Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Molly Martin, and I'm the director of New America Indianapolis, part of New America Local. We're so glad to welcome you today to the third installment of our Urban America Forward Equitable Relief and Recovery series. Looking at racially equitable practices in the COVID-19 era, we're so excited to be welcome, to be joined by and to welcome our esteemed panel today and also to welcome all of you in the audience. As Angela and Narmada said, please do engage with us in the chat and help us take the conversation online using the hashtag Urban America Relief. At New America Local, we're so pleased to join Urban America Forward and our partners in the National Urban League in promoting this series because we focus on racial equity and economic justice. And there's probably never been a more important time to have that conversation. It's my honor to introduce our host today and my partner, Elena Beverly, assistant vice president for Urban Affairs of the University of Chicago and the head of Urban America Forward. Elena, I'll turn it over to you. And there we go. Thanks, Molly. Welcome everyone to Urban America Forward COVID-19 Equitable Relief and Recovery. I thank you for joining us for this third in our four-part series. I want to thank our partners, New America Local, and the National Urban League, as well as our generous sponsors. They've really been with the Urban America Forward Program from the beginning. That's the NEE Casey Foundation and the Kresge Foundation. Urban America Forward is an initiative of the University of Chicago Office of Civic Engagement. We launched in 2015 and have been an annual program in person. The goal of Urban America Forward is and always has been to bring together experts across a range of disciplines, each of whom are committed and have an opportunity to get them to share their approaches to advancing equity in America's cities. Urban America Forward furthers one of the University's goals of advancing inquiry and impact in urban areas in America and across the globe. We specifically designed this webinar series to bring together practitioner experts across the country in order to share their efforts and their learnings in this critical time addressing COVID-19 impacts.  The pandemic has exacerbated existing racial inequalities and disparities and has taken its disproportionate toll on African American and Latino communities in America's cities. As we navigate these dual pandemics of racial injustice and the impacts of COVID-19, we thought it important to come together and share both our efforts for equitable relief as well as how to envision a way forward that includes a more inclusive recovery. This program seeks to begin walking us down that road. And so this equitable relief and recovery webinar series brings together practitioner experts in eight cities to share their experiences, the partnerships that have been developed, the challenges that you've experienced and the lessons learned. And all of this is work that prioritizes racial equity in the COVID-19 relief and response. So let me outline our program today. We will begin with our distinguished speaker who will provide context and table setting and provide the background for this important discussion. And next we will have a panel of experts who will delve a bit more deeply into their experiences, their challenges and lessons learned in this work. Speakers will then ask questions of each other in an effort to promote a dialogue amongst our practitioner experts. And then finally we'll have Q&A from our audience participants. So thank you for engaging in this discussion. The Q&A will be curated by New America Local and will be shared with us as a group toward the end of our program.  She is the president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League. The Chicago Urban League is dedicated to advancing economic, educational and social progress for African Americans and promote strong sustainable communities through advocacy, collaboration and innovation. Having served in the public arena for most of her professional life, Karen has deep experience in serving urban communities and addressing the challenges that confront urban life. She was previously the mayor of her hometown, Gary, Indiana, from 2012 to 2019. And I had an opportunity to work with her closely during that time during her tenure as mayor. I know her to be a visionary leader and committed to resilience and it's that commitment that has helped her garner a national reputation for her leadership. It's also important to note that Karen was the first female to lead the city of Gary and the first African American female mayor in Indiana. Without further ado, Karen Freeman Wilson. Good afternoon. It is my distinct honor and pleasure to join all of you, particularly our panelists today. And those of you who are sponsors. I am excited to hear about the panel so I will not be unusually long, I am going to get out of your way but I think the discussion that we're having today is so important. Not in the context only of what has happened and what we observed, but how do we recover. In fact, how do we transform as communities across this country. I can remember a conversation that our team had in our conference room before we began working remotely. And as we thought about the impact of COVID-19 on the city of Chicago and on our work. We were very concerned about two areas and those areas were health care and education health care because obviously COVID was directly related to health because it was in fact a health related illness. But education because we knew that as schools were making the very difficult but necessary decision to go remote that some young people would be left behind. It was during this time that the decision to commission a report that would help us to quantify what we feared would happen was done. The result of that report was a publication that you will find on our website at shiul.org which is an epidemic of inequities structural racism and COVID-19 in the black community. While this report largely focuses on the black community in Chicago, many of the tenants that you will find in the report really are relevant throughout the United States and we would certainly invite you to take a look at that. So I'm just going to briefly talk about some of the risks that were found in the report or outlined in the report and that is the risk to not only contracting COVID-19 but also the risk of mortality from the disease. I'm going to also outline how we hope the report will help us in Chicago and in communities throughout this country not to just recover because we know that recovery is important but also to transform and really create a better framework for citizens, particularly those who are poor and who are disadvantaged. Finally, I hope that we can outline what partnerships look like going forward because after all we're talking about partnerships today and I think that that is going to really be important about transformations. So let's talk first about the risk for infection. What are some of those factors that made black folks and I would argue are Latino brothers and sisters more at risk for infection. The first was employment. They were more likely, we were more likely to be essential workers. When many folks were able to work from home and began working remotely, black folks were overrepresented in grocery stores and health environments and those jobs, public transportation and other jobs that simply didn't have the ability or the luxury of saying I'm going to work from home now because they were identified as essential workers. So often when people think about essential workers, they think immediately about doctors and nurses. They forget about those who work in health care institutions in the cafeteria in the laundry as CNAs and other essential workers but also those individuals who work outside of the health care industry who work in prisons. As prison guards who work in other places that were deemed to be essential to the continuation of business in society and so even though restaurants and other places shut down the public transportation and others continued and I think you found particularly in our urban communities and over representation of black and brown people in those vocations. The second risk was housing. You know, so often when one person was diagnosed with COVID-19 that meant that they had to quarantine themselves within their own home. That meant they may have gone to the basement or they may have gone to one room and they would not use the bathroom that others in their homes used. If in many instances black folks didn't have that option, black and brown people, there's only one bathroom perhaps in the home or people are sharing rooms and you have multi-generational families living in. So you might have had someone who had contracted COVID-19 with a grandparent living with a grandparent or older relative. And so those limitations meant that it was more likely than not that everyone in the household might in fact test positive as a result of the disease. Another factor was the fact that many folks in the black and brown community did not have the ability to socially distance. Not just at home but for so many you found that there was an option of ordering food out, of doing so many things on the internet like your banking, like many of the other services and goods that you might otherwise get outside the home. But if you didn't have access to reliable internet, if you didn't have access to those options that would allow you to socially distance, then you found that you had to go to the bank. You had to go to the store, you had to go to restaurants to order, and that in fact made it more likely that you would be infected. And then finally the factor that we lifted up as an increased opportunity to become infected with COVID-19 was mass incarceration. And of course that speaks for itself. What about the likelihood of death from COVID-19? The first was the discriminatory discrimination that you find in healthcare and access to healthcare. I had this experience myself. I went to the emergency room twice and was never diagnosed with COVID-19 until I went and insisted on getting a test. So there's a greater likelihood to dismiss it as something that might not have been the coronavirus. The hyper segregation that we see in our communities make it more likely that black and brown people were to die from COVID-19. The incidents of living in poverty and the income disparity made it more likely for people who might die from COVID-19. And environmental contaminants, the fact that you might have lived in a moldy house and that moldy house may make you more susceptible to respiratory diseases, had an impact. And then of course the pre-existing conditions that were talked about very early on during the epidemic, but there weren't as much, people who talked about it weren't as likely to acknowledge that those pre-existing conditions come from living in food deserts, come from the environmental injustice that we experienced and many other factors that were not just a factor or a result of unhealthy eating. And so what does all of this mean? I would suggest to you that it means a couple of things. It means that as we look in our communities to transform as a result of COVID-19 and quite frankly as a result of the racial justice and injustice that we've seen in our communities, we need to think about how do we rebuild and how are we able to make decisions that impact employment opportunities, that impact housing opportunities, that impact access to health care. What does equity look like now that we take these factors into consideration and how can we make our societies more just and more equitable? And I would suggest that one of the prime ways for doing that is to build broader coalitions. One of