's part of why you're here for this session. And I want to introduce briefly my two excellent co-panelists. So I'll start on my left, because I think he's going first. I don't know if he used the title Honorable Anymore. But this is my friend, Ben McAdams, honorable, because he was formally one of my favorite members of the U.S. Congress from Utah, the Salt Lake City area, where he was, I think, known for being a bipartisan sort of activator of conversations with both Republicans and Democrats, which is a weird place to be in today's politics, and I think was a weird place to be even when Ben was in Congress. He's been a longtime civil servant and statesman, served as the mayor of Salt Lake County, a state senator, was, I think, one of the most successful local officials in Utah history, and he's now doing something very exciting through a fellowship with the Sorensen Center around activating underutilized city and state resources, I think mostly real estate, around the country. And he's going to tell you a bit more about that. And then to my right, I have another friend, Jonathan Tower. Jonathan Tower is the managing partner of one of the largest impact investing funds in the U.S. called Arcteris. They've grown what has become, I think, maybe the most unique Opportunity Zone fund in the country. It's a fund focused on investments in low-income areas that overlap with things like infrastructure and clean energy and affordable housing and private equity acquisitions of companies all around the country in places like Baltimore and in Cleveland and in rural Maine and rural Colorado. So a very unique, interesting private equity model, and I'll just kick off sort of this next phase of the conversation by saying this, I think the goal today, I think one of the ties that binds all three of us is this idea that the private sector has to be activated in a really significant way to solve really big public policy challenges. And if we're talking about how we deal with affordable housing or how we deal with low-income communities or how we deal with renewable energy or how we deal with broadband infrastructure, another thing that Arcteris does, I think the argument I would make and the thesis I think we all share is that public policy, one, hasn't worked on its own and is probably insufficient to solve the scale of the challenges we face in all of those topics. And I think both Ben and Jonathan have been at the vanguard of figuring out ways that the public and private sector could work together in really creative ways that frankly I'm not sure anyone else is doing at scale to drive public resources and public priorities alongside private capital. So I'm going to stop there with a brief overview of what I think we're going to be focused on today and I want to turn it over to Ben to talk about the very exciting project that Ben is working on out of Salt Lake City. All right, well, thank you, Steve. I will just say as a Democrat in a very conservative state and a Democrat who actually worked across the aisle to get a lot of things done, I've been called a lot of things and Honorable was never one of them. So it was a relative joke. Let me just say. So first of all, I'm here to talk about the work that I'm leading. It started when I was mayor, but I'm continuing it now today about unlocking opportunities to invest in America's future. So, you know, millions of people around the world have discovered how to make money right in their backyard, in their own homes from things that they own. Resources such as renting out a spare bedroom. You see here a lot of the share economy logos that we are also familiar with today. They rent out a spare bedroom, for example. They earn spare cash that helps to pay for groceries or gas or any number of other needs. So my daughter right here, she just actually turned 16 and got her driver's license. And she got a car that she'd saved up for and bought with her own money. And she found one of these share apps where she could rent out her car and make money. So of course, as a father of a new driver, I was so enthusiastically behind this because I knew every time her car was rented out, she was not driving it. So, but just to say, like our millions of people around the country are figuring out how to use their resources, their underutilized resources to put them to work to solve some of the needs that they have individually. And yet government has similar resources. Think of underutilized parking lots next to massive government buildings and areas that are now transit central and in the hearts of our urban cores. And yet we have acres and acres of underutilized real estate. Places around the world have figured this out. Copenhagen, Denmark activated their port area. You have Hamburg, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, many places around the country have figured out how to use these underutilized government spaces to actually activate them and then bring in revenue to support their communities. So we're talking to the government leaders around the country asking them what are your challenges? They may be addressing affordable housing or early childhood education, aging infrastructure in a time when government doesn't seem to even have money to fill our potholes, greenways and parks, climate change, climate resilient infrastructure. The theme that underlines all of this is that government lacks money to invest in some of their key community impact initiatives, the things that they need most. So our message to them is to utilize what they own. So first of all, do an inventory of what they own. You'd be surprised at how many governments don't even know the assets that are on their balance sheet. In fact, government finance doesn't really have the concept of a balance sheet. We talk about revenue and expenditures, but they don't even know what the asset side of their balance sheet looks like. And then asking them how to leverage those assets, how do you value it? What are those assets worth? So I'll give you an example. This I said that this work started when I was mayor of Salt Lake County. This is a map of Salt Lake County. We decided to put this premise to the test. And so we mapped all commercially viable publicly owned real estate within Salt Lake County, so excluded things like one of the things that's precious to us is our watershed and our back country that we don't