V te glasbeni komiteciju, ki se vzal, odstavili, da se prišli. Dobrali smo da se pomečiti kaj je modnit in se je zrčit, in če smo počkali. Zato vse odpočenje, ki smo vzal... Protože je, da se je izgledniko, je skupan, da se ogrojnega poključenja je, kaj je nekaj poziv, kako je izgleda. Bih, ki je obraj.  Tako, da se tukaj našli, da smo počusti, da se zeločili in zeločili. I tako, to je počusti, september 28.20. To je moment, kako v OpenOffice komuniteti zeločili, da se zeločili v in independentu fundaciju. Načo, da je fundacija, kaj je zeločil, dokonamentod, da je tudi projekte, produkt, liberejo objez, ali, da je tudi dokonamentod, liberejo projekte, ki je nekaj projekter, če vse je vse, nekaj dokonament je matlji, ko počke, kaj nekaj se začale, zelo, nekaj se začale, z vsehovo stranje in za vsehovo bezpočki. Fondation je been created for promoting pre-Softor, but also for taking care of the freedom of the users. Because one of the goals was to make possible for users to be free, to be not blocked by closed source software and the limitations that are coming when someone is interacting with those kinds of softwares." The other immediate connection is, of course, the promotion of the document freedom. And with that, it's clear that our focus is open document format and the great opportunity when it was decided that with ODF everyone can have. Because ODF, it's a – the other point – an open standard, it's an open format and it's the way for users to make sure that ten years from now, 20 years from now, their documents will be still available, still accessible, in jazim je to zazak, da je bilo svoj, da je ne kaj površnjala, za ko se vidi, da je svega, z vsem izvah, z vseh dokomentiracijovacja projekta in tezršenje ljudi in filter, ki imajo nekaj, in rečenje dokomentiracijovacja in z that, je to površnjala, da je otev nekaj dokomentiracijovacja. in da vse dokonvene poživali, je začala prijevati dokonvene v tebe, začal ti je zbranje, da je zelo poživali vse dokonvene, začal ti je podnovačno zelo prijevati dokonvene. Pobjal ti se dokonvene, da se pripreferila, da je zelo prijevana. In vse in v spremu tudi, da je začala prijevati, zelo početve, da je neče prijevane, je to zapecivane, kar je izgledan. And, for sure, we can't forget, as a foundation, that we also need to support, let's say, we main project that is a Libre office, and we need to continue to invest also in the development of Libre office. Everything can work on if all those pieces are kept together in vsi se vsegače, ko se vsegače, vsegače, vsegače. Tarsden je zelo vsečen, da je to zelo. Vseč smo od toh, da smo vsegače, da smo vsegače, da smo vsegače, in da smo vsegače, da smo vsegače, because it's not something we feel that is part of our project. And starting with those values, then there was the definition of the way to work. As you can see, the idea is that everyone can bring expertise, skills, ideas, in vsi se do는지, na nam轱 nekako. Kakimto so pričili, da ima pa med zrešanje in vse počeli. Ando vse pa pričali in mu do investicijo. Dinajo to, da je srečen to, da bi trajali zradi v ekosistem, in da ste na pomembnačku, in da in srečen pomembnačku naja, The rest of the volunteers that are bridging together is also a part that can't be ignored. Everything can work only if we have these puzzles of different pieces that are put together. For creating TDF and for making TDF going forward. To je počet, da, da smo tukaj, da se je trajno, da smo tukaj nekaj pričo, zato zdobimo, da smo načali in tukaj, da smo tukaj pošli in tega, da smo pomembili tukaj, ker, kako tako ne bo, nekaj poslutimo, da je v tkaj trajnje, umid likely that will bring us in the right place in the future. TDF is a legal entity based in Germany. For on the website you will find references not only to the foundation itself but also to other activities the funding is taking care of like zelo jutru konstithov. Konstithov protoval je razvaju in co 보 je začo način Scrub in nič nekaj ne jazili ljudi, neželji in njič nekaj ljudi in want začin začne in ljudi, professionalno prorodje in tov. There is of course the need to have some support, some experience of the developers are helping or experience the trainers or migrant hours, helping in using librarians or migrating from something else in this is all possible because n capturing all those experiences together into the foundation that we built together several years ago where we should really try to do our best for steving the foundation in the right direction. about the governance, we have several bodies inside the foundation and we have, of course, the board of directors that is the body that represents legally the foundation that takes care of handling the budget, approving the budget that then, as a project, everyone of us can use, can spend, can use in the right way and part of the budget includes also tenders and with tenders we can focus on development and support of areas of our projects that should get improved. The other body is the membership committee, part is here, and our focus is more on the board of trustees, that is the other body of the nation, and we are taking care of the membership, we are doing the reviews of existing membership, we are evaluating new requests to join the foundation, and in general, we are also trying to take care and address the needs, the feedback that are coming from all the contributors for making the foundation a better place to contribute. There are also some other formalities that both the bodies are taking care of, and we have elections, of course, the next election that is upcoming is the election of the board, that will be this October, November, we will start, you will read more, you will get information on the timeline and all the details that the, in particular, the members of the board of trustees need to know for fulfilling one of their duties, and normally the setup is done in a way that we have the membership committee that is handling the elections for the board, and when is the turn of the membership committee to be reelected is the board in charge for the election. There is, I was already mentioning it, and it's the board of trustees. Commonly we are calling also the trustees as members, and sometimes we are mixing up between contributors and members, but from this setup of the foundation, the idea is that the board of trustees is the group of members that are part of the foundation that can elect the members of the membership committee, the members of the board that can run for one of those bodies, and we are talking about individuals that are interested and committed in everything that is around the governance of the project. I will come back later on the role of the trustee, but yeah, there's much more to say on that. The last body that you can see here is the advisory board. The advisory board officially, it's not a real voting body, but in any case includes companies or other projects that are interested to give advices to the foundation, and in such a way they can contribute and steer a bit the direction of the foundation itself. Now back to the details of the governance. Do you want to? Yes, the board of directors, as Marina said, they have to steer the foundation, they have decisions, they have legal staff and so forth, and when the membership committee, which are most of us, as she said, we are in charge to approve or reject applying applications for becoming a member or remaining a member. There is a technical detail from this year, we have changed our tooling so to apply for the membership or renew for it, you must be already registered in single sign-on, which is, you know, the platform, which authenticates our users all over our system infrasystems. But for that, we will have a separate session with some extra details on the improvement made for the handling of the renewal. It's a follow-up from the discussions that we had also, the previous year, when probably some of you already heard the name of Proteus, and yeah, with that we will focus more on how we are working and what we are doing normally as a membership committee. But back to you on the activities of the commission. Yeah, there is also another speech tomorrow about, you know, those topics we will get probably more in detail. To become a member you have to somehow contribute, so be a partner of the community, and the contributions can be in many areas, just like translation, documentation, blog contribution, viki, and marketing, just like giving letters or something like that, videos and so on and so forth, telegram and mastodon and every kind of social media. Then there is all the design area, templates, icons, user interface and user experience, then improvements, sorry, collaborating in the infrastructure, because we have several servers with tons of software installed, which need to be maintained up to date, as well as operating systems and all the virtual machines and so on and so forth. So then there is the bug reporting, which is usually also a good starting point for newcomers, and the bug triage much better. Then the testing, the user support, also replying in the discourse or emails or whatever, or also group on telegram or whatever. And then, yeah, try growing the community, so spreading the word and inviting all the people become part of the community first and then members with both my mouth or telegram, by the way, becoming an advocate. Then there are trainings and code development, which is fundamental, obviously, but it's not the only, as you can see here, as well as the development of extensions, which is sometimes a starting point as well for becoming a developer. And then, yes, developing the ODF, the implementation of ODF file format within LibreOffice, which is something that attains also to the document liberation project, which is something that we sometimes forget to mention, or at least we don't do it enough, and then import and export filters, which is exactly what document liberation is for, and the promotion of open standards and open format. So, as I mentioned, it's not needed to be a member to contribute, because you can contribute freely, and you are invited and free to do it, but to be a member, you must have already contributed, and possibly you should have done it in a regular way. This means that it is not about having a kind of a sprint, and having, for example, translating the whole software once, and nothing more. We appreciate more, maybe less, but more constantly. And, yeah, represent the needs of the labor ERK, the membership committee, and no, sorry, the members. The members represent the needs of the local communities, because when you become a member, usually you are already contributing, but possibly you know many other contributors which are not, so in that moment, until they come part of the foundation, so becoming members, you can, anyway, talk by means of them. And, yes, both the community and the Board of Trustees, so the members, are supported by the Board, by the membership committee, by the whole team, you know, that we have a team of employees and collaborators. Yep, what can do the members? They can vote and those steer the foundation, because what they vote are the representant of the Board of Trustees, which are the Board of Directors and us, the membership committee. We are both voted by the members, but the members can also run, and please do it, to become part of the membership committee or the Board. So there are elections coming now for the Board, so please apply, if you are willing to give more support and to help steering the foundation. And then, yep. Oh, sorry, please. So Heijel was mentioning that the Board of Trustees doesn't have really the power to steer the project. Let me tell you why this is wrong. On paper, you could say, okay, I can only vote for the Board or for the membership committee or decide to run for one of those bodies, but when we don't have elections and we are normally doing our activities, you are a member and you have all the right to share your feedback, communicate with the