- Hello everybody, we're gonna go ahead and get started with our next session if you wanna make your way
- to your seat. If you can hear me, can you snap? Keep snapping. I feel like it brings good vibes. Alrighty,
- so as you're headed back to your seat, I have the pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker today.
- Out of curiosity, how are you guys feeling about the summit so far? Shout it out. Woo! I'm excited.
- I was just telling our panelists who were just up here that I feel greatly encouraged by their remarks
- and insights and experiences, but also equally convicted to not allow what we heard there in that panel
- to stay here in this room with us, but to carry that with us past the summit.
- into our work, into our homes, into our everyday lives. And so can we just give it a round of applause
- one more time for our panelists. So for our keynote speaker today, it will be Vu Li. Vu Li is an internationally
- internationally known keynote speaker, writer, and nonprofit leader. For those who've had an opportunity
- to see Morgan Stern's books, they are selling his new books, so check it out. Vu is known for his sharp
- insights, humor, unapologetically honest perspective. Vu speaks on topics including collective impact,
- equity, inclusion, burnout prevention, and the myths that often hold us back. I actually had an opportunity
- to hear Vu speak at a conference a few years ago. And again, I was equally encouraged as I was also
- convicted about next steps. And his remarks really shaped my perspective. And honestly, it was a breath
- of fresh air in a season where I felt incredibly heavy about the work ahead. And so I think you're really
- going to enjoy his remarks.
- He's a great man. Mary and I have had a great opportunity getting to know him in preparation of his
- summit keynote. A little bit more though about Vu is that he is a former executive director of RVC in
- Seattle. Vu has spent his career advancing social justice by developing leaders of color, strengthening
- organizations led by communities of color, and fostering collaboration across diverse communities. He
- challenges us to take our work seriously
- while also not taking ourselves too seriously. Any snaps for that? I'm thankful for the people in my
- life who do that for me. And lastly, Vu brings a blend of candid insight and humor to every keynote,
- drawing on real world experiences. And so I hope right now you have a notebook ready, a computer ready
- to take notes of the great remarks that he's gonna bring to us. Can you help me introduce and welcome
- Vu Lee to the stage, please?
- Thank you so much Tatiana. Hi everyone. Thank you heading home for inviting me here to speak. I got
- in here from Seattle this morning at like 1 a.m. and then I woke up at like 7 a.m. and I've been lurking
- here in the shadows like a hawk, like a sexy Asian hawk, just listening to y'all and reading your post-its
- and stuff. And I'm finally waking up now.
- which is great because y'all are full of tacos and you're probably sleepy. So we're going to do something
- to start off with, which I know some of you just love. It's called an icebreaker. I know. I know.
- I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, sir. It's OK. It will only be slightly painful, but it will be short,
- OK? And it's probably something you've probably never done before. I used to run an after-school program
- for low-income kids, and so we had to get them active all the time. So what we're going to do today is
- a rock, paper, scissors tournament. Here's how it's going to work. You've got to listen. You're going
- to start off as an egg. Everyone put your hands on your head. You're an egg. And then if you win battling
- another egg, you become a chicken. You're a chicken. If you win that battle, you become an eagle.
- Do that. Do that. You're an eagle. Great. Egg.
- chicken, eagle, then you're going to be Superman. My kids made this up, so I don't know what's in my
- program. And then if you win that round, you can become an angel, a non-denominational angel. So this
- is what you're going to do. Now, you've got to find the people on your same level to battle. And it's
- going to be one, two, three, shoot. One, two, three, shoot. If you win,
- You go up one level. If you lose, you go down one level. You've got to find the same people in your
- level to battle. The first five people to reach angel status gets a prize. And it's going to be one
- of these cool rocks that I stole from my children. I told them if you keep leaving your rocks around
- the house where I can step on them, I will take them to Bloomington, Indiana and give them away to random
- strangers. So there you go. All right, everyone get up.
- All right, you are all an egg now. Go find another egg. One, two, three, shoot. Go ahead.
- We have an eagle over here. Go find an eagle. Here's another eagle. We have an egg over here.
- All right. We're looking for one more angel. We got another one. We got another one. Yay. All right.
- Wait. Thank you so much, everyone. All right. Go ahead and pick out a cool rock that my kid.
- Here's this one, too. Yeah. Oh, you got that one.
