renewal project is very important. If the house is on fire, it's hard to do that. If you're a strong shop, believe it or not, it's just a little bit easier. And once we all agreed, well, ultimately what the goals were, they agreed to term limits.  They agreed to term limits for board officers. You didn't have to show up to vote anymore. You could vote online and you could vote through the self-evaluation processes, management providing feedback into that process of what they need, what we needed on the board, allowing non-board members to serve on various committees. So a whole host of things that occurred really over the course of three years. And now even after enacting these changes, it's gonna take several years for them to be fully ingrained in the credit union. So seven individuals. Our bylaws call for a board of nine. It is by resolution only that we can be at seven. Unlike Paul's experience, usually we don't have a contested election. It is the incumbents who run and re-run. It is also the incumbents who have been with organization and with our board for just a number of years. So on average, my board members have served at least four terms. That's three year terms. So they feel very paternalistic about the board, about the entity that they're running. They are open, obviously, to outside views. And so committees are a great way in which we also engage individuals who are just sort of testing the water and making sure that they understand just what is the responsibility in this whole volunteering effort. Great, thanks. The only thing I would add is I do think, I think I said this earlier, is that the governance is a means to an end. And I think it's important, even those of us who are kind of died in the world cooperativists and care about that structure that the governance is a means to an end. So my agenda would be is if you're advocating for a change in how the credit union does its business, that that is what you lead with, not with the credit union needs to be more democratic. Now there are extreme examples. I mean, Lafayette's been holding its annual meeting in the country club in Arlington for 15 or 20 years and it's an SBA employee's credit union. So they're places where somebody really needs to be whacked upside the head. But I do think that one of the great things about community organizing is it's about bringing the community together to bring about change. It's the change we seek, and the organizing itself is impactful, but ultimately we want to see the change we seek. So I would lead if I were trying to get engaged in the governance of a credit union that you felt had gone awry with what are the things we want the credit union to do differently. And I think Paul's example, there'll be people who will be excited about that mission as a spark. And so I think I would really lead with that rather than with the governance unto itself. And I'll just add, I've been on the board of the Lower East Side credit union for 12 years and I'm someone who actually, they won't let off the board. I'm trying to do some succession plan and talk to Paul because he seems to have it all figured out. We have tried this, so in spite of our name being Lower East Side, we've actually, we serve low income people throughout New York City and we've also unfortunately had to merge with other failing credit unions in the city community development credit union. So we now serve Central and East Harlem as well as low income New Yorkers around the city as well as several nonprofits that we've brought on into our charter so that we can serve those nonprofit employees and their members as well. There's lots of ways to sort of expand that membership. So we have a really sort of hodgepodge mix of members that we serve and that we want to attract into the leadership union. It's a challenge, I think all credit unions that serve low income people, it's, you know, find that it's a real challenge to recruit someone who is maybe juggling multiple jobs, doesn't have time, is struggling to make ends meet. Oh, do you want to serve on a board that meets once a month for three hours? We go too long, we're whittling it down to two hours. But then also does work in between. I mean, it's a lot to ask of people and so we've had some success here and there but what we've also done is bring on the institutions that serve the communities that we're reaching out to and because like I said, we're not just focused on consumer products and services but also on lending to community owned institutions, housing, cooperatives, nonprofits, we're trying to support a community land trust that's, you know, sort of in formation in New York City. Then we bring on also the nonprofit organizations or activists that are engaged in those efforts so that they can help us figure out how to best serve, how to best meet those needs and how to overcome sometimes the regulatory hurdles that we face in trying to expand and do, you know, these bigger, sort of more impactful things. Great, thanks. All right, let me open the floor for questions. Oops, sorry, we're using the mic for folks who were not here at the first panel. So, yep. Or do you, for the interest of time, you wanna go first and then you'll come and do the same one? Sure, I'm Brian Zwitski with the Office of Inspector General for the Postal Service. As I think you guys know, the payday loan industry, there's a tremendous amount of demand for these products that they're offering and in states