Good afternoon.
Thank you everybody for joining us today.
I am thrilled
that our ABNY Speaker is Darren Walker
leader of the Ford Foundation a 13
billion dollar
international social justice
philanthropy he is a man with a
staggering list of accomplishments but
he is really so much more than that
Darren is an anchor of our city as well
as an anchor of our nation
he is someone who  with great firmness as
well as great compassion
is able to bring us together challenge
us and encourage us really to be our
better selves
we at ABNY have been incredibly
fortunate to benefit from his insight
and his direction firsthand he co-chairs
our census 2020 organizing and action
committee and his wise and strategic
counsel
his advice and his support over the past
few years has really helped us build
towards a fair count and for those who
have not filled out the census form
please do so he is also a member of the
governor cuomo's reimagine your
commission he's chaired the new york
city mayoral advisory commission on city
art monuments
markers he served on the independent
commission on new york city's criminal
justice and incarceration reform to name
just a few
darren grew up in texas he is the son of
a single mother he was a head start kid
recruited to the program's first
preschool class in 1965.
it was an opportunity that set him on
his path first the university of texas
for both
grad undergraduate and law school and
then to new york
where he's put down roots to become a
pillar of our community something we are
incredibly fortunate that took place
his story is proof that programs that
help raise people up like head start and
the pell grant he received
have the power to create unlimited
possibilities both for individuals and
for our society at large
before joining forward darren was the
vice president at the rockefeller
foundation
he also is the ceo of abyssinian
development corporation
now as president of ford of the ford
foundation it is one of the world's
largest
foundations since taking the role in
2013
he has tackled inequity as his primary
mission
he knew that to do more good and pushed
for justice he had to rethink
philanthropy
embracing different ideas different
voices and different models
his mission is more relevant than ever
in the midst of a global pandemic
that has disproportionately impact black
and other communities of color darren
has challenged us all to look at the
structures that maintain privilege
that block social and economic mobility
and that help
and to help advance the changes that
create opportunity
and advance a more fair and just society
in a time with so much tough and rough
news for us
his faith in people in our country in
our city his belief that we can grow
together and
improve is truly inspiring and i'm
grateful he's here today
to share his wisdom and experience in
recent weeks
we heard from our public advocate jamani
williams last week we heard from deputy
mayor phil thompson
as part of our series on conversations
with black leaders
i want to thank melvin miller and laura
cruccio for conceiving and building this
important series
and i look forward to what's ahead in
that as new yorkers we are on a journey
together one i believe
will continue to lead to a better new
york i hope the insights and
perspectives we're hearing and the
conversations we're having will deepen
our understanding of each other and the
actions we must take
to make our city more just more fair
more equitable
and more anti-racist and to do the right
thing now it's my privilege to introduce
our moderator for
today jennifer jones austin the ceo and
executive director
of the federation of protestant welfare
agencies
she's a leader in the fight against
poverty you guys know where she is a
rock star
who throughout her career has empowered
the disenfranchised and
marginalized she has served also as the
senior vice president of the united way
of new york
as family services and coordinator for
mayor bloomberg
as deputy commissioner for the nyc
administration for children's services
at that time and as civil rights deputy
bureau chief for attorney general elliot
spitzer
i'm proud to say she's also an avenue
census organizing and action committee
member
we'll have to wrap up at 1 45 on the
nose today so without further ado i will
get off and pass this to jennifer and
darren thank you both so much
thank you thank you thank you for having
me
and uh steve i want to thank you stephen
you and abney for
uh providing me this moment for me it's
a rockstar moment a moment that i get to
spend some time
conversing with darren with darren
walker um
i'll let you in on a little secret i am
supposedly taking the day off but when
the invitation came
from abny to spend a little time with
darren i said of course i'm doing it
and darren you are the highlight of my
day you are probably the highlight
of my week um i think you know how much
i appreciate
uh admire revere you and this is just an
opportunity
for me um to be reminded that there are
other people who are in on this
conversation but to
to like you know me learn from you learn
more about you
uh and and and and learn more about kind