want to touch. We want to keep it in its natural state or you can think of historic theaters or other things that just are off the table. What you're left with here in blue is viable public real estate. When we did this inventory, we saw that we have 44 square miles of publicly owned real estate that has commercial value. We went to actually assess the value of that. We made some some estimates to kind of get a get a sense for what it's worth. It's certainly not down to the penny. But we estimated that this portfolio in its current state, this would have been 2017. So real estate has gone up significantly since then. But in 2017, our real estate was worth in its current state about 13 billion dollars. And then if we were to put it to work like the rest of the market and the adjacent vicinity had done, this portfolio could be worth 45 billion dollars. So to put that in perspective, as a mayor, my revenue or my budget was about 1.2 billion dollars a year. We had assets 10x our assets in their latent form or 45 billion if we were to actually put them to work. So I just do the quick back of the envelope math. If we got a third of our assets generating revenue and that and they generated so 15 billion dollars roughly generating revenue and it generated a 3% return because we put in housing or office space or other things that were generating a return back to government, they generated a 3% return. And that would be a revenue stream of 450 million dollars a year. It's more than I collected as a mayor on property tax. So when we talk about how government is constrained, it doesn't have the ability to invest in our core functions like early childhood education or filling potholes or climate change and clean energy, other key social impact needs. It's because we're not looking at our balance sheet. So I'll give you a quick example here. This is West High School. My kids, my daughter and her twin brother, my daughter who you saw and her twin brother went to West High School. This is the West High School campus located in downtown Salt Lake City. Across the street from West High School is a $16 million per acre housing development. So you look here, you've got a driver's education course. You look at just underutilized spaces, fields, football fields. We think if you could put this to work like the market has, you create $400 million for a title one school where a lot of the kids are struggling to get the resources they need and to even have funding to go to college. So this is that driver's education course. There, by the way, is a driver's education course at our DMV, the Department of Motor Vehicles, less than two miles away that could be used. This course is used from 6 a.m. to 7 30 a.m. in the mornings that could create $29 million to go back to the school district to invest in critical needs. Or you look at the parking spaces, there are approximately 224 parking spaces. We're paying 128,000 per parking space for students who, this is right next to a transit stop, great bus accessibility, it's very expensive if you think is this the logical decision we want to make. So we organize, I organize the putting assets to work incubator. We're working with six governments across the country who are the vanguard of figuring out how to unlock this. What I'll say to get it back to what Steve and Jonathan are talking about here, government cannot do this alone. Government needs to surface these opportunities, but once they have surfaced these opportunities, we cannot put these assets to work without partnering with the private sector to move forward these developments in a way that then certainly if you're bringing private capital to the table in a social impact approach, private capital is going to recognize a return on investment, but they will also know that in addition to the return that they're recognizing for their investments, they are generating return back to government that's going to fund critical things like investing in our kids, investing in our education, investing in our communities. Thanks, Steve. I got a mic. I want to turn it over to Jonathan too and I want to flag a question. I want to come back to you with Ben, but don't answer yet, which is when you lay out these $45 billion of potential opportunity for the private sector, how do you actually effectively prioritize that for private investors? Because most of them will have no sight line into that. So where is the connective tissue between activating those assets, doing things that developers may be looking for, like accelerating the ability to develop them because of entitlements or providing tax support or whatever needs to happen. And then I just identifying them to private investors. And before you answer that, I want to turn to a private investor to talk about what he does. I want to get back to him. Just flagging that so you have plenty of time to think about it.  You're working in communities all around the country. When you talk a bit about Arcteris, maybe I could frame this and talk a bit about the unique ways in which you partner with states and cities in order to work on priorities, to invest in priorities that they're pursuing and how that fits in within the kind of fun strategy, the fun model of what Arcteris is doing. Sure, Steve. And by the way, it's great to be back here in person with all of you. Really happy that everyone can be in one room here once again. This is a really important topic. And I think Ben really reflected upon an awesome, large use case that a lot of communities from coast to coast can be using. I'll talk a little bit about Arcteris impact and what we do and then propose a framework really around that and other shared value, shared resource partnerships between public and private organizations like government agencies and investment firms like Arcteris and hopefully give a few plugs of ideas that you can take back home, use them in your investment funds or your foundations or if your public policy people popularize it in your own communities. But just by way of background, so Arcteris is a social impact investment firm. I found it at 13 years ago. From day one, we've been focused on investing in low income communities and the residents who live there. I confess that when I started the firm, I didn't even know the term impact investing. It was at a conference a couple years later that I was listening to someone talk about impact investing. And I said, I think we're part of that. And it's really exciting to see that there are other people that have similar missions and similar objectives. But here today, we've grown, so we're based in Boston. We invest coast to coast in the United States. Now have 34 people on the team and just launched our seventh fund and all of our funds work in partnership with government and foundations to anchor place based programs with very specific social impact objectives that we measure. Just like we have a financial audit, we have an annual impact report that we publish with Harvard Business School's initiative for competitive inner city. That's Michael Porter's think tank.  