where they, you know, they ban payday lending, you know, that demand doesn't go away and the folks find somewhere else to get their loans. The challenge, of course, is that there aren't a lot of great alternatives that are really affordable. I've heard some of you talk about you're offering small-dollar loans and I had a couple questions about that. One, could you talk about what, whether these loans pay for themselves or if they're heavily subsidized? And two, whether there is some aspect of how you do it that would be scalable to be able to do it on a much larger scale if there was, you know, the capital to do it or what not? We run economic metrics on all the products and the payday alternative loan, I think ours is 18% and they pay an annual fee, I believe of $35. It functions like a line of credit. That one is a break-even proposition at best. We do more closed-end little signature unsecured loans than we do payday alternative loans now and those come in really three forms. One, where you get the money entirely up, here's your $500, pay it back in six months or a year. That one is profitable. We have a borrow and save product, which is basically, oftentimes to get out of payday alternative loans, we'll give them, let's say it's a $1,500 loan, here's $750 upfront to take care of your payday loans out there and then here's $750, we're gonna put into a savings account, we're gonna secure it and when you pay that loan back, then that $750 is yours. That's a program that's been out there two years. We've done about $600,000 in credit. We've lost about $15,000 to $17,000, I can't remember exactly. So it is, the rates will vary. Some people that get that product have decent credit, believe it or not. They just want that product. I can't tell you that it really drives savings behavior because it's not repetitive enough. So that one is marginally profitable and then the third type that we have is a credit builder product where they have terrible credit and instead of saying, no, we're not gonna help you at all, we take the full amount of money, $1,000, put it into a savings account, secure it, they pay it back, at the end of it, they've established some positive credit and they get the $1,000. So that one we lose money on, believe it or not. No, no, that one is a credit risk is non-existent. So these are small, small, small profits. If we've fully loaded the expenses into them, given the relative loan size, probably not there. We have some small grant money that comes in to help subsidize them. Thanks to everyone else for coming on. How about the scalability? Well, credit unions have the infrastructure to do this now. So as they said, there's a lot of credit unions, they're all making unsecured small loans right now and these just require little tweaks to their system and practices and they could do that. These are not loans of a size that I would imagine a bank would do. Most of them are all less than $3,000 and it seems like that's kind of a cutoff in the banking industry. If you wanted anything smaller than $3,000, they might give you a credit card. So I could see scalability on the credit union side would not be difficult. On the bank side, I think there would be some misalignment with the motives. I do think it gets back to what's the purpose of the product. So I saw some research last week from Michael Barr for financial institutions at the Treasury and is now a professor at Michigan where they'd interviewed low income folks in Detroit and they said, do you know the number one product that folks wanted from financial institutions was? So checking account where they couldn't overdraw. So it meant they couldn't write checks and that if they use their debit card at a merchant or an ATM machine, if they didn't have the money, it would reject the transaction and we think that's a much better product for folks because it gets to this question of income and expenses.  But to have the discipline of saying, okay, I'm going to the counter and I've got a gallon of milk, a carton of eggs, some black beans and a dress and to have the transaction rejected and you say, oh well, if I take the dress back I can actually buy this stuff. So I think that's really in low income communities it's a question of what is their true demand for products? I actually, I refuse to believe, we're in a state that had payday lending, we banned it. We don't see that there's greater demand for credit that is not being met. What we're seeing is that people aren't having their income used to pay the profits and expenses of the payday lenders. So I think trying to figure out a way to balance and let's not say small dollar credit's not important, we've got a lot of small dollar credit projects like the ones that Paul described, credit builders, savings builders, but it's hard, I'm worried again to go back to the previous panel on postal banking I'm worried about what the profit center would be for postal banking, where would you get income to do it? Really for us, the income comes from the $100,000 mortgage loan, not from the $1,000 personal loan, it comes from the $15,000 used car loan. And that's true, you always cross subsidize, it doesn't, we don't make profits off of checking accounts. It's just, those are very, those are cost centers but they're a key piece of a relationship. So I think one of the challenges you all face as you start thinking about this postal banking is where is the piece that generates enough income to