Board, communicate with the membership committee. Be vocal when it's needed and tell us if we are going in the wrong direction. This is the point. You are not just the last brick that is strolling around. You are part of the foundation and what you think as a member of the Board of Trustees it's important. You have a voice that is a point. This is probably one of the things that we should communicate better to the members of the Board of Trustees. You can tell us if we are not doing our job properly, you should tell us, because you are a member of the Board of Trustees, like the others that are already here, and it's important for us to get the feedback of our community, of our members. We can try to set some goals as Torsdam was sharing before. We can try to work on something, but we also need to be connected with all the other people that are part of the foundation, that are doing their job, their contributions every day. This is the point. So you can see the project. Yes, as such as in any kind of democracy, you vote for representatives, then you should be able somehow to influence them and remember them that they are representing you, but this is so quite common in every democracy. By the way, the reason video, tdf.io slash be a member, which explain those things we are trying to explain and give some motivation also to become a member as well. So if you're willing to contribute, and I hope there is some new comments in you today, especially locals, please do. You are really invited and welcome to apply, to first contribute, find an area where you have passionate, and so where you can enjoy and have fun, both you and the project, because something we remember yesterday during the community meeting is that the fundamental is that you need to have fun, because otherwise as a volunteer you will stop doing it. So the most important is to have fun.  And indeed, your contribution will be appreciated and credited, because we have the web page of the website where every contributor is listed, being a member or not. This is a page to apply for membership, stop it please. So if you have already contributed in the past, and you have done it regularly, please don't hesitate to visit this page. It will require for the single sign-on authentication, and then you will find the way to apply for membership. And we will review your contributions and possibly approve you. So I don't know if my colleagues want to say something. I would like to... Hello. Let me say that from Latin America we have a lot of people that probably won't be here with us at a conference in person. So I understand the point of AAL. I understand the point of Marina Gabriela, and I have my own point of view, as we all have inside the membership committee. I would like to see more ways to heard the local communities. It's my point of view as a member of the Latin American community, because we have talents there, we have people contributing a lot, and we are growing, and we want to demonstrate this to the global community. We are in time? No? It's finished? Okay, okay. Well, probably we will have more time to meet and share during the conference. Thank you. Some words? Just thank you. Thank you very much for everyone to contributing to the liberal office. Okay, nothing special, but if you do not feel you don't have enough influence on the decisions of the TDF, there is one simple remedy, run for the board. But beware, this could fire back. You will invest a lot of time then for that. Ja. I'm stealing you just a few seconds more. We touched a bit how we are working on the foundation structure. We started to discuss where things seems to be understood in different ways. Please keep in mind that we have a session on Friday that will be exactly with the membership committee where we want to really hear you, so it's not a presentation with slides and you are just listening, but will be a moment where we want to get feedback, also crazy ideas, complaints, whatever. Talk to us and let us know where we can improve TDF. Thanks a lot.


Well, hello everybody. Welcome. Welcome to Brain Club. I'm Mel Hauser. I use she they pronouns and I'm executive director here at all brains belong. I'm going to share screen and get us oriented to our community agreement, except motor plan for doing so. Maybe the automatic capacity. Okay, here we go. So today we will be discussing. Visions for community inclusion. And I'll introduce our panelists in just a few minutes, but for many of you, this is your first brain club so welcome welcome to brain club.  This is a very intentionally created education space for the broader collective ABB community to provide education about neurodiversity and related topics of community inclusion. Just as a reminder, this is an education space. This is not for medical or mental health advice. It's though though we do have support groups at ABB this one is not the support group so this is not a place to solve individuals specific problems this is for general education purposes only. It's also not a place to debate philosophy and view of the world and by view of the world I mean that we all have different brains and bodies and there is no one correct type of brain or body. Safety is the most important thing to us here, and in addition to affirming all aspects of identity, including neuro type gender, sexuality, race, disability, ethnicity and all other forms of diversity. We need to, you know, name that we protect this space very intentionally, because we are really trying to create a space that feels different from many of the other spaces that people spend their time in. The collective access needs of our group take priority over the individual as we come into this space, which is a space where people can collectively learn and unlearn together, feel safe and experience something different from the outside world right from the very first time, which is why we try to intentionally facilitate the way that we do. And that being said how we facilitate is that all forms of participation are okay here. You can have your video on or off and even if it's on we don't expect anything of you, we certainly don't need you to look at the camera or sit still. You can move and fidget and stim and eat and take breaks and anything that needs doing. And everyone's welcome here, adults, kids, pets, anything goes and observation is a completely valid form of participation. We also want to create space for everyone to be able to share their ideas. Most of our, most of our brain club today will be hearing from our amazing panelists, but we will have time at the end for questions and conversation, and we'll create space for everyone to participate at that time. When we, when we get to that place all formats of communication are okay you can unmute and use mouth words you can type in the chat. The chat is going to often run in parallel to what's happening on on the screen, I might read out selections, but often the chat is running faster than mouth words run. So please don't feel like you're missing anything if you choose to just close the chat and not look at it. Speaking of all types of access needs closed captioning is enabled you just have to toggle it on if you'd like to use it. So depending on your version of zoom, you might see the live transcript closed captioning icon. And if not look for the more dot dot dot and choose show subtitles. And if, if you don't, if you change your mind, and hold on. Okay, good, you're, you're, you're on it Sarah you're letting folks in for a way you're perfect. Yep, we're all set. So show subtitles for hide so it has been turned off. And that's my visual cue to open up the chat box so that I actually see it and by the way direct messaging is also enabled so if there's anything that you need. If you feel comfortable for any reason if there's anything that we can help meet your access needs please send a direct message at any time. Okay. So, inclusion. Inclusion is a big word and means different things to different people. It also is unfortunately often overused and used in spaces that doesn't in spaces where the basic prerequisites for inclusion are not met. Today we are so so pleased to be joined by five community six community panelists, representing five organizations. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to introduce everybody. And then what we'll do is I'll put the little zoom spotlight on each organizations representative one at a time, and we will have the opportunity to hear from everyone about their work their organization their vision for inclusion at the end we'll have time for questions. And this is kicking off by the way, a theme, a theme of the month of health and belonging. So, today, we are joined by Alyssa Chen from the Education Justice Coalition, Cal Arbor from the price center of Vermont, Max Burroughs, and I'm sorry Hassan I'm going to add your name to the slide. Indy, sorry from Green Mountains of Advocates. Indy Scherner from ACLU of Vermont and Wei Wei Wang from the Vermont professionals of color network. And so, is Alyssa here yet Alyssa had asked to go first. Okay. So, does, do any of our panelists want to go first because then I'll spotlight you and introduce you. I'm happy to go for Max. Do you and Hassan want to go first? Yeah. Okay, great. Let me turn the spotlight on here's Hassan's pin. And then we find Max, searching and identifying and clicking. There you are. Okay. Add pin. Okay, perfect. Max Burroughs is the outreach director for Green Mountains of Advocates. He is a person with a disability on the autism spectrum. And Max meets and connects with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities throughout Vermont and the country, speaking up for true inclusion. He also helps people with disabilities become better leaders in the self advocacy movement. And Hassan, would you be able to tell us about, and you can do this in any order, but I would love, love, love to hear anything you'd like to share about yourself as well. Sure. Hi, my name is Hassan. I work for Green Mountains of Advocates. I work with Cameron Topper and Max. And together, we work together with the Green Mountains of Advocates, with some of the South Advocates people from our group.  And I'm out, so you might have heard that before, some of you. So we are doing the South Advocates support, however we can support the South Advocates. Thank you. Well, Max and Hassan, we're both, I'm so glad that you're both able to join us. I'm wondering if you can tell us about, tell us more about Green Mountains of Advocates. So Green Mountains of Advocates is a statewide self advocacy organization. We support 20 plus local groups all over Vermont. The important thing to know is that we self advocates run the groups. When we get involved, we realize we are not alone while facing tough times. We feel proud of who we are. And self advocates say, and quote, we don't care how different we are. We like it that way, and quote. In our groups, we learn from each other. Yes, we can learn from people who do not have a disability, but getting information from our peers often increases the likelihood that we will understand the message. We enjoy each other's company, but we are not just a social club. We are part of a, we are part of the civil rights movement. Inclusion is by far the most important value of our movement, but we also value peer to peer connections. So at Green Mountains of Advocates, we spend a lot of time presenting to students, doctors, government workers, business leaders, leaders of faith communities, police officers and more. We want them to know that people with disabilities have a lot to offer, and we provide examples of how to interact with disabled people. In one example, we show people how to create documents in plain language. Let's see, I also want to mention that GMSA has been around since 1994, so next year will be our 30th birthday. And Hassan, if you have any thoughts you'd like to add to that? Well, that's, Green Mountains Advocates is a team in the state. We are a local