In his debut before both houses of Congress, President Donald J. Trump used traditional rhetoric to reveal his administration’s legislative goals for the coming year. Promising drastic increases in defense spending and replacement of crumbling infrastructure, Trump also spoke about his bold plans for American manufacturing, public education, the coal industry and tax reform.
Here, NationSwell Council members detail how to move forward on these areas of focus.
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Tag: making government work
The Strange Bedfellows Working to Save the Honeybee, Why Uber Is Getting in the Business of Public Transit and More
A Swarm of Controversy, WIRED
Can environmentalists and Big Agriculture come together to save honeybees? It’s a question Jerry Hayes, a former hive inspector turned Monsanto scientist, asks constantly. As conservationists blame Hayes’s company for colony collapse, he asks humans to learn something from the bees: how to cooperate for the hive’s sake.
Welcome to Uberville, The Verge
An experiment in an Orlando suburb could change the face of public transit. As part of a contract between Altamonte Springs, Fla. and Uber, local government subsidizes intra-city rides with the startup and fronts additional funds when connecting with mass transit. Critics argue that the plan isn’t accessible to low-income and disabled riders, but Altamonte officials say the deal was the only affordable way to connect the suburb’s sprawl.
Chicago Tackles Youth Unemployment As It Wrestles with Its Consequences, Chicago Tribune
Applying for a first job in Chicago can feel “like trying to go across Lake Michigan,” insiders say. Rap sheets or typo-laden résumés can ward off employers, and inaccessible transit through high-crime areas can discourage adolescents — disconnecting 41 percent of the Second City’s 18–24 year olds from work or school. Fortunately, a bevy of groups are helping this vulnerable group land work.
Working Toward a Just Society: How One American City Is Building Wealth Among Its Disenfranchised
In his seminal 1971 book “A Theory of Justice,” the American political philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment in his quest to define a fair and just society. He asks us to imagine ourselves in a situation in which we know nothing about our personal characteristics — not our gender, race, wealth or educational background. From this blind starting point, we’re tasked with laying the framework for a new, just society — the catch being, of course, that if you don’t know where you’ll land in the social hierarchy, what kind of world would you choose to live in?
Like Rawls, Thad Williamson, associate professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia, believes the key to a fair and just society is one in which capitalism works not to make as much money as possible, but to distribute wealth by offering equal employment and social opportunities. It’s a political theory usually confined to debates in lecture halls and academic journals. But two years ago, the city of Richmond offered Williamson a unique opportunity: to build a new government agency, from the ground up, that would tackle the constellation of causes that has led the city’s poverty rate to swell to 22.1 percent, triple the rest of Virginia.
That agency, the Office of Community Wealth Building, or OCWB, launched in 2014. OCWB attempts to boost the number of high-paying jobs for adults, offer more learning and development opportunities for kids and realign current housing stock to be more affordable and public-transit accessible. By 2030, Williamson hopes these efforts will cut Richmond’s child poverty rate in half, creating a more just city.
“We have a fragmentation of services. The issues that really should be discussed holistically are separated: employment, education and housing are all deeply tied together in an urban context,” Williamson tells NationSwell. “Getting separate departments and agencies to cooperate can be a challenge. That’s one of the reasons why the Office of Community Wealth Building was built: to set the strategy for the city as a whole.”
Richmond’s struggle against poverty can be traced back to more than a century ago, when the city segregated neighborhoods. In 1937, the most destitute areas were redlined, leading to “urban renewal” programs that, just a couple of decades later, razed entire neighborhoods and took blacks’ savings (which was tied up in their property). A dangerous cycle ensued. The city’s next generation found themselves lacking proper education and reliable public transit and involved in crime or child protective services. “Far too many children in Richmond have grown up, and are growing up, with the odds firmly stacked against them, as a result of growing up in poverty conditions,” Richmond’s Anti-Poverty Commission remarked in its final report in 2013, where the idea for OCWB was first suggested.
Williamson proposed that the OCWB focus on employment first, directing people to nursing and medical technician jobs at the area’s 20 hospitals, and to positions as logistics supervisors and welders for an expanded port. “We started unpacking what it takes to get to a job with a living wage, what the career path is and the practical obstacles that a family had to overcome,” says Williamson. “We came back to transportation, child care and health concerns” as issues that needed to be dealt with before parents could begin to think about work. “The thought all along was that a standard workforce program is not a bad thing, but for families in deep poverty, it wouldn’t be sufficient.”