- All right, here you go. You love rocks, they're the best. All right, everyone, you can please sit down
- now that you've woken up. Oh, oh, I'm sorry, we got all of our angels and all the rocks have been given away.
- All right, everyone, please sit down. If you are still standing up, you have lost the tournament, so
- please sit down. Just accept your fate. Sit down. All right, that got intense. There's some people over
- there going to some fist fights, and there was some hair pulling. I apologize for pulling someone's hair.
- All right, thank you so much, everyone. I am Vu. I use he and pronouns. And I am just so glad to be
- here among you all. Yeah, it's been rough. And I miss being in front of people. And even though it took
- 19 years to get here, it's just so lovely here. Everything is blooming. Everyone's been so friendly.
- The food has been really good. So I'm just very appreciative. Today, we're going to talk about just
- How awesome we are as a sector, right? Because I don't think people understand how amazing you all are.
- And then two, we're going to talk about all the challenges that we're dealing with and how do we overcome
- them. And then we're going to end with how awesome we are. That's the entire thing, right? A few disclaimers.
- One is that I have children, small children. And some of you may know this. If you have a baby, it's
- like getting a multi-year federal grant. At first, you're like, yay.
- And you're like, oh my god, this is so much work. And the requirements change every year. So I've been
- very loopy. Hopefully we'll have a little bit of time where we can just answer any questions you may
- have. This claim number two is that I don't claim to be an expert. I write a blog called Nonprofit AF,
- which stands for Nonprofit and Fearless. That doesn't mean that I know what I'm doing, really. So this
- is just one person's opinion.
- Also, it's easy to say, oh, Vu, he's up on stage. He must represent all people of color, all attractive
- vegans everywhere, or whatever. This is just one person's perspective. So you can just disagree with
- anything that I'm saying. I might cuss a little bit. OK, is that OK? Do people cuss in Bloomington?
- Some people get very offended. So just in case, apologies in advance. First, let's talk about how awesome
- we are as the sector.
- I liken this sector, the work that you're all doing, to air, whereas other sectors are like food, right?
- And the work that you're all doing is like air, and no one appreciates air until they need it, right?
- Until they have maybe one medical crisis, and then they're out, you know, and they lose their home or
- something. But until that happens, they may never appreciate the work that you're doing all the time.
- So society does not really appreciate the work that
- you all do every single day, right? That's why we barely have any shows about non-profit work, or like
- the work that we all do, you know? I was watching like, there's like 19 shows about cake, about baking.
- I was watching a show called, Is It Cake? Yeah, do you like Is It Cake? Such a good show. People bake
- these cakes, and they're realistic looking, and some people have to guess, is this a cake, or is it
- like a shoe? That's the entire premise of this show.
- Right? But the work we do is just as suspenseful. You know, like, are we going to file that 990 tax
- form on time? You know? Are we going to, can we fill out these tables at our gala? Do we need to pack
- it with volunteers to make it look full? Stuff like that. I was thinking of cool shows we could pitch
- to Netflix, for example. The Amazing Free Supplies Race. This is when, like, a bank moves or something,
- and they're like, hey, you nonprofits, we're moving.
- And we have all these free supplies and furniture and all these nonprofits assembled into this team
- to be the first to get that sweet metal filing cabinet. There's also dancing with major donors. Well,
- we partner up a nonprofit leader with a major donor, and the nonprofit leader is like, should I call
- this person? It's been three weeks since we've emailed them. We don't want to seem too aggressive, but
- we need this gift renewed.
- Or my favorite, Nonprofit and Afraid. Anyone has seen Naked and Afraid? Naked and Afraid, no one here.
- Amber has seen Naked and Afraid. Naked and Afraid is on the Discovery Channel, y'all, so you know it
- is educational. It takes these two people and they are strangers and places them in the wilderness.
- And they have to survive for three weeks and they get a survival item that's usually a machete
- and a fire starter, and they are naked and afraid, and they get bitten by mosquitoes a lot. I'm thinking
- we take someone who's never worked in housing and homelessness before, and we place them at a shelter
- or something, and they get a survival item that's like a 1993 Honda Accord to survive. Anyways, the
- point is we've been invisible for a really long time, and we really need to stop, right?