cover the costs? Great, thanks Dave. Can I ask your indulgence to switch the order because you are speaking later, go ahead. I just wanted to make sure people got a chance, you hadn't. All right, so sorry to hog them. I just wanted to ask a question about do you see value in your organizations thinking about really building your constituent base in community organizing type ways so that your members are effective advocates for your organizations in a broader sense, especially if there's hopes to grow the credit union movement and make it more. I know we're talking about a market, a market niche but I mean, I would hopefully like to see it one day grow bigger than it is and how do we get there without community organizing? So yes, absolutely is the answer. But there are some challenges in all of that and at our credit union we're trying to see just what is the opposite of that? What is the opportunity? And let me tell you this. So one example is in terms of serving an immigrant population for instance, a product that we have launched recently in cooperation with an immigrant advocate doing work directly with the community is a citizenship loan. So the citizenship loan is fantastic. It uses some non-standard types of predictors to determine the repayment of the loan. It also ensures or leverages that relationship that the borrower has with that community-based organization in providing additional security for this loan, it's an intangible but it's there. And that's the result that we're getting. We operate in DC. There's an immigrant advocate group in Maryland just in suburban DC that wishes to basically establish the same relationship because of field of membership restrictions, we are not easily able to just take this loan, the same partnership, the same model and replicate it elsewhere. So there are some limitations to just the scalability of all of this but that is not to say that within our field of membership within our own geography that we can't do more. To others, want to comment there? Absolutely, I mean, who wouldn't? I don't understand why somebody would say no to that question. We're opening a branch this week in a very low income distressed neighborhood and it's a block party. We're giving out shirts, we're on social media. We want everybody talking about this. We want as many as we can possibly have because we understand if we are viewed as a bank that's coming into a low income neighborhood, we are going to fail miserably. They have to own it. It has to be, they have to protect it. They have to want it. And in order for that to be successful, they have to be advocates for it. So absolutely we want as many advocates as we can. And I'll just add really quickly wearing my new economy project hat. So new economy project is an economic justice organization that builds coalitions to fight for economic justice and we've done a lot of work building coalitions that challenge banks, practices, press for fair financial services system, reinvestment and so forth. And very early on we're sort of lucky that in New York City we have a strong, handful of very robust community development credit unions that are socially active, they're social justice minded and we've engaged them as I mentioned before in coalitions. We've worked to broker relationships between worker centers and labor unions and other community organizations and organizers so that their members could have facilitated access to these community development credit unions for all of their needs. And in many cases this is just sort of undocumented immigrants, people who have no credit or terrible credit. We also devised at new economy projects several loan funds, a foreclosure prevention loan fund as well as a dreamer loan fund for young immigrants that have the opportunity to apply for deferred action right now. And we've partnered with credeings to service those loans essentially taking advantage of their systems that are already in place. But all of that has really I think helped sort of expand the visibility of community development credit unions with the broader organizing and advocacy world and these are all things that can be easily replicated and we're trying to replicate them around the country. So that's just another way to I think get other organizations that have political power and have that organizing sensibility to feel a stake in these credit unions and not just to see you as like another bank. Thanks. Two questions. One, I would like to hear more about how you interacted with commercial banks because you said in terms of the strategy for scaling up, you were doing that. So I'd like to know really what happened. What did it do for the credit union and then did it change anything with respect to the bank? Was there any purpose to this for the bank? Did it to the bank change its practices as a result? That's question one. Question two, I wanted on this issue of it's the best kept secret and Ralph Nader said it was the best kept secret 20 years ago. It just flashed to me that that's really curious because kind of the most publicized single issue with respect to social oriented banking all over the world is micro credit, which is massively publicized. I mean, the guy who started it got the Nobel Peace Prize and everybody's for it. It's the cure for poverty. I don't happen to agree with all those things. But nevertheless, why is it that micro credit institutions and initiatives have became, it's tamping down a bit, but it