the benefits we have seen as a result of the social unrest that we've seen all across the United States, is that corporate America is becoming more in tune to the impact of structural racism. But they're not just becoming more in tune to it. They're saying what is our role in helping to dismantle it? What is the role of philanthropy in helping to dismantle structural racism? And we've certainly seen that in the city of Chicago as the Chicago Community Trust has made reducing the wealth gap one of their primary goals and one of their primary funding focus points. The other thing that we've seen is government being engaged in a way and across partnerships so that they have made grants to micro businesses. They have made grants to those who have experienced housing insecurity. And they are not only providing those grants, but they are providing the technical assistance through advice from nonprofit organizations and both the National Urban League as well as local affiliates have been heavily engaged in this movement. With every crisis, with every challenge comes an opportunity. And I would argue that out of the challenge and epidemic or the pandemic of COVID-19 and the epidemic that we have seen in terms of the racial injustice and the social unrest that have come from that has been an opportunity to really rethink how we engage citizens at every socioeconomic level of every race and culture. And not only how do we engage those citizens, but what is it that we can do collectively across sectors to create better opportunities for these citizens to have a better quality of life? And I will tell you that has been our laser focus at the Chicago Urban League and certainly at the National Urban League and it has been an honor to work with the University of Chicago as we engage in this work. And we look forward to doing that here in the city of Chicago. Thank you. Thank you, Karen. Karen Freeman Wilson, everyone. Thank you so much for so eloquently laying out all of the many risk factors that contributed to the disparate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color. And I thank you for highlighting the importance of partnerships across sector for dismantling structural racism and also for achieving the type of transformation that we all believe and hope and believe is possible. So now we're going to turn to our panel of experts to delve a bit more deeply into the question of how to leverage public private partnerships to marshal equitable relief in response to COVID-19 for some of our hardest hit communities. We have so much important content to discuss that I am going to simply introduce our panelists by their name and title as opposed to their robust biographies, but you should have received information about the biographies in an email in advance of this program and you will also be available online. So to start us off, it's my honor to welcome my friend, Daniel Ash, who is the Associate Vice President of Community Impact at the Chicago Community Trust. Franklin Baker, who is the President and CEO of the United Way of Central Maryland. Ellis Carr, also a dear friend, President and CEO of Capital Impact Partners. Pam Lewis, who is the Director of the New Economy Initiative in Detroit. Milton J. Little Jr., who is President and CEO of the United Way of Greater Atlanta. Carmen James Randall, who is the President of Programs at the New Orleans Foundation. And Carmen is bracing for a storm to come to her area. So we are very grateful that she's taking the time to be with us today. And Joanne Stately, the Director of Impact Strategies for Economic Vitality at the Minneapolis Foundation. We're thrilled that each of you have taken the time to join us. So let me start off by asking Daniel, Daniel Ash. Partnerships are critical in this time of relief efforts, rapid relief efforts for COVID-19. Can you tell us a bit about the Chicago Community Trust partnerships and what you prioritize in COVID-19 relief to date? Thank you, Elena.  So the two characteristics that sort of distinguish sort of the response here in Chicago and Karen touched on them. One, it was collaborative, swift and strategic. And Elena, your question about partnerships really leads into the importance of collaboration. The trust recognized is sort of what we would argue is our unique sort of convening power, the ability to bring government philanthropy to nonprofit sector community corporate together and respond together. We recognize that quite frankly, some of these alliances did not exist. And if they did exist, they may not have been sort of rich in trust. But this was an opportunity for us to solve for that. As many folks like to say, there's nothing like a sort of good crisis to get folks in the room to start getting to know one another. So we were very intentional about sort of leveraging that and working with our partners. We have a lot of United Way folks here, the local United Way and working with others sort of key stakeholders to sort of make that happen. And strategic, I want to underscore that point and make sort of two context setting sort of remarks one. We wanted to be intentional about activating existing infrastructure. And this is sometimes I think philanthropy you lose sight of you make investments year over year over year in a moment where there's great needs sometimes there's this Tennessee step back and say oh we got to create something new. So what we were intentional about is making sure that we built on the assets that we'd invested them and others that invested in over many, many decades. And then we sort of use this moment to sort of lift up bold ideas. So this is this is opportunity to not test an idea, not research an idea, but go to market with ideas that we've been sort of toying with for years. For example, the idea of financing direct cash transfers in the moment of need made sense, right, and we were able to do that. In terms of priority setting I want to make a couple context setting remarks one, we had to prioritize further all geography with this specific focus on black and brown communities. And that was absolutely key. We also prioritize all relevant sort of sectors. And so, in addition to large scale response funds one set up for the city and the metro area, one set up for the rest of Illinois. We set up the local community here set up funds that were targeted at various sub sectors. For example, we had a fund set up for to support community organizers, a fund was set up to support the arts community fund was set up to support journalism. And each of these sort of funds had sort of a steering committee made up of sort of the members of the stakeholder groups that I mentioned earlier. So I wanted to make it in closing one. We made a commitment in the moment of crisis to learn together. So, the larger funds that were created created a week created a weekly opportunity for those leaders those steering committee members those investors to come together and learn about what was going on.  You know we didn't wait to hear about that 234 weeks later we heard about it real time because those folks were at the table. In addition to sort of learning in the moment. We've now sort of pivoted to continuing to work together. So the same type of synergy that drove the rapid response the emergency response must drive the recovery. And again, Mary was sort of touched on this a few moments ago. Last point I want to make one. We, we are standing up a recovery fund. The recovery fund essentially will be fueled by the assets and relationships that were developed during the emergency response. And this is an opportunity for us to think, and with the same spirit of urgency that we need to get things done, like in this city. In order to get things done, we have to keep these relationships intact. And so, so as so one thing that is important to us as we sort of walk away from the sort of basic human needs responses, we're understanding that we have to leverage that momentum as we move forward. I'll stop there and let you move to the next panelist. That was wonderful. Thank you so much for that framing you brought up so many important themes that I'm certain they're going to be salient throughout this discussion. I want to, I want to introduce Franklin Franklin Baker who's the president and CEO of United Way of Central Franklin, can you speak a bit about part the importance of public private partnerships and how you prioritize COVID-19 relief, and perhaps touch upon some of the themes that Daniel just mentioned about the importance of learning together the importance of acting on bold ideas and working with existing infrastructure to carry out the input that the Swiss relief efforts for Central Maryland. Thank you so much Elena as we share during our prep meeting there's probably no thunder to be stolen, because all of us have been doing very similar work from the mayor to Daniel to my colleague Milton and Atlanta all of us have been doing very similar work so for our participants. Repetition deepens the impression so deep in your impression as you hear today. As we do with most crises of United Way of Central Maryland. We really built this strategy, and we continued as Daniel said to look at the infrastructure that was in a place at the time to really help individuals but also families right affected by COVID to effectively do four things really respond recovery build and the last are really is reimagine. So as we're going through the process of immediate need, as we're helping people to recover from the coming tsunami of evictions, etc. As we're focusing on rebuild as a longer term strategy. How do we rethink the age of practices right in this novel environment we're in. So all of our actions really were aimed at allowing us to proactively and I love that word Daniel proactively aid our community right in dealing with the immediate midterm and long term effects of this unprecedented pandemic and I know all of the panelists would agree. This truly has tested our resolve our agency right our commitment to this, not only the short term. To support pantries to support mental health and other issues that are emerging, but also our commitment long term so for us between standing up our own COVID community fun and creating to funding collaboratives involving 22 community and family foundations we raise more than $8 million. This is important because this has never really been done in the Baltimore region before the numbers not important because there's some on the panelists who raised three or four times that amount is just the idea that's happening in this time with the level of commitment has been incredible. And so the funds were really used to help with a host of the categories you'll hear from the other panelists food insecurity, the digital divide is so important to foreclosure avoidance, lots of nonprofits who needed sustainability during this time. A lot of our key work and neighborhood empowerment was really lifted mental health child and spousal abuse with so many people being close to their family members, having eight to 10 hours of a day in the face of people who they may not see as much doing normal times. So we also really were thinking about how do we support employment and the grocery store workers and so proud of this initiative it's a key essential worker category that was lifted by the former. We used an intentional to Daniel's point equity lens and how funds were distributed and also which nonprofits actually received the funding in our community and so 242 unique nonprofits were funded and 52% of those nonprofits were led by black indigenous people of color in our community and 47% of them generated less than $1 million in aggregated revenue for their nonprofit so very important about 28% of our folks funded were less than 30 years old. So we also focused on age and how we fund those organizations that are led by people who are