Thank you very good morning. The first thing I'm going to just present was at Caesar. Oh, well my goodness, I'm very upset that I had to follow him because he has challenged some of my thinking. I don't know if I'm still going to give this speech.
But in all seriousness, good morning. It's my professional honor and personal pleasure to join with you this morning. I apologize for being late, but let's just get right into this.
Plato once said that wise men speak because they have something to say and fools speak because they have to say something. I've always been an avid reader and as a former competitive debater, motivational speaker and now public figure, I've always loved words, language, and been keenly aware of their power and influence.
In the midst of my mother's activism as a tenant organizer in Chicago for the Urban Link, I was often in so, and that front seat informed for me how important it is to specifically name the source of your ire or the source of your inspiration.
Movements are launched and mobilization sparked by a word. Throughout my 23 year career in government, including and especially the last seven years as an elected official, I've come to realize there are word trends which emerge every couple of years.
For the last five years, one of those social political trendy words has been inclusion. Admittedly, I've jumped on the bad one and I use the word often. I keep naming inclusion, working for inclusion, driven by moral imperative, of course.
This inclusion thing is certainly about much more than politics or pandering or even principles. This is simply about progress.
In all ways, by any means, inclusion is simply common sense. Government is stronger and more effective and it reflects it and represents the diversity of its citizenry, a diversity of perspective, opinion, and thought.
These are necessary to ensure the issues we address and the solutions we develop are not done through a monolithic and homogenized lens.
Now, admittedly, when I raise inclusion, the sense I get in many rooms from those listening, although not here today, feels the equivalent of a shrugged shoulder or rolled eye.
Well, of course, she eats all about inclusion. She's a progressive black woman, after all.
Like many aspects of our society, something as abstract as inclusion is still viewed through a racial lens, as if inclusion is some 21st century form of reparations.
Now, on a fundamental level, my agenda, my work, my approach, my politics are all about inclusion.
I work in symbiotic partnership with community, cooperatively governing, intentionally including community and problem solving, and policy development.
I work with my colleagues in government, pushing us, all of us, beyond what I call box checking diversity, or simply creating a low bar culture of tolerance.
In the city of Boston and in and outside the halls of government, we celebrate diversity. We tout the need for inclusion, but we often narrowly defy it and aren't intentional about making it a reality.
And we need to be. We must be. Intentional about inclusion because the social and economic costs are too great. No doubt about that.
Inclusion, cognitive diversity, results in innovation, and that results in economic growth and development.
But frustrating thing about all of this is that inclusion in city hall, the state house, Congress, or the White House means simply taking 20 more minutes just to think something through.
It means making five-year phone calls. It means taking the time to translate a document. It means thinking about whether that meeting space is accessible.
It means thinking about whether holding a hearing in the middle of the day gives everyone a chance to have their voices heard.
Inclusion isn't hard work, but it is work. Inclusion may be inconvenient, but it certainly isn't impossible.
And while government is bureaucratic and things move slower than the private sector, we also don't get the luxury of beta testing an anti-violence campaign or beta testing a development process.
Sure, we love our pilot programs. I won't fret on that.
But we are on a deadline every single day and things need to work every single day.
Ultimately, in government and outside of government, if you don't value inclusion as something worthwhile, as something that's not just the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do, you're not going to get it right.
I believe inclusion makes government better. Inclusion makes us smarter. It saves us money. It helps us avoid mistakes and delays. It helps us develop more fully-formed solutions and approaches.
What helps me, sort of my internal prompt, is asking myself a very simple question. Who isn't around this table?
Of course, I define inclusion as equitable access to city opportunities, revenue investment and the like, but I also define it as an equity and opportunity to contribute.
It's not only about everyone getting a fair share of the pie, so to speak. It's about everyone getting a fair shake at baking the damn thing.
Inclusion is really about shared power.
I urge you to ask yourselves the same question. Have the same internal prompt when you're sitting in a meeting, making a decision.