became this worldwide sensation whereas you're saying credit unions can't get any notice, any respect. I think I'll try and answer your second question and I'll dive in on the first one. I think part of it is that the term credit union is kind of an odd duck. We're actually both credit and savings institutions. We're not unions. So at least, in fact, in the South, the word union often gets you kicked out of the room. One of the supermarkets that's headquartered in North Carolina actually required their credit union to call itself credit association before they would allow it to serve the employees of the supermarket. So I think part of it is that a lot of it is the fact that we have this historically closed field of memberships. It's the Firestone Employees Credit Union. It's the GE credit union. It's the Portland Teachers Federal Credit Union. So people just think, OK, I don't know what a credit union is and if I do, I'm not eligible to join it. I think that has a lot to do with it. I don't know if other people may jump in. On your specific question, on our partnership, for the banks, what they got out of it was that they got CRA credit for making home loans to low-income families. So the story is that we would make 50 or 60 mortgage loans a year and then we'd go to the big banks, many of which, even when they were much smaller, were headquartered in North Carolina and say, you guys have this great distribution network and people know who Wacovia is and who First Union is and who Nation's Bank is and who BB and T is. Will you make these loans? And they said, well, we're not in the business of portfolioing 97% LTV loans to low- and moderate-income homeowners. And we said, what do you mean? What do you do with them? And they said, well, we sell our loans to these people called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And so what we did is we did a four-part partnership. So the Ford Foundation provided us with some risk capital to take some of the risk of the loans failing. Fannie Mae agreed to buy the loans if the banks would make the loans and we would take the risk with the money that the Ford Foundation had put up and that we had raised for it. And so what we were able to do is say, so you then go to the bank's CEO and say, okay, here's great news. You're gonna get all the PR value of announcing this new CRA home loan product that's gonna serve, again, even if we were just in North Carolina, you're gonna make 3,000 home loans a year for the next five years.  You're gonna service the loan so you're gonna get income for doing that and a business relationship with a person for doing that. So for them, we really thought of their economic and marketing interests and regulatory interests. And then for us, it was all about if we can do this at scale, we can go from making 50 home loans a year to making 5,000 home loans a year because it's not that we envied Wachovia's knowledge of how to make loans to low-income people. We didn't think they knew how to do that as well as we did. We envied their branch infrastructure and their brand name. And so we basically took advantage of the fact that Fannie Mae had trillion dollars of liquidity. Wachovia and Nations Bank had two, three, 400 branches across the state and ultimately across the country and that we had this knowledge base of how to make affordable home loans to low-income folks. And you still see that in other spaces. So Bank of America has recently announced, I forget what it's called, but they've announced a checklist checking account product that costs something like 5.95 or 6.95 a month that you cannot overdraft. You can't go to an ATM machine and overdraft. You can't go to a merchant overdraft and you can't write checks on it and overdraft. So for a low-income person, you know, again, if Bank of America marketing that product for us, that's a grand slam from a mission standpoint. It doesn't help us get a member but it's gonna allow Bank of America to compete with payday lenders, prepaid cards, check cashers to help low-income folks succeed. So for them, they priced it where they think they'll make money because they've got a scale that we don't. So 5.95 or 6.95 for them per month for thousands of accounts is profitable and they're gonna get, you know, essentially CRA credit for doing it. So I think there is, again, there's a space for us to do our community-based solutions but then leveraging it so that we can get the guys who are bigger than we are to do that and recognize there are times where you're gonna punch them in the face. I mean, right, if they buy a subprime mortgage lender, we would challenge a Bank of America or Wells Fargo but if they're at the same time gonna do something that's good for the community, we're gonna praise them. So it's building a real, you know, it's community organizing, right? When your friends do good things, you hug them and you stand at the podium with them on the press conference and when they do bad things, you get in the back room and you chew them out and if they don't change their practices, you get in front of the microphone and chew them out. So. Oh, there's a lot of comment on either of the questions. Only on the best kept secret part of the question about semantics and the whole field of membership connotation. You also need to realize that the credit unions run a whole gamut of sizes, just a couple million dollars to a few billion dollars. And so there will be stark differences there. There are credit unions that are low income designated. There are CDFI credit unions. There are community development credit unions. So there's different credit unions that are all bundled under the same umbrella.  