- Things have been really dire the past several years, and it's gotten really, really bad. I've
- aged significantly. I'm only 24. This has been really rough. I'm just thinking that we're in this moment
- where we have this existential crisis now, where we just cannot put up with the same stuff that we've
- been dealing with before the pandemic, before everything that's been going on,
- Now we have an opportunity to do something completely different. We were looking at that vase with the
- faces and stuff. Now we can see something completely different. And let's do that. So I just want to
- just run through some of the things that we need to start thinking about doing differently.
- First of all, we've got to stop putting up with bullshit, y'all. There is so much bullshit in our sector.
- I was talking to a donor who was like, well, we want to give you money, but we don't want this money
- to be spent on your
- garbage expenses like staff salaries because that's overhead and we don't like overhead. So annoying.
- We put up with this from donors and funders and politicians and it's just been very irritating. I kind
- of liken the work that you all do to firefighters putting out the fires of injustice, right? Can you
- imagine a firefighter rushing to put out the fires
- And then someone stops them and says, I want to make sure that the money I'm giving you to put out these
- fires is being spent on the water and not the hose. Because the hose is overhead. And I don't, we don't,
- what is your hose to water ratio? And because we're nice people, we're like, oh, no, no, don't worry.
- We found another funder who's paying for the hose. You're only paying for the water.
- We're spending less than 15% of our money on the hose this year. That is so much bullshit. And because
- we're nice people, we just answer that without thinking how ridiculous this is. How do we address the
- fires? And we're stopping all the time to answer questions like this. The answer when someone asks,
- what's your hose to water issue should be, get the hell out of my way. There are fires. OK, we don't
- have time for that anymore.
- We also don't have time for questions like the sustainability myth. When funders or donors are like,
- how are you going to sustain this program when this grant that we give you runs out? How are you going
- to sustain it? I don't know, Kevin. Why don't you sustain it? You're a funder. You have money. I have
- shit to do. You sustain it. I mean, it's so annoying.
- How are we going to leverage this grant that we give you to get additional grant funding? You leverage.
- You know everyone. Give us money, and then go tell your friends, give us money, too, so that we can
- run our programs. We're very busy. I don't understand. Right? That's so silly. We need to stop putting
- up with this. On my blog, Nonprofit AF, you can find a blog post called Standardized Answers to the
- Sustainability Question.
- where there's nine different versions and you just copy and paste them into grant proposals. And this
- executive director called me up and said, Vu, I copied and pasted your medium length version into a
- grant and got $25,000. So because it's a silly, silly answer, in many ways what you're doing is filling
- out the gaps left behind by the rest of society. If the market forces were doing its job,
- If government were representative of its people, and people were paying their fair share of taxes, and
- corporations were treating their workers, well, maybe people wouldn't be so homeless, right? So the
- fact that these systems have been broken, and then you're out there trying to fix it, and people are
- like, how are you going to pay for all the tools you're using to fix all this stuff that we've been
- causing? It's insulting.
- So we gotta stop dealing with all this and putting up with it. We've also been dealing with BS from
- our corporate friends. My friend calls it besplaining. Besplaining is like mansplaining when a for-profit
- does it to a non-profit. By the way, thank you to any corporate sponsors for bringing me here today.
- Really appreciate you all. But I fly around and I talk to corporate people and they're like, Vu, do
- you all do
- Over there, non-profit, what we do over here, it's called accounting. Do you know what numbers are?
- Of course we do. When you are forced to play funding Sudoku on a daily basis, because no one funds 100%
- of anything, and people want to fund certain specific parts, and you got to start to piecemeal Frankenstein
- bits of stuff together, then you become the best accountants ever, right? So it's insulting.
- And there's some major differences between for-profits and non-profits that we don't acknowledge.
- For example, in for-profit, if a company does really well, if Apple sells a million iPhones this quarter,
- and next quarter it sells two million iPhones, it doubles its revenues. In this sector, the work that
- you're doing, if you're serving 100 families and now suddenly 200 families need your services,
- Now you're scrambling for resources because the reimbursement rates are not going to be 100%. You're
- subsidizing every single person, every single service that you're doing. So it's not sustainable. The
- more successful you are at your work, the less sustainable you become oftentimes. And also, you're expected
- to perform miracles on these highly restricted, limited orders. Like we gave you $10,000 last year.
- Why didn't you end homelessness?
- Like, this is what you're expected to do all the time. You know? People are like, oh, you house 20 people?
