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On this episode of Let’s Fix It, two social innovators Cheryl Dorsey, President of Echoing Green and Phillip Atiba Goff, Co-Founder of Centre for Policing Equity, Co-Founder of Justice Rx, and Carl I. Hovland Professor of African American Studies and Professor of Psychology at Yale University are dismantling inequitable systems in policing to philanthropy.
Learn from some of the world’s best social innovators on how to create a more just, sustainable and equitable world.
Podcast transcript
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Cheryl Dorsey: There is injustice and inequity around the world. But individuals, when given resources and support, can make a big dent against those inequitable systems and have a real role in bending the arc of history towards justice.
Pavitra Raja: Welcome to Let's Fix It, the podcast from the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship and the World Economic Forum that speaks to leading social innovators and finds out how they're fixing some of the world's biggest problems. In this episode, we speak to two social innovators who have made equity and justice their mission.
Phillip Atiba Goff: Racism is a masterwork of kingpins. It's a system of narratives and rules that give license to bullies. So the work that I'm doing and the work that my team does is we create scholarship, relationships and policies to destroy kingpins and their labours. I'd say that's what we're looking to fix.
Pavitra Raja: Subscribe to Let's Fix It on Apple, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts and make sure to like, rate and review us. I'm Pavitra Raja at the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship. Join me and learn how some of the world's brightest minds are quite literally fixing it.
Cheryl Dorsey has been a pioneer in the social innovation ecosystem for almost three decades. She began her career as a doctor and quickly realized how hard it was for some people, especially people of colour, to get medical care.
During her journey, she discovered her compass – head plus heart equals hustle, a formula that I've successfully used in my career journey too. Today, Cheryl is the President of Echoing Green, an organization dedicated to empowering black social innovators. Let's jump right into our conversation.
Cheryl Dorsey: Echoing Green, a community I've been a part of now for close to 30 years, first attracted me because of a very simple message that there is injustice and inequity around the world. But individuals, when given resources and support, can make a big dent against those inequitable systems, and have a real role in bending the arc of history towards justice.
So I think I was very compelled by the role of individuals in reshaping and reforming the trajectory of human history, if given the right sorts of support, belief and championing to make that possible. So I think that's been sort of the work of my professional life the past 30 years.
Pavitra Raja: Within the past 30 years, you've gone from being a doctor to a social entrepreneur and then now leading Echoing Green. Can you tell us a little bit about your really illustrious career journey?
Cheryl Dorsey: Well, I would say my career journey has been a circuitous one, right? And I suppose most of us get into the world of healthcare because we want to serve. And there was a deep commitment to service that started me doing that work so many years ago.
I'm the daughter of two public school teachers who collectively devoted close to 90 years of their lives to working with young people in inner city Baltimore, Maryland, thousands of students, helping to set them on the course of opportunity.
I think for me, a good example of what we try to tell young people at Echoing Green is this interesting formula of head plus heart equals hustle, right? So there's an idea of what are your skills and your talents? What are you really good at?
I was particularly interested in study in school. I was a good student in math and science, so naturally sort of gravitated to pre-med and other hard sciences. And that sort of led me to this idea that perhaps I could make a difference by becoming a doctor.
So I trained as a paediatrician in Washington, DC and I think like most of us, when we're engaged in something that's quite meaningful, you often, you start to begin to analyze sort of deeper structural issues, right?
So here I was a young resident in inner city Washington, DC, patching up children who I then sent back to the same communities and schools and homes that led them to have poorer outcomes because they were poor, because they were of colour, because they were disenfranchized.
So a deeper analysis of what was my both role and responsibility to those children, but also was I making a dent in a system one patient at a time? And I think I ultimately decided the answer to that was no, which ultimately led me into the work of social change and social innovation and Echoing Green. And here I am 30 plus years later, Pavitra.
Pavitra Raja: And what are you most proud of that Echoing Green has achieved while you've been leading it?
Cheryl Dorsey: I was in the early classes of Echoing Green Fellows. You know, Echoing Green was founded by the senior leadership of General Atlantic, a global private equity firm. They're real pioneers in the field of social innovation.