MOVIN’ ON UP
The agency’s signature pilot program, called Building Lives to Independence and Self-Sufficiency (or BLISS, a word rarely used to describe government services) kicked off by providing 18 families living in public housing with whatever support they needed to secure jobs and move out. The participants — 24 adults and 46 kids — say the program is unlike anything they’ve ever seen in government. Only a select number are accepted (though all other workforce-innovation programs are open to everyone). Since BLISS is locally funded, with no mandates set by the state or federal government, members set their own personal goals, and the agency strategizes ways to achieve them. Caseworkers aren’t clock-punching bureaucrats either, cordoned away in an office; once BLISS gets involved in your life, you’ve practically got a new family member, participants report.
Jessica Ortiz is one such person. With two young daughters to support, Ortiz was laid off by a corporate law firm, where she had worked on foreclosure cases against homeowners. Initially, she applied for any job opening she could find: retail sales, administration assistant, hospital staff, line chef, security guard. Weeks later, if Ortiz did hear back from employers, they often said she was overqualified. After eight months of unemployment, Ortiz’s savings had evaporated, and life in her housing project was downright miserable. Her sink had been backed up for two years, the landline phone broke, and “D.C.-sized rats” infested the rooms, including the bathroom, where one rodent managed to dislodge the toilet pipes.
Within about three months of enrolling in BLISS, Ortiz’s caseworkers pointed her to a job opening at a local community-development nonprofit. Armed with her résumé and a reference letter from a BLISS caseworker, Ortiz was offered a job helping people with down payments on their first home or negotiating their debt. And the assistance didn’t stop there. In addition to hooking Ortiz up with a job, the agency called the housing authority to see that her toilet got fixed and the rat holes sealed, and it subsidized her childcare, which would have cost Ortiz about $1,250 a month. OCWB also organized regular meetings for the two dozen BLISS parents (including Ortiz) to swap advice, and it held sessions on topics like saving money via coupons, finding children’s books at the right grade level and balancing a budget. Unlike most state and federal programs, “the regulations [at OCWB] are coming from the people themselves, and they adjust to the participants,” Ortiz says. At BLISS, she adds, the staff views “you as an investment.”
PUSHING FORWARD
At the end of BLISS’s first year, 16 of the 18 heads of household had new jobs, and three-quarters completed financial literacy training to prepare them for homeownership. Seeing the results, the city council voted to make the OCWB a permanent fixture. Williamson says he’s particularly proud of assembling a capable and diverse staff of 14 employees during his tenure. “It’s such a huge undertaking, and the agency is trying to accomplish big things in a context where doing even little things often is very challenging and requires great persistence,” he says.
After laying the groundwork for the OCWB and leading it to its initial success, Williamson has returned full time to the classroom. Taking his spot is Reggie Gordon, a Richmond native and member of the city’s previous anti-poverty commission, who is stepping down as CEO of the American Red Cross’s Virginia chapter. Gordon says he’s got a prototype for how the agency should work, and it’s now a matter of obtaining long-term financing, growing the number of participants and rigorously documenting what’s effective.
In the hands of Gordon, and Williamson before him, what began as a thought experiment turned into something tangible, a government program that helps poor families move toward independence. Rawls would probably agree: Richmond is starting to see what a just society looks like.
MORE: Participants Claim This Program Boosts Them out of Poverty. Should Other Cities Implement It?
Baltimore Explores a Bold Solution to Fight Heroin Addiction
In the emergency room at George Washington University (GW) Hospital, in D.C., Dr. Leana S. Wen administered anti-inflammatory meds to kids choking with asthma, rescued middle-aged dads from heart attacks and sewed up shooting victims. Unlike a primary care doctor, she knew almost nothing about the strangers wheeled into the frenzied space: their medical history, financial situation and neighborhood all mysteries.
The usual anonymity made it all the more surprising when she recognized a 24-year-old mother of two. Homeless and addicted to opioids, the woman would show up nearly every week, begging for treatment. Without fail, Wen delivered the disappointing news that the next available appointment was three weeks away. Inevitably, the young mom relapsed during that window. The last time Wen saw the young woman, she wasn’t breathing. Her family had discovered her unresponsive, killed by an overdose.