- That's great. That's like an output, not an outcome. Can you imagine if four products had to do with
- this? Can you imagine going to Apple and saying, hey, Apple, you sold a million iPhones last quarter?
- But that's an output, right?
- I want to know the outcomes, Apple. Of the million iPhones you sold, how many people used their iPhones
- to update their resumes, and then used their job, and then used their iPhones to get jobs? How many
- people did you have to find jobs for? Well, how many seniors fell and broke their ankle, and then they
- used their iPhones to go onto WebMD and learn how to foster attorney care for their broken ankle, and
- so they did not go to the emergency room, and so they saved taxpayers' money? How much in taxpayers'
- money did you have to save, Apple?
- That's what you're expected to do all the time, right? And it's very, it's really irritating. So we
- need to stop putting up all this bullshit. Yeah, we can absolutely learn from our corporate friends
- for sure. At the same time, there are certain challenges that are very unique and we need to do things
- a bit differently. One is we've got to restore our sense of imagination. I think in many ways we've
- lost that because we've been forced into this learned helplessness sphere.
- because of limited funding all the time. And we've lost the ability to imagine a better world.
- In my book, there was a colleague who was talking about how there was a homelessness organization that
- was celebrating their 50th year anniversary. And at the gala, their board chair went up on stage and
- said, and raised a toast to 50 more years. And everyone clapped.
- Right? Now, that's not something to toast to. We don't want a world where many of these organizations
- are still in business. We want a world where people are at our house and safe. And maybe many of us
- can go out of business and we can quit our jobs and become like a wedding singer or whatever we've always
- dreamed about doing. Right?
- That's what we should be thinking about doing. But I think we've lost our sense of imagination, and
- we need to get it back. I think we've also lost our sense of ambition. We don't know what it looks like
- anymore. What does that look like? Who has heard of Juicero? Juicero? OK. You'll love this. Juicero
- was a Wi-Fi connected juicing machine that came out of Silicon Valley several years ago. It was $700.
- You buy these proprietary, you subscribe to these proprietary packets of cut of fruit and vegetables
- for $7 each. And you place one packet into this machine and it squeezes out one glass of juice. It was
- supposed to disrupt the juicing industry. Bloomberg did an investigation where they took the packets
- and squeezed them by hand and got the same amount of juice, but faster.
- So they wrote about this and Juicero went bankrupt. But before they did, they were boasting that they
- had $125 million in venture capital. They were boasting that they had 50 full-time engineers working
- to design this Wi-Fi connected juicing machine. Can you imagine what any of us could do that's better
- for society if we had $125 million?
- But no, oftentimes we've been trained to think very small. We start to think that if we ask for $50,000
- or $5 million or whatever, it's too much, when the reality is not enough. I want you all to have the
- audacity of a Wi-Fi connected juicing machine. I want you to start thinking about that level, like what
- does it take for us to solve homelessness, for people everywhere in all of our communities to have safe,
- and affordable housing. What does that look like? How much is it gonna take? It's probably gonna take
- like at least two or three more zeros. So add a zero to your budget. When you are asked, if you're a
- funder, add a zero. If you're a policymaker, start thinking big too. I think that's the only way we're
- gonna have to solve many of these problems here. So we need to start thinking and imagining much bigger
- than we have been because we have not in many ways. I think in many ways,
- We've kind of started believing that the world is always going to be crappy, and our job is to make
- it just 10% less crappy. And we're not going to be able to solve problems if we start thinking incrementally
- like that. There's other things we need to change, like philanthropy and our relationship with funders.
- It's been really exhausting. I'm so sick of writing all these grant proposals, because funders oftentimes
- think that they deserve a special snowflake grant application.
- and a special snowflake grant report when it's all the same information. Except some funders want this
- answered in 500 characters, another one wants it in like a thousand characters. It's all the
- same information. It doesn't have to be that way. I remember a funder calling me up once and he said,
- I was in my car, you know, eating my lunch between meetings. And he called me up and said, he said,
- Vu, I really like what your organization is doing. Can you find a grant that you wrote for another funder
- and just forward the whole thing to me?