Ask yourself, who isn't here? And keep going with that line of questioning.
Are you making decisions for people from communities who aren't represented in your decision-making process? Are you making assumptions about people or communities?
Now, I warn you, the reality is that someone is always going to be missing from the table.
But I promise you, your work, your goals, whatever they will be, will be better if the decision-making process is an inclusive one.
The benefits of inclusion, cognitive diversity and collaboration are not theory for me.
They are a governance practice.
As an example, I love restaurants. If that's not obvious by my generous heads, I didn't just get them from my mama.
I love restaurants. They don't tweet that. They serve as social and economic anchors. They provide community spaces.
And restaurants are often the path of least resistance for individuals with quarries and immigrants to entrepreneurship, self-sufficiency, family stabilization, and upward mobility.
No matter how good the food is in a restaurant, the realities of their profit margins are made on their bar.
But a liquor license and a liquor license is key to the financial viability and success of a restaurant.
But for 100 years, the city of Boston has had no control over its own liquor license system.
For 100 years, Boston's liquor license system was about the least inclusive process you could possibly imagine.
The Brahmins might have set up the system to keep the Irish in check, but wouldn't you know that somehow, there are bars and restaurants up and down Broadway and South Boston,
while the entire length of Blue Hill Avenue and Matapan, the very spine of our city, has two liquor licenses.
For 100 years, we've operated with a broken, antiquated system that created a second-class series of neighborhoods.
That's why advanced legislation to disrupt this outdated and biased system, which have resulted in neighborhoods with density and saturation,
choking at their quality in residential life and neighborhoods that were complete food deserts, drive-throughs, not destination locations.
I believe every neighborhood in the city of Boston deserves an equity and opportunity to build community and to build wealth,
and I believe neighborhood restaurants play a critical role in that.
So after 100 years of state control and only a handful of new licenses, by working intentionally in collaboration with an inclusive process,
we now have 75 new licenses. 80% of those are restricted to historically disenfranchised and marginalized neighborhoods,
and we eliminated the cost barrier to getting a license.
I do believe that this will be a game changer. This will result in community and wealth building in perpetuity.
This allows business owners and entrepreneurs to create community staples and explore a culinary pathway that can bring life into a neighborhood.
The convergence of advocates that believed in a more equitable Boston, Boston that supported community restaurants,
allowed me to pass a liberal license reform policy, which is on pace now to undoing the 100 years of economic hurt and marginalization.
I know the best policies are the ones that have community voices behind them,
where elected officials can listen to the people in their communities and create dialogues that create change.
But I'm not stopping at liberal licenses and restaurants.
Our city government, not its dedicated workforce, but many of our policies, our programs and approaches are broken,
and every day they remain broken.
And as long as they remain broken, then we diminish the hope and the opportunity to fix broken homes, broken communities, broken neighborhoods, broken families.
I mentioned earlier that I've taken stock that there tend to be trends in verbiage and word uses.
So one of those words right now is inclusion.
But taking note of language is not the only thing that I've taken stock of.
I've noticed that low income and communities of color are virtually the same wherever you go.
You don't need official city signage to let you know when you were entering a low income or majority of color neighborhood anywhere in this country.
The predictable markers are all around.
A concentration of liquor stores, fast food establishments, check cash and facilities, dollar and phone stores.
It is also typical to see the same type of informal economies, barbershops, hair salons, bodegas, community based early education and care facilities, and churches.
Lots and lots of churches.
Now a good number of the businesses are owned by immigrants, women, people of color, which is a good thing.
And the fact that they hire locally is also a good thing.
But what isn't a good thing is that all of these industries are tough to maintain a stable workforce and do little to support wealth building.
That is why I'm developing strategies to strengthen these informal economies while also incentivizing a diversification of goods into the market.
Boston is in the midst of its third biggest building boom, and much of our zoning laws are outdated.