of how we all can be showing up in this
this moment we're all here right now for
a reason for a purpose and a reason and
so
there are many of us who want to learn
from you and that's what we're going to
do in this next little while
we're going to talk about uh you as a
leader your journey to
leadership we're going to talk about um
how we all can show up in this moment of
social change and what that can look
like
and and that can be both from you know
like thinking about it philanthropically
to um how we can serve our communities
and serve organizations seeking to serve
others
so i'm just going to jump right in
that's okay with you
i want to begin uh with you sharing with
us
your journey and as um i
mentioned to you i uh you know we all
can read your
cv we can go online and we can read
wikipedia we could read all of the the
articles written about you and there are
many for many good reasons what i'm
curious about is
what really has made you who you are i
once heard
congressman elijah cummings talk about
the footnotes
those experiences along the way there's
law school there's undergrad there's
this job that job
but what are those defining moments that
have
poured into you to become the leader you
are well thank you
jennifer i um you and steven the
combination
i feel like um i believe it was in
richard
ii uh i love shakespeare but there was
at one point where richard says
my life reads much more interesting far
more interesting than it actually
is so you and stephen have been
enormously generous
and as have all of the abny members i
am so grateful to abny
for what it stands for this is a city
unlike any other in terms of the people
committed
to the civic good and the private sector
especially it's really impressive and
during these moments
uh abny is more important than ever
you know i'm jennifer you and i are long
time friends so i
i don't want i'm interested in talking
about me only to the extent that it is
helpful to talk about the moment we're
in and what
are i'm really not interested in talking
about me
kwame um but i do think that
we all have those footnotes and you know
growing up black uh poor gay in a small
town
in texas there are absolutely imprints
on your life experience and we all have
those
experiences i think of so many i mean
when i was
13 i uh had my first job as a busboy in
a restaurant
and it taught me so much because when
you are a bus boys you know
you are the bottom rung uh you and the
dishwasher
are uh the least uh status um
employees and you do everything from you
know clean the toilets to
um bus tables and one of the things that
i learned
from that experience was what it feels
like
to be truly marginalized in
in a place and a space because your job
as a busboy
is to walk around the perimeter of the
room
and be invisible while you are waiting
on people who
often extend to you no
dignity or in any way recognize
your humanity and i
have taken experiences like that with me
on a journey because so much of what i
see in the world today and so much of
what
i am so fortunate to be engaged in here
at ford
is work to
ensure that every person is extended
dignity
and that the idea that we all
possess humanity is something that
is not fully understood in our society
today
and we have too many of those of us who
have benefited
from the system and the system
which quite candidly
i've lived with privilege and i've lived
without privilege
and i will tell you there is a
difference and i will tell you
that when you live with privilege
the winds are behind you
you literally have the tailwind that
just
simply by showing up every day your
privilege is compounded
just as you as a disadvantaged
lower income person have the tailwinds
that are compounding your disadvantage
and we have in our society today and
this is why
we have brought all of our focus to the
issue of inequality at ford
we have too much inequality we
have too little opportunity and when i
was a boy
even though i experienced racism
homophobia
all sorts of things that were barriers
i never once felt
that my country wasn't cheering me on
that there were not uh behind me
uh a a set of infrastructure
supports that would propel me forward
if i worked hard and played by the rules
and did all the things that i was taught
to do
today i don't feel that little black
and brown boys and girls in small towns
and housing projects
or for that matter a lot of
working-class white people
in this country feel that america is
cheering them on they feel
they feel as the survey the pew the
gallup surveys
tell us what they feel what they feel
according to those surveys
increasingly is that our systems are
rigged
they are rigged for elites they're a
rigged for people like us
who have been big winners i have been a
big winner
in this uh this economy the kind of
capitalism that we have today that is
generating far too much inequality and
so the question today for
those of us who have been been big
winners is not what
are you going to give back but it's what
are you going to give
up absolutely absolutely and at the new
york times piece the opinion piece that
you wrote