And, you know, Echoing Green was one of the earliest founded funders of social entrepreneurs, having been founded in 1987. The idea was to apply many of the business principles and practices that had made them such successful private equity investors, applying that same sort of rigour and commitment to the entrepreneur, to the work of social change.
And I heard about Echoing Green while I was a graduate student at Harvard. I had taken time off from the medical school to go to the Kennedy School of Government and was working with my mentor, one of my dearest friends, Dr Nancy Oriol, on an idea to help reduce the infant mortality rate among Black infants in Boston.
At the time, in the late eighties, Black babies were dying at three times the rate of white babies, which is horrific and inequitable enough. But the fact that it was happening in the shadow of some of the world's greatest medical facilities like Brigham and Women and Mass General Hospital, was truly unconscionable.
So the two of us together, I, as a medical student and Dr Nancy Oriol as an obstetric anaesthesiologist, started thinking about what could we do from our perch of privilege at Harvard Medical School to take on this racial health disparity in our own backyard.
And in spending a lot of time talking to the community, doing outreach, came up with this idea of starting a mobile health unit to really bridge the gap between what was happening on the streets and what was happening within the walls of some of the world's best medical facilities.
And hence was born the family van, the mobile health unit that we created to serve residents in a number of neighbourhoods in Boston that were overrepresented in Black infant mortality.
We didn't know what we were doing. I was a student, she was a obstetric anaesthesiologist. We sat at her kitchen table most nights when her kids were screaming, the dog was barking, eating pasta, while we were trying to figure out how to set up this programme.
And I told her that I saw a flyer on a kiosk about this new fellowship, that perhaps it would give us money to help start this programme. And fortunately, I applied and was fortunate enough to run the gantlet of interview process and was selected as an Echoing Green Fellow in 1992.
Having access and belonging to that community helped me tremendously, and it made the highs a lot higher, but the lows a lot less lower. So that was my initial foray into social innovation.
For the past 20 years, I've been fortunate enough to be staff of the organization and to sort of round out your question, what am I most proud of about Echoing Green? So many things, but in many ways what keeps me here all these years later Pavitra is its deep commitment to being a community by, for and of social entrepreneurs.
I fight every day to support their work around the world, and that gift of being part of this beloved community, I just couldn't be prouder of that.
Pavitra Raja: Cheryl, you're so inspiring. You said so much that I want to unpack. Let me start with this. Why is representation so important to you Cheryl, and how are you, especially through the work of Echoing Green empowering Black social innovators?
Cheryl Dorsey: Representation allows us to see ourselves reflected in spaces in the work that we do, in the movements we're engaged in. And once you see yourself reflected in these spaces, that really is the predicate that then allows you to really imagine bigger and bolder dreams for yourself in your work.
We've got really good data from the education reform movement that shows that higher student achievement happened when kids of colour have, for example, principals and teachers of colour. That's what representation looks like, right? And it translates directly into better outcomes.
And I think that's been true of social innovation for many years, because of the way that the social innovation movement was founded. It came out of a tradition in philanthropy. It came out of very elitist circles. And as a result, it was not representative in terms of race, class, geography, not well-represented in the Global South enough. But that begins to change.
I think increasingly it has been important that as a Black woman, I'm a longstanding voice in this space. So that signals that there is a place for people who look like me in this movement.
And it gives, I think, some level of comfort and belief to folks who look like me, that they've got representation trying to create a more equitable and inclusive space to welcome that in.
Pavitra Raja: You have been a thought leader of this space for 20, 30 years. Why do you think that social entrepreneurs are key to finding systemic level solutions, whether it's the climate crisis or whether it's social justice?
Cheryl Dorsey: You know, so many of the advancements of the 20th century happened because of these great social justice movements. So it is one of the most important sort of historical forces that we have.
But I think I increasingly began to believe that justice work will always and is necessary but no longer sufficient to take on the challenges of the day, which are changing and growing with such rapidity. They're so complex that it requires sort of new arrows in the quiver if we're going to get after these things.