- Don't even worry about changing the name of the other foundation or anything, just forward the whole
- thing to me. And I hung up the phone, and a single teardrop rolled down my face, poetically. And I looked
- through my phone, and I found a grant that I had spent like 40 hours working on. It had like a 10 page
- narrative and 13 attachments, including a logic model, a theory of change, a budget in Word,
- the blood types of every staff member for some reason, I don't know, forward the whole thing to this
- funder. It literally took like two minutes and we got $200,000 or so, right? They got everything that
- they needed. There was no need for them to have their own special snowflake grant application. So why
- do we keep doing this? We just put up with this. I think every non-profit should just have like one
- grant proposal and just be done with that.
- The other thing is like, we got to change the way that we've been doing fundraising. We've been trained
- to constantly be grateful all the time. We've been trained to have this attitude of gratitude, right?
- And I hate it. I don't care that it rhymes, okay? Attitude, gratitude. And it manifests in like this
- thing where, you know, we have this donor-centric model fundraising, where you are supposed to elevate
- donors, put them on pedestals, make them feel like heroes,
- And it's exhausting. We are trained to do things like, make sure you use the word you all the time when
- you write handwritten thank you notes. Like, you did this. Because of you, our community is stronger.
- Because of you, several families were housed or whatever. We couldn't have done this without you. And
- I am very tired of it. I kind of liken it to, I don't know, husband-centered marriages. Right?
- Now, I've been a husband before, and I would love it every single time I did the dishes or something,
- my partner writes me a handwritten thank you note. Like, Devo, you did it. Because you loaded up the
- dishwasher today, our family is stronger. Our community is better because of you. The children and I
- are so thankful for your presence in our family.
- please come to this exclusive wine and cheese event for amazing husbands like you. I would love that.
- And I'd be more likely to do the dishes if that were to happen. But is that an effective marriage? I
- don't think it is. How do we solve these problems if one party is supposed to chase after the other
- one, constantly thanking them, making them feel special all the time? It's turned our sector into this
- Sky Mall catalog.
- You know? We're focused on customer service. We're not focused on addressing these issues and going
- out of business. We're focused on making sure that donors feel really good, that they have a good customer
- service, so that they come back and keep buying our services forever. Like a Sky Mall catalog, which
- I don't know why they disappeared. I really like that catalog. We shouldn't do that anymore. We need
- to have some deep,
- conversations with our donors. It prevents us from having conversations with our donors. Like, why do
- we have these systems of inequity in the first place? Probably because some of you are not paying your
- fair share of taxes. Right? So how do we have these conversations with donors if we are told to treat
- them like heroes? How do we actually tell them, hey, look, we need you to pay your share of taxes
- It needs to be equitable so we can start thinking about building better housing for people and raising
- minimum wage. How do we have conversations with businesses and say, look, you've got to pay people better?
- But instead, we don't do that. They keep hoarding. They keep exploiting workers oftentimes. And then
- people need services. Then they donate some money to us to then provide some of these services. Then
- we're told to thank them. And that continues this cycle. We have to get out of this cycle, y'all.
- Yeah, we have to do a much better job with advocacy and lobbying and organizing. We have not done enough
- of that. In college, I became a vegan. And that was really rough because this was before veganism was
- cool. And all we had were salads every day. And it was really awful. It was tough. So I formed
- the Vegetarians Union. And I recruited like 200 students.
- And we marched on the administration to demand better foods for vegans and plant eaters everywhere.
- It was really difficult because many of us fainted from lack of protein and iron. And our pleather shoes
- kept breaking down. It was the most difficult 300 yards we had ever walked. But you know what? It worked.
- And within a month or so, we got
- tofu nuggets and stuff that we were wanting. The point was we need to start organizing and do things
- a lot more. We can't just address the symptoms of inequities anymore. We've got to start working to
- change the systems that we have. So that's that. And then a few other things. We've got to get out of
- this scarcity and martyrdom complex, y'all. S&M, scarcity and martyrdom.
- It has not been good. All right, some of y'all are sitting on crappy chairs that you got on Craigslist
- 12 years ago. Probably, right? Who has a chair that you duct taped together from somewhere? You know,
- we gotta start paying our team members better. We gotta start thinking about how do we create the space
- where people are not burning out because that's been happening. And it's getting worse because now demands
- are getting higher and people are burning out at greater rates
- And it's often because this scarcity mindset that we've been forced into. And I wanted to get out of
- that. You deserve a nice chair to sit on while you change the world. You deserve vacation time and a
- sabbatical policy for every single person here. If you work like five or seven years, you deserve a
- couple of months at least of time off to recharge here. So everyone should have that in your policy here.