really speaks to this issue that for all
of us
who have benefited from the
opportunities that were presented us or
that we just
were born into we all have some
privilege
or i should say many of us who are
privileged have you know have a role in
a responsibility it's not
just a white black thing it's all of us
in this moment
um you know stephen introduced you and
talked about
your having benefited from head start
and what we are seeing increasingly
uh head start has always been challenged
through the years
uh and other you know support programs
have been challenged but they're being
ever more challenged
people often want to look now and say
well what is really the value out of
these programs and so many of us
are fighting to make sure that these
programs are maintained
would you if someone asked you i'm just
going to ask you
can someone do you believe that it is as
easy
today and you know this builds on what
you the point you spoke to
as easy today for someone with uh
your your childhood and your childhood
experiences with respect to
growing up as you've noted in the one
percent uh
lowest income do you think that a child
in america today
has the chances that you had to succeed
and become
uh you know someone who's accomplished
as much as you not just
on but not just because of merit but
because of all of the opportunities
presented
uh you know not looking at head start as
a handout per se
do you think that someone in your shoes
today
a little boy in your shoes today has the
opportunities that you had
in america the answer is
no that's not my
opinion that's not anecdote that's a
fact
the data i think supports this the
evidence
is incontrovertible that a young person
today
the likelihood of their being able to
get on the mobility escalator has
significantly
declined the sad reality is that if you
want the american dream today
you should move to canada because canada
is delivering more social mobility
more opportunity for lower income people
to move up in society and that
is a ringing
indictment of the united states that
today
we do not have that i never once
considered the cost of
education as a barrier
to my getting a college degree
i never once thought about that i i of
course knew that i didn't have the money
but i knew that there were pathways
through
the pell grant through private
scholarships
through work study through the various
mechanisms and that it was all within
reach today that is just simply
not the case so when i graduated
and went to law school came to new york
i did that all debt-free and so
today that same young
person comes to new york
with six figures of college debt
or law school debt and it significantly
impedes your ability to do the things
that we should be doing i was talking
with my friend robert smith recently
because
in acknowledging the great thing that he
did for morehouse
in that graduating class of 2019
where he paid he played the paid off all
of their loans
he paid off all of their loans and but
what i was saying to robert
is i need him to also speak to why
private philanthropy can't solve that
problem
and it becomes sometimes a distraction
when people say you see that's the
solution we just need
uh billionaires to adopt uh
a graduating class uh that is not
a systemic uh scalable
solution to what is a major public
policy
challenge right right gotta have the
government engagement
to ask the question to set the
parameters for what college out of cost
for a low income a moderate income
student now that's not to say that
colleges need to be regulated in this
way by
government but it is to say that
government
and the public has a role to play in
investing in human capital my country
believed in my potential
that was manifest in the head start
program that was manifest in the
good public schools i attended i'm proud
to say
jennifer that i have never attended a
day of private
education in my life and the places and
spaces
i occupy today that is such
a rarity it is such a rarity to find
anyone
um in many places here at the ford
foundation where you say
have you ever attended any kind of
private school
almost everyone raises their hand um
and i believe that is a problem
when we have disinvested so
in the public anything
public education public parks
public housing we have privatized
the idea of public goods and public
assets
and that's very dangerous in a democracy
so how do we begin to to change
this this dynamic this picture this the
environment in which we now
live for so long uh you know the
response of the the response of
philanthropy has
been kind of these one-off like projects
or programs but not really
engaging in social impact work
and maybe not really understanding that
uh and even sometimes not willing to
engage in
uh the work that brings about change in
policy
uh you know but you know sometimes
people say well
you've got philanthropy investing
billions and billions and millions of
dollars
in aggregate and you don't see real
change
but very often that's because we're
investing in a little program here a
little program there
and we're not really looking for social
impact
so so what do you think in this moment