group, like, from Green Mountains Advocates, like, some of them is like from the agency, some of them from outside the community. So I'd be a small group for the South Vecacy, we try to do our own goal from what we know and also like what we want to do with our team, like some of the team, they have their own goal, what they want to do with the community, with some of the community and some of the South Vecacy. That's it. Thank you for sharing that. I wonder, when we speak about the word inclusion, what does inclusion mean to each of you? So the bottom line is this. The bottom line is we want what you got. We want to learn. We want to be seen as equal members of society. When given opportunities and accommodations, we contribute so much to our communities. Unfortunately, people with disabilities are often looked down on more than looked up to society continues to like send a strong message that we are not capable. We are too slow. It ties into the false idea that we as people with disabilities are not able to do a lot of things for ourselves like adults. Unfortunately, it is a pretty broadly accepted mindset and it casts a shadow over our desires to work, go to college, you know, date, travel, get married, raise a family and much more. An inclusive community means people presume competence, whether it is at school or work or in social settings, people and systems would not be judging us and resist the urge to decide what we can and cannot do. You know, that our rights are respected. We have the same opportunities as everyone else. This includes real work for real pay going to college getting married and raising a family. That society respects all of our identities. People understand the connection between the different isms like to see how ableism and racism intersect. This understanding can open the door toward achieving justice. And when we need services, we should be able to get services that respect all the parts of us. People should not say we are too complicated. Hassan? Well, for us, for me, I will say this. Everybody has their own pace. We have our own pace. And when it comes to our own way of doing them, when it comes to how we live for ourselves and also how to train our own.  And about how to free everybody from anybody else. So they say about making your own freedom. And also, like, when it comes to a suffocacy, not just about what we need, also, we need to know about that different barrier, like also from the different cultures and different religions too. And because like everything what we do is also have a different type of barrier when it comes to helping other people. And that's it. I'm nodding and taking all that in because, you know, everything that you both said is so important. And we don't see that everywhere. We don't see that happening. So what what what would you like the community to know about your work how to get connected with your work to be part of something that is so important. You know, I, we have relationships with organizations such as, you know, legal aid, Vermont family network, the Vermont worker center and government offices, you know, we work together to address disability issues. We like to work with organizations within the disability field. Not a problem at all, but we have found that working with organizations outside of the disability field like 350 Vermont, just one of more than one organizations. Our issues become everyone's issues. Anything you want to add us on. Yes. And also, when we do ask a team some of the problem when we saw a problem also make other problem too. Like every time one you have asked is asking in the group what we connect with other community and also with our own connection with other people. Everything what we do is like connecting to other than and so we are like connecting to other organization and also for ourselves to and also every time when we are connection with other organization. It's also making us like give up like giving us a little bit about it's bringing and also about the opportunity what we want to do with our own community and with other people. Absolutely. Is there anything else that either of you would like to share. Well, I think that you, I think that you asked also about involvement. Am I correct I think you, I think there are two questions and one and I wanted to point out the involvement part like, I think that, you know, to get how to get people involved with, you know, our organization there are many ways for self advocates and allies to get involved with and say, you know, attend some of our webinars, you know, join one of our, you know, you can join one of our 20 plus local groups throughout the state. And that's about to our annual conference that happens, you know, voices and choices. You can visit our website, you know, Facebook and YouTube pages. And finally, we take the lead on a national project called SARTAC. SARTAC stands for the Self Advocacy Resource and Technical Assistance Center. And we have weekly meetings with 50 plus self advocates from at least 35 states. And we get to hear what other advocates are working on all across the country. And we've been doing this for about four years and have developed great friendships with other leaders who have disabilities. Anything else you want to add to that, Hassan, if I missed anything? I think you got all about the same time. I was shared a little bit like for the Green Mountain Self Advocacy for us, like we try to make sure everybody understand for the self advocacy too, for other way like for us. We also making sure like people understand what we are trying to do and also making sure they know.  We can like sum the work what we do and also what the other organization do we don't understand. So we need to make sure people understand. So we try to make sure we understand. So we try to make a plain language to making sure easy for everybody and for us to. Thank you. And what we know when we think about plain language, plain language benefits everyone. And I think that it's a skill that I'm going to put a link in the chat to one of GMSE's webinars from earlier this year about plain language because it's a skill that I think everybody needs. Yeah. Agreed. Well, thank you both so much. No problem. And if you're if you're able to stick around for for questions after after we hear from other panelists that would be amazing. We'll do. Awesome. So I'm going to shine a spotlight on Indie. Here we go. Okay. Thank you.  They are the policy advocate at the ACLU for months and have focused primarily on criminal legal reform and police accountability reform at state house. and advocacy and has committed themselves to creating space for community members and policymakers to dream beyond the status quo. And outside of birth, they love playing with their three cats, spending quality time with their partner and moving your body. Welcome, Andy. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. When I was writing that bio, it's kind of like, I want to say an out-of-body experience trying to like put into words how the work that I do and what I'm engaged in. But just to start off, I'm the policy advocate at the ACLU of Vermont. That means that I do legislative advocacy in the state house. Most of my job deals with legislators, so the people who are enacting our laws that impact our very lives. And as the policy advocate at the ACLU, I'm also able to engage in community and doing coalition work, which I love to do. I love being around people and just learning more about what we can be doing to just like create more inclusive, beautiful community spaces. So I wanted to share a little bit about the ACLU and then maybe diverge a little. So the ACLU of Vermont is one of 53 nationwide affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union. It's better known as the ACLU. I feel like that's what is usually out there. The ACLU has been working to defend the rights and liberties of people for over a hundred years and has been doing this through legislative advocacy, litigation and various other community organizing to ensure that we are protecting people, people's rights and protecting people's abilities to like move through community safely and as they are wanting to. Some of these cases that we've been involved in regard racial equity, reproductive rights, policing reform, which is a big one, educational access, voting rights. And just about every other constitutional right you can imagine and the ACLU of Vermont is small. There's 13 of us. We have a comms communications department. So they do public educating, social media. We have development, which they do everything with money and raising money for this org and continuing our mission and value. And then the legislative advocacy team, as I said, does everything legislatively and lots of lobbying as well.  Yeah, so that's pretty much it about the ACLU of Vermont. Thank you, thank you for sharing. And from your point of view, what does inclusion mean? What does it look like? Oh my goodness, this is such a good question. I kind of want to answer it through two ways. I would say for the ACLU of Vermont, I would say inclusion means I would say inclusion means supporting the fight for freedom and unity, meaning that we are ensuring that everyone in the state can equally and equitably enjoy the common benefits of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, guaranteed to us by our state and our federal constitution. But that's a little heady and not in the body as much. And for me, I would say the inclusion is the active consideration for people's experiences and the active commitment to make space for different identities, to celebrate and uplift these identities in ways that continue to like center our needs and creating ease and abundance and joy and rest all of the things that we all deserve. So just a lot of creating space and being very committed to creating that space for people. Absolutely. What would you like the community to know about your work? Oh my, another great question. Sorry, I'm also trying to like see what the chat is. Oh, don't worry about the chat. I'll like, I'll bring this up and see. I like, it's, no, this is like, this is a brain thing. Like when you're the presenter and then the chat's going, yeah, you're trying to object. Yeah, just popping off. But, oh my goodness. What do I want the community to know about my work? Oh my gosh, in the work at the ACLU. I really want to say that we are committed to pushing the boundaries of the status quo through various policy initiatives and strategies. We not only do advocacy in the state house but we are really trying to engage in community more and to understand what people who are living here in Vermont really are wanting and needing to ensure that our civil rights and liberties are not being infringed on. So we focus on criminal legal reform as a very broad space of engagement. And we also do creating, we're trying to move into this space of like creating policy that really encourages legislators and policymakers to center our needs. And so I just, I think I want to maybe focus more on the less traditional work of the ACLU of Vermont which is economic justice. So we do a lot of like criminal legal reform and within that there's like smart just like, oh my gosh, I'm trying to find better words. We're just wanting to create a smarter criminal legal system. And within that we are seeing that what drives people to interact with our criminal legal system often is because of unmet needs and resources in community. And we are really interested in getting to the root, I would say and trying to build up better like structures and foundations to meet the needs of people. So I just want to put out there that we are part of the Fund Vermont Future Coalition. And I'm really excited about this. On Thursday, there's a press conference where they'll be calling on the state to raise revenue. So like taxing the rich, which is something I feel like we've heard, it's been like talked about but to know that there's actual