“I always think back to my patient now: she had come to us requesting help, not once, not twice, but over and over again, dozens of times,” says Wen. “Because we do not have the treatment capacity, the people looking to us for help fall through the cracks, overdose and die. Why has our system failed her, just as it is failing so many others who wish to get help for their addictions?”
Last January, at age 32, Wen took a new job as the city’s health commissioner. As the leader of the country’s oldest public health department (established in 1793), Wen devotes much of her attention to an urgent problem: addiction to opioids (a class of drugs that includes heroin, morphine and oxycodone) and prescription painkillers. In the seaside port city of 622,000 residents, two-thirds of them black, heroin addiction grips 20,000 people. Many more pop prescription drugs before turning to heroin, a drug that’s cheaper than ever and more socially acceptable since it can be snorted and not just injected.
Baltimore’s drug addiction is lethal: Last year, 393 residents died of overdoses, a staggering number that surpassed the city’s 344 murders in a year of record gun violence. Long past a criminal “war on drugs,” Wen is implementing a public health response to this medical crisis. Her three-part plan involves preventing overdoses, treating addiction and ending stigma against drug users. By treating addiction as a sickness, not a scourge, she’s now saving lives on a broader scale than any emergency room physician.
“It ties into every aspect of the city. I’ve spoken to kids who question why they have to go to school every morning when everyone in their family is addicted to drugs and doesn’t get up. If we have employees that are addicted or have criminal histories because of their addiction, then what does that mean for a healthy workforce?” asks Wen, a fast talker who regularly works 14-hour days. “This is absolutely something we need to address as a critical public health emergency.”
Tenacious even in childhood, Wen spent the first eight years of her life in post-Mao China, until the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre forced her politically dissident parents to flee the country. They moved to Los Angeles’s gang-infested neighborhoods like Compton and East Los Angeles, scraping money together from jobs as a dishwasher and hotel maid. With money tight, Wen remembers her aunts choosing between prescription medications, food or bus passes. Never one to wait, Wen enrolled in classes at California State University, Los Angeles, when she was just 13 years old. By age 18, she finished her degree, graduating with the highest honors, and went on to earn her M.D. from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Working as a public health professor at GW, Wen spearheaded campaigns to cut healthcare costs, remove lead from homes and design walkable neighborhoods with access to reasonably priced, nutritious food, which caught the attention of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and landed her a new job.
A key to Wen’s plan for fighting opioid addiction is the distribution of an antidote to reverse a life-threatening opioid overdose. Inhaled through a nasal spray or injected into the upper arm or thigh like an EpiPen, Naloxone instantly revives a person from an overdose with few, if any, serious side effects. During a heroin high, chemicals block pain and induce euphoria — dulling the body to such an extent that the lungs forget to breathe while sleeping or the heart fails to pump adequately. Essentially shaking the brain out of its high, Naloxone creates a 30 to 90 minute window in which medical treatment can be sought. “It truly is a miracle drug,” Baltimore County Fire Chief John Hohman tells the Baltimore Sun. “It takes someone from near-death to consciousness in a matter of seconds.”
There’s only one catch: “You can’t give yourself this medication,” Wen explains. A person in the midst of an overdose often doesn’t have the wherewithal to inject the antidote. “That’s why we need every single person in our city to have access to it,” she adds, explaining that friends, family and community members have the ability to save a life.
In a controversial move, Wen issued a blanket prescription to the entire city last October — meaning anyone can buy the drug from a pharmacist. (For recipients of Medicaid, the price was reduced to $1 at a time when the drug’s price spiked drastically.) Wen sent training videos to jails and hospitals. Health department staffers visited areas notorious for open-air drug markets. Last year, the agency distributed 10,000 units of Naloxone and trained 12,500 residents how to administer it. That’s a big number for a program’s first year, but it’s still only half the number of active heroin users in Baltimore.
Outside of the roughly 30 recorded uses of Naloxone by police officers, there’s little hard evidence whether the drug has saved lives inside the city’s crack houses, parks and underpasses. Using data from Poison Control and other sources, Baltimore estimates Naloxone saved hundreds since 2015. “This remains a vastly underreported statistic,” says Sean Naron, a city spokesperson.
