know any organization certainly true for the church i think one has to have an experience of love and caring in your own life whether you came formidably you know as a child and i know that a lot of people haven't been blessed with that kind of experience as children but somewhere along the line one has had to come to know the reality and the experience of being cared about and being cared for and valued as a their sunday you know it was like the only time they had off was go visit some elderly members of the church and you know as i thought about that in terms of you know how that's influenced me in terms of anti racism work it really would it wouldn't call going and visiting elderly people as acts of justice but it has the same thread in of the way life was for them i bring that same kind of question i guess into anti racism work and so you know i think about that kind of formative experience i look at it in terms of the broader picture you know race and fairness and justice here in our nation and beyond and the question once you start asking the question who is included and who is and then start asking the questions of why is it that way you find yourself as long as you keep asking those questions on a on a journey that you really can't stop you just have to keep following where those questions in the christian tradition for example the language of being born again that's been narrowed in you know a lot of sectors to mean something very in my judgment small but really it's about transformation is about you know being born into a new life a new way of seeing things a new discovery that's what anti racism work is about in the christian tradition one talks about dying to know the way of life and rising to a new way of life is a powerful metaphors for change and transformation you know those are kind of person and then in the in our tradition we also have the metaphor just become stuff that you're repeating it is really about change social change it's about a justice movement and it's about transformation on a big scale so one thing that's been important for me is can turn your commitment to my own growth and learning i don't think i can be an effective leader if i don't continue that process and i have continued to discover you know those things that i was absolutely unaware of and continue to be surprised that you know being a part of have a lot more courage in terms of being engaged relational way with people of color i think a lot of white folks and i would have a had to include myself have an innate anxiety about engaging with people of color i am mindful of that i think it's not about earning you know america pageants for your good work an anti racism i can bring that with me into a new relationship and say here look what i've done every new engagement every new relationship starts is a fresh start and where i'm engaging with they don't know me from anybody else that they have other white guy that they've encountered over you know their lives and and so that's where i have to start and that means i have to start with a good deal of him knowledge you know openness in this situation that my own preaching is certainly  dynamics of you know our sacred text scripture is the story of empires in holland and in justice our are through that and hebrew scriptures and the gospels and so on sho begin to understand more clearly than ever accept this as of us not hard to understand the intersection between the dynamics of you know empire and of justice and how that played out you know thousands of years ago and how it continues to play out today and terrorism work you know in my judgment is not for the rangers it's for people working collaboratively and collectively and so if one wants to be serious it on terrorism work well as to be serious about forming community and building community and again you can have a you know religious expression of that as a church community can have a secular expression of it some other types of communities but being a partnership and being in collaboration and having a support network i think is vital for antiracism work that just can't be done alone and that's not just strategic question of numbers but it's really a question of internal support it is really walking into the difficult than painful stuff of life and so in order to do that and that became discouraged and i watched as he was spit on his white man who worked for and i watched my father i remember watching my father because the man i even at that young age understood that the brain hate that would have had to be inside of him to make him do this to someone like my father even at that age and on the stand that what i couldn't understand was that my father stood taller and took his huge protective hand put it on my head g that he really transmitted to me from that experience has left me with a better greater deeper commitment  to mastery of myself so i wanted to understand how the inside how his inside how the mechanisms for got the strength gave him that strength exactly so what i tried to do ground your vision of change from i want things to change to i want things to change to a better and more are deeply when i say spiritual and cultural way the way of knowing the way of thinking the way of producing something different if it's transformational it has to come from something different than what the racism that we're fighting came from in other words you can't solve the problem and you can't create transformation out of the same thing that produced the kind of strategy and hatred that we are trying to transform you have to have an alternative so i think that's what my work has been about that culture has to include spirituality so it has to it can't if spirituality is not present think cultures not produce our language and values and customs and beliefs that come from is a ridge or brown is what we try to put we put in place and we see it play out in a class rooms with the children that we work with we see it play out particularly in african with african american children that we work there where children are expressing a level of frustration