momentum in Vermont to move in this direction and to raise revenue to help address some of our social service needs is incredible. And so I think that's what I want to highlight and to share about the work that we're doing. It's a new area that we're getting involved in but we see it as so crucial to the rest of everything that we are doing and really hope to just continue in this space and to advocate for meeting people's needs. That's really amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. I didn't know about that. That's a big deal. Yes, yeah, it's been like, oh my gosh, I want to say like a four year conversation. There wasn't really, we weren't really sure if there was going to be like an actual campaign but yeah, again, it's just really exciting that we're coming together. I think the campaign is called fair share for Vermont. And again, it's just to center raising revenue so that we can have those social services that we're told so many times that we don't have the money for but we know it's there and just very exciting, very exciting work. Thank you. Thank you so much. And there's some questions in the chat. I think what we're going to do is we're going to save questions so we can hear from everyone. But first, Indy, I would like to ask how people can learn more about the ACLU of Vermont and get involved. Yeah, oh my goodness, there are so many ways. We have our website ACLUVT.org, if I'm saying that correctly, where you can learn about the wide range of issues that we work on a little more in depth. And also we have, I can link, I believe, if I have it here, we have a volunteer interest form that people can fill out if they want to get engaged that way. I do just want to put a plug in for those of us who are in central Vermont, Montpelier, East Montpelier, we'll be having a letter writing party next Wednesday. And this is just an opportunity to gather in community and to put pen to pen, pen to paper, oh my goodness, on the issues that matter most to us. So we'll be providing materials and talking points and helping people identify who their representatives are and offer guidance on how to write an impactful advocacy letter because that's so important and part of the work that we're doing. So we have that coming up. And if that's not of interest, the volunteer intake sheet is another way. Awesome, thank you so much, Andy. All right, Alyssa, are you ready? Swap out the spotlight. Hey, everyone.  Amazing. And Alyssa, I'd love to introduce you. So before becoming an organizer at the Educational Justice Coalition, Alyssa worked in alternative high schools in Vermont and California. Alyssa is excited to be in Vermont growing an education justice movement at the Education Justice Coalition. Alyssa leads an internal work and coordinates the Education Organizing Committee as well as the Educators Color Group. Welcome, Alyssa. Hey, everyone, nice to be here. Do you want me to just share a little bit about our org to get started? Please do, we'd love that. Well, yeah, so we got started like, I guess seven years ago with the Ethnic Studies Bill that created Act One. And so this was an effort to try to change our standards at the state level. And since then we've grown into a broader coalition with a bunch of volunteers and grassroots projects which all share more about kind of all with the mission of trying to ensure that schools are equitable, inclusive, welcoming places for marginalized people of all different backgrounds. And so we are like an intersectional organization, which means people in our leadership and our volunteers represent different identities including BIPOC folks, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA plus and more. Thank you. For you, what does inclusion mean? That's a good question. I think it's, when I get questions and grants that will say like, how do you know your work's having an impact? I feel like it's all about like the stories we tell. And so tonight we were debriefing our Educator of Color retreat and someone was like, I didn't get to go, but I wanted to share the story for my friend. Like they're very introverted and they were very nervous to go and they just felt so welcomed and they were just so happy to be there and they really brought a lot back to our program. So I don't know, that story just stands out to me and it kind of like, when people ask us, how do we know our work's having an impact? It's the stories we tell. And so I think it's like, if the stories that youth in schools are telling about how they feel like welcomed and included and excited to go to school like it sounds very simple but if those are all the stories we start hearing out of schools like kind of our work is done and I know we're really far from that but I think it's about like, I can't define what inclusion is for all of you because everyone has different needs but if the stories you're telling me is like, I love school and it's a place I wanna be and it's a place I feel welcomed and seen and heard then I can say with some certainty that your school is inclusive. And so just recognizing that it means different things for different people and it's more of kind of a feeling and an experience that a list of checking things on a box. Not agree more. Thank you for that. What would you like the community to most know about your work that you haven't shared already? I guess two things stand out that are unique about our work. I think one is building a particular culture is very important to us and we really believe and like I've worked in different schools and organizations that have nice missions but then it can be very, it can be very painful or toxic or hard to work there. You don't get treated well, it's always very urgent. And so I think one thing I want people to know about us is we really see that the way we are with each other and the way that I interact with volunteers or staff or the spaces we build is the work itself. And so I think that is an important thing about our organization that we care a lot about the culture and how we do the work and how we be with each other in relationship and not just what the impacts are. Because sometimes you can think you're having good impacts but it doesn't feel good, so it's not worth it. And then, yeah, on slide four, if anyone wants to check that out, I have a overview of our programs. We have worked for educators of color and schools once for educators of color. We have a really exciting education for social justice conference that I think some folks from all brains belong were there or joined us online. And so definitely would love to welcome and see anyone there. And we hope to continue to work with you all to think about access and how we can continue to make it more accessible. We have an emerging youth organizing program that I'm excited to share with people. There's a BIPOC statewide camp, the social justice summer camp in Chittenden County and a youth organizing leadership program. And I left my colleague Kayla's email and so if there's any youth on here and you wanna join our Instagram chat or there's like stipend and opportunities, for example, for youth to help plan our conference. And so if you're a youth on the call and you wanna get involved in helping lead workshops or plan conferences or just talk with my colleague Kayla and see how you can get involved. I wanna highlight that. And then I'll also highlight we have a class for educators. We also welcome parents and students to join because we think that it takes like a whole village and community to transform our schools to make them more inclusive. And that's like a sliding scale class. There's remote options, there's in-person options. We have our amazing team of facilitators and I'm piloting the curriculum with Burlington educators and so far people are really enjoying it. They like how self-directed it is, how interactive, how it really values people's knowledge in the room. And so we welcome anyone to join us in that. And then we also have a project because there's a lot of stories talking about the stories we hear that are not about inclusion. We hear a lot of stories about bullying harassment and so that's kind of in partnership with Indy and Mel joined that work recently. And so we wanna let folks know about that project. And if you'd like to share a story, we are hoping to use those stories to make changes in policies. Thank you. And Alyssa, I just put the link in the chat for that project. Awesome. So that's the narratives for change. It's where community members have the opportunity to share stories of bullying and harassment so that we can shine light on that because people don't get it. People don't know how common the trauma is. Thank you, Alyssa. And how, so you just listed a ton of things and I'm gonna link again your website for folks to get involved. So any other ways that you'd like folks to know about getting connected with the Education Justice Coalition? Yeah, I put this in the, you can look on the website but I put everything in the slide deck so it's all laid out.   If you'd like to help plan the conference, that's like a committee that's just getting started. We're having our second meeting tomorrow actually so you can even come tomorrow. So you can chat me or you can email me. We meet once a month and it's a really fun group of people trying to plan a really amazing conference. And if you're educator color, that would be me. If you're a youth, you can connect with Kayla. And then these two other opportunities I mentioned like if you wanna sign up for that class, we have that open for 10 more days. You can share that around or if you have a story or you're a parent who has a kid that has a story about bullying and harassment and you wanna share that to help make changes. I left that info there as well. Thank you, Alyssa. Okay, Weiwei, you ready? Yes. Hi, Alyssa. Just wanna say hi. Haven't seen Alyssa in a while. Hi, my name is Weiwei Wang. She, her pronouns. I am with the Vermont Professionals of Color Network. Am I supposed to introduce myself or Mel are you gonna do something? As you heard her talking, I was like, oh, I'm completely slacking because of my executive functioning I was supposed to introduce you. So Weiwei is the co-executive director of the Vermont Professionals of Color Network. Vermont Professionals of Color Network founded in 2019 is dedicated to advancing the prosperity of all professionals of color throughout Vermont by building from within. And in both her personal professional life, Weiwei brings a passion for community connection and development and refining accessibility for historically excluded communities through changing systems of oppression. Weiwei, welcome. Hi, I'm back. Yeah, so I'm one of the co-founders of the Vermont Professionals of Color Network we're a relatively young organization. Like Mel said, we started unofficially in 2019 and we started officially in 2021 as a 501C3 organization. Tina Rudin-Hira and I are the co-founders and also the co-executive directors at this point. We have amazing staff of folks and our mission is to advance the prosperity of folks BIPOC folks across the state. And that could mean economic prosperity if that's what prosperity means to you or it could mean social prosperity if that's what that means to you. We are focused on supporting folks to get access to existing resources and to build resources where they're not. So something that we know is BIPOC or global majority folks across the state are the last to know about a lot of different resources that are available and the last to be able to access those resources. So something that we're trying to do is to make sure that people are aware of those things that are available through social media, through our website, through speaking with folks across the state and our focus is really on three different groups. So professionals and we define professionals as actually we just created the statement. So I'm gonna read it out to you. We define it as an individual dedicated to developing expertise