Thanks. I work with Service Employees International Union. And I guess, you know, I've heard you talk about the difficulty of getting people on the board in terms of time but I've also heard about you talking about how it primarily, you know, you're working for low income communities, communities of color. So I guess my question is to what extent your boards are they representative of the members that you serve? And if not how we can move in that direction and it's not just a question of time but thinking of the board maybe as a leadership development and what are the skills that they need that we can give them and train them the opportunities to learn them so that they can fill those roles. So maybe we'll hear Liz's question as well and let people respond to both at once just cause I'm looking at the clock. It's gonna be tough to do quickly. The issue of regulation came up over and over and over again. And I'm really intrigued by what are the, and I think I'm guessing some of the answer has to do with the different types of credit unions there are. But in particular, what are the kinds of things that you feel like your regulator could do to be better supportive? I'm more interested in that right now just as intriguing that then in the how do we get regulators off our back which is a conversation that is difficult to have from a community organizing perspective. Mm-hmm. So two, two different questions but people can take one or both. On the last question, if we are a strong credit you have a demonstrated good track record of management. If there are underserved areas in relative proximity to where we operate we should be able to serve them. Right now I can't go any bigger than an MSA and remain a community charter. Now if I wanted to reach out into that county I would have to convert back to a selecting employer group sort of structure and go through all these hoops which would just, it's just dumb. Okay, it's just dumb. The other thing is secondary capital. I mean we talk about that a lot as a group. Credit unions can only build capital through earnings. That impedes our growth. There are banks for CRA reasons that Randy mentioned and foundations and other sorts that would likely invest in credit unions through secondary capital but the structure of that secondary capital as mandated by our regulator is not very attractive to them. So if we can modify those regulations discussions now with the regulator to allow that to be amortizing then it would be much more unders and that can provide fuel for some of these other community development activities.  Are a lot of you set to talk? The amortizing secondary capital piece does not require any legislative change, correct? Okay, it gets pretty complicated. Everyone check with Randy. I wanted to add in that credit that's a word of where there's no one person sort of on the line and ironically our regulator is not too thrilled with those. So I want to make sure we answer your question. I think it's a balancing act. I think for our credit union we've generally like many folks here who are in the nonprofit sector, we try to bring people who bring expertise and knowledge to our board. Whether it's an accountant, an attorney, a local developer, many of them an attorney, a local developer, maybe even a community organizer, but there's also that balancing act that we are a member governed institution and so to make sure that we've got the engagement of the members is always a challenge and I would confess that for us, as we should be, we try to think a couple of folks and the active members. There are resources to be active in leadership and we're discussing in my credit union ways that we can engage members that don't necessarily involve the huge time commitment of a board of directors but maybe other kinds of ad hoc committees that sort of have ownership of certain things that they can spearhead, but it's hard. It's just a real challenge. Thanks. Do people on the panel want one minute to say anything? I bumped my stake. I bumped your stake. We're gonna hear from all of our panelists and we're gonna keep them to their up to eight minutes no more so that we will have time for questions and answers again in conversation. This is about public banking, potential and lessons learned to date. So I'm not in this order but I'm gonna let you know who's on the panel. Maybe people could raise their hands so people can identify you. San Munger, Senior Associate Center on Wisconsin Strategy. Jason Collette, Organizer with the Alliance for a Just Society. Jared Garner, Policy Advisor for Oregon Working Families Party and on contract with various other good organizations. Gwendoin Halsworth, Founder and Executive Director Global Community Initiatives. Mark Schneider, Professor of Sociology, Reed College Editor, Socioeconomic Review. And Carl Bote, Writer, Scarring Expert on Municipal Banks in my home state of California. Okay, I'm gonna start with Mark, you're up. Thanks folks. I came with both slides and a tie today. And I believe I'm the only sociologist in the room. Which is good to have one sociologist I think. I'm here mainly to, I think the reason I'm here is that I've done a fair bit of research on cooperative, local, state-owned and mutual enterprise