But so here to date, we invest in private equity operating businesses. We invest in infrastructure. Most of that today is broadband or clean energy, but you know, a waterworks or an electric line or things like that could work just as well in that kind of framework. And then we also do a fair amount of real estate. We have 1.7 million square feet under construction right now, about 1600 multi-family units. So across those areas, we're investing in clusters. This is an academic theory, but in clusters, the idea is if you take a city like Detroit, 138 square miles, it would never make sense to invest in a company in the north of Detroit and then do some housing in the south and do some infrastructure in the east and then do some, you know, solar in the west. We cluster things together to try to create vibrant communities. And that's one reason that we do partner with government agencies and foundations because they really have a reflection of the community's best interests at heart. We collaborate. We define the scope of these programs. The government or foundational usually put up 20% of the money, which is usually five or $10 million. And then we'll put up 80% of the money, which is usually 20 or $40 million.  When I think about, you know, the massive untapped assets, just in Salt Lake City alone and as Ben was saying, that's coast to coast. It really helps us think about this shared value. Like what is the profit maximization or really the outcomes maximization that you can achieve by marrying together public and private forces? Because, you know, I mean, like tongue in cheek, but $10 million of depreciation tax benefit means a lot to a bank or insurance company investor. And it means nothing to a city government that doesn't pay taxes anyway. A city that's tied on its budget and, you know, really wants to fund up $3 million social program will be a very willing participant in another project with a private investor that frees up $3 million so that they can go do their social impact program. So when you think about it, it's not an efficient market because the individual actors have such different needs and wants and liquidity constraints and things like that. There are very vibrant cities that can't issue muni bonds to fund new projects because city council won't allow it to happen or if they issue another $1,000 of muni bonds, they'll lose their bond credit rating. But there are vital projects that need to be done that are really important to the people who live there. So thinking about some of kind of the touch points, this really creates a framework for some very structured, collaborative work thinking like, OK, like here are the things that I have and here are the weaknesses and here are the things that you have and here are the weaknesses and let's kind of put all the cards together on the table and see if there are things that we can work on. You know, what example that our team recently did, which I was excited about. So Washington DC has the Potomac River and then the Anacostra River. Part of Washington DC is on the other side of the Anacostra River that's Ward 7 and Ward 8. It's been an historically very low income area and almost by design. I mean, there were no bridges going over the Anacostra for, you know, many, many years and now the bridges have been built and the two sides of Washington DC are merging towards being one. Um, the Mayor Bowser as part of her campaign had said, I'm going to use the city's leasing authority to help some other parts of the city that are really hurting right now. So how does this happen? So they don't actually want to spend more money on leasing than they are right now. But instead of leasing a building that's right next to the Rich Carlton in downtown Washington DC, we're going to build something new in a city that hasn't seen much in the way of economic development for years. And how does that work? So Arc Terrace and Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group and a minority developer called Asland partnered on this project, developing one hundred and fifty thousand square foot office building. And mind you, like this is all happening during the pandemic. And we're saying, you know, is this work from home thing going to work out? It was a deal that absolutely would not have gotten done, but for the collaborative effort between Arc Terrace and all of those partners, I just mentioned, really the city anchoring it. So the city is able to sign a 21 year lease and District of Columbia is a really good credit tenant. They're leasing out the entire project. So when we think about it, you know, we're we're impact investors and that we're always thinking about impact first, but we're also thinking, how do we not lose money on this transaction? How do we make an attractive return for our investors? So we did this from our Opportunity's own fund. And in this project, we're investing in a new building development that's being leased to the District of Columbia for 21 years. That's a pretty good credit tenant. A bank will actually lend on that, you know, pre-construction so that you can have more efficient pricing and things like that. So we think of something like that as kind of a muni bond. In some respects, it's better than a muni bond because we're holding the physical collateral. We own the building. It's not like if the District of Columbia failed to pay, we'd have to go take it back. We own the building and, in theory, someone else could move in there. But also the city is getting what it wants because with zero city funds, zero appropriations, they're getting a huge building in a part of town that really needed economic development. I gave a real estate