Critics claim that Naloxone encourages risky behavior and perpetuates the cycle of addiction because it removes the risk of death. “Naloxone does not truly save lives; it merely extends them until the next overdose,” Maine’s Gov. Paul LePage, wrote in April when he vetoed a bill that would have expanded access to Naloxone without a prescription. Suggestions like that make Wen balk. She calls them “specious,” “inhumane” and “ill-informed.” “That argument is based on stigma and not on science,” she responds. “You would never say to someone who is dying from a peanut allergy that you’re withholding their EpiPen to make them not eat peanuts.” Similarly for drug addiction, Wen believes there’s no use in talking about recovery tomorrow, if we don’t have the ability to stop a fatal overdose today.
Most in the medical community agree on the dire need for Naloxone. Experts caution, however, that it can’t be the sole response to this health crisis. Like most other cities, Baltimore is still trying to figure out how to effectively direct users whose lives were saved by Naloxone into long-term treatment programs, says Dr. Marc Fishman, medical director at Maryland Treatment Centers, a regional clinic. After reversing an overdose, an addict may “get dusted off and given a piece of paper with some phone numbers. They’re told to call this number today, tomorrow, next week. Maybe somebody will answer. Maybe they’ll take your insurance. Maybe they’ll see you next week or next month,” explains Fishman, who is also an addiction psychiatrist and faculty member at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Instead, Fishman suggests the medical system needs a “full continuum” from Naloxone administration to addiction treatment. It’s not unprecedented: just look to patients with heart issues, he says. They, too, receive lifesaving drugs to stabilize their ticker, but rather than being discharged immediately, a cardiac clinic assigns a care plan and prescribes maintenance medicines to patients.
Wen fully embraces the idea: she wants to see medication-assisted treatment that fools the brain into thinking it’s getting opioids without getting high or blocks an opioid high after shooting up, alongside housing and supportive social services. In the meantime, she’s set up a 24-hour hotline for users to get treatment option referrals. (Since October, it’s received 1,000 calls every month.) By next year, Wen wants to open a stabilization center where a person can drop in for several days to get sober.
It’s far from the perfect solution, Wen acknowledges. But at the moment, she’s constantly iterating new approaches. Last year, at a meeting of the Mayor’s Task Force on Heroin, Wen asked her colleagues to think of what they could do immediately that wouldn’t need further funding or manpower. That type of thinking fits with the approach she learned from life-or-death decisions in the emergency room: it’s better to act quickly now with what’s available than to wait for an instrument that might never come.
“Everybody is working hard and trying stuff. Some things are succeeding, and some are failing,” Fishman says. “I get a sense of dynamic enthusiasm. People are rolling up their shirtsleeves. I’m sorry that white kids from the suburbs had to start dying before anybody started paying attention, but it’s better late than never.”
Despite Wen’s tireless efforts, overdoses continue to rise in Baltimore. Last year, 260 heroin users overdosed, tripling the 76 intoxication deaths in 2011. Why are people still dying? Wen returns to the idea that a heroin user, on the brink of an overdose, can’t save himself; the rest of the city needs to be on the lookout, which isn’t always the case.
Baltimore’s response to this crisis has the ability to end an epidemic and to unite an ailing community. Wen, who says she’s an optimist by nature, might just find a way to cure a hurting American city after all.
Homepage photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
MORE: How Do You Breathe Life into a Neighborhood That’s Been Forgotten?
Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation
Mindfulness, the practice of being awake to the present moment, is now in vogue in American workplaces as varied as Google, Goldman Sachs, Aetna and General Mills. Backed by scientific research of the cognitive benefits of ancient Buddhist meditation, corporate types thinking of productivity and the bottom line quickly trained their workers how to focus using mindfulness. Outside of finance, tech and manufacturing industries, NationSwell found seven more workplaces where you find employees reaping the benefits of meditating on a regular basis.
1. Concert Hall
Where: Tempe, Ariz.
After studying mindfulness for four decades, Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is renowned as the field’s mother. Her concept of mindfulness differs from the common practice, in that she believes no meditation is necessary to change the brain’s chemistry; instead, she achieves mindfulness by existing in a state of “actively noticing new things,” she tells NationSwell.
As part of her research, she once split the Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra into two groups and instructed each to play a piece of music by Johannes Brahms, which she recorded. Langer asked the first group to remember their best performance of the familiar piece and try their best to replicate it. She told the other group of musicians to vary the classical piece with subtle riffs that only they would recognize. Langer taped both performances and played them side-by-side for an audience. Overwhelmingly, listeners preferred the second one. To Langer, it seemed that the more choices we make deliberately — in a word, mindfully — as opposed to the mindless repetition, the better our end-product will be. The most important implication for Langer came later, when she was writing up the study: In America, she says, we so often prize a “strong leader to tell people what to do,” but as the orchestra’s performance proves, when an individual takes the lead instead of doing what someone instructs her to do, a superior result is the likely outcome.
