We know what equity isn't, but what IS equity?

[Music] my name is Melvin Carter and I'm from St Paul Minnesota I'm uh what fifth generation I think St Paul Minnesota and just a child of that Community I'm a child who grew up hearing stories about Saint Paul's old Rondo Community that's the community and you have this community in your neighborhood it goes by a different name but it's the historically thriving African-American community that was uprooted when somebody decided we want to put a freeway through this uh in here but you you have that neighborhood in your city you may not know which it is but find out when you go back home I grew up hearing those stories we'd be riding on the freeway and my father would at a certain point would say you are in my bedroom now uh because my grandparents owned over a half a dozen commercial properties on Old Rondo which were taken to build that freeway for all of us and it of course wasn't just them we had uh almost 700 families who lost their homes who lost property whose family inheritance was gutted uh to build that freeway and today's dollars I've seen research that suggests uh up to 157 million dollars of wealth stolen from our African-American Community it occurs to me that in the 50s and the 60s Saint Paul may not have been the Chocolate City we know it as today and so Saint Paul's number is 157 million ever it is shocking to think about what Detroit's number might be what Oakland's number might be what Atlanta's number might be Washington DC Baltimore what our national number might be and so oftentimes we do this work as though we're starting from scratch we're not starting from scratch we're starting from burial we're starting from intentional dismantling of that economic ecosystem that you were just talking about and so we're not putting something together we have to put something back together that was intentionally destroyed by governments by businesses by non-profits by the people who sat in all of our seats before us so one thing I've learned is that we know well what Equity isn't it we know well how to sit in a room or see a policy or see a tweet and say that's not equity but we don't always know what Equity is and you can't build something you can't project something you can't create something on the basis of knowing what it's not I will tell you as a parent who is tired of trying to find teachers who look like my child I will tell you as somebody who could spend this whole morning telling you stories of being pulled over by the police when I know I wasn't speeding I could tell you as someone who knows what it feels like to pawn literally everything in your apartment and still not make rent that I am tired of talking about Equity so we got to figure out what Equity means a long time ago in a former life I went to business school at Florida a m University and my dean of my business school knew what she was talking about when she said the word equity as a matter of fact all of you private sector folks in the room know what you're talking about when you say Equity you're talking about money because the the the first definition of equity let me give you three things that characterize equity for us as far as our guiding definition in Saint Paul the first one is participation in an economy Evan if I own equity in a company that just basically means if that company has a good quarter I have a good quarter too that's the starting point if we're going to be an equitable City that means that as our Skyline grows as our tax base expands somebody should have an easier time feeding their children somebody should be able to pay the rent Equity means transferable appreciable assets Equity means ownership of transferable and appreciable assets and I just want to get us out of the space where when we in our social justice life talk about Equity we don't know what we're talking about Equity means ownership of appreciating and transferable assets an asset that's going to be worth more next year than it was today that I can pass to my children when it's time that's just what Equity means oh that sounds good but how did we get there like how how do you how do you put that in place like what are what are our building blocks to do that in the year 2000 I was a student at Florida a m University which was one of my nation's largest and livestorically black colleges uh is one of our is the capital city of Florida and so if you remember election 2000 and the phrase hanging Chads that's where I was I wasn't a super political student you might look at me and think oh it was probably on you know student senate or student government and then I wasn't I was active in non-profit organizations I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity NAACP but I actually know electoral politics just never seemed relevant to actually making people's lives better I remember thinking coming up to election 2000 I'll probably go vote after class if I have time now don't forget this is Bush versus Gore in Florida which is kind of an important swing state and here I am thinking I'll probably go vote after class if I have time I was living with my older sister her husband and their two-year-old daughter at the time of my uh brother-in-law said to me with a smile on his face but in knowing certain terms everyone living here today is going to vote [Laughter] and I said all right that feels like a good deal so I got in the car we went to the Poland place it's a swing state it's you know open election it's a record turnout and we stood in line in the cold for about 30 or 45 minutes and we stood there in the United States of America in the year 2000 arguing his right to vote which seemed incredible we were arguing his right to vote and so I grew up in a middle class life I grew up in our public schools and I grew up you know in those history classes it says you know we've had some tough times in America back in the 60s but we're past those days now and all of a sudden this experience in 2000 in the United States of America it felt like well we're not done yet and let me tell you standing there for me was one of the most profound feelings of powerlessness I've ever felt in my life equity has to be about participation in the economy Equity has to be about ownership of transferable and appreciable unpreasonable assets and if we want to get there Equity has to be about inclusive decision making processes I would suggest that the reason we have disparities in America the reason I have disparities in Saint Paul is because every decision that human beings ever make are designed to benefit the decider and so if we really want the decisions that come from City Hall if we really want the work of your organization to impact a broader set of people the only real logical way to build that future is to create a broader set of decision makers it's something that we are committed to in our city when I first got elected and people said who is your cabinet going to be who's your transition team and what they meant as we decoded it was like who are the like 12 to 15 like most insidery Insiders and what we ended up doing instead was we put an alcohol out in community and say you know what we we need community members to come together and be our transition team and we we asked for a group of people uh to help us uh name our cabinet every member of my cabinet who I've ever hired has been hired through what we call our community-based hiring process where we bring community members together to Source resumes uh to identify you know who meets minimum quality who doesn't to do the first set of interviews and to pass forward to me a slate of finalists when we first announced that