younger. We also stood up a separate equity and social justice fund and I'm a partner in crime and Atlanta Milton did so as well. And we're one contributors to really designate contributions right to efforts that were really important to this space. And as a wrap up with our coven 19 community funds 65 private companies is a very important piece, right, from the large companies like the ravens you have a big big organization to other key big companies to some of the smaller mom and pop shops who were really interested in supporting this and 1046 individuals contributed from $5 to $20 etc multiple times throughout this process. The key learnings as I wrap up key learnings from this collaborative work is that there was significant knowledge sharing about various nonprofits, which we've not really as United Way funded in the past. What synergies we have for significant signature investments outside of this cycle base week by week funding construct and also ways to share resources and really engaging this one resources around sharing data collection concepts research and evaluation and analysis. And this has been so fruitful with all of these funding partners as we're moving from kind of the recover to the rebuild phase of our initiative so much more can be said but I'll stop there. Franklin thank you. And now I'm going to turn it over to Ellis car who is the president CEO of capital impact partners. And Ellis, it's the same question in terms of partnership public private partnerships and how you are prioritizing coven 19 relief. But if you could also speak to that intentional equity lens that Franklin mentioned I know that that's also very important to capital impact partners. Great. Thank you, Elena. And it's a pleasure to be with you all today. Really appreciate the, the panels that went before me because I'm going to repeat a number of similar concepts as well. So kept one pack is the national nonprofit community development financial institution. We primarily lend invest and develop capacity building programs to help expand access to affordable housing quality healthcare education and food support. And from our perspective, we, we thought about prioritization very similar to my peers who went for me in the three specific categories, relief recovery and transformation and recognizing that organizations require different types of support to respond to their communities. And so from a relief perspective, we recognize the need to act fast. So we focus on our existing borrowers and leverage existing partnerships to channel capital supports where they were most needed. From our existing borrowers perspective we proactively reached out to them to help them understand and educate them on the options that they had in front of them. Specifically, we use, we, we use the connected into resources around how they could get access to PPP funding and others locally set up micro grant programs. And we also allow them to understand how they can access reserves that they had embedded in their loans for operating and working capital and the like. And lastly, we work with them to really help them understand what that could look like in terms of modification or restructuring of their existing loans to provide them with some immediate relief that they had really come to support the businesses and nonprofits. We also leverage existing initiatives that we have in DC, we leverage partnership through the called the entrepreneur color program and DC, which is a public private partnership engaged to create new pathways in the region for to buy very low cost capital and business advisory supports to entrepreneurs of color to grow and support their businesses and create and build wealth. There we partner with two locally based community development financial institutions to channel release funds to the two locally based small businesses in Washington DC, which they were able to get grant funding for distressed businesses as well as to educate them on where they could go to get support. We also launched the DC or DMV good food fund, which is an innovative response fund that provided about 100,000 dollars and rewards to keep partners on the ground to help sustain and stabilize mission aligned food enterprises and also to support the regional food economy as well in the Washington DC area. And just to name a few others in Michigan, we had a number of partners that we've worked with we had a statewide food program called the Michigan good food fund, which we also channel both micro grants to them and through our partnerships with other locally community based organizations and CDF eyes. And also, lastly, we provided kind of residential kind of retention support for our colleagues and in the midtown Detroit area to ensure that they had so that we could help lessen the housing burden that they were were coming upon. So that's those were just a quick synopsis of how we looked at kind of the immediate relief efforts but we also recognize as many others did that recovery was was needed as well so we use this as an opportunity to kind of see those and accelerate those things that were already in place or already we were already working to develop but also just to accelerate them because we realize at a time like this that many financial institutions are stepping back or even pausing and we need to lean in further. And so we created a rapid response fund in California to really help the support and accelerate the growth and telehealth and telemedicine for community healthcare clinics in California with a number of partners. We launched diversity and development initiative in Detroit, which is focused on increasing the number of diverse real estate developers who can help influence and change the built environment in Detroit by providing low cost capital for real estate developers particularly at this time. And lastly we announced a partnership with the largest mission based small business lender in the country, coming together with capital impact to form an alliance that will help provide holistic community and economic development at scale and nationally across the country we're initially starting out in the DMV Detroit in LA but want to take that on broadly across the country in partnership with other organizations. And so I'll pause there and Elena in response to your last question just say that we have put equity at the center of all our work going forward and we recognize that the reason that our communities are in the the state that they are in is because of systemic racism and and policies that have held our communities back in it, unless we really focus our efforts on the root causes of that created created these issues will continue to talk about these for the next 30 years. And so for us equity and justice have been at the center of our work, and we use finance as a way to help enable that. Thank you so much Ellis and turning to our next speaker. We have Pamela Lewis who's the director of the new economy initiative. And I'm, I'm hoping that you will also speak to some of the themes that Ellis raised in terms of leveraging the existing infrastructure, but also going trying to go beyond and provide more information about how to access relief efforts that might not otherwise get to our communities or the communities of color that each of us serve. Yeah, thank you for having me on this panel. This is quite a group here to learn from and hear from and I'm happy to be a part my comments are focused on the impact of COVID on the smaller small businesses in Detroit. So I'm honing right in on that slice and I think it's important to understand that of the 60,000 businesses that make up Detroit small businesses 51,000 of them are minority owned. Most of those have less than five employees and most of those have no relationship with the commercial bank. So you can assume that when the cares act thinking was happening, we knew that many of the Detroit businesses were probably going to get missed from efforts such as that, but I'm taking a small slice of Detroit efforts that dealt with health and human services testing and all the things that my colleagues have talked about that include a lot of different partners. It's a new economy initiative because it may not be so obvious what we are. We're a strategic grant making initiative, one of the largest and longest running ones in the country, funded by national local funders like Kresge and for night foundation Wilson foundation and the like, and our whole mission has always been for the last eight years how do we build a network of support for entrepreneurs and small businesses that really lower the barriers to those underserved entrepreneurs, so they can get access to capital businesses and networks. And fortunately, during this unfortunate situation of the pandemic. This network of organizations that we've been making grants to, we're able to activate in a way that could provide supplemental assistance to the smaller small businesses in our city. When philanthropy had already helped to fund this network through any I, we have the relationships and trust to engage in that, and we were able to work to make some, some level of impact. So when you think about the grantees of any I I'm talking about micro finance institutions CDF is incubators accelerators etc. And so what happened when the pandemic hit we as a grantmaker and convener had some decisions to make particularly understanding that the cares act dollars probably we're going to miss most of our businesses. The first one was to focus slowly solely on the smaller small business, you know small business category is up to 500 with the average small business in America is under 10. So we hold it on 250 employees with an emphasis on those owned by key people of color, and also expanded beyond just brick and mortar, because as as LS and Franklin and others mentioned, you know a lot of the executive orders drove support from the state just to brick and mortar businesses, but there's so many service businesses and home based businesses that we knew still needed help. So we wanted to be additive and complimentary to what the state and the feds were doing by providing stabilization capital through grants to these businesses. We also did activated loan and rent relief programs. Instead of focusing on deferment programs working with our grantees who are CDF is and micro finance organizations to buy down and pay the loan notes for six months for all of the businesses that were in their portfolios which made up that particular group was about 300 or so. And most importantly, we put ourselves in this position to be this conduit to funding for those nonprofits that understood the needs of the small businesses that they were working with, and our philanthropic funders who wanted to do something. And they were, they had a very accelerated way of working with us as we were innovating with our grantees and activating these interventions, and then going to our group of funders, and being able to mobilize about $5 million within weeks that were converted to grants that went to 20 organizations that could do these interventions that touched about 2000 small businesses. So the last decisions we made, and this is where the whole cross sector coalition conversation starts. The work that I've been doing has really been heavily a coalition around philanthropy. This moment really caused us to rethink how we even joined the table of the mayor, the private sector, other nonprofits like Detroit Future Cities and others to take on how do we support small businesses because we knew what we were doing. We may touch 2000, but that still pales compared to the need. Detroit means business coalition, which was a public private nonprofit and philanthropic coalition that was formed, led by the mayor, DTE energy, and others on the nonprofit and philanthropic sector have been doing a lot of work to