And social innovation seem to be one of those really important arrows in the quiver to interrogate why. So, again, I think social innovators are a particular type of transformational leader sitting between the market, the state and civil society.
And that ability to sort of diffuse and engage and mobilize across those sectors makes social innovators a particularly unique and relevant form of actor. That's one reason.
I also think the other reason is because they're entrepreneurial, right? So the fundamental power of entrepreneurship to disrupt, which you need for these sclerotic, inequitable systems that are so asymmetrically powerful, right? Incremental change is just not going to ever get it done.
So the opportunity to both disrupt and leapfrog, which is unique to sort of entrepreneurial approaches and leaders, is really quite alluring and made me begin to realize that there was something really special about this class, this breed of leader.
Pavitra Raja: What do you think is something that can be a barrier for social innovators to continue to do what they do? What worries you about the sector the most, and what do you think needs immediate action?
Cheryl Dorsey: There are lots of things in sort of the social innovation ecosystem that need to be bolstered, which is why, you know, you and I do the work that we do.
I would say Echoing Green is increasingly focused on this idea of the need to sort of fix movement finance, right? The sort of the financing structures and systems are fundamentally broken to do this work.
A couple of years ago, we produced a really important report with our friends at Bridge Span, looking at the capital gaps between our Black leaders versus our white leaders.
And it was in many ways sort of the perfect sample, a comparison set, because, you know, everyone who knows our world knows that less than 1% of the thousands of people apply to us are going to become Echoing Green Fellows.
So you would think once you run the gantlet of this incredibly Darwinian search process, once you're in the Echoing Green network, there should be parity in terms of the capital that our Fellows are able to raise.
And the fact that we were able to demonstrate such a disparity between Black and white innovators in our portfolio where, you know, Black social innovators were raising 24% less revenue than their white counterparts, but 76% less unrestricted net assets versus their white counterparts.
That initial capital gap had knock-on effects that slowed and was a real drag on the trajectory of the enterprises run by these Black leaders. And they were not unique, but simply emblematic of what was happening to leaders in the Global South, what was happening to women social innovators, women of colour social innovators.
And then what we began to see when we did some more digging in our portfolio, you know, there are about 900 Echoing Green Fellows, but when you look at the 400 or so who are folks of colour who are working on racial equity issues, if you looked at their budgets and tried to upsize the smallest ones to get them to be about a million a year, or if they were getting some traction and we're about a million or so, we try to get them up to 5 million.
These groups were so undercapitalized that they could have collectively absorbed an additional one and a half billion dollars annually. That's how undercapitalized these enterprises are.
So the notion that we're asking these civil society leaders to go forth and take on the biggest challenges of the day without appropriate resources, without appropriate infrastructure, with lack of access to those sorts of capital tools, has made it very clear to all of us at Echoing Green, that until we figure out the financing, the right financing at the right time for the right leaders, the suite of tools, the suite of technical support services to allow them to absorb and leverage the types of capital, we're not going to be able to send out our justice troops to do this work because they're not properly capitalized and resourced to do it.
One of the reasons it's broken is because our capital markets have an investor-first focus, full stop. It is all about the lens from which you approach things and everything is set up through an investor-first lens.
Imagine what things would look like if you had a founder-first lens. That did not exist. It exists at Echoing Green because we are fellow-first, but we are a distinct minority. It does not exist in spaces - the capital markets don't work that way. Philanthropy does not work that way. The power dynamics are completely shifted to the capital allocators, and that's why you end up getting these structural problems as it relates to finance and so many other things.
And that actually does relate and walks us to this question of intersectionality. We all probably became familiar with the term because of the amazing Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who noted there's an interconnected nature of these social categorizations that create overlapping and interdependent disadvantage and discrimination.
But a lot of her work actually stemmed from the work that came out of the Black feminists in the 40s and 50s and beyond, pushing back against the women's movement in the United States that marginalized Black women because they were not only women, but they were also black people in the United States.
And all you have to look at is the relative earnings of people. So for every dollar that a white man earns in the United States, a Black man earns $0.74, a white woman earns $0.78, a Black woman earns $0.64.