example first because it's just easier to conceptualize, but our largest asset class right now is broadband fiber. And if you look at the map of the United States, this would have been a good slide, but if you looked at the map of the United States and you said, show me all the places in the U.S. that lack 25-3 high-speed broadband access. You know, you'd have this patchwork quilt of rural areas and low-income urban communities that don't have access. And I don't need to wax poetically about the digital divide. It's a really hard thing to catch onto any economic development trend or academics or health or everything else without high-speed broadband. So we all recognize that that's something of critical importance. The problem is that the federal government and the state governments and the cities are not funded well enough to pay for the entire project. It's not like the rural electrification process in the 1920s where you say, okay, we're just gonna throw billions of dollars out and get this done. Through CARES Act and ARPA Act and everything else that's come out since COVID plus opportunity zones, which came out right before COVID, you actually have a pretty attractive toolkit for solving these kinds of problems. State of Maine, which is one area that we're doing a lot of work right now, it's a big state, but it's only got 1.3 million people. And almost by choice, you've got low-income people that choose to live five miles apart from one another. So you think about just the gerrymandering of how do we connect these homes where it's gonna be $30 a month revenue, but it's costing $5,000 to do a hookup. The economics just aren't there. So the federal government solved this with a $450 million subsidy to the state of Maine to finish the job, requiring that the cities and counties that received the money partner with private capital institutions to get it done. And that's where we come in. We can go into these projects, like Ben was saying, where we would own that physical asset for we're putting our money in, we're owning it, releasing it to the government or releasing it to the ISPs with a backstop from the government for 10 years in an opportunity zone and then selling it back to them. The number one question that comes up in all of these transactions, whether it's a parking deck or waterworks or a sale lease back on City Hall, which I don't recommend doing or broadband fiber, any of these projects, the number one concern in the back of a politician's mind or a foundation's mind is usually, what if 10 years from now the investment fund, it's like front page news, they made a 10 bagger off of an impact investment leveraging city resources. And you can't let that happen. It's an untenable outcome. And that's why this community benefits agreement is so key because you can cap out your return. You can basically give the government a call option to buy that asset back at farm market value at the end of 10 years. You can also keep on a long-term lease and extend it into almost perpetuity. But when we look at these types of projects, it's really important to think about three things. One is, how do you effectively cap the upside in exchange for downside protection? It's one or the other. You're not gonna get the venture capital-like return, but you're also getting the benefit of the government as a de facto credit tenant. The second thing is, how do you leverage the assets that the government or foundation have? Money is the obvious first choice, but when money is absent, the government can give a guarantee, a non-cash solution. The government can allocate federal resources from ARPA or state small business credit initiative for any of the new acronyms that came out since COVID. So how do you best leverage those entities? And then the third is really, how do you cut up the tax benefits? And it goes without saying that big investors who come into impact funds, whether they be banks or insurance companies, they're very focused, not only on risk aversion, they're very focused on the tax benefits. It's either a long-term cap gain exemption through opportunity zones, or it's using the depreciation that you can get off of these new assets and figuring out how to maximize that allocation to your impact investors and basically shunted away from the government where it's wasted. So that's the overview that I'd propose here. And I do really think that, if you'll indulge me for a really brief history lesson from my perspective over the last 13 years, and I'm only speaking about 13 years because that's the start and current for ARP Terrace, but 2009, we're at the bottom of the great financial crisis. There is a huge credit crisis. Companies that are functioning well are not able to get their bank loans. Banks are yanking their loans. Construction projects aren't getting funded because the banks are fundamentally unstable. Congress's response to that was the 2010 Jobs Act, which rolled out a bevy of new programs from State Small Business Credit Initiative to SBLF to make sure that banks could lend and resume lending, particularly in places that were starved for capital. By 2017, all of those programs came up for extension and Congress said no. It wasn't a heartless decision, it was just they did their job. Congress created a solution to a credit crisis. Those programs were effective. We weren't in a credit crisis at all in 2017, so Congress stopped it. And at that point in time, what filled the gap for economic development funding was, number one, foundations stepped up big time to fill the gap left by federal government, and two, the cities and states who had the money were able to pull out of general appropriations. The obvious inverse to that is that the cities and states that didn't have the money got further pulled behind by the gap. And then Opportunity Zones came out at the end of that year. Thank you, Mr. Glickman, for your kind invention and giving that to the rest of the country. That's been really the strongest and most valuable economic development tool in the shed in our experience. More valuable than all of those other acronyms I mentioned. And then when COVID started, we got a suite of new programs here. So I'd propose that there are more tools to solve these kinds of problems there today. Nobody can be an expert in all of them, but collaborative behaviors between impact investors and government are a