and rage what where does that come from at age seven sam and twelve and what we're really beginning to see is that it comes from the the lack of capacity again to express what they are have what's going on inside so if you think about what spiritual values are they are more internal so what we try to do is to say let's tell us what's happening with whatever words you have and that then will tell us what what's happening in your spirit and we try to really teach the children and work with children and show them that we teach cultural we teach culture classes all that means that we in the classroom we expose children to once again those things that culture bring so what  is language crying having think about their language their think about their people and think about their family system their community and think it through and say what is it that you get from this family and in many cases if it doesn't feel good to the children then we say what would you create if you had the opportunity part of the what what what would you create rather what would be the out turn to to that kind of sadness and it's an amazing experience the voice of children come up with things that we think comes from the internal kind of can't fight playings and replace them unless you have something to put in their place and so that's that's the approach that we're using it is we have practitioners and clinicians in where they're educators healthcare providers who come here to read and learn a way of living and being that does challenge the institutional practices that are a racist and our judgment  and so our culture of the structures is an approach to it is that people are individuals this personal transformation has start from the inside out and no matter where we work in a minute what position we ho we are a part of the problem and now we must together become a part of the solution let me let me tell you how i got into health care now so i read michael harrington's book the other america back in one nine hundred sixty two and when i was in high school and it said there were forty to fifty million people in this country that were really not benefiting from the american dream and they were basically the poor and the people of color and that really struck me and when i read that book and then i realized over the next several years that john kennedy also had read that book and he developed this war on poverty he started it and lyndon johnson carried it on and it was making a huge difference in communities particularly communities of color and that resonated with me because where i grew up we didn't have any people of color and i was really interested in what was going on throughout the throughout the states and seeing the changes that were meeting knowing that that this world is much bigger than than what i was seeing in my little hometown so that sort of stuff at home and when i was when i was eight years old my dad took me to a green bay packer game and that's when i saw the first african american in my life and his name is bobby man it was a running back for the green bay packers first african american i'd ever seen and i asked my dad about that as we were walking home and he said yeah he can only come into town during football season and he the needs to leave when the season is done and he can live in town he has to live on the outskirts of town and i reflected that to my dad that that doesn't seem fair i might add said no that isn't fair so i'm hoping that your generation actually does something about that so that was sort of an a seminal point where i had to really think about oh there's some expectations that my generation maybe can do something to make things better for a lot of people so that was certainly one particular instance but certainly as i became commissioner of health and we started asking folks around the state what creates health and recognizing that many populations particularly of color in american indians are not benefiting from all the benefits of the state really became clear that we needed to really address health equity and really proactive way just looking at the data looking at the pain that people are under looking at the situation is that people don't really have any opportunities to be healthy they're in situations where there really are refrain from benefiting from all of the things in our state we've been working with even before i became health commissioner and we were really working with communities about how to create health and how to deal with disparities but becoming health commissioner gave me at a platform to really take it to a different level and get some visibility on this issue so we develop the a court which identified the fact that disparities are a huge problem in the state and that they're really not about access to medical care and personal choices and it's really about the social political climate that social economic climate that people are in so we if we're going to really be a healthy state we've got the best medical care system in the country we really overall are very healthy state on average but we have these huge disparities that have it and as our population is changing unless we really address those disparities will not be able to maintain our status as a healthy state so in order to do that we have to deal with health equity and the issue that most people don't want to talk about is is race and the disparities we have and the lack of opportunities that people of color in american is don't have because of some of the policies that are in place that have been put there many many years ago but are impacting them negatively and so we decided that that's where we would lead we would lead with a discussion about race as one way of getting at all of the policies in the systems that benefit whites at the expense of people of color in american indians but certainly is going to when we were looking at the central quarter liberal did not pay attention to the people in the middle of that line particularly people of color in the middle of the line and low income folks where there are no stops and really