During this period of unprecedented development, now is the time to reform our zoning code and to do so in such a way that we can, through law, ensure intentionally the healthy development of community.
Now this change cannot just happen from bureaucrats, government neighborhoods need to meet to revision their environments, which is why I've been convening focus groups with Boston residents to inform a zoning policy definition of healthy.
Now I'm sure it will come as no surprise to many of you the reoccurring themes.
Open green space, access to affordable, fresh and healthy food, accessible, affordable and reliable public transit, a diverse, welcoming, safe and connected community, affordable, quality housing.
Reforming the zoning code in this way will ensure we develop an ecosystem that supports and grows low and mixed income and mixed use development.
A community does not want to nor should it be forced into design, and a lot of times residents feel as if development is outside of their control.
I want a Boston, a collective Boston that feels stakeholder, ownership, pride for their block, for their community and for their city.
So much of being an inclusive government or striving to be one is about how we present ourselves to the world.
That initial interaction, whether it's in City Hall or in the community or online, strongly shapes an individual's view of their government.
We need your help.
Believe me, I understand the criticisms of government of elected officials, I get why people are cynical.
But the truth is, the vast majority of people in government are there for the right reasons.
We want to do good, but we want to make people's lives better.
But we have limited resources, and we have limited time, and for elected officials we literally have deadlines every two or six years to get things done.
I have served four terms, that's seven years, on the Boston City Council.
It took me two terms of meetings before I was even ready to make a push on liquor licenses, which meant every election, that work, the progress, that issue, was at risk.
I believe all of us in this room share the same values and vision for our communities, this city, and our commonwealth.
But now we must intentionally align and synergize our steps and collaborate as social architects, as values engineers.
I need you to be partners in this effort to think about who isn't at the table, to do more than celebrate diversity, to honor it, meaningfully.
And that begins with inclusion and share power. Thank you.
Thank you.
I'm just going to just take an opportunity to ask you a question or two, and then open it up to the larger group.
So the question that I wanted to ask you is, well, I have a number of questions.
One, you started as Cesar back in the room. You are. So Cesar, I started her talk by saying that she actually differed in approach to what you said.
And I actually, I don't know that, I didn't see that personally. I saw a lot of connections between what you were saying and what Cesar was saying in terms of the political approach and the design approach.
But I actually really appreciated that connection. So my question is, many of the people in this room are coming from either backgrounds or deep interests in the way in which media and technology impact communities and impact people's lives.
And everything you said about inclusion and about exclusion, I think, resonates with many of the conversations that we've been having over the last year or so, which is what are the ways in which the technologies that people either have or don't have,
the ways in which people are using or misusing the media technologies in their lives. How are you seeing that impact your work? How is that impacting local communities on a daily basis where you can actually point to areas of possible sort of tension or intervention?
Well, one of the things I was speaking to in terms of my frustration with government is that, and it's just a reality of the structure, is that it doesn't move slowly.
But I don't mind that we're being deliberate because I can't play start-up with people's lives. So I have to be very deliberate. There's a reason why you just can't, with a brush, suddenly do something.
But with the influence of social media, it has created an incredibly challenging climate because the foot is sort of on the pedal all the time. And I use the word ecosystem a lot, and it's very fragile.
And so I have found that challenging in some ways. It creates this platform, this opportunity to more effectively engage people, to inform them. But in some other ways, it has also created such a sense of urgency and such a demand all the time
that I think that it's suppressing innovation because what I think is happening with elected officials is that now they are more apt to provide you with a statement or a position than a real plan.
And that's really the struggle for me because that's what I want to get to. If at the end of the day, the best thing that I have to tell you about me is that you saw me more than anyone else, then I have failed you.
But social media is really feeding the retail element of this, and you see people just pressing and pushing for what is your position? Are you for us or against us?
And so you know what that means? It gives politicians an hour. They get to say, hey, listen, women, I support reproductive freedom. Are we good? Okay. Hey, LGBT, we did marriage equality. Are you okay?
