(Instrumental music)
Unless you're in a crisis,
you don't know if you can really execute.
It turns out that a crisis like the one we faced in 2020
has shown that we can really bring the best out of people,
and have them work together in ways
that we never even predicted or expected.
When I think about COVID-19,
or I think about racial injustice in this country,
I think our students are starting to see
the ability to be that person creating a solution.
This is the first time that every single thing that I do
not only impacts community,
but it impacts me as an individual.
It's more than just, I'm going to work today.
It's, I'm fighting for my life today.
I never, never expected to deal with a pandemic,
so I've learned to be very flexible,
implementing solutions based on
what the community is needing.
This is a time where community organizers
are teaching us how to dream.
Things become possible from impossible
really quickly during these times.
At CZI, we are about building
a better future for everyone,
and for us, that means working within a greater ecosystem
to complement all the amazing work
that's already happening in science,
criminal justice reform, housing,
community, supporting the whole child.
We are so inspired by our grantees work,
and we hope that the world sees how important this work is,
how big of an impact we can make together
if we invested to build a better future, collectively.
(Ocean wave sound and birds chirping)
One of the things that we've been thinking hard about
here at the Biohub is how we could put together a system
that would detect new and emerging pathogens
in a broad range of different countries around the world.
Little did we know that we would need these tools
right in our backyard.
When Steve Quake and I started the Biohub,
it was really just kind of a fanciful idea.
What if we have these different disciplines,
engineering, physics, math, biology inside this hub?
And so when COVID-19 hit, we were sort of ideally positioned
to capitalize on having all those different expertises
come together to work on this problem,
which was how do we get fast testing to the people quick?
We built a complete COVID-19 testing lab.
And we did it in eight days.
We began to understand that the virus
is not evenly distributed in our communities.
For example, in the Mission District,
we found that over 90% of the positives
were from the Latinx community,
and that correlated very closely
with their inability to work at home only.
This was incredibly important
for actually forming new legislation
here in California and in the city
about the right to recover,
being able to keep your job if you were forced to isolate
and quarantine if you're positive for the virus.
These are all key social determinants and social changes
that are going to be necessary to really combat this virus.
We're part of the community,
and we have a responsibility to the community we live in.
The South Coast is a geographically large community,
but there's only about 5,000 residents in the area.
There's about half of the people that are Anglos,
and half of the people that are Latinos.
A lot of them are first generation immigrants,
or some of them the sons and daughters of immigrants.
The main industry is definitely agriculture.
Puente is a nonprofit organization
that serves the South Coast, and we provide health programs,
educations, and economic security services.
The reality test, at least to me,
came when I had community members
telling us that they got furloughed for 40 days,
and so we put a focus on the health and the economic impact.
We started distributing PPE, hand sanitizers, masks,
and we started food distribution almost right away.
We started testing directly at the farms,
and testing for community members,
and so the team just wore all these different hats,
and you see them all geared out with PPE,
assisting directly, so that we know
which community members need to isolate.
We have provided a stipend
to undocumented families twice now.
That makes me really happy to know
that the resources are going to the people that need it.
I think it was helpful to be the ones
assisting with that response
because they knew us, they knew our faces,
and they don't have to feel that
their legal status or low income
had anything to do with them accessing what they need to,
and what their children need to.
And I can bet you some of those children
are gonna be the leaders of our community
in the years to come.
Hello, kindergarten.
(children chatting)
PilotED is an elementary school.
When thinking about,
well, what's so radically different about that school,
or so radically different about our curriculum,
so much of it is centered around our student identity,
and then the identity of the teachers in the room.
We don't shy away from conversations about race,
or gender, or religion, or sexuality, or family structure.
We take those things head on.
When a kid is coming in with issues of food insecurity,
or home insecurity, or potential abuse at home,
we make that our issue.
The school did end up getting closed down
for spring quarter.
Our kids struggled.