to see the community come forward and say you know we're being disadvantaged by that policy that says you have to move people as from rapidly as possible you're paying it to the only one criterion that's the efficiency of it you're not paying attention to the population it's and so with their advocacy and their organizing and they're really creating a movement they were able to get three stops not only that they actually changed federal policy on how to evaluate transportation things like th central corridor light rail it really reflected that it's the power of communities coming together to address policies that really disadvantage some income is a huge issue so we developed a report on income  health and from our studies it really showed that if you increase somebodies income from the lowest twenty percent up into the next category you actually could increase that life expectancy by about three and a half years that that little bit of investment at the low income level is really really important group for help that it says that we have to take an approach that is broader than what we traditionally have done in health department worth so we're taking now at the health department of health in our policies approach where we really say we need to partner with transportation and housing and economic development and corrections as a team to create the conditions in which people can be healthy and to do it with a health lens how does it actually improve health and where the health equity lands how does it reduce disparities and how does it advance health equity so that when you know that the department of transportation is building a road how can we make sure that everybody the community can benefit that it actually enhances health as opposed to detracting from he build the capacity of those community building opportunities in those communities those opportunities for health because we know that if everybody benefits as paul wellstone said everybody benefits and and we know from the data that the if we can reduce the income inequality everybody's going to get healthier even the people at the top so with deed and economic development regular said economic development through that equity lens and that disparities lens  have i think we're going to have a really healthier state and it'll be because everybody's doing it together and a lot of it's personal stories of things that i've learned are worried am and what i'm learning from a conference that i'm going at and so my reflections on that and i recognize that when i tell a story that reflects about something i'm doing people often open up and are willing to share a little bit about what they're doing or they reflect on the same kind of thing from a little different angle it's you need to be open a little ball are able to sharing a little bit about your my name is lee under a very yes chief diversity officer for the minnesota state colleges and universities well i think first thing is i share a legacy was many of the south africans having lived under apartheid a christian in south africa and i moved to the united states after south africa's political settlement just to find that in the united states people still struggle with race people still struggle with the  people still struggle with discrimination and i work in an organization way i think we deal with a lot of the ricin jewel effects of that era of racism of segregation and we need to transform organizations to be clues to value and validate the presence of those whose value may at some point in history be questioned or even subjugated and our organizations need to be more inclusive of that and our organizations need to be more inclusive of that so when you talk about transformation i think it starts off with outsell you are born human if we prefer disenfranchised we could not apply for the same jobs as everybody else we could not live in certain neighborhoods there was a time we could not even get an education which meant that we were not good enough or inferior or we just had less value in that also acknowledging the pain the the abuse that we have to overcome that we have been affected by that and then we need to reclaim the fact that we have value and that we should not allow those things to hold us back unfortunately today we still see people dealing with internalized racial oppression we see people subjected to a gemini so thinking that they cannot make a contribution or that their contribution is not acceptable in order to oppress or to regard somebody is in fear you have to ever very  defunct view of who you are and it's actually a lack of your own humanity if you believe that somebody is not fully human as you are in order to hurt somebody and to abuse that aside one thing i have been working on over the past few years is also dealing with trauma but when i think about trauma i also think about the the bystander is also traumatized so what did it mean for people watching the civil rights marches and watching people getting shot m t a gassed and chased down with dogs what did it mean for those  also traumatized those people and so they too need to think about how do they hit it healing and how do they overcome that trauma so the first thing i would say is we need to create spaces where we can tell us stories where both the traumatized end those bystanders can tell those stories i think it was dr king that said in one of his eloquent statement was he looks forward to the day  when the slave to the children of former slaves and former slave owners can sit at the table together that means dealing with that trauma that means doing something in order to sit at the table together you look at all workplaces today we're still pretty much separated and unfortunately when we're not intentional about that we tend to suppress that generation upon generation and that leads to dysfunction and that leads to pathology and it's not dealt to us it comes out in ways that we nice to expected and maybe in ways that might be much much more complex to deal with so my da undertaking in my organization is to create morning tension ality to create