distribute PPE, to make a very easier point of contact for businesses to find resources, whether it's financial assistance or technical assistance, etc. And so, you know, I could go on and on like others, but all that to say, even though it sounds like there's a lot of momentum and a lot of movement and people are coming together. I'll be remiss in not saying that the need is still so great that we all need to do so much more. Thank you, Pam. And now I'll turn it to Milton J. Little Jr., who is the president and CEO of the United Way for Greater Atlanta. Milton, can you speak to your partnership efforts and your prioritization for COVID-19 relief please? Sure. Since you won't ask me, you won't allow me to say ditto. I'll have to come up with something we're excited about. We've done all the things that previous panelists have talked about. We launched a partnership with the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta in March over a five minute phone call and within about a month and a half had raised close to $25 million through that work. We had an additional five from other philanthropic sources. And we now are leading the city of Atlanta's efforts around eviction prevention. That's $22 million of CARES money. So by the end of this calendar year, it'll be $50 million of COVID related money that's flowing through a United Way of Greater Atlanta focused on a variety of issues, whether it's food insecurity or emergency financial assistance or the health issues that the former mayor talked about. We've touched all of those issues. The partnerships were incredibly important. Our first three donors of the first three, two of them were private companies. So we started the fund within a matter of two days with two and a half million dollars. And most of that coming from the private sector and that's only continued all total about 50 companies and foundations have invested in the fund. If you pay any attention to the headlines here in Georgia here in the deep south, you know, we're not ready to talk about recovery yet. We're not in a position to do any pivoting other than to pivot to the next emergency need. We are still struggling with food insecurity was still struggling with access for K through 12 students to hardware and internet access for their online education. When the last school year ended, they were probably 20% of all of the kids across Greater Atlanta who had not logged on to one instructional day. The COVID slide the educational COVID slide for Greater Atlanta was about two years and so we are starting behind the eight ball we are two years behind where we had been through all of the educational progress that has been has been made. We've seen so many of the small businesses ignored by the PPP program and a portion of the funding that we had secured had gone to those technical assistance and capital providers who could provide some assistance to small businesses. We put a particular lens on equity early on in two ways. One, we created a body of work over the last five years that had really been focused on ending disparities wealth and other disparities in Greater Atlanta. We created something called a child well being index which could measure down to the zip code how children feared across 14 different indicators. So that index gave us a quick way to look at the zip codes where we knew the priorities were going to be. None of the issues related to health surprised us. We've been doing a lot of work in those areas so we knew which providers to be able to go to. So you talk about existing infrastructure. There's a lot of stuff that had happened over the years that we could just plug into one of the things that was important about the partnership with the Community Foundation is that United Way covers 13 of the Metro Atlanta counties. The Community Foundation covers 23. So we were together around who to invest in and all 13, but we had to rely on our partners at the Community Foundation to give us insight into who were the other major players in those other counties we had no familiarity with that could do the work that needed to be done around the priority areas that we had and we had focused on. The last thing that I'm going to focus on really is the eviction prevention work. I'm excited about it, but I am daunted by the city of Atlanta estimates that there are 14,000 households in the city that are at risk of eviction. The $22 million of CARES money while it sounds like a lot is going to cover at least well maybe little more than 7,000 of those households that leaves 7,000 folks that we're not going to be able to touch with these resources. The estimate for greater Atlanta is that there are 150,000 people who are at risk of eviction. So we have a huge problem facing us and I keep reminding folks just because there's a moratorium doesn't mean you don't owe the money. It just means the sheriff's not going to come and take your stuff. And so we are having to work extremely hard to make sure that folks don't let in a rearage grow to the point where even the CARES money can't help them. And so that's probably the biggest concern that I have amidst all of the shared concerns that my colleagues here on the panel have talked about that are burning platform issues for all of us in greater Atlanta. So I'll stop there. Thank you so much, Melton. I'm going to turn to Carmen James Randolph, who is the Vice President of Programs at the New Orleans Foundation. And Carmen, I'm hoping you can speak a bit to some sectoral specific strategies that you have worked on in a public private partnership fashion. Good afternoon, everyone. It is so good to be here. So thank you so much for the invitation and for this opportunity to be on this incredible part on this incredible panel with such experts from around the country. Again, I'm with the Greater New Orleans Foundation. And I think first I want to frame how we have been responding to COVID-19. We've been doing so within the context of disaster. And here in New Orleans, I would say since Hurricane Katrina, the Greater New Orleans Foundation has been acutely aware of our need to be prepared for disaster. And the need for us to look at how we respond to disasters. So about three years ago, we had put in place a disaster strategy that was grounded in racial equity in resiliency. We were building back stronger than before in sustainability, really focused on the sustainability of the nonprofit sector and civic engagement, giving, making sure that people had voice in the process of determining how their communities came back. So this is the frame for our disaster grant making. And we also have done so in a way in which we've educated our donors that most of the needs come in the immediate days of a disaster, but we know that often disasters take weeks, months, even years. In our case, we are still in different stages of recovery from Katrina to come back. So we grant about 60% of the funds that we raise for our disaster fund in those immediate days following a disaster in the days reached month. And we reserve about 40% for long term support. So we have been responding to COVID within that framework. I will say we also pre register nonprofits to receive grants from our disaster fund. So when a disaster strikes were able to turn around grants within 24 to 36 hours of a disaster being declared. And I'm saying that for a reason. So here we have COVID-19. Many of the groups who were responding immediately, especially I've heard some of my colleagues talk about the issues of food security and so on and so forth. We, we anticipated those being challenges. We were able to make grants within 36 hours nonprofit had them because we do it electronically of the declaration in our community. But COVID-19 as we all know is different. We are really still in phase one of response. This doesn't have a very defined period of, you know, the, like, for instance, in the aftermath of a storm where you're gutting and mucking and doing recovery. And then it's rebuilding. We are still in those early stages, just still in the early part of the recovery from COVID-19. And we've worked very carefully with our government. So we are in partnership with our state office of Homeland Security, where we are in close partnership with our New Orleans office of Homeland Security and emergency preparedness. And we're communicating with, we have parishes here in Louisiana with those parish leaders in our surrounding parishes to get a handle on what the needs are, how we can coordinate support and how our grantees who are often not just responding in one place can be deployed in other places throughout the region. And in this case of COVID, a couple of things that we've learned. One is that in terms of the funds that we have for we were able to activate our disaster fund and have partners from our local United Way to local funders as well as national funders contribute to that fund and individuals. But it was through partnerships with, for instance, like PepsiCo, we were able to give some very targeted and deeply needed support to address issues like health inequities. The long standing healthcare inequities that we've had in our community. COVID has just like other disasters has just exacerbated those inequities. Many of you know our our economy here is tourism driven. We are a hospitality driven city. So, I will join workforce development meeting that later this week that at our last meeting of our workforce development board we had had 78,000 applications for unemployment in that month. So the impact in terms of how many people are out of work is profound. And it's important to know that these folks haven't just lost their jobs. They've also lost their health insurance. So one of our strategies has been to work very deeply with our federally qualified health centers, because it's our FQHCs and we have FQHCs in neighborhoods throughout New Orleans and going out into the region. They're the ones who are seeing, they were telling us as early as early April that they were already having an uptick in how many folks were coming in who were not who were not insured, and also an uptick of how many folks were coming in, not only needed testing but also had mental health challenges and needed mental health care. So we have partnered with about four FQHCs, which between the four of them serve about 125,000 people and counting. That's at last that I've talked with those folks. As a strategy of helping people not only get care to improve their ability to provide telemedicine and not make telemedicine something that also didn't become something that was a privilege of those with resources. For instance, I remember our one FQHC president said, you know, if grandma has a flip phone, we can over limited in how much telemedicine support we can give grandma if she needs help, because we can't assume that everyone has a smartphone or an iPad or a computer at home to participate in a solid telehealth visit. So anyway, we have been working to help increase their capacity to do that as well as to do testing. We've also have partnered with our local mayor's office to look at boosting testing support to help our schools come back online to provide rapid testing and urgent testing when someone is developing symptoms, whether it's a teacher or a student. And I would say in terms of some of our other public-private partnerships, we've had corporate partners, some led by our board from the Saints, from the Tabasco Company, and also the Crystal Company. So we love Hot Sauce and we're thrilled that those folks have jumped in to support through an employee assistance fund that has supported hospitality and service workers with families. And through that fund, we have supported nearly 2,000 families in our region with grants to the family of $1,000 each. And I will tell you that one thread of work has, and we keep that fund open, we've continued