[Applause]
I’d like to ask you all to indulge me
for just a moment by closing your eyes
I’m watching and envision a better
Baltimore picture what it actually looks
like and what its gonna take to get us
there not only that but who are the
people that will be there to do that
work so you can open your eyes again we
make intentional decisions all the time
about the people that surround us in our
lives and in our work we do it when
we’re planning a dinner party when we’re
hosting a wedding even when we’re just
inviting our friends out to the bar we
think about who will know who who will
like each other who will push each
other’s buttons and whose dance moves
will rule the night so what if we were
to use that same skill that we use to
have a nice time together it’s actually
fuel social change how might it look
different what if each one of us has the
power to build a world changing room
these questions have become core to my
work in Baltimore over the last few
years and they really had their origins
years ago when I was working in global
health and marketing the public health
projects that I was working on at the
time in West Africa and other parts of
the world would always get a lot
stronger if we had taken the time to
truly listen to the audience that we
were trying to reach if we understood
their real needs and ideally if we had
been able to work side-by-side each
other in order to design solutions and
in those instances lived experience from
that audience we were working with was
actually viewed as sort of a source of
expertise so after doing that work for a
few years I moved to Baltimore to go to
grad school here at Hopkins at the
public health campus and I arrived to
Penn Station hopped in a cab to head
east and the very first thing that
jumped out at me was the drastic
change in landscape from huge historic
mansions in Mount Vernon to blocks and
blocks boarded up row homes along East
Biddle Street many of them marked with a
big red X to indicate to people that
they weren’t stable or safe and though I
had seen that kind of crumbling
infrastructure in developing countries
or as doing a lot of my work at the time
I had hardly ever seen it in the US and
definitely not at that scale and so it
raised a lot of questions for me around
what had led to that kind of neglect and
more importantly what it was going to
take to reverse it but I had a lot of
learning to do before I could even begin
to answer my own questions so I started
going to community meetings and panel
talks I as a public health nerd decided
it’d be important to read up on the data
and really understand what was going on
so I learned about the 20 year life
expectancy gap that was between
neighborhoods just five miles apart I
started volunteering I worked on an
urban farm in Reservoir Hill and along
the way I was getting more and more
involved in the city and in its
landscape I got to know educators and
health officials politicians and
community organizers and a whole range
of people social innovators social
entrepreneurs that were designing
solutions for Baltimore’s most complex
challenges and showing up in very real
ways to do that work every day and I
realized by coming into contact with all
of those amazing people that the city
actually had everything that it needed
in order to solve its own challenges the
issue was really that the people and
resources and ideas were failing to
overlap so you’d have conversations in
one part of town about improving
neighborhoods or improving schools there
were almost the same as a separate
conversation on the other side of town
and those people those different groups
of people were relative strangers to
each other
divided along lines of geography or
identity profession
power and those vast divides between
people and neighborhoods in the city
were holding the city back and so a
whole new set of questions began to
emerge for me I started thinking about
what it would take to break those
barriers down and just by asking that
question I started finding people around
me who were noticing the same kinds of
patterns and wanted to see them shift
suddenly we were having conversations
left and right about silos and not the
kind that you find on a farm but the
type of silos that emerge around
knowledge and networks and ideas the
kind of silos that form when only
like-minded people have opportunities to
talk with each other when bikers talk to
bikers or designers talk to designers or
health people talk to health people and
so on and we saw these kinds of clusters
of thought happening all around the city
and wanted to begin to break them down a
quick dip into the history of Baltimore
will tell you that those silos didn’t
just spring up out of the ground
spontaneously they were constructed very
intentionally over time and they were
meant to concentrate power and wealth in
communities that already had it and to
concentrate poverty elsewhere the
policies of exclusion and the
disinvestment in neighborhoods and even
the physical barriers that have been
created the curbs and fences and
highways that cut through neighborhoods
I realize over time had really been the
city’s greatest mistake it also became
abundantly clear to me that in order to
address the challenges that we saw in
the fabric of our city and in the lives
of every resident living here we were
also going to need to reverse those
practices and policies of exclusion so I
began to play around a little bit with
this concept of rooms I
thought it was really important to
recognize who was in the room if we were
going to be making real and lasting
change before I go more into that I want
to just say so
a room may be something physical like
this if you kind of look to your left
and right right now and you can go ahead
and do that think about the sheer human
potential that’s sitting next to you
think about the people that are in this
space and what they’re able to do and
also think about who was invited to be
here today who showed up who wasn’t