more validity for this kind of discussion and also for people to learn and to engage with each other you know everybody talks about diversity everybody talks about inclusion but only to a limited point we are thinking a more about authentic engagement and what does that mean it means accepting each other with all of the band aids and being prepared to work through that so that we can move from what i would call pseudo community to more sente community as a young activist i was very angry i was deeply resentful i saw how my parents had been treated by ordinary people on the street ordinary privileged white people in south africa and i struggled with that i felt the need south africa as well as dr martin luther king at the philosophy of nonviolence and i firmly believe in that i feel deeply was in the human spirit is something like compassion and compassion for those in need and we might not always all have material need we might have other needs some psychological need and need to learn to be loved and to love someone else and that's what i find we need to develop in our society as we overcome some of these difference of course the first layer that people always resort to is anger when we think about the stages of grief you know when we're confronted with  reality left to allow people to get through that so that the real work and accident happen and that's what i do on a daily basis as a practitioner in my organization raise awareness and secondly challenge people to action and a much deeper action and i've talked a lot about individual action i'm a firm believer also in collective action start here with the reverend dr tim johnson who is the pastor at cherokee park united church thank you for being here leon rodriguez who is the chief diversity officer for the minnesota state colleges and commissioner at wired with the department of health so that was very inspirational to hear all of you talking about the work that you do the first question i'd like to start out with is just what inspires you to as a leader to continue to be engaged in overcoming racism and working towards achieving racial equity in the community what are there specific things that have influenced your work certainly you talked about some of those things in the video but just so that we can hear from you what keeps you inspired to be engaged anybody can take this question about community the the desire of community to really be a healing community to be a whole community when you look at that david ellwood wrote wrote a book called poor support and in the list of all of the things that in  and makes us really look individualistic at how we're doing this is the one saving grace is community our desire for community and then so i hearken back to our healthy minnesota twenty twenty from what i heard in the i was thinking about a healthy minnesota twenty twenty framework which looks at what do we want to do to create health and we start with children the opportunities for children it looks at the the need for equity and eliminating disparities but it really evolves around the power of community to make that happen so i think we need to continue to work with our children to work on health equity and do it in community that's what inspires me about the thing the the thing i said in the video that inspires me is  actually once again my father my mother the women who women and men who've gone before me and i think i have four sons i have four sons who are black men and their father and my brother i have one brother so being surrounded by men who are suffering the consequences of what the society has  has really done to them and only one of them the father of my children really gave into the rage and attempted to reproduce the raid that he had experience and i think seeing that implications of that rage you know his attempt to to kill me most of you know that whole story and then our son's growing up and trying to recover from this  experience of having been brutalized and made to think they were not human beings i saw that inside of our home and i've worked really hard not to allow that to be reproduced on my watch i do not want that reproduced on my watch i want my sons and the people who come in contact with them my grandchildren my granddaughters i want them to understand that rage and resilienc stand side by side and it's our job to reproduce the resiliency to look at it to teach it you know to live it to wear it in every place and the only way to do that as i have understood it is to go back to who was  before i came in contact with white people and so that's that's kind of what inspires me is to keep reproducing that so that it really does stand as an alternative to the rage and the  treatment inhumane treatment that has happened you know since i believe that that sounds like a less than kind of transformation of yourself which is hold on to i think you said it in the video too which is healing remembering who you are and what you want to stand for to not reproduce what you've experienced is a major challenge in terms of being resilient and i think i'm reverend johnson you also talked in the video about being committed to your own learning process and transformation process so for maybe for us and for dr johnson the question i have for you is what are the lessons that you've learned al ong the way in your own transformational journey through your institutions or with you that you might share with with the audience that maybe you didn't get a chance to say in the video so let's start with  well there are lots of lessons i guess one that i was actually thinking about as in reference to the first question but relates very much to this question also and that stories that we are lifting up your story i phone be very powerful story it is not surprising that you know you told us that it's hard to tell it without feeling emotional but it's not just the stories it's that story connected to a bigger story and so it seems to me in transformation work it's always about making that linkage between those we have the ability to come together we have the ability to do great