Trans people, we did public accommodation. Are you cool? Immigrants, we're going to work on immigration reform and black folks, we're going to work on mass incarceration.
I mean, it's created this, elected officials are not being prompted. They are not being encouraged to think holistically, to think comprehensively, to consider the totality of a person.
And I think social media has really contributed to that. And so that is something that daily I'm battling and trying to address and deconstruct so that we can be about the business of doing this work in a way that is meaningful, that is thoughtful, and that is lasting.
So it seems like there are, what you're pointing to is the necessary response from politicians and from governments and that driven by the tensions of social media or the demands of social media.
But also we see a parallel phenomenon. We see the ability for more voices to be heard. So there's a rising up just as there is a need to be immediately responsive.
Absolutely. And that has become sort of a reference point. So you'll hear that in the hall a lot. So it used to be a gauge for an issue and the level of awareness that people had about it and where they were on it was about how many emails were sent to the office.
So people would use that as sort of a gauge so whether or not people were paying attention and what they cared about. I mean, I represent an entire city. So that's 22 neighborhoods, about 655,000 people and growing.
It's impossible to get consensus on anything. But I don't think that's what people elected me to do. It's not my job to do what the most people tell me to do.
I think I was elected to actualize my values and to exercise my best judgment. And so there are different, you know, resources that I pulled from with which to inform that judgment.
And social media has become one of those things. Let me share with you one positive example of that.
My first year in office, we saw that there was a Scuddle Blood on social media. A lot of people posting about having Harvard alumni that were excluded from a venue or public accommodation in the city of Boston.
And there was this critical mass sort of talk happening online. And my consultant, who at the time was my chief of staff, raised it with me.
And I said, well, this is unacceptable, you know, no venue, no licensed venue in the city of Boston should be discriminating against anyone.
And just the short of the story is that people were here for the annual reunion, you know, and they were African-American.
They had rented a venue online to have a social gathering after a big game.
And the operators of the venue didn't know that they were African-American until they arrived. And when they arrived, they said that there were no gang bangers online.
And that there were a lot of black women there. And when there were black women, there were going to be a lot of black men.
And that it just seemed dangerous. And they, even though the venue had already been paid for and everything, and they were asking people to provide their Harvard ID.
They were people who graduated 20 years ago, you know. And so they shut the event down.
So they profiled people in line. They discriminated against people. And, you know, it really perpetuated this stereotype about Boston in terms of it not being welcoming and not being inclusive.
And, you know, not only did those people leave the city with a bad taste in their mouth, but a perpetuated narrative about Boston.
They also left with their money. And they left with their innovation, right?
So that was, so the social media highlighted this problem. We then bumped that up to the attorney general.
There was a formal investigation. That venue was found guilty of discrimination.
And for the first time ever, because we know this discrimination persists all the time, people had sort of been lulled into complacency about it.
And some even thought, well, what's the big deal that's happened? But for the first time ever, a venue was fined for discrimination, $30,000.
And that money was then distributed to organizations committed to the higher education of African Americans.
You know, so that's just one such example that we're not for social media, even though we know that discrimination is pervasive and existed many facets.
It would not have been illuminated to us, and we would have not have had the critical mass of complaints just from social media we knew was about 100 people.
And that then informed my advocacy and my work as a policymaker.
Thank you. I want to open it up to the group now. We have time for a couple of questions from Matt here before we go back to our lightning talks.
Yes, I'm not the lightning person. I'm the granddaughter of a preacher. I'm not the lightning person. I apologize.
If you're talking about that, I think you said that the city media might exacerbate people's tendency to get a yes-no from politicians.
But certainly the internet hasn't been around forever, but do you think it's a natural tendency for people to want to look in terms of black and white, yes-no, by-interview thinking?
That's human nature that needs to be addressed as a rude cause, I guess.