invited the other way I think about a
room is a more of a metaphorical room so
the kind that emerge around our
conversations about improving schools or
creating jobs and in these rooms they’re
often unspoken rules about who’s
considered an expert whose opinion we
consult and who will actually know what
will work and in those rooms as
metaphorical rooms and those
conversations if we’re leading people
out of them we’re also leaving
opportunity and knowledge on the table
so I started to experiment with this a
little bit I started a workshop called
community design lab and the idea there
was to get relative strangers in the
room to work together on specific
projects
I loved the sheer alchemy of getting
amazing people together to think about
change and to work on really amazing
initiatives and I would watch the guest
with it list role in as people
registered I think about who would know
who who would like each other who would
push each other’s buttons and who might
be able to help each other along so I’m
one of these events that we held in
South West Baltimore there was a woman
named kanika she grown up in the
neighborhood and she had a really great
idea for for bringing young girls
together to build peer support and to
help each other along and through this
workshop she was able to meet another
woman named Ann Ann grew up in Indiana
and was pursuing a PhD
in adolescent health and while kanika
brought this really rich understanding
of the neighborhood and of the girls she
wanted to work with and brought a
certain institutional backing and sort
of academic training and rigor and the
two of them over time were able to forge
a partnership in order to bring each
other’s projects to life and for me that
is really the good stuff that’s where
change starts to emerge and starts to
shift the workshops that we were holding
at the time were proving to be pretty
popular we were filling the room and so
we wanted to give people a chance to do
this more and more it turned out
strangers loved supporting each other
and giving each other advice so my silo
busting collaborators and I got together
and we decided that we wanted to create
a home for change makers and a home for
mixing people up we realized in this
process that there were people all
around the world that thought like this
they were in 80 cities around the globe
and they were specialists in creating
spaces for social change and so we
teamed up with them and we started the
impact hub Baltimore we’ve been open now
for about a year in station north and
it’s a community of people from diverse
backgrounds buzzing with the energy of
connection they bump into people that
otherwise wouldn’t be in their social
circles they’re able to voice opinions
and ideas that might not otherwise be
heard and that energy is incredibly
electric and effects we’re able to pull
people that work at government agencies
or nonprofits businesses nonprofit
leadership philanthropists and investors
activists and artists all of them under
one roof mixed together in order to
address some of the city’s most complex
challenges we’re getting it right we hit
a sort of balance of curation and chaos
sometimes we hang out on the sort of
chaotic ended a spectrum and there a
rather unscripted moments that come up
so we had a woman last year who had been
straighted with a particular political
official she’d try to get meetings
several times and had been turned down
so she came to hear her speak at impact
tab and she waited patiently through all
of her remarks and at the end asked the
question where she felt like she still
wasn’t being heard and ended up shouting
that elected official out of the
building and those moments can be really
tough but there are also real
reflections of the frustration that
people feel in the city and the pain
that’s going on in their lives and so
we’ve learned to hold space for those
hard conversations as uncomfortable as
they can be they also often give way to
tremendous healing and beauty in another
very unscripted moment back in April we
had Police Commissioner Davis from
Baltimore come and speak and it was just
a couple days away from the one-year
anniversary of the death of Freddie gray
and in his remarks he said to the
audience that he personally apologized
for any wrongdoing that had ever come to
them at the hands of police officers and
while words are really never enough to
undo decades of injustice I felt in that
moment that they were a really powerful
place to start his gesture acknowledged
the vast experience of everyone there in
the room but I don’t want to leave you
with the impression that only certain
people under special circumstances
are able to shape the course of history
all of us have the ability to convene
and connect people we do it all the time
we’re doing it when we plan a dinner
party or plan a wedding we do it when
we’re inviting people into our living
rooms and our boardrooms and our public
spaces and if we want to learn to do it
really well and effectively in order to
create change we need to also learn to
invite every voice around the table we
need to do it early and often and
authentically not only because this is
the
right thing to do but because each one
of those perspectives that diversity
perspective makes us all a lot stronger
imagine if we were able to hold our
elected officials and our leaders to
that level of accountability and do that
well imagine if we could do this with
our institutions ourselves could we
actually begin to replace patriarchy
with partnership could we begin to
design solutions to our most complex
challenges simply by dissolving the
walls that we’ve constructed between
ourselves so I want to ask each of you
as you go back into the world today and
build amazing things which I know you
will when you’re planning your next
meeting or building your next company or
starting your next team I’d like each of
you to slow down for a moment to
consider who is there with you in the
room thank you
[Applause]
I’d like to ask you all to indulge me