or skill or craft that contributes to personal growth and or social improvement and trying to kind of move away from what professional means from that traditional sense that is really might not fit who we are as individuals in today's working society. And so we support professionals, we support people who are building up businesses and nonprofits. So making sure that they have access to grants and supporting them in writing the grants and our third group that we haven't yet touched but is part of our mission is to support and empower youth of color across the state making sure that they know and actually everyone that we support knowing, making sure that they know that they are assets to the community that we can also create a safe space for them whether it's in their homes in their communities in their place of work so that they can really thrive and they wanna stay here. And we realize that not everybody wants to stay here and that's okay but we really wanna make sure that folks are connected. So one of the biggest things that we do is to create networking or community based events because there's that Vermont saying of you can't get there from here. So wanting to make sure that people feel connected because sometimes you're the only person in the workplace or the only person in the community who looks like you. So having that sense of connection is really helpful both for personal development, for mental health for a lot of different reasons. So that's one of the biggest things that we do right now. And also just to make sure that people are aware. I think Max had talked about, I think it was Max or I apologize. Huzzahan. Huzzahan, thank you so much. One of you had said making sure that there's things that are at like a particular the written word is comprehensible to everyone. And that's also really important to us because we do also support on some level folks who are immigrated to this country who are refugees making sure that they have access to that information or folks who, yeah, from all different walks of life. So I think that's it right now. Thank you, Weiwei. So from your perspective, what does inclusion feel like and look like? So from my personal standpoint, inclusion for me is really important because that's the reason that there are five of us who started VTPOC and for me personally, that looks like not having to wonder if I belong in a room, not having to wonder where the grocery store is because I don't know the name of it, not having to wonder like what a snow tire is or what yak tracks are. So for me, it's being safe in a community and in a workplace. For me, it's being where folks are understood by others when they understand others, meaning like there's a culture in Vermont that is incredibly inaccessible and people don't take the time to explain. As an example, there was a visitor who came to speak at a conference and somebody had used the word foliage and the dude is from Chicago, he's never heard the word foliage in his life. And in my mind, I was like, I don't ever say the word foliage. I just say like the leaves are changing. And so he spent the better part of like three days not knowing what the F they were talking about, right? And so it's that kind of like accessible information, accessible resources that I'm talking about and it can be something that is so seemingly simple but it's incredibly exclusionary. So for me, it's that. And I also personally ascribe to this framework of access where we're really thinking about access from a lot of different standpoints, meaning is whatever resource we're talking about. Is it available to the person that is trying to use it? Is it physically accessible to the person who is trying to use it? Is it affordable to the person who's trying to use it? Is it accommodating the individual who's trying to use it? Is it trusted? Like, is it acceptable to the person who is trying to use it? And are they aware of it even? So those are the six components, like the six pieces of access that I like to think about. And that's not always available. And so when there's not, like any one of those components is missing, then I personally don't think that somebody is missing out. Somebody is not able to use that resource. So it's safety, it's access, it's being part of the community and being able to like eat really good food and being able to share and laughter in a way that you're not trying to hide who you are. So those are some of the things that I think about. Just taking all of that in, yeah. How can the community get connected with your work? Yeah, so where we have a website, it's www.vetpoc.net. Right now we're trying to think of ways to engage, to like get people more involved. How can they volunteer with us? How can they be a greater part of what we're doing? What we're coming upon is the fact that we have a little bit of different ideas and the community has so many amazing ideas and we would love to engage folks more in the development of it because like we are really realistic that we're not going to be able to meet everybody's needs. We simply aren't because we're just one organization. We talk a lot about relief collective. We talk about the NAACPs. We talk a lot about community resilience organizations. We talk about education justice coalition. We talk about all of these different amazing BIPOC-led groups and other organizations that are available across the state because we need to all work together. So, but in answering your question, go to our website, check out our Instagram. Our Instagram handle is at vtpoc-network. We have an event coming up on November 14th where you can learn more about our organization and what we've been doing and what we plan on doing over the next year. So, please come to that event. If you can, we'll have really great food. I think we're having Harmony's Kitchen caterer as well as Taino Kitchen, oh, I'm so sorry. So, it's gonna be some really great food and it's at the Vermont Comedy Club in Burlington from five to seven and I'll drop some more information in the chat. Awesome, thank you so much for your win. Thanks. All right, Kell, I'm gonna shine the spotlight on you. Welcome. So, Kell Arbor is the director of the health and wellness programs at the Pride Center of Vermont. Kell and the team provide joy-filled wellness events and connect people to health services. Pride Center has a physical location in Burlington and serves the state with services all throughout. Kell, welcome. Hi, everybody, thanks so much for having me. If folks need to pop off at seven, I'll totally understand. You can find more info about our work at pridecentervt.org. We serve the state of Vermont for two ST LGBTQ plus folks in both direct service outreach programs where we connect with folks through affinity groups and center-wide everybody under the rainbow fun things like the Large Pride Fest in Burlington. We organize that event. We have a safe space team that's part of the Vermont network surveying two ST LGBTQ plus folks that are experiencing violence and harm. We also train healthcare providers in how to work with our populations. There's a lot of inclusive low-hanging fruit at healthcare facilities. Folks have already named some of these strategies around language. When we see a single-stall bathroom and it has a man and a woman sign on it, that's transphobic. It doesn't need to be reiterated that the single-stall is just for men and women. It's a restroom for everybody. What does the word restroom even mean? That's not a very clear word. We coach people to use pictures. Is there a toilet? Is there a urinal? A baby-changing station? An active wheelchair. There's an in-motion wheelchair image. Having ASL, so some of those access pieces around language that folks noted are, like I said, low-hanging fruit. We're really behind the times in Vermont, so we can make some adjustments that will change access for all people. We talk about intake forms with both pronouns. It's not preferred. My identity is my identity. It's not a preference or a choice. So not saying preferred pronouns, not using the word other for a fill-in-the-blank category that literally is othering folks. What name people want to be called that resonates with them, that intersects a lot of different communities around the name that I wanna hear for my service. So it might not be the name on my quote-unquote legal documents. When we're asking for sex and gender markers, asking ourselves why we need those things, if it's gonna help us serve people better, if it's not, then it might not be relevant to ask. But there's times when we need to know one of those times is for insurance and to be able to match it up. So be clear that it's for insurance because I am somebody who is deciding female at birth. I have three different gender markers in the systems. I use X on my license. I'm still coded as female to get some health services because you're denied care if why would a man need testosterone or a pap smear? So there's things on the inside that a client might not know. So like what Max and Hassan do, we do a lot of patient advocacy around navigating systems. We're left out and harmed so much. I rarely see intersexed or ex-gender markers. X is unknown and unspecified. Those are legal gender markers in Vermont. Australia pulled them out from the Holocaust actually. And we have X for unknown unspecified. People are moving here in droves to raise their babies and to have all their gender-neutral kids, but they leave because our systems are not gender-inclusive. So we have a lot of work to do in our schools and in all of our healthcare settings and a lot of that technical support and access. We have tips and tricks on our website and also offer dialogues and lived experience panels. Sometimes folks need to hear stories from folks that have lived experience so that they can really understand the impact. I constantly hear folks say, well, we don't have enough Latina people living in Vermont to look at the numbers. It's a great time to use qualitative data. When we uplift the needs of the communities that we're most not serving, everybody's care is gonna get better through that. So all the intersections that we have, there's some commonality about some of these places with access. And I just wanna uplift what everybody else has already said. And we have a lot of neurodivergencies specifically in our two ST LGBTQ plus populations, a third of Vermont youth identify within rainbow communities. That's a large demographic and we're gonna keep seeing more and more people move here. So we have a lot of work to do to be that safer space. I think for me inclusion goes hand in hand with belonging that it's both that I show up and see myself on the intake forms in the images for outreach. I see myself in the people giving service that doesn't mean they're gonna serve me better but I might be more comfortable and open with somebody that has an identity and alignment with me. So we see more and more people want queer providers or trans providers, people of color, people with disabilities. I think that it's like Alyssa was saying that feeling and that sensation. And it makes me wanna come back for more when I hear people moving to Vermont and pretty immediately leave, I know we're not an inclusive state yet. So I know we have a lot of work to do in that and just connecting people to each other is a lot of our work here at the center, networking people. We had more than ever pride fest from the tip to tail of Vermont this past year across June and it's in Croyabula to have more community brewing up spaces to meet and greet and do what Weiwei saying, connect people to resources that they are just left out of knowing about. To connect with our work, there's lots of different things going on at the center. We have a web calendar, we do a lot of support groups for the community and that's a great way to warm handoff people into events. We have a pride hike event happening this weekend at Shelburne Farms, a great way to access mental wellness beyond