systems in the United States. Their evolution alongside or in opposition to corporations and a variety of infrastructure industries from agriculture to banking and insurance to electricity. And the effects of these systems on local communities and local markets, the potential benefits of these systems to local economies and economic development, trajectories of economic development. And I've been asked today to provide a few comments, opening comments providing some context and overview of the public bank campaigns and the Bank of North Dakota. The touchstone for all of this is the Bank of North Dakota, the nation's only state-owned and operated bank. Bank of North Dakota was formed in 1919. It was really emerged as a part of a broader set of movements against corporations from the progressive and from the populace through the progressive, through the New Deal era in a variety of industries that emerged in response to corporate consolidation, independent producers and farm communities and other sorts of community groups and economic groups were increasingly facing corporate consolidation, large-scale corporate consolidation in a variety of industries and in the infrastructure industries in particular during the late 19th through the early 20th century and responded in a variety of ways from regulatory strategies to antitrust to organizing waves of cooperatives. And the Bank of North Dakota emerged as a part of this movement really. In the movement, these are a series of linked movements and these movements really imagined a world or directed main counterbalancing corporate power in a variety of markets, creating possibilities for more decentralized regional economic development around small stakeholder forms of capitalism. And we're all designed to try to capture some parts of the value chain in modern speak, some of the benefits of economic development for all these communities in the plain states the Midwest and the South. The Bank of North Dakota emerges in 1919 as a result of the non-partisan league of the group of populist progressives capturing both houses in the state legislature and the governorship. And we're interested in developing an initiative to cover a broader program of public ownership in grain elevators and terminal marketing facilities and crop insurance and in banking in order to try to counterbalance and capture some of the benefits of the grain trade mostly for its state. The Bank of North Dakota being the most important legacy of that for our purposes today. Three features about the Bank of North Dakota folks who are familiar with this and may be preaching to the choir here. The first is it's the depository for state agencies in North Dakota. The state agencies with some exceptions, public subdivisions are required to deposit their fees and tax receipts and do their banking as depositors in the Bank of North Dakota. That's the source of their capital. The second feature is this money is then used to fund agriculture and small businesses within the state. The Bank of North Dakota does and has done some direct lending. It originally was the direct lender to agriculture. It does not so much anymore that right now it does a lot of direct lending in student loans and some young enterprise and entrepreneurship projects. It's actually more important as an actor in bond markets and municipal bond markets and providing subdivisions, municipalities, counties with short-term finance. But it's main role for our purposes today as a wholesale bank that supports the state's community banks. And it does it primarily by operating a series of secondary markets for mortgages, missy for mortgages and most important by participating in loans with credit, with community banks. Community banks seeking to lend over their limits, over their underwriting limits or over the capital limits can partner with the Bank of North Dakota to increase the size of the loan and so they can stay with large clients. We'll come back to that in a few minutes. The third thing the Bank of North Dakota does is service bankers bank functions for the community banks in the states. Check clearing reserve requirements, that kind of stuff. So housekeeping stuff for the bankers bank. What's important to understand about this Bank of North Dakota model is that it's really not a statist solution. It's not a situation in which the state displaces all of private initiative and private enterprise. It's really a situation in which the state intervenes to create infrastructure and support for the private banking sector in the state of North Dakota. So it's not that the main function of the bank is to provide infrastructural support and to supplement private lending and private lending institutions in the state. And it's run, unless it's an economic development agency and it's run by bankers, not as an economic development agency, but as a bank. And so it's done, a profit making is not quite the right word in this, but it's actually generated a surplus that's as returned to the state for many of the years it's in operation. So why is this attractive? Well, there are four basic things, four basic benefits that have come to the state of North Dakota and its banking sector from this public-private hybrid of sorts. I mean, the first and probably most important thing is this apparatus creates an alternative circuit of capital that basically keeps money from flowing, instead of money flowing out from the state into large, into money-centered