businesses individuals uh
people already in the philanthropic
space in philanthropy
should be doing uh should we be engaging
more with government
should we be engaging just with the big
institutions like
what what should we be doing so let me
just
take on one this uh
this canard that i think i uh
hear and that is we've nev we've not
made any progress all billions
trillions have been expended and we've
made no progress so first of all
that's not true there was
a period in from
the middle 1960s
to 1979 where we saw
tremendous progress
in terms of poverty alleviation
educational achievement and attainment
we saw advances in the workplace
the numbers of people of people of color
particularly african-americans going
into professional schools
we saw unprecedented progress that
progress began
to level off and then reverse itself
it is what the data tells us no no no no
no
what i'm saying to you is why do you
think it leveled off because yes
i mean i i will tell you why i think it
leveled off but why i think it leveled
off is because what the data tells
us and me okay are the reasons the
reasons
are one we reduced our commitment to
anti-poverty
we experienced the backlash
to affirmative action and the pernicious
idea of
reverse discrimination and so we had the
baki case
and other cases that sought to reduce
our country's commitment to taking
affirmative steps
to bring in previously excluded
populations particularly african
americans we saw an assault on that
so and we saw corresponding reductions
concurrently we saw the implementation
of the war on drugs
which desecrated our communities
and criminalized black men and women
and large numbers and
we saw a change in the
corporate structure of our economy
which moved from what had been a more of
a stakeholder capitalism idea
to this friedman milton friedman idea of
the role of the corporation
is to earn returns for its shareholders
right
that's the role of a company all of this
together
set us on this course that resulted
uh 30 40 years later in
uh mass incarceration of black and brown
bodies
in the uh assault on the idea of
government
just the notion that government has a
role to play
uh there's been a an effect and a very
effective
effort to undermine that very idea
and we have seen the growing inequality
in our system and that economic
inequality which results from
uh and again i think the uh i am a
capitalist but i believe the kind of
capitalism we have today is
actually harming our democracy indeed
part of that harm
has been this this sort of friedman idea
um and and that is what did away
with many of the mechanisms for
uh for equality so my grandfather had a
third grade education
and was semi-literate but he worked as a
porter and a shoeshine man at an oil
company in houston
as a part of his compensation he
had an old-fashioned profit-sharing plan
and he got the stock of that company
which is today anadarka
oil company but he got that stock and
when he retired
his social security check and that stock
gave him a life of comfort
they traveled they went to disneyland
they saw their relatives who moved out
to la
they did all the things that uh
middle-class americans dream of doing
but that has ended today so we have an
economy that says
if you give to workers shame on you
and we saw that several years ago the
chairman of delta airlines
uh announced that he after a banner
record year was sharing
profits with workers
and he was roundly assaulted by the
analysts
uh in the airline industry who
the coverage of the airline industry
analyst who said
those dollars don't belong to them they
belong to the shareholders
and we're going to ding your stock
because you shouldn't be giving that
money to the workers
so we've had all of these things working
concurrently
that bring us to this place we are today
which in order to change we must have
leadership we must have leadership in
washington and leadership
at the helm of our corporations both
our public companies and importantly
what is off the grid that policy makers
don't even
fully get which is we have
fewer public companies today
than we had five years ago and fewer
than we had 10 years ago
and that is because companies can get
money
in the private capital markets they
don't need to go public necessarily so
we have fewer companies so what has
happened in this last
20 years has been the burgeoning growth
of private equity and privately held
companies
which today employ millions
of people and in fact we
the russell 3000 index doesn't even have
3 000 companies anymore
in it because of the growth of private
uh
sector i'm sorry of private equity and
privately held companies
so the whole thing needs to be taken on
and um it's going to take real
leadership to make that happen jennifer
i think we need to get you
in charge you see if we had you in
charge i think a lot of these problems
would
be taken care of you know i and i love
you for that i love you for that i think
that you know one of our biggest
challenges in this moment is that
people don't know the history and so
they look to the last five
10 15 years and they look to uh
you know they look to like the um the