No, absolutely. I mean, I think that's a challenge for all of us. I think that's a cultural challenge.
And one, again, I'm always trying to confront because I think if we're not dealing in the gradations, then we're going to be developing solutions and policies that are really rather shallow.
As an elected official, I work a 60-80 hour day. I'm traversing neighborhoods all the time.
And there are these impressions that I'm receiving. It's incoming all the time.
I don't get to choose. I have priorities. I don't get to choose what I work on because there are urgent demands all around me.
Things are being impressed upon me all the time, but I rarely have the space to pause to glean any meaning from those impressions to then develop thoughtful policy.
This has become very challenging because so many in the electorate are really defining leadership by what you show up at.
And the problem with that is that it becomes these sort of political, for lack of a better phrase, drive-bys where people go to an event to be recognized and leave and go to the netics.
But they're not sitting and being fully present in community to actively listen.
We can't work cooperatively if you don't even allow yourself the space to actively listen and to be present.
So I'm always trying to fight against this binary choice pressure that's bearing down on all of us because I think ultimately the policies suffer.
So that's my challenge as an elected official to say that we've got to be able to create the space to be thoughtful, to be meaningful, to process what we're hearing every day.
Because that's really our job, is to be thinkers.
The college professor doesn't have time to read anymore.
There were a couple of other hands up that I saw. Let's go back to Errol.
Thank you. Wonderful, wonderful talk.
I was thinking about one of the presentations we had before this had a heavy emphasis on youth engagement.
We were thinking, though, about our older citizens of the city of Boston and how they're providing care for the youngest citizens of the city as well,
and are very much connected and part of this.
And thinking about, especially with the emphasis on social media and maybe families and adults that are disconnected in various ways,
how can we best bring them, because they've already been part of the city.
And some of the solutions and things that they've offered up have been ignored, and it doesn't mean they haven't had them for a number of years.
So thinking about in what ways that kind of intergenerational force can be leveraged in this situation.
Well, I mean, I agree with you, and I'm often speaking about the grain of America.
You know, we have a booming baby boomer population, and people are so focused on those in the dawn of their lives
and in the prime of their life that we are often leaving out those in the twilight of their lives.
And we do need to figure that out, because people are living longer, and we do want to make sure that people are remain connected to community.
But I would just say that, again, the challenge, everything comes back to verbiage, to words, to language,
that when we talk about our more mature citizens, I think there's only one narrative that is used.
It's this idea of this homebound, isolated, you know, mobility compromise senior.
I mean, there are diversity of experiences on the spectrum of being an elder, of being a senior citizen, of being a mature person.
And it's really incumbent upon us in government to creatively address those and to engage people accordingly.
But again, it's much easier for us to just address one narrative within that spectrum, because that's all we're hearing.
You know, so it's just, again, we have to not allow constituencies or people to become single issue,
or to become defined by one profile and one narrative, because government will meet that need and move on to the next.
So, you know, that is something that I'm, you know, working on all the time.
And to your point about more elder citizens raising our young people, yes.
We see that, we've seen a trend for the last 15 years and that of more grandparents raising grandchildren
because of the impacts of addiction, the opiate epidemic, incarceration, growing poverty and so many other things.
So, you know, it's 2016 and I'll just close on this and say that, you know, everything is language and begins there.
You know, that's where advocacy starts, you know, sort of how you tell the story.
Narrative is so important.
And we have got to recognize that in 2016 we have a diversity of family models.
You know, and it's incumbent upon government to recognize that and to make sure that that is reflected in our policies.
Thank you. And I think we'll end this session now.
Will you be able to stick around for a little bit of time?
I'm not sure. These are mine.
Okay. We have two more lightning talks and then we're going to have a little bit more of a discussion.
So, if you could stick around for another half hour or so, then you can hopefully participate in that as well.
I can. Don't hook me when I need to go.
All right. So, please, help me in thanking Iowa.