for just a moment by closing your eyes
I’m watching and envision a better
Baltimore picture what it actually looks
like and what its gonna take to get us
there not only that but who are the
people that will be there to do that
work so you can open your eyes again we
make intentional decisions all the time
about the people that surround us in our
lives and in our work we do it when
we’re planning a dinner party when we’re
hosting a wedding even when we’re just
inviting our friends out to the bar we
think about who will know who who will
like each other who will push each
other’s buttons and whose dance moves
will rule the night so what if we were
to use that same skill that we use to
have a nice time together it’s actually
fuel social change how might it look
different what if each one of us has the
power to build a world changing room
these questions have become core to my
work in Baltimore over the last few
years and they really had their origins
years ago when I was working in global
health and marketing the public health
projects that I was working on at the
time in West Africa and other parts of
the world would always get a lot
stronger if we had taken the time to
truly listen to the audience that we
were trying to reach if we understood
their real needs and ideally if we had
been able to work side-by-side each
other in order to design solutions and
in those instances lived experience from
that audience we were working with was
actually viewed as sort of a source of
expertise so after doing that work for a
few years I moved to Baltimore to go to
grad school here at Hopkins at the
public health campus and I arrived to
Penn Station hopped in a cab to head
east and the very first thing that
jumped out at me was the drastic
change in landscape from huge historic
mansions in Mount Vernon to blocks and
blocks boarded up row homes along East
Biddle Street many of them marked with a
big red X to indicate to people that
they weren’t stable or safe and though I
had seen that kind of crumbling
infrastructure in developing countries
or as doing a lot of my work at the time
I had hardly ever seen it in the US and
definitely not at that scale and so it
raised a lot of questions for me around
what had led to that kind of neglect and
more importantly what it was going to
take to reverse it but I had a lot of
learning to do before I could even begin
to answer my own questions so I started
going to community meetings and panel
talks I as a public health nerd decided
it’d be important to read up on the data
and really understand what was going on
so I learned about the 20 year life
expectancy gap that was between
neighborhoods just five miles apart I
started volunteering I worked on an
urban farm in Reservoir Hill and along
the way I was getting more and more
involved in the city and in its
landscape I got to know educators and
health officials politicians and
community organizers and a whole range
of people social innovators social
entrepreneurs that were designing
solutions for Baltimore’s most complex
challenges and showing up in very real
ways to do that work every day and I
realized by coming into contact with all
of those amazing people that the city
actually had everything that it needed
in order to solve its own challenges the
issue was really that the people and
resources and ideas were failing to
overlap so you’d have conversations in
one part of town about improving
neighborhoods or improving schools there
were almost the same as a separate
conversation on the other side of town
and those people those different groups
of people were relative strangers to
each other
divided along lines of geography or
identity profession
power and those vast divides between
people and neighborhoods in the city
were holding the city back and so a
whole new set of questions began to
emerge for me I started thinking about
what it would take to break those
barriers down and just by asking that
question I started finding people around
me who were noticing the same kinds of
patterns and wanted to see them shift
suddenly we were having conversations
left and right about silos and not the
kind that you find on a farm but the
type of silos that emerge around
knowledge and networks and ideas the
kind of silos that form when only
like-minded people have opportunities to
talk with each other when bikers talk to
bikers or designers talk to designers or
health people talk to health people and
so on and we saw these kinds of clusters
of thought happening all around the city
and wanted to begin to break them down a
quick dip into the history of Baltimore
will tell you that those silos didn’t
just spring up out of the ground
spontaneously they were constructed very
intentionally over time and they were
meant to concentrate power and wealth in
communities that already had it and to
concentrate poverty elsewhere the
policies of exclusion and the
disinvestment in neighborhoods and even
the physical barriers that have been
created the curbs and fences and
highways that cut through neighborhoods
I realize over time had really been the
city’s greatest mistake it also became
abundantly clear to me that in order to
address the challenges that we saw in
the fabric of our city and in the lives
of every resident living here we were
also going to need to reverse those
practices and policies of exclusion so I
began to play around a little bit with
this concept of rooms I
thought it was really important to
recognize who was in the room if we were
going to be making real and lasting
change before I go more into that I want
to just say so
a room may be something physical like
this if you kind of look to your left
and right right now and you can go ahead
and do that think about the sheer human
potential that’s sitting next to you
think about the people that are in this
space and what they’re able to do and
also think about who was invited to be
here today who showed up who wasn’t
invited the other way I think about a