things people inspire me people inspire me because i see a deep sense of creativity and us and unfortunately that creativity sometimes is stamped out very early in our socialization and the lessons i've learned is when you dig a little deeper when you create the space people bring out the best i've been known to cry when four year olds at a daycare center are in a skit and they bring out the creativity it just brings tears to my eyes my son was about eight years old and he was learning to play the trombone and his arms were not long enough and he was creative and he played in that school band and the band didn't sound you know as well as it could but those kids were trying and that's probably why i work in higher education because people come to be better to learn more to work harder and i just take great joy when i see the end product when i meet them in the street and they tell me where they're working and what contribution they're making and i try to attend the awards ceremonies when they are on and that's really inspires me and that is the s of the lessons that i've learned is let's show up if we look in the room today woozy and lose not i can think of at least twenty five people that i wish were a year and it makes me uncomfortable that i didn't do enough to make sure those twenty five were yet today let's create the space to be creative and let's create the space to get to know each other that's wonderful so one of the one of the things i reflect on while the best work in the community is when transformation is happening what does it look like what does it look like so you know one of the things that it looks like to me at the wilder foundation is that it's not just people of color who are actually talking about race and racism and it and that at least from my view white people see themselves as a part of eliminating racism that they're part of the racially equation what does transformation look like you for you in terms of cultivating transformation overcoming racism what have you seen in the community and what does it look like what does it feel like to so why don't we start out a bit that the when i say when i see the change that's occurring in the narrative about what creates health i see transformation when we start talking about the fact that it's community it's relationships it's the power structure it's policies and systems that really create change when people start thinking differently about it about what health is and in my world that it's not about just about individual choice or about medical care it's really about the policies in the systems in the structure and and the power when i see that change in the narrative that i see is transformational because it transforms who's part of the conversation it also transforms thinking about who has power said who's in the room but who's in the room who's around the decision making tables who gets to make the decisions who sets the agenda who holds people accountable that's all part of the narrative that i see changing and i think that's transformative and as i go around the state i hear those things i see those things and i'm really encouraged that the community is ready for that transformational change that began with a change of the narrative  think once again and i on my way here this morning i got a phone call from someone who was going into who isn't in the hospital and at the end of life and the children have to now make the decision to disconnect you know her words were have to pull the plug and she was really struggling with the fact that she could not be with this group of children and her family who had to pull the plug so what when i saw her what i heard from her and when i hear from her relative to the children is the children were not  blaming anybody for the death i the children were not feeling so totally overwhelmed and paralyzed with thinking about death that they were going to be disruptive and chaotic because we see that often but the children were saying he i will see him again  that he's not gone he is going to be with me as an ancestor he can continue to direct me and guide me so i don't have to feel like i'm alone so transformation is  recognizing life at all into the cycle and seeing it play out in your decision but took leave of the solutions that have to do with death because the fear of death seems to really be so pervasive around us because we experience so much so i see it in the decisions that are made in the way people get together and celebrate life even if death is present children are referring to and says toure's without feeling like it's some kana to do something you know that people are really transmission starts to show up and you know jerrick and again direct and concrete ways of how we deal with our own pain and suffering and  i really feel that that gives me it gives me energy to continue to do this work because otherwise transformation is invisible but what is transformation look like to you there's a lot of different ways i can describe transformation and i'll give an idea since most recently last night over dinner i had dinner with a group of white women and there was about three women of color and the discussion that was held by the white woman whose home we were in was based on how asking us women of color how they could help and learning how to use the elements of hip hop to reach youth and how they can build using those tools and recognizing the history of where it came from to help build the transformation not incarceration with our youth in changing the statistics of how our young men and our young women of color think and and that rate there was a transformation i grew up in minnesota with the minnesota niceness and i'm sure all of us here are familiar of it it's not so nice right  and growing up in high school when i was one of the only people of color in the high school that i attended and it was basically our lunch room tables like the u n we called it the four food groups as i've been told by my mom and if we were to discuss anything that had to do with the race or how we felt to people of color right away it