to raise support for that fund. We keep that fund open and as this disaster, as this pandemic has continued, the stories that we are getting from individuals are becoming more and more desperate. So in terms of people being months behind on their rent. I can tell you that process is tough for my staff. This last bunch, for instance, there was someone who wrote that they have cut their HIV meds in half, hoping that they can make their HIV meds last for two months, since they don't have a means of paying their co-pays now. So, you know, and it's one thing for us in philanthropy to work primarily with nonprofits, but through this program we've had the opportunity to have a lens into what individual people are working with and working through. And to see mothers with three children head of household making $9 an hour and collecting food and getting food stamps, needing assistance. Honestly, it makes you realize how criminal it is that we have people working so hard for so little. And so this disaster of poverty is something that is with us, and it's only exacerbated by COVID-19. And in our area now, we are currently responding to COVID-19. We're responding to Hurricane Laura. We have 12,000 evacuees in our city from Laura. And we have Sally, which we're hoping we're told it's tracking east of New Orleans, but we'll still have some impact probably with flooding and possible power outages. But it's how we look to respond to multiple disasters at one time. And these issues of migrating for climate, these are all posing some tough issues for us to look at how creatively we work together in partnership, because this call is so poignant. We can't all, none of us are doing this work by ourselves. And I think that that is a very important point to underscore these problems are too huge for any one entity to try to tackle on their own. And this has been an all hands on deck here. So I'll conclude with that. Carmen, thank you so much. And you raise such important and some additional points, I think about how these partnerships can reinforce the availability of tools like telemedicine or like helping to eliminate the digital divide and also thinking very intentionally about the individual sectors that help run your city and who's going to need that support, no matter how hard they're working, they will still need additional support and services in this time. And I like Joanne, a state lead who is the director of impact strategy economic vitality at the Minneapolis Foundation to speak to her experience with COVID relief, particularly given some of the turmoil that Minneapolis has faced in recent weeks. Well, thank you so much for being able to be part of this distinguished panel and hearing some very similar stories that we've experienced here at the Minneapolis Foundation in the city of Minneapolis in the state of Minnesota. I'm getting some ideas just by some of your comments and thinking, oh, I think we should be able to think about some of these as we go forward in this opportunity to really provide direct support to our communities. So first, when you asked about the question, who are our partners. Our critical partners first are those nonprofits those organizations that are on the ground, the people that do the work the people that know how to address critical issues such as this, it's, we can't do this work without them. So we're kind of a conduit to the to the work that they're trying to do on the ground. So the nonprofit entities that have been mentioned before the organizations that we've been in relationship to our equity lens that we've been focusing on for the last 10 to 15 years have really helped to, you know, seed and establish relationships so that we could be in a quick response and dealing with COVID. In addition to our nonprofit partners are other philanthropic partners in the community. We have a number of foundations, a number of nonprofits that do re granting that are in conversation and when COVID hit a number of organizations and other foundations got together and we're very, very thankful for Minnesota Council on foundations, who brought this conversation on all philanthropy to how we were going to address COVID across the state and creating a partnership through the the St. Paul and Minnesota Community Foundation created a fund that was going to to provide dollars to support other intermediaries across the state to address COVID. $11 million was raised very rapidly, a number of funders, and we were a participant in that help to look at guidelines to make sure that BIPOC communities tribal communities, smaller communities we're going to have access to these dollars, and that basic needs through intermediaries, we're going to be defined by those entities themselves we're not we were not going to create those definitions for them. In addition to that we had also a relationship with the the Greater Twin Cities United Way, as well as the Minneapolis Foundation and the St. Paul Foundation who also wanted to do some very specifically targeted funding to address COVID that was going to focus on BIPOC and small businesses and again they're working with intermediary groups that are already much like in Detroit it sounds like had these relationships with those businesses and we were talking small businesses and how we could get direct dollars out rapidly, quickly to directly help provide with cash to support those businesses, the business owners, and employees to do that. And then we had our own initiative at the Minneapolis Foundation, and it's called our One Minneapolis Fund, which was created about a year ago that was specifically designed to be responsive and aligned with kind of the mission that we had at the Minneapolis Foundation. Our partners and we talk about partners. We really look to our donors when we talk about the Minneapolis Foundation is also being part of those partners, and we have donor advise funds and when we work with our philanthropic advisors and ask them to talk to them about what's happening in COVID, what the need is to respond first for that basic need request, which one we focused on in March, kicking that off. And, and also then with individuals outside of the foundation and their ability to contribute. We raised about two and a half million dollars very quickly, we instituted a very rapid response, not just what our usual catchment area is, which is the city of Minneapolis, we expanded it to the whole seven county area. And, and allowed for again individuals to find in those organizations what this basic needs mean to them what do they need emergency response PPP, helping businesses working with domestic abuse projects food we talked about foods insecurity the whole gamut was available for people to apply for funding, which also created more relationships for us that we didn't necessarily have before to think about this on a more regional effort. And then with our own effort for the one Minneapolis fund, we, we, we continued that work on the basic needs but then shifted after four rapid grant rounds starting in March and wrapping up by the end of May, from basic needs to being, we had a very unique experience with the murder George Floyd, and that we really needed to concentrate on supporting those small BIPOC businesses along those three major quarters that received enormous amount of damage. They had already been impacted by COVID. And now they had to think about rebuilding in a totally different way. That specific effort raised another two to $2 million. And these were all dollars that came from corporations for our partners that are out there, again, individual donors outside in the Minneapolis Foundation making it easy for them to give and in our internal donors as well. So we just kind of wrapped up that last ground last week to get another $2 million out there. Now we did it both ways. We did a rapid deployment to some of our key intermediaries to work with small businesses, and just said here we're going to give you $100,000 they didn't know about it. They just got the call. I said we knew you're looking at issues of your own capacity, use these dollars to the best way possible. By the way, come back and apply when we actually open up this process. So I think being nimble and responsive. And for us, some of the things that we did is we really fast track this in a way we've never done it before. Not 24 hours or 36 hours I'm very envious of that, but we were turning these over in four and five days and reviewing applications on on a almost a daily basis. We also really streamline the application process removed any type of barriers that we've heard about before and our applications and how for people to access those individual funds. And also, I think the question is how do we make sure we're funding smaller entities that is really part of our lens and how we do our work, we want to know which communities are they specifically serving which communities are not being served and who do we need to reach out to what the small mean when you're talking about small nonprofits and working with small businesses to also what does large mean with some of those longer term or 20 year intermediary organizations that have been led by people of color and and serving those communities for a number of years. We've also learned that a small grant can be as impactful as a large grant, and that really is again up to those nonprofits who may say, I really need something different with my technology to get this information out. So we look at everything kind of just by project not across you have to fit this criteria but what are you saying with each of your individual applications. And then I do want to talk a little bit about government I mean when we created these funds and participating with these other collaboratives. We really knew that government it was going to take some time. We didn't have unnecessarily heart to heart lot of conversation with our government entities, but certainly have had those relationships in the past and actually are our president reached out to our mayor Minneapolis. At the very beginning of this I just said whatever you need, let us know. So the city of Minneapolis is creating a fund that's going to represent other communities, people from the community are going to make decisions about how they're going to distribute the funds that are being raised for this fun and it's a, is I think it's a $25 million gold that they have, but as a community foundation, we have tools we can set up funds we can direct things very specifically, but at the same time we can also provide that broader look that tends to overlook areas that may be a miss. And the one thing I liked about our first deployment on basic needs is that we were very kind of encouraging to let people know that these were for the unusual aspects if you want to call a providing We did specifically identify gig workers as part of that provide support to We talked about multicultural kind of aspects of how we're supporting families when we're talking about a number of our families live together. It's grandma to grandpa to the youngest child and what that impact may be even working with artists groups and supporting the local arts and particularly larts in our BIPOC communities and helping to provide some relief and actual dollars to support their workers who were now not eligible weren't eligible for unemployment necessarily and helping to provide a gap. And finally, then I want to talk about one kind of unique relationship. We serve as a fiscal agent for what's called the Northside funders group and North Minneapolis is one of those areas that was severely impacted as a result of the riots but even prior to that, they were raising funds to provide businesses a part of covid. We assisted with that fight that that fiscal agent agreement to allow them to create a platform for giving. And after the the riots and the death of the murder of George Floyd, by providing that access to them that entity along a partnership with the West bright area coalition was able to raise over four million I think it's $4 million now. So again, just using what we have available for truths to support the community is also kind of important in thinking about this work as we go forward. And then finally, recovery and basic needs, and you've heard this before is part of that initial kind of response. But we also know that we have this other type of response to be prepared for. So all the money that has been raised, it's, you know, been raised as additional dollars with our dollars being part of that but we're moving into our unrestricted grant making round. And you're shaping that and how that is going to continue to provide the necessary support, particularly as a result of covid. And we don't know what's going to happen next by there so we're trying to be mindful of that we're trying to continue to support the causes that are out there and to engage with various partners to let them know that it's very important for them to contribute, not to us, but to others and too many during this process, and also really encouraging direct support going to those nonprofits that we know are doing this work in a very very purposeful way and an impactful way across our community. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you Joanne. So we are at the portion where I'm supposed to ask you a few questions we're running a bit out of time so I am going to ask, I'm going to put our foundation representatives in a bit of the hot seat. Part of the theme that we've heard over and over again is the importance of moving swiftly and of leveraging existing networks that were there's a existing infrastructure that you had to work with and through in order to get necessary funding out the door. So is there the potential barrier to entry. And are you guys thinking about that as you move forward to recovery so for example I'm thinking about organizations in neighborhoods that may have quote unquote less capacity or in my opinion have full capacity but be more informal and informal leaders and still have a constituency that they serve but may not have been the first entities that you thought about working with in in getting relief funds or getting relief measures out the door. Can you can you speak to that issue a bit. I'm going to, I'll start with Daniel with Chicago Community Trust, and then we can move on to to Carmen with the Greater New Orleans Foundation, and then to Joanne with the Minneapolis Foundation and then we have we'll have one question from the audience before we wrap up. You know, so thank you for that question and it's actually a really important one. So the answer. Yes, there, we do run the risk of the barrier to entry question because at many of the civic tables that have been set historically in Chicago. Community to them to the particularly black and brown folk in the city have not always been at those tables. Right. And so we, we are being intentional about while we leverage existing tables, creating new tables and creating the capacity for community to set those tables if you will. Prior to the pandemic, prior to the social unrest, the trust had authorized a new strategic vision. Part of that vision includes a portfolio that I had up called building collective power. And the premise of building collective power. Again, this is ahead of the pandemic was to invest in civic infrastructure that exists at the community level. And so that residents of particularly black and Latin X residents could a set their own tables developed their own agendas and act on those agendas. And we were very intentional about putting philanthropy in the position, meaning the Chicago Community Trust in the position of responding to what we heard from communities. Quite frankly, underscores the importance of that word, but it actually motivates us to celebrate the work at the ground and making sure that we use our convenient power to make sure those grantees that are doing that work are at these larger, broader civic tables across every sector. And again, as we develop the recovery funds and visit a build on all of the momentum that's been created as part of the response. We're keeping that front of my, again, as I see it as my personal responsibility to constantly ask the question, who's making this decision. I'm setting this table. And is the decision making actually connected to real people, particularly folks have been harmed historically by systemic racism. I mean, and we have to philanthropy sort of own that responsibility. Thank you for that. And Carmen, do you want to take a second to respond to that and that I'm going to ask Molly, actually, if there are questions from the audience, a question from the audience that we can share before we have to bring our conversation to a close. I would just quickly say this is where partnerships with local government and community is so important and partnership with other funders. First, as we our staff co-chaired the food security task force in the city. It was through this work that we had a really good understanding and grounding of the landscape of what was happening in food security. And one grant that we supported was a project that was started by young African American men in the lower nine to help the seniors. This is their work. They're nonprofit. We have never been on our radar had we not been at those tables. So I think having the partnerships in your community is vital to having a sense of what what work is happening on the ground and truly having impact in community. Thank you for that. And Molly, do you mind I'll turn it over to you really quickly. I know that there are questions coming in from the audience, the viewing audience. Can you, can you maybe summarize one or two of them by theme for our panelists. Thank you everyone. This has been a wonderful conversation. Pam, I'm actually going to come to you first with a question that talks about how you demonstrate impact, because we know while it's important to move fast right now that doesn't change or eradicate the burden to be able to demonstrate impact to funders and donors. Do you have any tips or tools that you'd like to share with the audience. That's a great question. We demonstrate impact along a number of ways part of it is activity but the other part is based on outcomes right so one aspect of it is who's getting the money how our money, how our dollars being moved, what are the organizations that are getting those dollars and who are they actually serving we do ask the question. If you're helping a small business what does that owner look like is that owner woman is that owner person of color is it an immigrant. And we're also looking at along those same lines when you're talking about business growth. Who's leveraging that capital, not just who's getting assistance but who's also getting capital. Again, what does that owner look like, and then how are they leveraging that and how are those businesses growing. And how are those businesses impacting their communities. So, you know, we follow a little bit of the same lines as traditional economic development where we depart is when we talk about the whole notion around culture change and who's involved. What I mean by that is, you know, adding jobs can be done in a lot of different ways, but creating a path for an individual that doesn't necessarily have education and access to strategic networks to start and grow a business to develop wealth for their own family is a measure that's sometimes hard to quantify. But if we're engaging with our community development organizations and equipping them to also be a concierge for small businesses in their neighborhoods if we're making sure that we understand the trusted and national business league or global Detroit who has relationships with immigrant entrepreneurs. We're engaging with those organizations. We also believe we're influencing the culture in terms of who's seeing as being deemed worthy of being supported in order to start and grow a business. That's so helpful so it's not just measuring the person at the other end of your relationship it's measuring the people in their sphere. That's what Dan said about making sure that we are all at the table. I'm very quickly one other question and I'm going to come to Franklin and then Milton and then Ellis and I'm going to ask you to give me a quick like three word answer. We've got a lot of people watching today that could be donors and are interested to know what they can personally do at a time like this so if you were to advise a donor or an individual looking to act who's listening right now. What subject area what what issue area should they invest in Franklin I'll start with you. So if that donor were interested in investing in greater Atlanta, it would probably be food insecurity. Because of Milton pounding the pavement today about the importance of staying in the response phase not even pivoting to the recovery or rebuild phase but if they're in the greater Baltimore region I would say to be quite honest it would be the digital divide. That's a huge issue for us a massive public school system. The CEO of our public school sits on our board so constant conversations with her on need and gaps, not even talking about the public charter schools as well as the private schools there's a lot of needs I'd say that. That's really helpful thank you Franklin Milton what would you add besides food insecurity in Atlanta. I want to continue the work to end educational disparity. We still have too many kids that are that are failing in school and unable to access their online education and we need solutions to that. That's incredibly helpful and powerful we can't ignore the thing that has been happening for decades, just because we're in a crisis right now. Alice I'll wrap with you what would your advice be. I would go with small business and health care. The two that haven't been said small business you know is is a great economic engine for communities across the country, but specifically provide a significant opportunity for communities of color. I also just say, given the pandemic, the health crisis is one that has been exacerbated and the disparities that we spoke about earlier will continue to happen, and there needs to be more access to opportunity to get quality health care across the country. Thank you so much. And because everyone was so succinct, Joanne I don't want to leave you out of this last segment we've heard from everyone else in this part two of the conversation. What would your investment recommendation be. I would continue to encourage people to invest in organizing community organizing at that grassroots level and and supporting leadership development within those keys and and there aren't enough so I'm not afraid that we have the tables, we need to expand those tables and invest. Thank you so much Joanne Elena I'll come back to you to wrap it up but thank you to the panelists for indulging me for a minute. Thank you everyone. Thank you for that fabulous discussion. It was so informative. I appreciate your thoughtful responses and also just the depth of of your work it has been it has been a real pleasure working with each and every one of you. I want to thank our partners New America local and the National Urban League. Thank you Karen Freeman Wilson for kicking us off I want to thank each of our speakers, Daniel Ash Franklin Baker, Ellis car Milton little Pam Lewis, Carmen James Randolph and Joanne and we want to encourage you all to continue this conversation. So plan to join us again on October 5 Monday October 5 from one to 230pm Eastern 12 to 130 central. But thank you for joining this discussion about the future of urban America and informing equitable relief and recovery and thank you for all that you do.