room is a more of a metaphorical room so
the kind that emerge around our
conversations about improving schools or
creating jobs and in these rooms they’re
often unspoken rules about who’s
considered an expert whose opinion we
consult and who will actually know what
will work and in those rooms as
metaphorical rooms and those
conversations if we’re leading people
out of them we’re also leaving
opportunity and knowledge on the table
so I started to experiment with this a
little bit I started a workshop called
community design lab and the idea there
was to get relative strangers in the
room to work together on specific
projects
I loved the sheer alchemy of getting
amazing people together to think about
change and to work on really amazing
initiatives and I would watch the guest
with it list role in as people
registered I think about who would know
who who would like each other who would
push each other’s buttons and who might
be able to help each other along so I’m
one of these events that we held in
South West Baltimore there was a woman
named kanika she grown up in the
neighborhood and she had a really great
idea for for bringing young girls
together to build peer support and to
help each other along and through this
workshop she was able to meet another
woman named Ann Ann grew up in Indiana
and was pursuing a PhD
in adolescent health and while kanika
brought this really rich understanding
of the neighborhood and of the girls she
wanted to work with and brought a
certain institutional backing and sort
of academic training and rigor and the
two of them over time were able to forge
a partnership in order to bring each
other’s projects to life and for me that
is really the good stuff that’s where
change starts to emerge and starts to
shift the workshops that we were holding
at the time were proving to be pretty
popular we were filling the room and so
we wanted to give people a chance to do
this more and more it turned out
strangers loved supporting each other
and giving each other advice so my silo
busting collaborators and I got together
and we decided that we wanted to create
a home for change makers and a home for
mixing people up we realized in this
process that there were people all
around the world that thought like this
they were in 80 cities around the globe
and they were specialists in creating
spaces for social change and so we
teamed up with them and we started the
impact hub Baltimore we’ve been open now
for about a year in station north and
it’s a community of people from diverse
backgrounds buzzing with the energy of
connection they bump into people that
otherwise wouldn’t be in their social
circles they’re able to voice opinions
and ideas that might not otherwise be
heard and that energy is incredibly
electric and effects we’re able to pull
people that work at government agencies
or nonprofits businesses nonprofit
leadership philanthropists and investors
activists and artists all of them under
one roof mixed together in order to
address some of the city’s most complex
challenges we’re getting it right we hit
a sort of balance of curation and chaos
sometimes we hang out on the sort of
chaotic ended a spectrum and there a
rather unscripted moments that come up
so we had a woman last year who had been
straighted with a particular political
official she’d try to get meetings
several times and had been turned down
so she came to hear her speak at impact
tab and she waited patiently through all
of her remarks and at the end asked the
question where she felt like she still
wasn’t being heard and ended up shouting
that elected official out of the
building and those moments can be really
tough but there are also real
reflections of the frustration that
people feel in the city and the pain
that’s going on in their lives and so
we’ve learned to hold space for those
hard conversations as uncomfortable as
they can be they also often give way to
tremendous healing and beauty in another
very unscripted moment back in April we
had Police Commissioner Davis from
Baltimore come and speak and it was just
a couple days away from the one-year
anniversary of the death of Freddie gray
and in his remarks he said to the
audience that he personally apologized
for any wrongdoing that had ever come to
them at the hands of police officers and
while words are really never enough to
undo decades of injustice I felt in that
moment that they were a really powerful
place to start his gesture acknowledged
the vast experience of everyone there in
the room but I don’t want to leave you
with the impression that only certain
people under special circumstances
are able to shape the course of history
all of us have the ability to convene
and connect people we do it all the time
we’re doing it when we plan a dinner
party or plan a wedding we do it when
we’re inviting people into our living
rooms and our boardrooms and our public
spaces and if we want to learn to do it
really well and effectively in order to
create change we need to also learn to
invite every voice around the table we
need to do it early and often and
authentically not only because this is
the
right thing to do but because each one
of those perspectives that diversity
perspective makes us all a lot stronger
imagine if we were able to hold our
elected officials and our leaders to
that level of accountability and do that
well imagine if we could do this with
our institutions ourselves could we
actually begin to replace patriarchy
with partnership could we begin to
design solutions to our most complex
challenges simply by dissolving the
walls that we’ve constructed between
ourselves so I want to ask each of you
as you go back into the world today and
build amazing things which I know you
will when you’re planning your next
meeting or building your next company or
starting your next team I’d like each of
you to slow down for a moment to
consider who is there with you in the
room thank you
[Applause]
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