high
uh incarceration of black persons they
look to
you know what is the current uh
achievement gap
of black and brown children and they say
see these programs don't work they don't
mean anything
and and that serves the narrative that
then allows them to continue down this
path
of disinvestment and disengagement
um you know one of the things that i
appreciate
about you uh uh darren is that
you know i i feel like you bring your
whole self
to everything that you do that your
professional is your
personal and and your personal is your
professional
and that allows you to see what is
happening in this world and how we all
have to be a part of the change
so as organizations businesses um
non-profit uh you know and and and
for-profit businesses
are thinking about how they show up in
this moment yeah i'm going to ask you
what do you think
are um what are the opportunities and
what are the dangers
yeah one of the things that i'm
concerned about right now is everybody's
now saying
you know black lives matter and they're
you know the banner goes across the you
know the front of the website page
and that suggests that you know i'm you
know i'm on board
and you know we're good to go or let's
go find an additional few
you know persons of color to populate
our board with and we've done what we
need to do
what does real social change look like
right now for corporations
and even for those in the public sector
and in the not-for-profit sector
so we're seeing you know unprecedented
uh
engagement on this issue as a result of
the murder of george floyd
and ahmad aubry and brianna taylor and
so many others because
after the murder of george floyd i think
it became
clear that racism
was no longer deniable deniability was
no longer an
option for white americans
in the wake of that murder and it
allowed for the first time
a kind of a collective acknowledgement
of a reality that many folks of color
have lived
for over 400 years in this country
and i see today
sort of two things happening on the one
hand you're right jennifer there is
a tremendous amount of virtue signaling
of guilt grants of issuances
of platitudes about black lives matter
and the crisis communication
staff have come up with amazing words
and language and
allegorical imagery in your commercials
etc
and then separately i am seeing
leaders make fundamental
transformational announcements
and commitments and this is what we need
we need to move
beyond the kind of tokenism
that has been acceptable to a real
conversation about transformation
and and we have to do this in the spirit
of helping us all
unite and heal
we can be better than where we
are today i
grieve for my country today
i grieve because it is it is
not the america i want
and i want to believe
uh as uh as langston hughes believed
in the great poem when he says let
america be
america again america
never was america to me
but he goes on to say and yet
one day america will be
because he had faith that even
in spite of seeing the
ugly underbelly of racism
that he experienced as a black man he
believed in america
and i think that for so many of us and
john lewis of course is my hero in this
regard
you have to carry with you that rage
and that optimism and that belief in
this country
and we're seeing actions by leaders
that give us reasons for hope
and much of that is coming from the
private sector quite candidly
it is coming from ceos
and board rooms who are waking up
and literally hearing for the first time
their black employees
tell them the stories of the racism they
experience
between getting in their car
and driving to the office the fears they
have
of just being stopped by law enforcement
and also they are listening to the
narratives
of racism that actually
happens at the workplace and
i think for a lot of ceos this has been
an incredibly challenging period
because they are hearing things uh
for the first time that they they may
have
heard but they are listening
in a different way and so i'm actually
encouraged
i'm not saying that you know corporate
america is going to transform itself
overnight that's not going to happen but
i do believe that we are
seeing reasons for hope and exemplars
of the way in which a path forward can
be
forged that will get us to a better day
a better more more
shared prosperity kind of economy
that makes it possible to believe again
and and um do you believe
that um that that
that that this this moment
is different in that the door is not
going to close overnight
um you know there's a lot that we're
asking that we are desirous of
uh with respect to change in our in our
in
in corporations and businesses uh for me
even in the nonprofit sector i believe
that we need to see some change and
i say all the time that just because
organizations are serving individuals
children and families
doesn't mean that there isn't systemic
racism and bias that is ever present in
their services and how they engage with
staff
um how do we ensure this moment that the
door doesn't close
overnight i mean one of my biggest and
i'm not i'm an i'm an eternal optimist i
believe in this moment
i believe in showing up to be all that