2. Primary School
Where: East Village, New York City
“The research is pretty conclusive: when kids feel better, they learn better. One precedes the other,” declares Alan Brown, a consultant with Mindful Schools where he offers mindfulness training to the private school’s freshman and sophomores. Brown incorporated a serious practice into his life at a week-long silent retreat, after “jumping out of my skin, reading the toilet paper, doing anything but to be with your own thoughts and with yourself.” He now teaches kids how to be attuned to themselves and recognize feelings that may be subconsciously guiding their lives, like when they’re hyped up with sugar or are stressed out about a test. (Solutions: spending a moment in a designated corner calming down, breathing through a freakout to restore higher cognitive functions.)
As someone in the caregiving profession, Brown reminds himself and his fellow teachers they need to adopt mindfulness practices as well. With them, “the way I interact with others comes from a place of much greater compassion for the kids: clearly this young person, who is not a fully-formed, self-regulating adult, is probably trying their best and probably has some really significant hurdles outside the classroom. I’m not going to let that get to me.” If teachers expect similarly enlightened behavior from their kids, Brown adds, they have to know, “You can’t teach what you don’t have in your own body” and better embrace a meditative practice to see the results at every desk.
3. Hospital
Where: Shrewsbury, Mass.
Modern mindfulness was formalized in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Jon Kabat-Zinn created an eight-week meditation routine to reduce stress for the hospital’s chronically ill patients that’s now replicated worldwide. Back on the medical campus where it all started, a new mindfulness program is being offered this summer for the people on the other side of treatment: the physicians, nurse practitioners and care managers.
The Mindfulness in Medicine program works to combat the frequent feeling of dissatisfaction about a lack of patient interaction among doctors. Instructor Carl Fulwiler gives lectures about the clinical research on meditation’s benefits, teaches 90-minute workshops for busy staffers and leads full-blown courses for a dedicated few. His teachings focus on how to avoid burnout with strategic pauses; by taking a breath immediately prior to seeing a patient, doctors can focus solely on the interaction. “Often they’re thinking about what’s the next thing they have to do or the documentation. They’re not even hearing a lot of what the patient is saying,” Fulwiler observes. With mindfulness, they can see what “might be contributing to a bad encounter, what’s preventing us from being empathetic, compassionate and more efficient in our style of communication?” The whole interaction may be over in three minutes, but having that time be meaningful is vital for helping the healers themselves feel the rewards of a demanding job.
4. Government
Where: Washington, D.C.
Change rarely comes to our nation’s capital, but that’s okay in Rep. Tim Ryan’s mind. A meditative practice equipped him to deal with legislative gridlock and partisan bickering. The seven-term Democrat representing northeastern Ohio practices mindfulness in a half lotus position for roughly 40 minutes daily — a regimen he began after attending one of Kabat-Zinn’s retreats in 2008, after which he gained “a whole new way of relating with what was going on in the world,” Ryan tells The Atlantic. “And like any good thing that a congressman finds — a new technology, a new policy idea — immediately I said, ‘How do we get this out?’” Ryan first wrote the book “A Mindful Nation,” exploring the ways mindfulness is being implemented across America, and today, in sessions of the House Appropriations Committee on which he sits, the representative advocates for more funds to be deployed to teach meditation tactics. The money may not be forthcoming just yet, but that hasn’t stopped mindfulness from gaining more new converts like Ryan every day.
5. Police Department
Where: Hillsboro, Ore.
Last month, Americans watched videos of officer-involved shootings in Baton Rouge, La.; St. Paul, Minn; and North Miami, and they read about the five cops who died in a sniper attack in Dallas. While those crises were deeply felt by civilians nationwide, they were only a glimpse of what cops encounter regularly. “Law enforcement is a profession that is deeply impacted by trauma. On a daily basis, we bump up against human suffering,” says Lt. Richard Goerling, head of Hillsboro Police Department’s investigative division and a faculty member at Pacific University. “It doesn’t take very long for police officers’ well-being to erode dramatically,” he adds, ticking off studies that track early mortality and cardiovascular issues among public safety professionals.