really big part of the solution. And I'd say the Shiny Apple Opportunity Zones are still great and they'll be around for a long time, but the Shiny Apple has passed from Opportunity Zones to all of the post-COVID economic development stimulus programs and weaving those together can be a great solution. And then I think Ben is the real forward thinker here because then it's even making full circle here now where impact investors can supplement the government in its unfunded most important community needs. So thank you for indulging me on the quick history lesson and happy to pass it back to Stephen Ben. Well, John, I want to pull the thread on two things I heard you guys say, which I actually think are both extremely controversial. And I want to ask you if you think they're controversial and why, and on the flip side, why you don't see more of it. What I take out of your core thesis is that cities and states actually have all the tools they already need to develop the priorities that they want to develop, but they actually have all the capital they need because it's activated through these physical assets, but very few places do it. And I want to ask two things about that. One, this idea that the private sector ought to be driving economic development priorities is an extremely controversial one. I think in particular in the philanthropic community that that is the wrong place for that responsibility to live and that it leads to and can lead to bad outcomes. So I want to ask you guys to respond to one that piece of it. Do you think it's controversial? Why do you think, because opportunity zones were not that long ago written up the front page of the New York Times as really Trump's invention to take over the inner cities through private capital. That's not the way I don't think any of us viewed it, but that is a, I think a common view and I want to poke at that. And two, is if it's so easy, if it's so obvious to operate all of these assets, this underused real estate, these first loss agreements, these underutilized federal programs, why don't more places do it? Is it because city and state governments are bad at this that their teams don't understand how the connectivity works, that they don't have the capacity and resources, that the public and private sector aren't really like, like, why isn't more of it happening? So I want to ask about the political public read of this approach and also why it happens in such a limited way around the country. So Ben, I want to turn to you. Yeah, I'm going to answer that question and also go back to, and I weave in the first question you asked about how this works with private capital. So I think there are things that government can, that only government can do and that government is strong at doing. Like, I think government is the place that articulates the value of a community. When I was mayor, I didn't become an expert real estate developer because I won an election, but I did become an expert at what the values of my community wanted reflected in their government action because that's what the election was about. So when we did this work, I showed you when I was mayor about inventorying all of our assets and then it was soon after that I got elected to Congress. And so I left, you know, I'd gained all this experience as a mayor of balancing a budget, thinking creatively to solve problems, to measure our impacts and to work across party lines to build, to create solutions. And I gained that wealth of experience and I went to Congress and didn't matter. So, thank you. But I lost my election in 2020. And so I came back and I was looking at, I still wanted to be in a place where I could make a difference and give back to my community. I came back to this idea that I had worked on as a mayor and I looked at the people who I worked with at Salt Lake County are among the best of government, super intelligent, creative, hardworking. But I came back and I said, what's happening with this real estate, this asset initiative and the response was, well, you know, we're really excited. We know we're sitting on a $45 billion goldmine. We're really excited to move it forward. But a few things happened. First of all, there was a transition from one mayor to the next. And so that kind of slowed things down. Oh yeah, I guess that makes sense. And then, you know, COVID hit. And so we were really excited to work on it, but everybody got busy putting shots in arms and managing a public health crisis. So, okay, I guess that makes sense. And then they said, and now we're really trying to move it forward trying to hire somebody, but our salaries are $20,000 under market and no one's applying for the job. And I said, oh, I guess that makes sense. And then I thought, none of that makes sense. That is, you don't say we've got $45 billion of opportunity and we're just too busy to get to it and too overworked and underpaid to get to it. And I give the analogy of this isn't the only asset the government manages. One of the assets we're familiar with is government has pension dollars. We collect dollars from our employees paychecks every month and put it into a pension fund that is managed to ultimately pay out in their retirement. And our pension fund managers didn't say we are too busy with COVID to really make investment decisions. We'll come back in a couple of years and reassess the portfolio, but we don't have time right now. Or they didn't say we are overworked and we just can't justify raising a salary so we just don't have the ability to get to that. Government actually, there's a model that works where government worked with a private sector ish mentality to actually keep those investments moving forward, making investment decisions and managing that government asset to maximize the returns to the beneficiary. And so that's what we're trying to do with this putting assets to work is to figure out the assets are real. These are dollars that are real and government controls them but they're not very good about bringing them to market. So what excites me is what you've got now thanks to the Opportunity Zone legislation is you've got private capital that understands government, understands investing, and is working to create a social impact in our communities. And I think we've just got to start building some of this connective tissue on a new initiative where government says, look, we need money to invest in early childhood. And we've got a parking lot. We don't really know what to do with it. Can you figure out what to do with it? And we'll be kind of a passive investor. We're gonna give you this parking lot so the parking lot's worth $5 million. You're gonna raise $20 million of equity to do a housing development. Since we're giving you $5 million, we wanna be 25% of the deal. And we're gonna get 25% of the returns over a period of time. We're gonna take those returns and now as a mayor, I know that my community wants me to invest in early childhood education. So you, private sector who knows how to do this, you take it and run with it. Just give me my 25% so I can do what I'm good at and invest in what my community wants me to invest in. So I wanna turn to Jonathan to answer the question too.  