we can be in this moment because
we're here we're purposed to be here at
this moment
to lead and to serve you know but i i
get anxious
when i see um and i hear people talking
about systemic racism
and limiting it to police misconduct
police brutality excessive use of force
when systemic racism is present
in just about every pillar of our
society
how do we ensure against the door
closing too quickly
well i think the door is not going to
close
quickly because of several reasons one
within corporations we have something we
did not have 10 or 20 years ago
we have large numbers of
african-american employees
who are often organized they're not
organized
necessarily at like a union but they're
organized in employee resource groups
in various affinity groups and these
groups are demanding accountability and
i've heard white ceo say
i've never felt this kind of pressure
from my black employees for example
so that's changed the
external customer
consumer client base is changing and
they are demanding
as well accountability around these
matters the gatekeepers have changed and
jennifer in certainly in the space that
you and i
occupy when was there ever a time
when four of the top 10
foundations in america were
headed by african americans indeed
when was there ever a time that we where
we saw
the leadership of so many of these
institutions
changing to be led by people of color
and so i believe the gatekeepers
whether they be at foundations
uh in the nonprofit sector
in media when was the last time there
was a black man as executive editor
of the new york times it should not come
as a surprise
that the times is journalism
has embraced this moment and is acting
and is giving light to these issues of
systemic racism in both its editorial
page
and the journalism that it covers so
i think that we are not going back
uh the gatekeepers whether it's
me and elizabeth alexander at mellon who
are deciding
the parameters of who gets grants
to the people in government who are
saying these are the organizations who
we should be investing
our government pension funds uh in um
etc etc too much has changed to go back
and i actually don't think we want to go
back most of us i think
and i don't think and then to be really
explicit
i don't think most white people want to
go back
i think most white people
are troubled by the idea they don't want
to live in a racist america and so i
think the work that we
have to do is together be
on that journey and we have to give
space
and um uh the the the time
and the and and the opportunity to make
mistakes
to our white brothers and sisters who
want to be on the journey with us
but out of um out of naivete i mean
you knew my dear david my partner of 26
years who
was when i met him just you know a nice
um
you know 30 year old you know guy from
chappaqua new york
who had never actually engaged with
black people
and his just naivete
and ignorance and um
in no way intentional but some of the
things he used to say
when we were first going out in no way
were
intentional they were just ignorant they
were just like uninformed
and i can imagine that today if he were
to
be you know uh
be videotaped saying some of those
things that were just
clueless he could be called a racist and
what he should he was crying
but he was crying oh he was on the
journey i mean look he was
he was you know in love with the black
man
much to the horror of a whole lot of
people and um
obviously he was on the journey but he
was not
informed on that journey he was not even
prepared
to be on the journey you know he wanted
to be on the journey
right i had a conversation uh i i'm a
part of a book club now titled the
uncomfortable book club
discussion and it is a group of about
20 women uh the majority of the great
majority of which
are persons who are white and
our first book is white fragility and uh
one of the organizers of the book club
woman who is white
opened up with i just realized after
george floyd
it is my turn to give back and it was
like
you know okay but we got to get that
it's not giving back
it's being a part of the solution right
and and so i think that that's
you know people they may not say exactly
they may not express it the way that
they intended
and right now in this moment people do
want to be a part
of this very necessary this very
critical solution
when you are making grants uh
to institutions do you look at their
um you know their board uh and look at
that absolutely
just to be really clear we have
uh with every invitation for a proposal
when
if we get an interesting proposal or and
we then invite you to
submit a full proposal in that uh
email package that you get from us is
our diversity
um table and we want to know
um both you know the people of color uh
disability and and other um
diversity uh characteristics of your
organization the board
um and it's material uh to whether you
get a grant from the ford foundation we
take
um a racial equity lens
to much of our work um and and because
of that it leads us to more likely
fund organizations that are
led by have significant representation
on their boards
and staff people of color that's not to