Through the organization Mindful Badge, Goerling teaches several police departments in the Portland area and in Northern California how mindfulness can better cops’ performance: sharpening their attention to life-or-death details, cultivating empathy and compassion that’s crucial for stops and searches and building resilience before encountering trauma. The theory goes that once an officer receives mental training, he can sense when a stressor in his environment is activating his flight-or-flight reactions and then check those instincts. “If a police officer is in their own crisis,” Goerling suggests, “they’re not going to meet that person in a way that’s totally effective.” The lieutenant is aware mindfulness isn’t a cure-all for “a landscape of suffering,” but he believes it’s a first step to changing a “broken” police culture that takes its officers’ health for granted.
6. Athletic Competition
Where: San Diego, Calif.
BMX bikers may not seem like a group that’s primed for meditation, but when an elite biker stuttered with anxiety at the starting line, his coach James Herrera looked into any way to solve the problem of managing stress before a high-stakes event. Herrera soon got in touch with the Center for Mindfulness at the University of California, San Diego, and he signed up his seven-man team for a small study into the effects of meditation on “very healthy guys who are at the top of their sport,” lead author Lori Haase tells NationSwell. Over seven weeks, the bikers practiced a normal mindfulness routine, but with extra impediments like having their hands submerged in a bucket of icy water to teach them to feel the sensation of pain, rather than reacting to it cognitively. As the weeks went on, their bodies seemed to prepare for a physical shock, without an accompanying psychological panic. In other words, participants’ bodies were so amped up and hyperaware that they didn’t need to react as strongly to the stressor itself compared to an average person. The study didn’t test whether it made them faster on the course, but it seemed to suggest that reaction times could be sped up by using mindfulness to slow down.
7. Military
Where: Honolulu, Hawaii
Like cops, members of the military have much to gain from situational awareness. A couple seconds’ of lead-time for a soldier to notice someone in a bulky jacket running into a public square could prevent a suicide bomb from taking out dozens of civilians and comrades abroad. But that’s not all mindfulness is good for in a service member’s line of duty.
Before soldiers even leave home, they must deal with leaving family and putting other aspects of their lives on hold. To prepare soldiers for deployment, University of Miami neuroscientist Amishi Jha offered mindfulness trainings at an Army outpost on Oahu to soldiers heading to Afghanistan. To fit the program into an already crowded training regimen, Jha drastically cut down the standard 40-hour model to an eight-hour practice scattered throughout eight weeks. Despite the stress of leaving that could sap the mind’s attention and working memory — “everything they need to do the job well when they’re there,” Jha notes — the mindfulness trainings prevented their minds from wandering. Tentative research Jha’s still conducting suggests those benefits persist post-deployment. Her session was just like boot camp, Jha found, only for the brain.
MORE: How Meditation Is Bringing Calm to San Francisco’s Toughest Schools
Questioning How Society Is Constructed Is the Best Way to Enact Change
As a staff member working for the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the mid 2000s, Tomicah Tillemann reported to now-Vice President Joe Biden and worked extensively with, he says with a chuckle, “a new senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.”
Inspired by successful policy work, Tillemann remained in government, serving as Secretary Hillary Clinton’s speechwriter (once going 100 hours without sleep in order to perfect a speech) and later, as her senior adviser. That work informed Tillemann’s current position as director of the Bretton Woods II initiative at New America, a new model of investing that combines the public and private sectors and technology to further social impact causes worldwide.
NationSwell sat down with Tillemann at New America’s minimalist offices in Washington, D.C., just blocks from the White House, to discuss the importance of collaboration and why appealing to logic isn’t always successful.
Is there an innovation in your field that you’re particularly excited about right now?
In the work we’re doing right now at the Bretton Woods II initiative, we started from the realization that we’re living in a world with a huge quantum of capital and problems. We don’t do enough connecting the two, and we have yet to develop a business model that allows us to move resources to solve big global challenges. What we have recognized is that with good data and good analytics, you can provide big asset holders with the information they need to see how targeted investments in social impact and development can address the root causes of the volatility that eat away at their profits.
What is the best advice you’ve ever received on leadership?
If you can build a community that is passionately committed to the cause that you are trying to advance, then your job as a leader becomes immeasurably easier. What I’ve tried to do in my work in the private and public sectors and now straddling the two is to bring together individuals that share a common commitment to the work that we are seeking to advance. At that point, I can kind of step aside and get out of the way and watch them do incredible things.