The Inspector General of Police Usman Babers says the police force has received reports about some state governors who are using political thugs to intimidate their opponents. A side report added that some national security outfits under the state control are also being deployed to perpetrate violence. The IGP warned against such action after meeting with heads of political parties in the country and other security agencies. I wish to appeal to the leadership of all political parties here seated to be determined to show the right leadership, but choose and publicly disassociate themselves from apps of political brigand age and violence as this is the only way we can...


In our South Africa now, the Israeli military has carried out a series of airstrikes on his border target in Lebanon. The development came miles after Iran launched its barrage of missiles and drones against Israel. Now, it is yet to strike Iran directly following the attack. However, and the country's ultimate plans for a response remain unclear. The President Joe Biden has reported the advice in Israel not to retaliate, given that its air defenses short down roughly 99 percent of Iran's 300 missiles and drones during Saturday's attack. The Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, says Israel is prepared for any possible scenario. Citizens of Israel, in recent years, and especially in recent weeks, Israel has been preparing for a direct attack by Iran. Our defensive systems are deployed. We are ready for any scenario, both defensively and offensively. The state of Israel is strong. The IDF, Israel Defense Forces, is strong. The public is strong. We appreciate the U.S. standing alongside Israel, as well as the support of Britain, France and many other countries. We have determined a clear principle, whoever harms us, we will harm them. We will defend ourselves against any threat and will do so level-headedly and with determination. Citizens of Israel, I know that you also are also level-headed. I call on you to follow the directors of IDF Home Front Command.


So, I want to point out an uncomfortable reality that we face as content marketers. And that is that nobody really cares about our blogs. Now hear me out, okay? I promise it's really not as insulting as it sounds. Our customers, of course, care that we solve problems for us. That's the essence of marketing, right? Find a need and fill it. Sometimes we're solving problems via our products and sometimes via our written content. That does matter to people. That's what Foster's Trust builds brand advocacy. What people don't care about is our blogs, i.e., these engines of content that we've created with the intention of engaging our audiences. Because with relatively few exceptions, our audiences are not that interested in being engaged by us. They're not coming to our sites, to our blogs, to peruse. And yet, historically, that's how we've thought about our content calendars. That's how we've organized our newsletters, our blogs, home pages. And that is why nearly every corporate blog falls flat. And if you stick with me, I'll give you the other perspective for B2B and B2C businesses to make sure your blog isn't one of them. So the key problem, I think, at play here is that marketers tend to conflate content marketing with blogging. They're not the same thing. And we do our customers, our industry, and ourselves, our businesses a disservice when we conflate the two. I think this problematic perspective is evidenced in the sort of recent trend of brand journalism. So when I'm speaking about brand journalism, I mean this highly editorial journalism adjacent content engine that looks really fun to work on, honestly gets a lot of industry accolades, but most of the time, these publications shut down, don't work, fade out into existence. So a somewhat famous example of this is Casper's now defunct blog called Van Winkles. Van Winkles launched as a media hub surrounding sleep. And this was sort of Casper's, one of Casper's many attempts to be more than just a mattress maker in the eyes of the world as a brand. They really want to be a brand about sleep. They don't just want to be a mattress company, they want to be a sleep brand. Van Winkles was a big part of that, and Van Winkles was really high-quality content. At first glance, it looks like a salacious brand play, but about a year after it launched, it shut down. Now the person in charge of this project told Digidae once it shut down, generally speaking, being an independent brand publication is not going to work. But at the end of the day, brands are performance marketers. If you don't deliver business results, they will let you go. Now what's kind of funny to me is the Casper doesn't actually seem to have learned this lesson because they currently have another iteration of the same strategy of brand journalism called Woolly Magazine. Woolly is a print magazine that you can actually purchase from Casper, and they've got an online edition. And like Van Winkles before it, it's really high-quality content. As a piece of media, Woolly is impressive. But impressive media, high-quality content, those aren't the same thing as effective marketing. What Casper is essentially doing with Woolly Magazine and what they were doing with Van Winkles before it is shouting about themselves. In a beautifully written way, sure, but this is nonetheless insular thinking to indulge Casper's own brand whims instead of being customer-centric content. And if it's not customer-centric, it's not going to work. 2018's most impactful marketers don't get caught up in this all-we-attempting distraction of a highly editorial journalism-adjacent content engine. They think about content in much simpler terms. But content is just another way to solve problems for customers. And when you think about it in that perspective, you're not writing a blog, right? You're not writing to engage or entertain. You're writing a library of resources to solve problems for your customers. So here's a real-world personal example for you at Tortuga. We make travel backpacks. About a year ago, we redesigned our blog. This is what it looked like before. We didn't just give it a fresh coat of paint to feel more modern, although I think you'll agree with me based on this slide that we really needed one. Here's, it's better. We were really rethinking our brand from the ground up and applying design thinking to every aspect of Tortuga. So we started by redesigning our physical product line, our travel backpacks and accessories. Then we went to our online store and redesigned that. And when we got to the blog, we had an identity crisis. And that's because we realized over the past couple of years since I had joined the team, we had slowly and somewhat unintentionally morphed away from writing a blog. Instead, we were writing this library of resources. And that required an entirely different approach, not just in the content that we published, but also in the way that we organized our site, our home page. So I'll get into more of the site organization later. But first, I want to give you a B2B example as well. So a few years ago, I was consulting working with a company called RJ Matrix, it's an analytics platform. I was working, I was running the paid side of things and working with the content team, and we were trying to develop a holistic content strategy for lead acquisition and lead nurturing. What we realized was that our blog wasn't working. It was, it was a traditional blog. Every post was sort of meant to engage. And theoretically, it would have worked in the mid funnel, but it didn't, certainly wasn't driving paid leads, even when we would convert it into white papers, lead magnets, et cetera. And it wasn't working in the organic side of things either. What was working, coupled with our microsites, was our annual benchmark report. And I think the reason for this is that the benchmark report answered the finite set of problems that RJ Matrix customers wanted RJ Matrix to solve for them. That's it, it's really simple. The benchmark report allowed people to figure out, okay, so I have all this data that I'm running through this demo of this new tool. I can now see my average churn rate. I can see my LTV. Are those numbers good? Is my turn too high? The benchmark report helped people understand where they stood and where they could improve. So what we did is we completely pivoted away from writing blog posts and instead focused on our one big thing, our one finite set of problems that we could solve for our customers. And Janessa Lance, who headed the content arm of the strategy, nicknamed this the barbell approach. So on one side of your barbell, this is your one big thing. This is your focus. This is where you start. You don't start with the channels. You start with the finite set of problems that you're going to solve. On the other side, you figure out how that finite set of problems applies to different channels. So at Argemetrics, for instance, we would pull out average churn rate if we needed to have a webinar or a PR opportunity or guest blogging spot. We'd go into detail on how to calculate churn, what the average churn rate is by a couple different industries, how churn and repurchases relate to each other. So we would pull out something that might have been one paragraph in this benchmark report and turn it into a thousand word blog post or a one hour webinar. So at Tortuga, we're in the travel industry. Our finite set of problems, our one big thing, is what should you bring on your trip and how should you pack it. That's it. That's what our customers want us to help them with because we make a travel backpack. And so it stands to reason that our customers want to know what they should put inside of that travel backpack. Now, it's not quite as fun to work on problem solving as it is to write story driven content. But we have to remember that we are not in this game to wax poetic. We're in it to grow our businesses and serve our customers. And it's tough to do that when every post we write does this. This is what happens when you write something that's brand first, brand forward instead of being customer centric. This is unfortunately what happens when you write story driven content which breaks my heart a little bit as a former J school person. A resource, on the other hand, does this. This is what Google wants on its search engine results page. So what qualifies as a resource? A resource, of course, needs to answer a finite problem that your customers legitimately have. A problem that's relevant enough to your suite of products, whether physical or online, that your customers would expect you to solve that problem for them, meet people where they are, right? Beyond that, a resource is comprehensive. It's not just a name, you know? It's expert, so it's not written by someone who is just googling other posts with this same query and figuring out what other people are saying. So, for instance, we have a post about the best filtration water bottles for travel. Our writer for that post didn't just Google all the filtration water bottles on the market and then figure out which one they liked best based on the product description. They tested all of them in places like Guatemala where you definitely can't drink the water straight from the tap. So a resource is comprehensive, it's expert, it's relevant, and it solves a finite problem. When you write resource after resource after resource, your blog's performance does this. Now this is a visit to subdomain graph, but I can tell you that our revenue graphs look pretty similar. I use a first touch and mid funnel attribution model in tandem to figure out which posts are driving first ever traffic and which posts are working on our mid funnel because our products are considered purchases and we have about a 30 to 90 day time from when people first discover us from when they eventually purchase. So for us, our blog, our library of resources is really important in the mid funnel. And when we started making the shift to writing resources, so our visits kept growing, but our revenue grew at an even faster rate. So if you're gonna make the shift to writing a library of resources, what else needs to change? First and foremost, your expectations.  