Because, you know, yeah, we're not on stage here for your real life, so I won't push you on it. But I do wanna pull out what I heard from that is, it wasn't that it was controversial this concept locally, but that I wanna frame this the right way. There was perceived to be a lack of capacity to execute on it. It was almost $45 billion sounds like an overwhelming thing to have to take on. And so when you frame it that way as opposed to, we're doing the West- One parking lot at the high school. It's like, it's a hard thing to get your head around as a public servant when you're dealing with all of these other things going on. So, I wanna turn to Jonathan though, I'm not, I'm doing it, I wanna ask you more questions, but I also wanna turn to Jonathan. Jonathan, I mean, I wanna hear to what extent you've seen these sort of approaches be controversial in the Lohu communities that you've been in. And to the extent they haven't, or have, where are places that you have seen that have done the best? You're kind of public sector partners at moving the ball forward with you as a private fund to attach those co-priorities. So I sort of wanna get to this idea of like what holds this up? Is there a perception that it is bad, or that it's hard, or that we can't, we don't have the capacity to do it? So tell us about places it's worked, and I think this is actually responding to one of the questions in the app here. And maybe we talk about places if you can that where it hasn't worked. Sure, a simple tip to an opportunity that comes over the transom is like, oh, that might be a really interesting fit for our terraces. Okay, this deal's been out there for five years. The government has tried 16 different ways to make it happen. Six different private equity firms have come in and they couldn't make it happen. And the community is lingering in the meantime. When I hear that, I'm like, all right, let's actually dedicate some real resources to this because this is where the secret sauce, which I just shared with all of you, I think can come in very, very helpful. And I hope that sharing will be useful. In a situation like that, there's been a failure to collaborate. Government has tried to do it alone. Philanthropy maybe has tried to do it alone. Private Enterprise has tried to do it alone. And none of them could solve the problem in isolation. But by collaborating together with two or three of those P's in there, you wind up with a better suite of solutions. So where it I think works is where we speak often in terms of but for, or but for this economic development subsidy or but for this collaboration, the project would have died. And when we see those kinds of opportunities where we can have an activist impact, that's usually a telling sign that it works. I think where it works best is where private capital is the majority of the solution, but there's some critical gap that's being solved by government as opposed to government puts up 80% of the money, foundations put up 15% of the money and then there's a foundation or there's a developer in the middle who puts in three pennies of their own skin in the game. You've got a misalignment of incentives. So if private capital is the largest source of that capital, that's usually a good balance. I mentioned before also trading upside for downside protection, that might just sound like a good portfolio management strategy, but what it really means is that you're giving confidence and comfort to the government partner here that you're not going to produce headlines in next year's newspaper that like someone made a killing by partnering with the government and it was ill-gotten in some way. So having actual a framework and a lot of this requires more than your average flowchart. It's financial engineering for social impact with so many new programs out there with so much financial complexity. And I'd say with maybe a lack of understanding in government about how capital markets work, it's not reasonable to think that government agencies or government employees are gonna solve those problems themselves. It's through collaboration and maybe some competitive markets engineering where different private investment firms are coming up with different proposals and the best one ultimately is chosen. So those are the things that I think really make it work well. Those are the things that make it not work well. And I think it's absolutely necessary to have some groups in there who are on the investor side of impact investing, people who are thinking about risk and return and how do I mitigate my risk? How do I get downside protection? How do I do this the most efficient way? How am I gonna get debt? I mean, you've gotta have government to make it happen but you've also gotta have some type A investors who have community benefits at heart to pull those kinds of projects together. So I wanna ask one final question which I think we have time for and it comes from the audience and I paraphrase it a little bit but I think it's a really important and really good one. We've talked about the public sector and some things they can do, some challenges they have. We talked about the private sector a bit. Clearly one of the most important stakeholders is not the most important stakeholder are the communities in which these projects are being done. So at the school maybe they wanna keep their track and maybe they want that space for other uses and either what their government or what the private sector sees it being used for. And from your side Jonathan, I mean clearly to have success in