banks and being sent off to finance derivatives transactions, the money is actually recycled back into the state. So it's kind of alternative loop of capital. And the function of that is to retie the banking system to the real economy in a way that's clearly quite important and fundamental. The back of North Dakota didn't get involved in derivatives and subprimality, they just passed on it, right? It's boring banking in Johnson and Quack's terms for those of you who truck with 13 bankers. Pretty good book actually I told you this semester. Second benefit, the bank historically functions as a shock absorber for the small stakeholder side, small business and small farms in the state in the face of crises. To tell a lot of stories here, the standard story you hear about banks banking during the Depression and farmers. Farmers, they're dispossessed, they foreclose on the loans, the farmers are dispossessed. And in North Dakota, the bank created a moratorium on foreclosures during the Depression. And let farmers stay on the land and even not pay their rent, the rent-back schemes, as long as they could show they were actually on the farms and try to do something. And when prices recovered they would sell the farms back to the market price. So they functioned as a shock absorber. Also during the Great Recession, there was no credit squeeze in North Dakota. We can talk about that. The third thing that's very important here is that the bank creates and supports a robust ecology of community banking within the state. And I think Sam maybe talked a little more about participation loans and how it does that. But basically what it does is it does not lend directly to commercial industrial markets, but it lends in partnership with the lead community bank and allows those community banks to expand their lending portfolios without fees of their loans being punched by big banks when they do private partnerships with big banks or forcing those banks to grow large in order to grow with their customers. As a result, there were no bank failures in North Dakota during the Great Recession, during the financial crisis. It's one of the most community banked states in the nation. It's first and third in community branch and deposit shows up a fair bit in responding to disasters, right? So the state floods a fair bit on the ground in flooded communities to help rebuild them. And there's great stories of flooding, of what happens to cities on North Dakota, Minnesota side of the border, and how well the North Dakota cities have recovered and how poorly Minnesota cities recover in terms of the population from flooding. And Minnesota is not understood as a place with low social capital. So this is a pretty useful comparison. Okay, so these benefits have proved very attractive. For activists seeking solutions, I got one more slide, it'll be very quick. Activists for solutions, how to deal with the financial from, push to defer the applicable, maybe more. I'm not afraid from state to state, but I'm out of time, so I will step over and let Sandy. I have some slides for you too, way too many now that I think about it.  You talk time cheaper. Yeah, this doesn't count against me, does it? Is that it? No, I got it. It doesn't count against my time. It can count against me personally. So I'm gonna pick up where Mark left off a little bit and talk about the Bank of North Dakota, and that's not necessarily because we think the Bank of North Dakota is the ideal model or the right model for every state or for every municipality. Quite to the contrary, I think it probably doesn't. Bank of North Dakota has a very unique history and it grew up in unique ways with the financial institutions of the state, the public institutions, and the quasi public institutions in North Dakota kind of molded themselves around the Bank of North Dakota, which has been in place since 1919 or whatever. In other states, the opposite. They filled the void that the Bank of North Dakota occupies to some extent, and it would be difficult to recreate the Bank of North Dakota in those states. You'd be taking on things that the state housing agency does that microcredit institutions do, that CDFIs do. You'd be taking over their space a little bit. So you need to, when actually thinking about what to do in various states, I think it's important to carefully consider what the needs of the state are and sort of work backwards. And I think some of the other folks here like Jared and Jason will talk a little bit about that more. And if we get to Q and A, we can talk a lot about it. I'm not going to talk about it that much. I'm going to talk about the Bank of North Dakota. Oh, real quickly, I'm in public policy. We took a public policy approach to this, which is not in the weed lending and the sort of things that the credit unions and folks were talking about, though I've picked up some of it. Okay, so we were commissioned a few years ago to do what a bank modeled directly on the Bank of North Dakota would look like in other states. And I should say, the Bank of North Dakota's vests and it has data, therefore there's data about it, right? It has financials, you can extrapolate it a little bit. We know this, institutions of this, we do basically what we think are roughly comparable states in terms of population and economy and so on minus the oil boom and then the US average. And you see that North Dakota is above all of them on all of these various measures. We are.