was a change of subject and you'd see those white women run away the fact that these white women were conducting the dialogue that was a big transformation right there for me and for me to not ignore and say ok what do you what do you guys think you know you know no it was about yes let's listen let's hear each other out and let's just do that let's check it was through the checks and balances of everything out that's a transformation and then recognizing that they are needed because they're the majority in the state we have eighty five percent of  people in minnesota the population are white people still and they have they are in positions of leadership and like you said we can't ignore that we have to discuss how we can knock down those barriers and overcome those barriers and and  where our leadership is needed and where their leadership is needed it's not slicing them out of the picture it's encouraging that dialogue the and how do you see a transformation when what do you experience when transformation is actually occurring as a transformation is ongoing i don't see it necessarily just as an end product but of course it's great if we get to the end product it's more the journey i grew up in a country that was highly segregated and severely oppressive and a few years ago i traveled back to south africa was a delegation from the university of minnesota and i hadn't been home in a few years and so i was also anxious to see the kind of transformations that could have occurred in a society where people were too ashamed to acknowledge their own history or to dress in a way that might not attract attention or demeanor from from others we were very very eurocentric and so if you were dressed like i am today you felt at least i would be accepted but if you dressed in a more traditional way you might attract way too much attention and we were very concerned about that and when i went to this conference with folks from the new we went out one evening and i was just stunned and amazed that the food that was presented was the food i loved very much this is in a restaurant the food was just the food that was real comfort food to me and the restaurant was filled with people of different races and then a band came on and the music was music that i had no i didn't think anybody would appreciate the kind of music and then people started dancing and these were people white south africans and black south africans in indian south africans and they were all dancing to this music yet we were always so ashamed of that music and music was relegated to some of our own radio stations which often under funded or radio stations which could not broadcast that kind of music to a very wide radius and yet people were dancing there and people were dancing with each other that to me was transformation in south africa i think transformation has to do also with accepting ourselves transformation has to do with overcoming some of the historical trappings that we've experienced and being able to reclaim that that to me is transformation and i see it all the time when i go to campuses and i see students expressing themselves expressing their culture  expressing things which may remain hidden or which might be subjugated particularly in the presence of a dominant culture to me that is transformation and live for the day when we probably all can say we transformation among the things that transformation does i think is create safe places safe spaces where people can speak honestly and truthfully  i think that's really can often be a very hard thing to do especially around issues of race and among the things that one needs to be able to speak honestly and truthfully about especially if you're white is white s i think as white people we need to be able to name that reality so in our church for example we have kind of at the center of our  anyway and we've begun just naming that reality we had all year long conversation about our white jesus and what that means for congregation committed  racism and you know in all honesty that's an uncomfortable just naming of that reality i preach several sermons about white jesus and and i'd got some feedback that it wasn't welcome it was welcomed by a number of folks but you know it at least that it made people uncomfortable and what was uncomfortable about it was i think the naming of the whiteness and i you know i guess i've come to find that to be really kind of an odd reality when one looks at kind of the history of the use of whiteness so that when we move into the you know the where we are  today suddenly that language is off the table when for hundreds of years what this was used very explicitly to privilege one group of people but now you know we're not supposed to talk about it  anyway at the crucible to create a place where we can have those kinds of honest conversations without falling into the trap of guilt and shame because i absolutely agree that's a self serving useless emotion if one stays there but it kind of pokes you to think a little more deeply great but if you stay there it's absolutely unhelpful so to be able to create those kind of spaces and places that's transformation and looks like that it begins to manifest itself in other ways in which the kind of music that you have the kind of art that you draw upon these are resources that can not only add to transformation but reflective of transformation who is in who is being welcomed and in included into the community all those are i think manifestations of transformation that wonderful  so i think we've learned a lot actually from my panelists from watching the videos i don't know what you got out of it but i just thought i'd do a quick summary of the things i heard that i think are pretty special the first is that to truly cultivate transformation identifying and naming what's present in terms of the distortion of reality in terms of how things actually exist in the world with you know sometimes even a fact based can be helpful that hope  healing intergenerational so that trauma as it reproduced into future generations is very important that when the bonds