these projects the communities have to be bought in because they can be enormous if nothing else political obstacles to getting a project done in a way that works at the end. So could you guys speak to both of that? Where is the role of communities? How do they get empowered as part of their process? Where is their voice in this? So they're buying into the changes that are coming from either the public or the private sector. There's absolutely a role for communities in this and these are some of the specifics we're working through in this putting assets to work incubator and then we're working with other even outside of this incubator working directly with some cities to figure this out. But I think that it's a values conversation and the values conversation is gonna the values question is gonna go to the mayor and the city council but it's also gonna go to the community. And to go back to the parking lot maybe they want a driver's education course there but maybe we should ask them do you want a driver's education course? What if we could also give $1,000 a year to every Title I student and put it in their college savings plan? $1,000 would it be worth then driving two miles for that? And those are some of the, right now it's just yeah, we're gonna pay $128,000 per student for a parking lot but maybe there are some trade-offs that they might consider. I can see putting community in the decision to say I know very well as a mayor that people hate density, right? But what if the question is would you want two stories more of density and in exchange this is what's gonna happen to the community? This is what, because the community isn't just selling it off to some developer who's gonna put it in their pocket but you as a community member are part, are a vested part of this development. If you give an extra two stories of density it might mean another park or a trail or an early childhood or a childcare program in the community. Some of these things I think the question, we need to evolve and make the dialogue and the discussion more three-dimensional where the community's at the table helping to inform these decisions and but you're bringing private capital to the table to actually articulate and identify the opportunity. Thanks Ben. All right, John, I think you got 30 seconds. Sure. And that's like objective 30 seconds not John in 30 seconds, like a real 30 seconds. Is it 25 seconds now? Now you have 20 seconds. You've gotta have a community advisory board. You've gotta have some level of community engagement so that you're hearing the voice of the community not just the investors who might be in your fund. Even our solar farms get nimbyism and pushback. And there's always someone who's like, well, I like Colmore or, I just don't wanna see shiny panels or something. There's always someone pushing back but you need the community's support to get over those resistance points. So be proactive, get the community advisory board or some sort of community support group together in advance because no matter how attractive your impact project is, there's always gonna be a contingent in town who wants to push back against it. That was 60 seconds, but I'll allow it. Big thank you to Ben and Jonathan and to the audience. Thank you guys.


We just had a overview of what students have done in the past and what they are able to achieve from this kind of hackathon being organized in their institutes. So this was example from ESEL and now let us just get into a short sequence of proceedings what has to be done for preparing in order to prepare for a hackathon what should be your process. So I am just going to share couple of slides with you I am just going to talk about certain aspects which you should remember when you are preparing for a hackathon. Now I understand all the people who are attending most of them are curious to know what is hackathon and there are some people who want to genuinely participate and experience it. So both these types of people will be definitely wanting to know how to prepare for one such hackathon. These are kind of very informally collaborated slides so you can you may see some very interesting anecdotes in between and all that. So do not expect a technical presentation as such what we are going to have now. So this is the overview of what is the preparation required. So the first and foremost thing if you notice from whatever has been said so far and if you just google for this word also the basic aspect is that it is a team event. So remember that it is not a single person or maybe a pair also sometimes may not work. It is a team event and you require people from all walks of life to come together like students your friends and then collaborate in order to get this thing going. Now when you want to start that obviously because it is a time bound affair therefore you need to plan it very very well and that is the whole crux of the whole participating in hackathon is most of the time planning perfectly for this particular the way you are going to approach it. Now let me just go back to the slides okay so we were talking about the preparation phase here and like I said because it is a team event the building and the complexion of the team becomes one of the most important part in the preparatory phase. The second important part is about how to design a strategy which will help you to solve the problem at the end and finally but not actually less in any terms is the practice part because you have to perform within a stipulated time frame therefore there is no choice but to practice it enough that when you go there you can just deliver in that time frame. The team is a very crucial part and you can see that it is not necessary that every time the team what you are planning to have together has to be only in a particular format of your liking. I mean to say that whenever you pick up a team please remember the objective of the hackathon. For example if a hackathon is about a hardware problem then you might require people who have the hardware background. On the other side if it is a out and out software coding hackathon where java is the native language which is to be used then you may not do this mistake of taking lots of hardware people with you because they would not be of any use when the problem comes in java. Mirror analogy which I could think of is in cricket where you have told that the