say that we
don't fund
majority-wide organizations we
absolutely do
but often even in those cases we
are interested in their diversity work
we're we're interested in helping them
uh to become more inclusive
organizations but it is very important
because when we have done this and other
foundations are also doing it
so this is the way when i was
referencing gatekeepers and how
gatekeepers can change systems
and our and recognizing our influence
if we i know that if the ford foundation
implements
a policy other foundations may or may
not
do it but they will certainly uh
want to know about it and many of them
will ultimately make those changes
and you know and i think we've only got
two minutes left unfortunately but i i
do want
for those who don't know to know that
you've been advancing this change
uh for for decades now and just speaking
about the ford foundation i i remember
several years ago when you determined to
sell off
of the art collection of the ford
foundation and to re-imagine
uh the art uh you know the art
collection for
for the for the foundation there were a
lot of people whose you know eyes wide
and larger than mine like what are you
doing
but you had a you had an objective you
had an aim and you wanted to evidence
the importance
of you know like inclusion and diversity
and the diversity of our i mean we
had a wonderful collection that henry
ford ii
had acquired a very
typical 1960s kind of a collection
um all male 1 woman
mostly european artists so we had
a lot of drawings of picasso
chagall renoir
i mean we had a lot of that wonderful
things
but the trustees uh decided
um that the vision that i put forward
for transformation of the foundation
around
social justice uh inequality
um and and inclusion of
of all of us in the narrative
um precluded uh um
the idea of such an art collection and
so
i was very excited that the trustees
agreed with my recommendation to
de-assession the collection
and to take the proceeds of that cell
and acquire new works and i'm
thrilled about the works we've acquired
the first of which
is a monumental piece in our lobby by
the artist kahindi wiley
who did the great portrait of president
obama
of course we could never afford a candy
wiley today we were lucky that uh we
we got ours before the obama
announcement was made
because that was a game changer but it's
a great uh
indicator but we've got artists from uh
carrie mae williams and carol walker and
glenn lygon i mean i could just go on
and on um just
a terrific array of artists um primarily
artists of color
um queer artists artists from
a native country um and of course
international given that we are a
foundation with
offices in 10 regions outside of the u.s
to have
artists from all of those regions
represented
as well was very important because we
see here
this intersection of art and justice
we know that art has a role to play
in in a human being's development
of our capacity for
humanity our capacity to see the
humanity in
others because we are more empathetic
through
uh art we we become more empathetic
by engaging in poetry and and the visual
arts and the performing arts and theater
and when i see
leaders when i see people today
who use language
calling other human beings names
that dehumanize their own humanity
that seek to strip them of their dignity
i look at those people and i know that
they have never read
kipling yes they have never seen
a beautiful painting
they have never seen the photography
of daoud bay they have never
witnessed anna devere smith on stage
that these are people who themselves
are suffering from a poverty
of intellect and a poverty of
of soul because their souls have not
been nourished
or nurtured by the arts because
when your soul is nourished and nurtured
by the arts
you see humanity all around you
and you have an ability to empathize
with those other human beings whatever
color they may be
whatever their status may be
because we're all humans and each and
every one of us deserves to live with
dignity
well we're at the end of our time but um
and that that may be my greatest
disappointment of the of the week
you were the biggest highlight and being
at the end of our time oh
it is my joy always jennifer jones
austin you know how much i love
you and i could i'll go anywhere i love
you
and you've managed uh in just a little
more than 40 minutes to
cause others i'm sure to just be totally
uh
enamored with you and all that you are
and how you were showing up in this
world and seeking to
change the world not just for some of us
but for all of us and never leaving
behind
uh those who some consider the least of
us
not in the least but we appreciate you
and i thank abney for allowing us this
moment
yay thank you stephen rubenstein and
abney and belva
thank you guys you guys are incredible
okay i'm so grateful you said
we're not going back you said we're on a
journey and i just want to thank you
both
for leading us on this journey and
hopefully i
i know you both will continue to lead us
and we're truly grateful
i just want to say everybody take care
we look forward to seeing you again soon
thank you thank you