of community are strengthened because of the type of dialogues music how we question and are with each other that transformative and that the asking of questions from the dominant culture to people who are not a part of that community can be transformative because so often it's the other way around and there's a healing aspect of doing that that's very helpful and finally you know i think what i heard is that we all bring our own self imposed limitations  from our own experience with grace to every single interaction and that we need to actually come together to have authentic dialogue and also leadership together so that  overcome racism to be truly transformative in our institutions in the community so we're at eleven forty five we have questions we do have time for questions ok ok we're going to take a few minutes for questions in the moderator but the real moderators are going to tell me when we need to stop so any questions that you have for the  panelists thank you for being here today my name some say i'm a student at the university of minnesota i wanted to ask a question tim just basically solidified it when he said the name in the reality is a critical component of seeing transformation and so is there ending things special about minnesota when it comes to that because it seems that for me my experience at the university of minnesota the first thing that happens when you know i ever name a reality when it comes to race relations or the disparities that we have here everyone's eyes glaze over and it's like oh my goodness here he goes you know and so my question basically is how can you get through that without being labeled without being judged and without basically being marginalized for the fact that you brought that up who'd like to think that on our panel layout i think you are talking about some of our cultural realities because we don't engage with each other on a broad range of issues and unfortunately when we talk about those cultural and racial realities they are non normative it is time for us to make those part of the norm because this is our experience this is our collective experience i said in your shoes and still do but let's not be also a one issue activist let's think about a broad range of things that we can approach sometimes because it's not normative people go into shock when when you raise that and i like to reference to guilt i think guilt is a good thing but  become something that leads to in action and i'm fortunately when you do raise those issues one of the reactions people have could be guilt the other is a lack of emotional maturity when race becomes a topic of conversation some people just have don't have the emotional capacity to engage in that conversation we don't have all the solutions but certainly if we had the emotional capacity we could stay at the table and we can stay in the game and we can certainly discuss whatever we feel we still need to achieve i'll take one more question and then we'll have to move on so  question is what keeps you going and what motivates you and what can i learn all alert all the time well let me i want to respond to that first question and then i'll get back to it because it's related the reason minnesota is healthy is because of the investments that were made thirty or forty years ago in the public good in minnesota has really historically as a collective spirit and we've invested in the public good we've invested in the commons and it's that commons that has that makes us healthy it's our communities that make us healthy now as we become increasingly diverse i moved to minnesota in one thousand nine hundred eighty and we had two percent people of color in american indians at that point we're now seventeen percent increasing rapidly thirty four percent second graders are kids of color american indians all of a sudden our commons is different and i talked about the narrative that i'm seeing that people are starting to redefine the commons they're starting to think about that the public good and how we invest in that and so what keeps me engaged is as i'm seeing the energy that's in communities coming forward to say we want to invest in different ways and i see them as supporting the things that we're doing at the health department saying you're on the right track with the statewide health improvement program for example which gives power to the communities to decide how to do that with community leadership teams they're coming to the legislature as a community to say we want to help department to do this and they're getting to get out getting us to do what we want to do you know the communities coming forward with the power to make change that really energizes me when i see that i always tell people that you as a community have a lot more power with the legislature and governor dayton than i do because you come with it with a power and a passion and the actual stories about what creates help we're glad to partner with you in that that's that's what energizes me on a day to day basis where he was telling me we're at a time so why don't we have all their team talk and then we'll all wrap up ok i just want to say that one of the things years ago that i read that always stays with me too is that a writer named nealie fuller said if you do not understand white supremacy and racism what it it is how it works that everything else that you understand will come to you as you and so on a day by day basis you know i recognize that the experiences that i'm going to have will come from that kind of place from a white supremacy place even in minnesota and so what i have to do is look at what is the outearn and to as i said and then try my best to have that be across generations so what do i talk with how do i share that as specially with young black people who will be at this point in time are surprised often by the way they are treated in different institutions and so we want to  this idea that we are in charge of our own destiny and they we can change even that which seems unchangeable wonderful i just like to thank our distinguished panelists it's been a pleasure