pitch is supporting the batsman but then you have selected lots of bowlers in your team. So the team selection is very very important and crucial therefore remember the objective of the hackathon and then take the team with you. This can be even spread out to people like who are non-programmers maybe good designers good crafts people at times you require people who can do things for you who have hands-on skills with them. There could be good pessimist in the team who will constantly argue with you about why you are taking such a decision and it will help you think more detailed manner in order to incorporate a particular change in the whole strategy. So the combination has to be always kept in mind when you have the objective clearly defined of the hackathon so think about that objective and then select the team. Now here we have often seen and if you just go and have a look at hackathon experiences the teams which are competing with each other also may offer some help at times if you are stuck and they can see that you are stuck there they may offer the help but remember they are competitors so they may not help you to solve the entire problem so do not depend on such things rather have your own stuff with you. So the point is that you will not be able to choose a team clearly unless and until you study the objective well. From the team you have to plan how you will going to work during the hackathon so that patch is time bound therefore you have to estimate both the loads whatever you have to work out during that time and also because human body will require some rest you have to also think of what is the level of comfort you can effort to have during that time. Why I am saying effort to because at time there are people who have not slept throughout the hackathons and then they keep on working all the time but not possible for everybody because it can be 48 hours and sometimes more than that so you have to plan for both plan for your work and also for your comfort time now how to do that we will come to that later but the third part is about the strategy now there could be situations which will be coming up during the hackathon which will require change in your strategy the ideal condition is you imagine various situations which could be possibly happening during the particular phase of the hackathon and prepare multiple strategies so that if one fails you have the other option to go ahead and crack it or you have the options at least to discuss with somebody so the team and the strategies will work hand in hand at this point and the complexion of the team again like I said will come handy because you will have options to play on and again I come back to the cricket analogy because if the run rate is high you send the biggest hitter of the ball because you want to score more runs at that time so it is it is as simple as that at time but maybe the non-cricketing people may not agree with me on this but they can think of any other options because it applies to any mode of game actually speaking discuss these strategies beforehand because you can take the team into confidence plan out and think about whether you can go in other direction at that time by the feedback which they will give you that will help you in drilling more holes kind of problems which your strategy may have and that would be better if collective intelligence is put together rather than thinking alone again I repeat this a team effort remember to talk to team all the time about all the actions and every action what you are taking practicing is one of the most important because you have decided what tools what softwares what platforms you are going to utilize to solve the problem study those technologies beforehand read available documents if you have many online tutorials are available these days go through them pass it on in the groups make a email group of some kind where you can pass on these and share this information with each other but most importantly practice the coding a lot of times before you actually come to that because you know for sure how it is going to work and then you can perform better during that period planning your work is important because you need those essentials at the time when you are going to perform in that hackathon technical essentials such as your laptops and batteries all the possible cables the pendrives all the internet dongles if you require the internet all have to be thought of in a situation because of that time frame you may not rely on the information that there is internet availability because when 50 teams are trying to access the internet the same time there could be situations where it will crash and you may not be able to jump on to the internet when you actually need it so it's better to have all the stuff with you whenever you are approaching that this comes under your planning phase apart from the technical essentials you can also for the team as well as for yourself for example you require a phone charger because you'll be away and you need to call make calls headphones if you are addicted to music because you would like to listen to the music and keep all of these things as a wish list before you actually pack for your hackathon remember that it's almost impossible to get anything at 3 a.m. midnight in whichever part of this particular city you are so plan it very very well apart from the technical requirements you also have to pack up your personal things so carry a extra pair of clothing because you may have to change there itself have a small maybe a thin sweater or a jacket if it gets colder in the night a small pillow or a thin blanket for a very short nap where you want to take up just bend on this table and have a small nap because you may not be able to afford a longer sleep during the hackathon carry lots of water bottles some snacks so to keep you just charged enough we have also seen sometimes good ideas come up if you have a chocolate maybe at the middle of the night and then you can just get back to your work so all these things will keep on helping you in getting the situation right when you are coming to the point where the hackathon starts what I was talking about is what you can do before you get into that hall so after you do that then actually the time comes where you have to perform and that I thought we will we will get experts in various ways to talk about it