we were going to do that people looked and said there's no way you're going to get the hundred people you need to make this happen a week later we had 300 volunteers and there are 200 people who are mad at me to this day because we didn't have enough chairs for them in the room a reporter asked me why are you doing it this way I said you know this is usually something that's done by like a small group of insiders I said it still is we just have a big group of insiders these days and so we're committed to this inclusive decision-making process we're committed to Bringing people into the process because when when when when when you do that when people radically get to determine their own fate then they'll make sure those decisions that are made in City Hall they'll make sure that the work of your organization they'll make sure that the work of your company uh benefits a broader set of people you know people ask us all the time why you know why why why um are you doing this like why are you like why are you doing poverty alleviation differently why why do you think there's room for like why do you think there's a need for a new approach and I always turn the question I said it's like give me like one reason why we should keep the war on poverty going the way it has for the last 60 years spoiler alert we're not winning and what we find as a parent who when my oldest child was born we were awake if you know anything about WIC you know is nutritional supports for women infants and children we could walk into a grocery store every couple of weeks and get more milk more eggs more peanut butter than we could possibly figure out what to do with in the 10 days until we got another book of coupons the thing is my daughter was born with a life-threatening allergy to peanuts my daughter was born allergic to Dairy and my daughter was born allergic to eggs so we could walk through the grocery store and get milk enough to bathe in but none of the soy milk that she could actually drink we could get eggs we could get peanuts but none of the almond butter that she could actually eat and I would be so angry that somebody in some Hall of government decided they knew more about what my child needed than I did and what we learn is when when when when when when when people make decisions about us without us then what it does is it either weakens or even weaponizes the systems that we all pay into that are supposed to be helping us raise our children now that's something that's personal to me because you know I already told you I'm from Minnesota and so that means names like philando Castile that means names like Dante Wright that means names like Amir lock and certainly names like George Floyd are intensely personal to me when we saw that protest movement that went far beyond Minnesota went across the globe I I would suggest that I don't think people were just protesting police violence again on our black man I'm black man I think people were protesting all of the different ways in which it just feels like these systems that we pay into that these systems that we're told we can trust and frankly these systems that we have no other choice but to rely on just feel like they have their knee on our neck and so turning that notion around really is a matter of life and death there's no two ways around it turning that system around turning that set of systems around really is a matter of life and death and that means only bring people into the decision-making processes it's about bringing people into the opportunity and the ability to determine their own dignity uh bringing people into the opportunity to raise their own children in the way that they know their children need to be raised it's about turning this model on its head that says poverty in America is created by a lack of character that's why we aren't winning the war on poverty because we don't know what it is and it's pretty simple poverty in America is caused by lack of money and in fact it's a farcical manufactured lack of money because we also rehearse all the time that this is the wealthiest Nation on the planet so poverty is in that case created by a broken ecosystem by a broken economic ecosystem that is human made and if people can make it the good news is that people can dismantle it so as a part of all this work our goal is to make Saint Paul the co-op capital of the world we want more businesses owned by low-income workers and more buildings owned by low-income tenants per capita than any place in the world um and it's really not for those people you know we always talk about those people right and we're guaranteed the income is concerned you know the reason that feels so like harsh is because our lives have been filled with the racist tropes about what those people will do if we give them money and one of the great things about our research is we're finding that when those people have money they buy groceries and they pay rent and they buy bicycles for their kids and they take their family on vacations in fact I would say those people spend money a lot like we people would do because we're finding out for once and for all there really was no they in Us in the first place just a really big we inhumanity and so you know the opportunity to own a business isn't just for those people it's because our demographics are changing it's for the the stability of our regional economy it's for the stability of our national economy in a country that's becoming more and more diverse it's for our ability to just say we are charting a path to an inclusive and Equitable future and we know what inclusion means and we actually know what Equity means for the first time I told you I went to school in Florida and I told you that story about election 2000 and the crazy thing about election 2000 is the leader of the three world was decided by 537 votes the winner of that election was the president for eight years so the course of this country in the course of this world was incredibly uh uh uh influenced by 537 votes which means that if all of us he said there's 100 people in this room 125 people in this room which means that if all of us had just talked to five people the whole course of humanity could have been different that's a remarkable opportunity for us my challenge for you is this you don't have to change the entire world if you work in an organization if you work in a city if you work in a community if you work in a company that you need to have a broader impact on a broader set of people all I'm asking you to do is make sure that you're working for an inclusive economy all I'm asking you to do is Advance uh ownership of transferable appreciable assets among the you know all the times we'd sit in a room and say how can we help those people better I want to liberate you from that all you have to do instead of saying I can't just I just can't figure out how we can help those people who aren't in this room to tell us uh what they need and when you identify a group of people when you identify a neighborhood when you identify a community that you need to serve better liberate yourself from that and bring them into the room and identify a community that they can serve better because they are part of the decision-making processes and I'm suggesting that if you do your work and if I do my work and if Evan does his work and if James does his work and if we all leave this space and do a little bit to move this work forward then by the time we come together next year for our conference in Saint Paul Minnesota [Applause] we can find ourselves in a fundamentally and transformatively different place thank you for sharing space with me this morning [Applause]