one-on-one talk therapy is to go out and do a fun activity that you like to do with like-minded people. So we love those hikes. We're also showing United in Anger, one of the ACT UP documentaries on December 1st on World AIDS Day at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier. The AIDS epidemic had intersected all communities and we see a lot of their work still needing to be done around housing, healthcare inclusivity as somebody who was dying with an AIDS diagnosis and told that women don't get STIs. It infuriates me that we're really behind the scene with serving gender diverse folks with sexual healthcare. Medicaid just released their prior authorization for hysterectomies this past year unless it was for gender affirming care. That's absolute discrimination. We are everywhere giving access to hormones to people who are cisgender, who are men and women, but we're making it very difficult for trans and gender non-conforming folks to get access to hormones. So there's a lot of downright discrimination happening and a great way to plug in is get some training and resources. We are serving to ST, LGBTQ plus folks all over the state and we intersect every identity that's out there. A third of our survey respondents in 2019 identified as living with a disability. So we have a lot of intersection, somebody's access to care, might not be their gender identity is the biggest barrier to care. The BMI for surgery, the body mass index for surgery is 35. That's an incredible discrimination point for folks that want top surgery or other gender affirming care. So we don't always think about body size as being a major barrier to care, but it is for surgery. So there's a lot of layers to the intersectionality and lots of different ways to plug in. Thank you, Cal. And I also appreciate you supporting my executive functioning in layering in responses to my questions as you went. I appreciate that.  I'm gonna add your co-panelists back to spotlight. Except I don't even, I think that, hang on a second. Hold on. Add pen. It just happened. Hold on. It disappeared. Here's Alyssa. Add pen. I'm happy to go through and spotlight people if that's helpful, Mel. Can you find Cal? Where's Cal? Where'd they go? You were literally right next to me. I don't understand how that happened. So there we go. Wait, what? Great. Oh, thank goodness.   And if there's any lingering questions, I'll compile them. Scrolling up to the very beginning and the first question was around use of plain language, around professionals who use a lot of jargon. Does anyone have any responses to that? Was that the question from Amanda from DMP3 or P3P? Yes, and it looks like what that is, it's a disability in medicine mentorship program. So I did put my answer in chat, but I will answer it verbally as well. I don't worry about the balance between readability and prestige. I just, I mean, I simply need to understand things in plain language and about abbreviations, I make sure anything that is abbreviated needs to be spelled out and I address that. And also if there's any big words that are said in the document, I have to ask for clarifications. Now, I mean, in terms of, you know, readability, I know that sometimes when we come across documents that are not in plain language, we kind of use tools that will, you know, tell us like what grade level they are and then sometimes determine that way if we have to, you know, break down whatever we have to like, you know, break down from something else. I'll add to that. Part of it is get to the point. We use a lot of flowery language and talk around things. So it's not just that it's plain language, but that we're clear and specific and not using this pretentious academic speech that literally is not saying anything. Yep. Anyone else wanna add to that? I'm gonna connect this question to the last question in the chat. This looks like maybe, maybe, Kel, if you'd like to start with this one and then I'd love for others to join in. It's like, and the person who asked the question hopped off, but I think it's a, it's a, just good answer to the conversation around when professionals, particularly researchers or people collecting data, they want checkboxes. Um, what, what do you say to that? Given that the checkboxes often resulting in someone being othered? Yeah, sometimes all we can do is harm reduction in that moment. I like to show people the form that I have so they can see the options. There should always be a decline to answer. And if I decline, it shouldn't mean that I am then denied services. And sometimes that happens. There should be no case where no box keeps me from the services. Sometimes we can upfront offer questions that can be seen as me as the patient. And then I on the backside put it into the data that makes the most sense. So that front facing with that patient, they don't have to see the harmful. And then behind the scenes, I put it into the box that makes the most sense. For example, we have been HIV testing with trans women for many, many years.  Absolutely not. Do I have to in the government database code them that way? Yeah. And so it's sometimes just keeping the information away from them having to visually see it can be one strategy, but having a blank line is best practice. You're never gonna have enough checkboxes. There's just no way. Bye, Max. Thank you. Does anyone else wanna add to the topic of the checkboxes that are othering for all kinds of topics? Hey, at all brains belong what we do in addition to gender with a blank line. I mean, just like all the categories like race is asked that way too. And we've never had feedback that patients mind being asked to write out a word or type out a word. It's just a way of not having anyone be in a situation to have to check a box fit in a container that they don't identify with or not see their identity represented in the words that we came up with. Yeah, and Kel's added in the chat. Anytime you gather data, ask yourself, why am I asking and what am I doing with it? Yeah, I'd love to open this up to probably have time for the one or two questions depending on how quick they are. Kel's adding eight of 10 healthcare facilities do not ask for sexual orientation or gender identity data and that's not helpful. So why do you think that is? Why do you think that healthcare facilities? That they don't ask? Yeah. Because our identities are seen as a choice and a preference and irrelevant to the care. And sometimes it is irrelevant. If it's the dentist, you might not need to know that information. If it's the gynecologist, you might want to know that information. So again, like why are we gathering it and then how we're doing that? Because it's seen as private information, especially in puritanical New England where though heterosexuality and cisgenderness is rampant in our faces, that there's any other types of gender or sexual orientations expressed is an absolute like abhorrence and we're treated that way. So there's a keep that private attitude around our identities.  And we're just not believed. A lot of times folks are coming to appointments, feeling like they need to prove that they're trans or they're asked questions that don't honor, I'm a lesbian, stop asking me if I have risk for pregnancy. And I think we see that in so many instances of the I'm not believed, I go to seek healthcare and I'm not believed for so many reasons. You don't believe I'm autistic. You don't believe that I know what's going on in my body that I have this symptom. Like, it's your body. Of course that's what's going on for you. Of course that's your symptom, right? Like just, yeah. So I think that like zooming out, I think part of inclusion is that you get to show up as your true self and that people just believe you. Like that, thank you all. Thank you so much to India and Hassan and Max and Alyssa and Cal and Weiwei. Thank you all so much for being here. And thank you, thank you to all of you who have joined us for this conversation. And we'll look forward to seeing you next week where we'll be discussing the language of belonging. Bye.


Good afternoon, welcome to the Global Report. I'm your host, Lily Ong. We have with us today Dr. Adam Garfinkel, who's been to many places and done many things. Notably, he was the fish writer for not one, but two secretaries of state, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. Dr. Garfinkel is also the founding editor of the American Interest. His mission is to explain America to the world and vice versa. Welcome to the show, Dr. Garfinkel. Nice to be here. Nice to be here. Now, Dr. Garfinkel, we are actually in the same time zone because you're right here in Singapore. What brought you here? A fellowship offer at the Raja Ratnam School of International Studies at the Nanyang Technological University. Invited for a year. I thought that would be fun. I'm not an East Asia expert. I've been to Singapore before a couple of times, but I'm not an East Asia expert. I thought it would be a really excellent opportunity to learn more about East Asia, both the history, the culture, the politics, and everything was going great until COVID again descended on us because we had scheduled most of the regional travel we were going to do, most of it invited travel for the second half of the fellowship, and then it became impossible really to go anywhere. So, unfortunately, as great as the year has been so far, it could have been greater. Well, at least you're getting to see a side of Singapore that most of us don't even get to see, you know, the serene, quiet side of Singapore. Now, Dr. Garfinkel, I recall at one of your RSIS talks, you referred to yourself as an everything bagel. So, bear with me if I were to go from one hotspot to the next in the geopolitical sphere, because I know you have your paws on many critical issues. Hold on a second. I don't think I ever refer to myself as an everything bagel. What I tried to say was that the book that I was trying to write wanted to be an everything bagel, and it is. It's a book that tries to get arms around a synthetic understanding of the subject, so it's not me that's the bagel. It's the book that I'm trying to write that wants to be the bagel. I'm the bagel, not the bagel. Oh, that's even better. If you're the bagel, you know what goes inside the if everything bagel. Now, so I want to get your take on several critical issues that facing our world today. And I think in order to analyze that, we kind of have to look back at some of the events that led us to where we are today. So, why don't we start with the messy one? Why don't we start with the Middle East? Perhaps you, I don't know where you want to start it from, maybe from the invasion of Iraq because that was during your time in the Bush administration, is that not? That's right. That was in March 2003. That's when that started. Yeah. I mean, I'm still bad for why US went into Iraq. I knew there was some accusations of weapons of mass destruction, but those were never found. So, look, this is not a great time to refight the Iraq war. It's an extremely complicated subject, but there were really three kinds of rationales for the war. One was the fear that there were both stockpiles and programs of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And there were programs. There were many, many fewer stockpiles than American intelligence and not just American intelligence, but everybody basically expected to find they were not there, but there were programs. There were programs that were in escrow against the day when the sanctions on Iraq would lift. Dr. Jerm was still alive. All those programs were real. You have to remember that in 1991, after the Gulf War, what the United States found in Iraq showed that we had vastly underestimated the progress that Iraq had made on weapons of mass destruction. So, you know, intelligence agencies don't like to make the same mistake twice. So, in this case, they made a different mistake by exaggerating, overestimating how many stockpiles would be there. When we