- People are starting to move into four-day work weeks and things now. So we've got to start thinking,
- how do we do things differently and not just doing the same things? Many of our best practices are really
- terrible. I don't know. A lot of our boards are so ineffective. We're still using Robert's rules. Who's
- Robert? Why are we still using his rules? With the motions and the tabling,
- Robert was Henry Martin Robert, who in 1876 took the U.S. Congress parliamentary procedure and put them
- into a book, and now 150 years later, literally, we are still using the set of rules that was designed
- for 400 people, not 12 people eating hummus and some tiny oranges. Thank you, sir. Yeah, thank you,
- Jeff. We can start using Jeff's rules now.
- It's like Taco Tuesday. Many of the things in our sector, like Robert's was like Taco Tuesday. You don't
- have to eat tacos on Tuesdays. Is it Tuesday? And we had tacos. We don't have to. Next year, if it's
- on a Tuesday, I don't want to see tacos here, OK? Many of the things, they're just suggestions made
- up by people. We don't have to use them. And people are starting to do things differently. Like, do
- we need to have one CEO? No.
- People are starting to move to flatter structures with their shared leadership, because so many CEOs
- and EDs are burning out. So now people are starting to do shared leadership, co-directorship. Even some
- organizations, they don't have any leadership at all. They're just very flat, and they have a lot of
- meetings. But it works sometimes. We can start doing things like that. So we've got to be bolder, and
- we've got to protect DEI. We've got to continue doing it.
- Thank you. And we're going to move towards DEI Equity 2.0. I know we've been under attack. DEI has been
- under attack. But it's only been under attack because it's been working. Why would they attack something
- that doesn't work? It's been working to restore equity and justice. That's why it's been under attack.
- And we need to start really focusing on doing a better job with DEI. Even the 101 stuff, we still need
- to do a better job with.
- Some of y'all, for example, still don't list salaries in your job postings. If I see that, I'm taking
- you down. Put your salary postings on your salaries and your job postings, OK? Also, like, I don't know,
- there's still a lot of job postings that's like, must have a BA or a master's preferred. Why? I've been
- an executive director
- of two organizations over 13 years. And I can tell you, you don't need a formal degree to be an ED.
- You just need a high threshold for pain and chaos. So no, stop leaving people behind. There's tons of
- people. We know the education system is inequitable. So stop using it to discriminate against people.
- There are some brilliant people who, for whatever reasons, they may not have a formal degree. But they
- may have lived experience that we definitely need.
- in this work. But we need to value that more than like a BA or whatever. I saw a job posting that said,
- must be able to lift 50 pounds. Like, why? I mean, I'm a vegan. I can barely lift up my arms. So we've
- got to start being a lot more thoughtful about how we go about doing this. But I also think DEI 2.0
- is really exciting.
- Like with the fundraising we've been doing, for example, talking to donors about like where their family's
- wealth came from and thinking about how we can do maybe reparation. I was talking to this major donor
- who attended a workshop where she discovered that her family's wealth came from stolen indigenous land,
- like literally pushing a native family off the land and taking it. And she decided that when she gets
- her inheritance, she's gonna get 100% of it back to the native community. Like that is DI 2.0.
- And it's amazing, and it's hopeful. I'm going to wrap up, because I would love to hear your thoughts
- on things and any heckling you might be wanting to do. I know it's easy for me to come up here and just
- yell at you all a lot and talk about all the things wrong with our sector. But the reality is that our
- sector is amazing. I love our sector. And I know the last few years have been really, really depressing.
- And but at the same time, there's some really hopeful things that are happening out there. And I don't
- want us to lose hope. There's some brilliant things every single day all over the world that are happening.
- Like Mexico, I think, just forgave like 5 million predatory mortgage loans instantly for like 5 million
- people. Finland just eliminated homelessness. They made housing a human right and provided housing first.
- The hole in the ozone layer is closing, y'all. In like 10 years, we won't have a hole in the ozone layer.
- The giant-ass patch of garbage in the Pacific Ocean, it's shrinking. People are actually making progress
- and shrinking this giant patch of garbage that's the size of Texas. And it's working. Namibia is now
- all women run. Their president, vice president, speaker, assembly, all women.