You know, when I think about a five-year-old who's used to showing up,
going to the school farm, or going to the cafeteria,
you quickly strip all that away,
and yes, kids need to start learning at home,
but they also need to figure out ways
to make that human connection,
and so we had virtual fun days,
and eventually opened up the park next door to the school
and had cooking nights, and pottery nights,
and movies in the park nights,
because in this virtual learning environment,
we have to double down on the mental, and spiritual,
and emotional well-being of our kids, too.
(crowd applauding)
Can we give it up for our families out here?
(crowd cheering)
If our kids are showing up with anxiety about racial injustice,
coronavirus, and the virtual learning experience.
The fact that we have those vulnerable conversations
will prepare us to take on anything
that society throws at us.
And furthermore, not only handle these things,
but also create solutions for them,
and it feels really good to kind of sit in a place
where we have team members who are dedicated to that.
Working for 15 years with youth and families,
and doing case management with them,
I started to recognize and realize
that it was deeper than that one-on-one care,
that it was policies that needed to be changed.
As a lobbyist, I'm educating whoever it is
that I'm talking to about the issue.
The legislators have issues that mean a whole lot to them,
and that they carry near and dear to their heart,
but there's other things that they have no idea about
because they haven't experienced them,
and so what I've learned is that it's my job
as a black masculine-presenting woman
to walk in and stand in those gaps,
and show, like, I'm just a person, and these are the issues,
and this is the reason why you should care about 'em.
When COVID-19 occurred, we knew that we needed to figure out
how to get people released from our local jails and prisons.
We knew that if we got people released,
people were still gonna need housing,
people were gonna need access to health care,
and we identified service providers across the state,
and some of those people provided housing,
some people were having money to get people IDs,
and birth certificates, and social security cards.
And so we literally, during this time,
have been able to beef up our re-entry efforts
here in Kentucky.
I know and I understand that the community that I envision,
I may not ever see it,
but it's my job and my duty to paint the vision,
and to start doing the work and to start planting the seeds.
So whatever your issue is, whatever keeps you up at night,
the lack of affordable housing
sits somewhere at the root of that issue.
If you care about racial inequality,
you have to care that most white Americans own their homes,
while most black and Latino families,
because of years of racial discrimination, they don't,
and they are disproportionately
exposed to the eviction crisis.
To really understand poverty in America,
we also really have to understand housing and eviction.
And so we here at The Eviction Lab have built the first ever
national database of eviction in America.
We can tell you every year in America,
about 3.7 million evictions are filed.
That's seven evictions filed every minute.
So when COVID hit,
we immediately thought of renters facing eviction,
and so we developed a new tool
called the eviction tracking system,
and we started tracking evictions in several cities
across the country, and releasing numbers on a weekly basis.
And policymakers have taken notice.
In fact, when the CDC released
it's national eviction moratorium, they cited our research,
and I think that it speaks to the power of data
to move federal policy.
So what would it mean to stop evictions?
Communities would be stable, families would know each other,
they'd be able to kind of invest in a community
and understand the value of a home,
make their neighborhood safer,
because they know they're gonna be there next year.
It would mean that kids would know
they could go to the same school year after year.
It's an investment in education,
it's an investment in our communities,
and it's investment to economic mobility
and social mobility.
2020 has been a tough year,
but I think what we've learned
is how we could really come together
to do something that otherwise wouldn't have happened.
And how do we actually harness that magic,
and deploy it in new and innovative areas?
Many things that are moving us forward,
those things have been moved forward
by the tenacity of grassroots movements,
and so I think that folks on the ground demanding more,
out of themselves and out of us, gives me a lot of hope.
I know that it's not enough for one organization,
whether it's CZI or one grantee,
to be invested in this work.
We need to build a movement together
to build a better future.
The world that we want to see, none of us have lived it,
but what we do know is that we can have a different nation,
but these are the things that it's gonna take
for us to get there.