In our current efforts, we are fortunate to have partnered with some of the leading foundations and many of the largest financial institutions in the world. When you put these guys together, provide some vision and serve as a catalyst for their collaboration, they’re going to do spectacular things. The great challenge of leadership is to deliver a vision that can appeal to people who wouldn’t otherwise work together. If you can provide that, then you’ve got it made as a leader.
What inspires you?
My grandfather came to the U.S. as a penniless Holocaust survivor. He arrived with $7 and a salami in his pocket, and his salami was confiscated at customs. Through a lot of hard work and education, he eventually served the United States in the Congress for 30 years and became chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I was able to grow up learning at his feet; I spent virtually every summer in Washington, D.C., with him. The great benefit of that was seeing his commitment to improving the state of the world. He recognized what could happen if you didn’t; he’d seen the evil that could be unleashed when people looked the other direction.
What do you wish someone would’ve told you when you started working in Washington, D.C., but didn’t?
In so much of what we do in Washington and certainly the work we do trying to mobilize the world’s largest asset holders to invest in social impact, we’re trying to change behavior. Part of that is based in logic, but a lot of it goes beyond that. We tend to focus a lot of time and energy on logic, and it’s necessary but it’s not sufficient. In order to do everything else, you need to build communities, relationships and get very good at leveraging different centers of power. Ultimately, you can have the best case in the world, but unless you know how to speak to people through those other channels, you’re probably not going to do what you set out to accomplish.
What is your idea of a perfect day?
My most important job is dad to five amazing kids. Our oldest is 10 and our youngest is 16 months. My happiest days involve them. We go to the San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest every summer, and if we go out and catch some crabs, read some books together and spend some time on the beach — that’s real tough to beat. It’s a reminder of why you do everything else that you do.
What is your proudest accomplishment?
Definitely my five little people, and they’re in a class by themselves. Beyond that, I hope to someday say that my proudest accomplishment is leaving them a world that’s materially better than it would’ve been if I hadn’t engaged in these issues.
What is something that people don’t know about you but should?
I was born in the car on the way to the hospital. My mother was a very brave woman.
What is your all-time favorite book?
I really like Thomas More’s “Utopia,” which is a great exercise in how to reenvision and reimagine a society. The questioning that is evident in that book and the reexamination of some of the fundamental principles that you assume that need to undergird our civilization is something that we need more of. I think we can benefit from constantly looking at the way our society is constructed and asking, “Do things really need to be built as they are?” To the extent that we can make that part of our constant conversation in our heads, we can do good things.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
The Surprising, Eco-Friendly Place to Store Data Servers, Safer Ways to Care for the Sick and More
Why Data Farms Are Heading Underwater, CityLab
According to an animated Walt Disney classic, everything’s better, down where it’s wetter. That’s exactly what computer giant Microsoft learned when it submerged a data farm under the sea. Cold ocean temperatures eliminates the need for massive, energy-sucking cooling systems, which land-based servers require.
Hospitals Focus on Doing No Harm, The New York Times
When one hears that an estimated 98,000 and 440,000 people die because of preventable errors at hospitals, it’s easy to think that doctors are breaking their promise to do no harm. In response, healthcare facilities nationwide are implementing new procedures — from the somewhat common sense (practicing consistent hand washing) to the more complex, like immediate monitoring for symptoms of sepsis and changing hospital culture.
Here’s How Houston Boosted Mass Transit Ridership by Improving Service Without Spending a Dime, Vox
Thanks to overcrowding, late arrivals and seemingly constant price hikes, it’s no wonder that subways and buses get a bad rap. In the highway-riddled city of Houston, transit officials found a way to boost ridership: by emphasizing frequency over geographic scope. More importantly, however, was their discovery of a mass transit strategy that can be replicated coast to coast, at no cost.
Join the NationSwell Council Conversation with Lawrence Lessig
When it comes to making government work, Lawrence Lessig sees a straightforward solution. The country, he says, needs to overhaul the way elections are funded. The challenge, of course, is making that happen.
Lessig will discuss this challenge at a February 2 lunch from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. with NationSwell Council members in New York City. We hope you will join the conversation by tweeting your questions before then by using the #NSCouncil hashtag or joining the live conversation on Twitter.
Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard University, launched the Mayday PAC as a “counterintuitive experiment” to tackle the problem of money in politics. In phase two of this experiment, which was first tested in the 2014 midterm elections, Mayday PAC is looking to its supporters to recruit members of Congress who will support reform. As The New Yorker put it in a recent profile, “Lawrence Lessig wants to reform campaign finance. All he needs is fifty billionaires.”
In his TED talk, Lessig says that only by spreading funder influence beyond the “tiniest slice of America” can we restore the idea of a government dependent on the people alone.
“We have lost that republic,” he says. “All of us have to act to get it back.”
Republicans and Democrats Rarely Agree On Anything. Except This
Republicans and Democrats indicated at the start of last week’s legislative term that 2015 is the year for criminal justice reform.
With an ideological split dividing President Obama and congressional leadership, you can probably expect more bickering than legislation to come from Washington over the next two years. But one of the few issues lawmakers seem to agree on is the need to reduce our prison population, now surpassing 2.3 million inmates. High-profile Republicans are lining up behind sentencing reform at the same time that Democratic leaders, including Rep. G.K. Butterfield, the new chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), announced that the overhauling of the criminal justice system is the top priority.
“We believe Congress has a critical role to play in helping to restore trust in the criminal justice system, ensuring that every American is treated equally before the law,” write Reps. Elijah Cummings, John Conyers, Jr., and Bennie Thompson, the ranking Democratic members on three powerful House committees. “This is a transformative moment for our country.”
Statistics about our country’s prison system are disturbing, to say the least. There are now more black men in prison, jail or on parole than were enslaved in 1850, The New Yorker calculates. The entire populations of Philadelphia and Detroit could fit in the bunks of our jails, Pacific Standard adds. And the costs of all these cells are staggering: Detaining inmates now eats up almost one-third of the Justice Department’s annual budget.
This growing federal bureaucracy has caused many Republicans to pivot away from the party’s traditional tough-on-crime stance. Why? It just makes economic sense. Add the nationwide anger over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the rallying cry for change is louder than ever — from both sides of the aisle.
“There is a well-founded mistrust between the African-American community and law enforcement officers. The statistics are clear. Video clips are clear,” says Rep. Butterfield. “You will see the Congressional Black Caucus make criminal justice reform a centerpiece of our work.”
As solutions, black legislators have promised to push for updates to “outdated” mandatory sentencing laws, accountability for police and “unethical prosecutors” and access to competent public defenders, says Butterfield, a North Carolina Democrat.
This progressive rhetoric is expected from Butterfield’s caucus — known on the Hill as the “Conscience of Congress” — but what is unusual this year is that a group from the right, including Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas, Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch of Utah and Rob Portman of Oregon, are also trumpeting reform. Each of these lawmakers has introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at undoing decades of slamming criminals behind bars.
“I say enough’s enough. I won’t sit idly by and watch our criminal justice system continue to consume, confine and define our young men,” Paul, a likely presidential candidate, told the National Urban League last summer. “I say we take a stand for justice now.”
Reform still won’t be easy. Last year, the Smarter Sentencing Act, a proposal to shorten prison sentences for low-level drug crimes, and the Federal Prison Reform Act, a bill that would have given inmates credit for time served in job training and drug rehab programs, both stalled and died without a vote on the floor.
Looking ahead, any future bills will have to win approval from Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, the Republicans chairmen of each chamber’s judiciary committee. Both boast reputations for being tough on crime, and both can delay any bill indefinitely with exhaustive reports, hearings and amendments. But in a hopeful sign last month, Grassley introduced a bipartisan bill with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, designed to prevent “at risk-youth from entering the [prison] system” and helping juvenile offenders already “in the system become valuable members of communities.”
As is usually the case in Washington, compromise seems to be the way forward. “There will be times when I will encourage the CBC to reach across the aisle and try to reach some bipartisan deals that will not make us feel good, but will move the needle in our communities and communities of color,” Butterfield tells BET. “The fight for the future is not a black fight, a Democratic or Republican fight; it is a fight that all fair-minded Americans should promote.”
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What the Former Mayor of Indianapolis Wants You to Know About Government
Stephen Goldsmith is the former mayor of Indianapolis and former Deputy Mayor of New York City for Operations. He sat down with NationSwell and shared his thoughts on how government can work more effectively with data, unions and the private sector.