did a readout of what caused the error, it was pretty interesting to find out why all the intelligence agencies were wrong. Saddam wanted everybody to think that he had weapons of mass destruction. One was to intimidate his own people because he was a brutal dictator. The other was to intimidate his neighbors, including the Iranians, his arch enemy, with whom an eight-year war had been fought between 1980 and 1988. It was basically for status, and it's very ironic in a way, that his claims, which were largely believed because of the nature of his regime, are what got him killed. There was a Romanian philosopher named Emile Teodon, who once said that history is irony in motion. It's a wonderful phrase. It certainly applies in Saddam's case. There were two other reasons for support for the invasion. One was the view that, in the wake of the attacks of September 11th, simply dumping the Taliban regime in Afghanistan wasn't enough to demonstrate the verve of the United States and the determination of the United States. And so a peace had to be taken from the board that was more in the heart of the Middle East than Arab country. Afghanistan is not an Arab country. So some people thought that Thomas Friedman made that argument in the New York Times, for example, that the United States had to take another pawn from the board in order to show how serious it was. But the real reason, I mean, one of the other reasons for it was that there were some people who were thinking strategically and understood that the longer term problem the United States faced after 9-1 was not Iraq but Iran. And so the idea was to flip Iraq and turn it into an American friend or proxy and have U.S. troops in Iraq after a new Iraqi government was constituted so that the United States would have military forces on both sides of Iran in Afghanistan on the east and in Iraq on the west. And the idea was that that military force would then be able to exert some leverage. It's called coercive diplomacy to get the Iranian regime to stop doing a lot of the nasty things that it had been doing. So in some people's minds, the real target of all this was not Iraq alone but basically to move the chess pieces around and to put pressure on Iran. Now that was actually not a bad idea, but it didn't work because after the combat was over, after the statue of Saddam fell in Thirudu Square, everything got screwed up. There was no phase four planning. The insurgency began. And instead of the United States putting pressure on the Iranians, American troops became soft targets for Iranian mischief and they still are. All right? So it backfired pretty bad. You can ask yourself, well, was the concept of the war itself wrong or was the implementation wrong? People will be arguing this for a long, long time, okay? But it's important to remember, two things are important to remember. There's a difference between the original concept for the war, right or wrong, and the screw above the implementation. About that, there's no doubt that it was screwed up. But one thing I want to say finally on this subject, there are a lot of people in the world who think that Secretary Powell and the vice president and Congolese Arise, who was national security advisor at the time and so forth, deliberately lied about the existence of weapons to mass destruction programs and stockpiles in Iraq. That's just not true. There's a difference between deliberately lying and inadvertently saying something that isn't so. This was an intelligence error, not a deliberate lie. I was there, I know, okay? But the hate-bush syndrome, just like the later hate-Obama syndrome, leads people into all sorts of wild ideas and suppositions. There was no deliberate lying. There was some exaggeration. There were some things that the vice president Janney said, a couple of things that Dr. Rice said, that where they were spinning, they were spinning the matter for public relations purposes. But in the serious speeches about the whole business, there were no deliberate lies told. There were mistakes made, but there were no deliberate lies told. Yeah, I was there on the onset that I have tremendous respect for Secretary Colin Powell. He was always a man of diplomacy. He would always think about deploying diplomacy before any kind of military means. But I guess what baffled a lot of us was how did 16 intelligence agencies get it so wrong? I think that will always be the question that baffled people. Well, some years ago, somebody who was in the CIA at the time, a fellow named Ken Pollack, wrote a piece in The Atlantic magazine explaining this. And it's by far the best after analysis of the intelligence error that I've ever seen. And he ought to know because he was part of the error and he was part of the team that tried to figure out what they did wrong.  I mean, the United States has 16 different intelligence agencies. There's 16 separate agencies. They all do something a little bit different. There's supposed to be something called the DNI, the guy who's in charge of all this, director of national intelligence, who's supposed to coordinate all this and put it together. This was an office that was created in the aftermath of September 11th. It doesn't always work that well. You have very large bureaucracies like this, each one doing something slightly different. Getting them all on the same page and getting them to cooperate is not romper room work. It's not easy. And so there are bureaucratic reasons as well as other reasons why things are hard, why it's hard. But as I said, in this case, it was kind of an odd situation in that Saddam was quite clever in a lot of ways, just like Donald Trump may not know a lot about the world and he may be encyclopedically ignorant about a lot of the things that he spouts off about, but he has very shrewd political intelligence and people misunderstand or underestimate, or as George Bush would have said, misunderestimate, just how clever a political maneuver or a tactician Donald Trump is. The same with Saddam Hussein. I mean, you can be crazy with respect to ends, but be quite shrewd with respect to means. And he was in a lot of ways. So you have to be very careful how you assess people's skills and shortcomings. It's not simple. Now when we look at Bush's time in the Bush administration during that period, there was this massive projection of power onto the Middle East. Would it be correct to say that President Bush was not just looking to eliminate the regimes that he thought was unfriendly to the United States, but he was actually embarking on this mission to refashion the entire region into one that's consistent with American interests and values. Yeah, that's right. Again, this is another thing people will be arguing about for a long time. When President Bush first took office in January of 2001 in the campaign, and then once he took office, he was arguing for a more humble American foreign policy. Don't remember that now. That was before September 11. And the idea was basically the United States was doing too much after the end of the Cold War. We didn't need to be the kind of control freaks that we had been in the past. I'm sorry. You're talking about Preston, George H. W. Bush here. No, I'm talking about George W. Bush. Okay. Bush 43. His father, Bush 41, that was different. That was before the Clinton, that was eight years earlier. So that was a different time in some ways. We could talk about Bush 41 and Brent Scowcroft, two of my favorite American leaders. But the idea was a humbler foreign policy. Less kinetic, lower metabolism. George W. Bush wanted to pull back. It was 9-1-1 that forced that prematurely into the dustbin of history. Piece of people panicked, basically. 9-1-1 came as a huge shock to American leaders, even though the Hart-Rubman Commission, which had delivered a report to the new president in March of 2001, so just five or six months before the attack, had warned of mass casualty terrorism on American soil. I know a lot about the Hart-Rubman report because I wrote it. I was the chief writer. But nobody paid any attention to us, really. They just didn't take it seriously. It was one of these low-probability, high-impact kind of events that human psychology has a very difficult time wrapping its head around. So in the new administration, they didn't pay much attention. They didn't happen. Then there was mass casualty terrorism on American soil. And they panicked. They didn't know what to do. And you will remember, maybe you won't remember, you're so young, you will remember that not long after September 1, there was anthrax in the mail and nobody knew where it came from. And there was a fear that that also was Iraqi intelligence that was now attacking the United States with bio-weapons. We didn't know. We were blinded. American intelligence had not pivoted on a dime after the end of the Cold War. We were still very high-tech oriented. We had not resuscitated our human intelligence aspects. And we really did not know much about the specifics of where these kinds of threats might be coming from. So if you've taken an oath to defend the country, you always want to err on the side of safety. You want to ask yourself, I have to take all these possibilities seriously because if I'm wrong, right, then I haven't fulfilled my oath. So there's a tendency in times of crisis and urgency and pressure to overdo it a little bit on the gruesome side. And so Vice President Cheney wanted to have the entire country re-vaccinated against smallpox because there was some evidence that the Iraqis were screwing around with the genetically modified smallpox. We found stuff. President Bush decided that wasn't a good idea, but he agreed to re-inoculate the entire U.S. military. And that's expensive and dangerous to do. So this was a time when people weren't sure they were blindsided and they sort of panicked. That was the atmosphere. And at a time, it's a little bit like with COVID-19, but not the same, right? When people are in that kind of mood, there's a tendency for people to vault themselves into a kind of heroic mindset. They get glassy eyed. They think of themselves in sort of trans-temporal times, and they just kind of assumed that if they get the basics right, that all the details will take care of themselves. But of course, all the details never take care of themselves. You have to take care of the details. Now, when you talk about the Middle East, I mean, the Middle East isn't just Iraq. The Middle East is 20-some countries. And I mean, we'd be here all week, not just for part of a half an hour if you wanted to discuss all of those countries, not to mention the rest of the world, which is vast, and not to mention all the other issues that are going on. Just very quickly, coming back to the Middle East, to where we are today, is there a strategy for the Middle East? What is the U.S. intending to do? Are they trying to get up? Are they trying to stay in? What are they trying to do? It's important, I think, to realize that we're not living in normal times when it comes to who is president and how the United States government is working. These are not normal times. They have not been since January of 2017, and they won't be until this man is out of office. There is no grand strategy. There is no strategy. What there are, what there is, what there are, reminds me of something that Lionel Trilling once said back in 1950, there are irritable mental gestures masquerading as ideas. That's what there is. Donald Trump shoots from the hip. He is an in-the-moment, present-oriented kind of person. He doesn't have strategies or policy ideas. He has impulses that he has honed over a long time, and they're actually quite primitive. He has brought back something that people thought was dead for 250 years, the idea of mercantilism. I mean, all he seems to care about is the bottom line of trade deficits and economic figures, and that's a substitute for geopolitics writ large. For example, I mean, you could justify wanting to change the nature of the Sino-American economic relationship and the broader relationship, political relationship that's attached to the economic relationship. That should have been done a long time ago, but the president only sees it in terms of dollars and cents. If you want to press the Chinese to reevaluate their behaviors, you know, stealing intellectual property rights and closing their market to foreign goods, what you do is you rally your allies, and you go at the Chinese collectively. You make common cause with your allies in the European Union. You make common cause with your allies in Mexico and in Canada, but that's not what he did.  