Because a resource doesn't count if it's not comprehensive and if it's not expert. So give your team the time and the energy to be able to actually produce something that needs to exist in the world instead of writing some inane optimized nonsense. The second thing I would challenge you to rethink is your blog's homepage. So in a world where people are not coming to your blog to peruse, newness is somewhat irrelevant. Timeliness doesn't matter that much. In that case, a reverse chronological feed of your post is a waste of the most valuable real estate and that is your blog's homepage. Your homepage in this world is for two things.  So telling them you're one big thing and you can see our orienting copy, what to bring and how to pack it. It's basically the TLDR of our entire library of resources. And the second, of course, is the UX side of the equation, helping people find things quickly and easily. So you can do that with navigation, which we rethought with our redesign, of course, a visible search bar. These are all things we know, but another thing that we've tried that's been effective for us is trying to take the experience of I need something based on this topic. What's the best version of that experience? Sometimes it's a search results page. If you know exactly what you need, if you're going to Morocco and you wanna know what to pack for Morocco, sure, search for that. But if you're kind of new to carry on packing and you don't really know where to start and you need to buy a bunch of stuff for your trip, then maybe a search results page is not quite the best experience. So what we've done is we've aggregated some of our most popular, most requested posts into something that looks like prose. So you see these links, like the best travel clothing, minimalist packing tips. When you click on one of those, it brings you to something that looks like a blog post, and it essentially goes into a little bit of detail about lots of different things, like the best kinds of fabrics, the benefits of quick dry, the benefits of merino wool, when to choose a poly blend over merino wool, but then it just touches on those and links to the big posts that we've written about merino wool. Same thing for the best filtration, well, I guess that's not travel clothing, the best dress shirts or the best travel pants, which by the way, the best travel pants is one of our highest revenue posts of all time and we don't make travel pants. But it's a problem relevant to our audience. It fosters trust. So I recommend trying this strategy, sort of rethinking what's the best experience if I have this problem or this set of problems? What would I actually look for on the homepage? What's my version of a start here section? So to wrap up, I really just want to challenge you to stop thinking about content marketing, like blogging, and start thinking about it like problem solving. Start being more customer centric in your keyword research and your content calendars and your homepage. So I don't know if we have time for questions, but if not, come find me any time during the conference even if you work for Casper and want to yell at me. I'll start bucking up.


Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Node Summit 2017 in San Francisco at the Mission Bay Convention Center. We've been coming here for years. Really active community, a lot of good mojo, about 800 developers here, about to the limits that the Mission Bay Center can hold. And we're excited to have our next guest. He just came off a panel. It's Jacob Groundwater. He's an engineering manager for Electron at GitHub. Jacob, welcome. Thank you, it's great to be here. So really interesting panel, Electron. I hadn't heard about Electron before. I was kind of digging in a little bit while the panel was going on, but for the folks that aren't familiar, what is Electron? Yeah, Electron, there's a good chance that people who haven't even heard of it might already be using it. That's a good thing. Yeah, Electron is a project that's stewarded by GitHub and it's open source and you can use it to build desktop applications but with web technologies. And we're leveraging the Google Chrome project to do a lot of that and Node. Node.js is a big part of it as well. So build desktop apps using web technologies. Yep. And why would somebody want to do that? You know, I think at the root of that question it's always the same answer, which is it's just economics right now. Developers are in demand. Software developers are in demand. The web is taking over and the web is becoming the most common skill set that people have. So you get a few benefits by using Electron. You get to distribute to three platforms automatically. You get Linux, Mac and Windows. Sometimes it's like super easy. Sometimes you do a little bit of building to get that to happen but you could cut your team size by down by maybe two thirds if you do it that way. Wow, that's a pretty significant cut. Now you said 1.0 released last year and how's the adoption? I actually can't even keep up with the number of new applications that are being published on top of Electron. I'm often surprised I'll go to a company and I'll say, oh, I work on Electron at GitHub and they'll go, oh, we were developing an Electron app or we're working on an Electron app. So it's kind of unreal. Like I've never really been in this situation before where something that I'm working on is being used so much. So I think it's out there, it's in production, it's running in millions of laptops and desktops. That's great though, because that's the whole promise of software, right? That's why people want to get into software because you can actually write something that people use and you can change a world that can be distributed all over the world with millions of users before you even know it. There's this wonderful thought of writing something once and then it running in millions of places potentially. Like, I just love it, I love it, I think it's super cool. Yeah, so as it's grown, what have been some of the main kind of concerns, issues, what are some of the things you're managing within that growth that's not pure technical? Yeah, that's a great question. One of the biggest things that I found interesting is when I go on our website and check the analytics, it's almost uniform across the globe. People are interested in it from everywhere. So there's challenges like, right now I had to set up a core meeting to talk about some of the updates to Electron and that had to be at midnight Pacific time because we had to include the Prague time zone, Tokyo time zone and Chennai in India and we're trying to see if we can squeeze in someone from Australia and just the global distributed nature of Electron. Like, people around the world are working on this and using it. Right. The other part you mentioned in the session was the management of the community and you made an interest, you know, we go to a lot of conferences, everyone's got their code of contact published these days which is kind of sad, it's good, but it's kind of sad that people don't have basic manners, it seems like anymore. We've covered a lot of open source communities. So one of the jumps to mind is OpenStack and watch that evolve over time and there's kind of community management issues that come up as these things grow. You brought up kind of an interesting paradigm. If you've got a great technical contributor who's just not a good person for, I don't know, he didn't really define, you know, kind of the negative side but got some issues that may impact kind of the cohesiveness of the community going forward especially because community is so important to these projects. But if you've got a great technical mind, I never really heard that particular challenge. I think it comes up a lot more than people realize and it's something that I think about a lot and one thing I want to focus on is what we're really zeroing in on is bad behavior. And not a bad person. And one of the best ways to maybe get around that happening is to set an expectation early about what is acceptable behavior and alert people early when they're doing things that are going to cause harm to the community or cause harm to others. And also frame it in a way where they know like we're trying to keep other people safe but we're also trying to keep those offenders giving them the space to change. If they choose not to change, that's a whole different story. So I think that by keeping the community strong we encourage people around the globe to work on this project. And we've already seen great returns by doing this so far. So that's why I'm really focused on keeping it, keeping it a place where you know you can come and show up and do your work and do your best work. Right, right. Well, hopefully it's not taking too many of your cycles. You don't got too many of those characters. Every hour I put in I get like 10s and 20 hours and hours back in return from the people who give back. So it's well worth it. It's the best use of my time. All right, good. So great growth over the year. As you look forward to next calendar year kind of what are some of your priorities? What are some of the community's priorities? Where is electron going? If we touch base a year from now what are we going to be talking about? Excellent question. So strengthening, formalizing some aspects of the community that we have so far. It's a little ad hoc, would be great. We want to look to having people outside of GitHub that feel more ownership over the project. For example, we have contributors who probably should be reviewing and committing code on their own without necessarily needing to loop in someone from my team. So really turning this into a community project. In addition, we are focusing up on what might go into a version two release and we're really focusing on security as a key feature in version two. Yeah, security is key. It's got to be baked in all the way to the bottom. All right, Jacob.  Yeah, thanks very much. All right, he's Jacob Groundwater. He's from the electron project at GitHub. I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.