- And 60% of their legislators are women. Burkina Faso planted this giant wall of trees to push back the
- desert, and it's working. The desert is shrinking because of it. And all over the United States, everyone
- has been out there fighting against all sorts of stuff, against inequity. I think in Texas, the governor
- banned rainbow crosswalks or something.
- And all these artists painted rainbows everywhere, all over every city. One group took some laser lights
- and projected a giant laser rainbow across the sky. So it's been backfiring. We've been seeing in Minnesota
- how the communities work together to protect one another and to push back ice. And it's been really
- inspiring. So I don't want you all to lose hope, because I think it has been challenging in the last
- few years. But I really do believe in us.
- Um, last thing I'll say is, um, I think it's, I think it's, it's, you know, doing this work can be really
- challenging because sometimes you don't hear, you know, just people, just, just how much your work has
- affected the lives of people. I think today we heard from our panelists, which was very inspiring.
- And I, I appreciated that so much, but oftentimes we don't hear because we're, we're like air. We're
- invisible. We don't hear the impact of our work.
- And we don't hear thank you enough. So I just want to end by saying, by letting you know that your work
- makes a huge difference. And all these ripples that you create that you may never see, I'm one of these
- ripples. My family came over to the United States when I was eight years old. My father fought against
- North Vietnam and was put into reeducation camp. And then we left Vietnam and came over here and didn't
- have housing or food.
- And it was all these nonprofits that helped us find Section 8 housing, all these political leaders and
- corporate sponsors and funders. And they helped us to find housing and food. And I think the most important
- thing that they did was they restored this sense of hope and community that we never thought we would
- ever feel again in our new home. And I can't go back to those people who helped my family and tell them,
- because of your work, I was inspired to go and get my master's in social work so I can pay it forward.
- Dropping out of pre-med, making my parents very proud. You know, I can't tell them that. But that's
- what your work does. You probably help just so many people that you will never hear from because they
- may not have the emotional capacity or maybe the language skills
- at that moment to let you know how much of a difference it made to them. I got my master's in social
- work, and then I went and I worked at a non-profit helping low-income youth. And I remember just a couple
- years ago, I was flying somewhere, and I heard someone call my name. It was like, Mr. Vu. And I turned
- around, and there was this young man who said, Mr. Vu, do you remember me?
- I used to be in your after school program, like 10 years ago. And I remember this kid because he was
- so frustrated at this homework that he was not able to do. It was a math homework. But his English skills
- were not good enough to understand the story problem. So I sat down and tried to help him as best as
- I could. But I have a master's in social work. I don't know math. So I got another staff to come and
- help him. And this kid will come to this.
- program every single day. And then I became an executive director. And then I spent a lot of time just
- raising money, yelling at staff, weeping in the supply closet slash conference room. And I never saw
- this kid again for 10 years, until that day. And he said, Mr. Vu, because of what you did, what you
- and your program did, I was able to graduate from high school.
- And then I went to college and I graduated. And now I got this really cool job at this airline. And
- he was just beaming. And I just thought about all the kids that we helped that we just lost track of
- and we just never saw from again. Right? And I think about all the ripples that you create every single
- day that you may never, ever see ever. But it makes a huge amount of difference. Because that day, I
- got a free upgrade to first class.
- Thank you. So that is it. I would love to hear from you all. Actually, do we have any time, Mary,
- for this? One minute. Take five minutes. All right. Any questions or comments or anything here? Oh,
- we can just end and eat more tacos. Wait, they cleared the tacos.
- Oh, well, thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Jeff. You are my new favorite person in this room. Oh, yes,
- Amber too. Yes, you're my second favorite person. Thank you so much, everyone. I know, again, things
- have been really rough, but I want you to keep notice. But I think in some ways, we're seeing all these
- challenges because, in many ways, it's because
- The new order, the status quo is dying off. And people are starting to reckon with the fact that many
- of these systems are not working for us. And so I think that we're kind of like last year was the year
- of the snake. And this year is the year of the horse. But last year, the year of the snake was like,
- the snake, no one likes the snake. They're like evil, and they get people to eat fruit or whatever.
- And they're like gross.
- But I think the snake is also a symbol of shedding of old skins so you can have a better snake. And
- that's kind of where we are right now as a society. We're shedding the skin of inequity and injustice
- and all the things that no longer function and work for many people in our communities anymore. So we're
- going to have a better, more equitable snake when this is all done. So you are like the doulas for the
- snakes of equity.
- Thank you.