He's not very smart. Now somebody who actually thinks strategically or who understands policy won't do things like that, all right? I mean, in the early part of the administration, even when the adults were still there, when HR McMaster was still there and Secretary Mattis was still there and so forth, people thought, well, you know, the adults will keep this guy from doing crazy things, but the crazy guy is still there and the adults are gone. So that didn't work out. In the early part of the administration, if you didn't like a policy pronouncement, you just wait 25 minutes and it would change, right? So that's the kind of situation that we're dealing with. There is no strategy and there are no policies as conventionally construed. There are these scattered impulses, what I call a monkey in the machine room phenomenon. In other words, it's a big government, right? If you leave it alone, it will take care of business. It will hold hands with other countries. It will do the normal stuff that it's used to doing, right? But every once in a while, for reasons nobody can really predict except for the trade portfolio, somebody in the White House will reach their arm down into the government and start screwing around with it, not knowing the institutional memory, not knowing anything about the history of these relationships and just start screwing around with it. That's what I call monkey in the machine room. That hasn't happened in Singapore. There isn't even an American ambassador in Singapore. One's been named but not sent off to the red dot yet. So the president reached down into the did a monkey in the machine room thing with Kim Jong-un in North Korea. He did a similar thing with the so-called deal of the century, Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, which is a crock, right? You never know where he's going to reach his arm. What he does is, there isn't, we don't really have a foreign policy. What we have is the use of foreign policy issues for purposes of domestic political signal. That's what this president does. Everything is designed around domestic political advantage. You see it all over the, all the stuff about the Ukraine and about Russia and who actually was responsible for trying to hack the 2016 election. What these guys do is, whenever there's a problem, they do an old-school yard tactic, which is called, I know you are, but what am I? It's what eight-year-old boys say to each other on the asphalt. It was you make up an equal but opposite fantasy in order to confuse people who don't know any better about what the truth is. So if the Russians interfered with the 2016 election, and of course they did, which doesn't mean by the way that the Trump campaign colluded with it, that's a separate subject. President had that confused early on. So because that casts doubts over the legitimacy of the election, so these guys go and make up, well no, it wasn't it wasn't pro-Trump hacking, it was pro-Hillary hacking that the Ukrainians just make it up out of a whole cloth. And lately they've made up Obamagate out of a whole cloth and Biden gave. They just make the stuff up. But it's, but it's, but it's, there's a logic to it, all right? It's exactly what the bad stuff that they did, but it's just turned around 180 degrees and directed at somebody else. Now, Dr. Garfinger, you mentioned Russia. Let's, let's talk about Russia, the country that's often portrayed as the American nemesis. You know, it's been almost 30 years since the Cold War ended, but nowadays it feels like US and Russia are back in another Cold War. I want to look now. No, the Cold War, people have to be careful with language, Lily. Cold War had three unique aspects. One was that it was fundamentally an ideological phenomenon. It was about the future, the moral future of the world. The second was that it was conducted in blocks, not just individual countries, right? And, and the third thing was that it was tied up with the problem of what were then still novel nuclear weapons, all right? None of those three things is true about US-Chinese relations right now, as bad as they may be. None of those things is true about US-Russian relations. There is no ideological element of the same kind. There are no blocks. I mean, what allies does China or the, or Russia have? Russia has one, Syria, right? And there, and nuclear weapons don't really play an important role in the nature of the fears that are involved right now. So, unless you want to really dumb down what the phrase Cold War means, which you shouldn't do, right? It's, look, we have perfectly good words for these things. It's called rivalry. That word's been good for the last several hundred years. Let's just talk about rivalry. Okay, let's, let's use the word rivalry then. So, when do you think, so that the Cold War ended in 1991? And I'm tempted, I'm very tempted to point to NATO's Eastwood expansion as the retching out of the tension. Maybe you agree, maybe you don't. Well, let's put it this way. That Russia was going to become at some point a recidivist imperial power. I think was a pretty, you could pretty much guess that it would be. It's just the nature of Russian history in the Russian state. That said, the expansion of NATO, when it was done and how it was done, was arguably the stupidest thing the United States has done in the past hundred years. I remember being on a trip to Moscow with Brent Scowcroft. And, you know, Brent had been pretty taciturn.   And it was.  So the Russians were going to be problematical to their neighbors at some point. That was very likely. And, and, you know, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was. But Dr. Guffinkel from 1991 to 1999, when they started the Eastwood expansion, was there anything Russia did, anything at all that, you know, that gave NATO no choice but to expand Eastwood? Was there anything they did that? No, the reason, the reason for expanding the alliance had nothing to do with Russian Bay. Russia was very weak at that time. All right. And don't forget, even though the alliance was expanded to include a lot of these former Warsaw Pact countries, the number of forces the United States had in Europe and the number of equipment dropped dramatically. So it wasn't so the United States increased the physical threat to Russia, not at all. This was political stuff. And when you said political, you mean it was deliberate provocation? No, it wasn't a deliberate provocation at all. The idea was that you had these countries that had been freed from communism and from Soviet influence, and you wanted to integrate them into the West. The best way to have integrated them into the West was to have them join the European Union, which many of them eventually did. But that takes time. There is a, there is an accession protocol that these countries have to go through. It took a lot of time. These countries themselves, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Romanians, Bulgarians, they were nervous. And they wanted some kind of pledge from the United States to protect them against a recidivist Russia. And we had something called the Partnership for Peace, which was kind of a half-white house between NATO and not NATO. And as far as I was concerned, that worked pretty well. And there wasn't any Russian threat. The Russians were very weak. There was no reason to accelerate adherence to the alliance. But organizations never go out of business if they can help it, even if their raison d'etre disappears. And NATO is a good example of that. So the idea was, now that there's no more Cold War, there's no more full-de-gap, Germany is reunified, what's the alliance for? So the alliance agonized over what it was supposed to do if there was no more Soviet Union and no more Soviet threat. So it decided to become a transformational element in creating a Europe whole and free. You remember that phrase from Bush 41? And so that's really what it was about. And the United States actually thought that Russia was a partner in this whole business, and Russia was made a part of APAC when it was created. So there were all these compensatory things that the United States did that was designed not to alienate the Russians. But of course, it was inevitable that this kind of a thing, symbolically, would in fact alienate the Russians. And more importantly, it allowed Russian leadership, especially when Putin became the leader, to use the supposed threat of the West to rally domestic support for his political. And that's what he's been doing ever since. The anti-American plank in Russian foreign policy has nothing to do with the United States. It has to do with Vladimir Putin's domestic position in Russia. It's very popular. This nostalgia for Russia for the Soviet great power status. Russians are very proud. They don't want to be called a regional power, which Barack Obama unfortunately did. It's true, but you don't have to say everything that's true. So they're prideful and they have every right to be prideful. So we culture burned their history by expanding NATO. I think it was a very foolish thing to do, but it was not about threats and it was not about anything Russia did. One of the reasons that the Clinton administration expanded NATO was to get the ethnic vote as a result. I mean, you know, the Polish population, Slovak populations in Chicago and Detroit, Pittsburgh, they tended to vote Democratic because they were in labor unions, right? But they had, we had wandered from the Democratic party in recent years. So this was a kind of ethnic lobby pandering, right? So decided to get all the Polish vote, you know, and what might have been a close reelection campaign in 1976. So part of it had to do with domestic politics. I mean, Donald Trump isn't the only politician who uses foreign policy feints and signals for domestic political purposes. Everybody does it to some extent, not like Trump, but- Dr. Gafenko, just a few minutes ago, you mentioned Russian interference in the US electoral process. I just want to quickly point out that for those of us from the outside looking in, U.S. sounds like a big part calling the cattle black because we have seen U.S. interfered in the electoral process of many other countries, sometimes even in a form of perhaps outright regime overthrows. So, you know, it baffles us, why is it okay when U.S. jobs sit and it is not when others do it? I'm going to- As far as the United States is interfering in the democratic processes of other countries, it's been a really long time since that happened. You have to go back to 1948 for the really big examples where the United States interfered in both the French and Italian election in 1948 in order to prevent communists from coming to power. But interfering in the affairs of other democracies, yeah, the United States has thrown its weight around sometimes and done that in Israeli elections in the past. But- And of course, in the 50s, the United States was instrumental in getting rid of a government it didn't like in Guatemala. There's a lot of- Oh, sir, I'm sorry. I got a- We have to end here because our time is running up. But I hope it's okay to ask you back for another show because I want your take on U.S. and China too. Would that be all right? Sure. We just started. We just started. Yes, we did. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Sure.


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