That is a clear example of intersectionality, right? Doesn't get any clearer than that. Dollars and cents in your pocket based on your overlapping identities. And I think what happens is that philanthropy has been slow and late to recognizing that their path to impact runs right through racial equity and having a deep understanding and analysis about the impact of race, class, colonial status on your ability to solve problems in the communities that you care about.
And until philanthropy starts to take on that intersectional lens, starts to recognize those differences and how they impact opportunity and outcome, but also have to impact your solution set, we're not going to get anywhere. And again, philanthropy has got to do that work and it just hasn't done it yet.
Pavitra Raja: That was the amazing Cheryl Dorsey, President of Echoing Green. Stay tuned because after the break, we're going to hear from Phillip Goff, a social innovator who's using big data to make racial bias a thing of the past.
Pavitra Raja: Welcome back to Let's Fix It, the podcast from the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship at the World Economic Forum. In this episode of Let's Fix It, we're learning how social innovators are exposing racial inequality and changing the lives of people of colour.
Phillip Goff first experienced racism in high school. It was an experience that would transform him. Today, Phil is a man of many talents. Psychologist, social entrepreneur and a storyteller. He's also the leading voice in the science of racial bias. He combined his talents to co-found Center for Policing Equity, the action think-tank on race and policing. Phil is also a personal mentor of mine. His words of wisdom and encouragement have transformed my life, and we hope that this conversation does the same for you.
Phillip Atiba Goff: Bullies exercise their power on you individually. And then you have schemers who exercise their power through creating formal rules so that they don't have to be blamed. They can blame it on the rules, not just them.
Kingpins exercise their power through creating narratives that compel the construction of rules that protect them, so that they can claim it should always be that way, that it is right and natural that the rules that we have should be that way.
And racism is a masterwork of kingpins. It's a system of narratives and rules that that give a licence to bullies. So the work that I'm doing and the work that my team does is we create scholarship, relationships and policies to destroy kingpins and their labours. I'd say that's what we're looking to fix.
Pavitra Raja: Tell me a little bit about a different dimension of how you approach this problem and how you are attempting – and I would say the word attempting because this is such a complicated issue and it plays out very differently in different contexts – how is Center for Policing Equity, JusticeRx, how are you looking at fixing the problem through your organizations?
Phillip Atiba Goff: It's funny, you diagnose a problem and immediately you want to go in and you want to sort of say, 'Alright, so I understand what the problem is. Let me put in the solution.'
I think a step that often gets missed – and for sure I missed it at various times – is you don't diagnose what your role is, what your role should be. As an academic, as a social scientist, as a quantitative person, I don't live in each of the communities that share the forms of oppression and stratification that I have both experienced and witnessed.
It's not right for me, therefore, to sort of be at the lead in those local communities. It would be like parachuting in. I talked with activists and organizers who referred to it as mosquito work, where you're literally extracting what you need and then you fly away, often leaving an infection.
So the stuff that we do at CPE is we try and stay in our lane to unlock bolder action towards justice. And what that means is we've got folks who are leaders and leaders could be elected officials, it could be folks in law enforcement. It is always some constellation of folks in communities. And sometimes the leaders are not even acknowledged as leaders.
These are just brilliant folks with deep expertise and their wisdom and their own experience. But those leaders sometimes don't know what has been successful elsewhere because you can't read everything all the time. They don't know what's possible and/or they don't know the path to travel that won't cost them the power they need to continue pushing for change.
So in the US right now, we have elected officials all over the country who want to move to lessen our reliance on systems of punishment. But they fear that if they do that, that violence will spike and they'll be held politically accountable in the next election. What change can they push for if they lose the next election?
Now, sometimes you got to decide that there are things more important than the election, but sometimes what you need is someone who can show to you, you can engage in bold action that will address this problem in a way that is values consistent, without losing your shirt from it.
And so that's the evidence that science can bring. Those are the narratives that scientists, that scientifically-informed organizing can bring. And those are the relationships that we can set up, once that scientific baseline is set up. So that's that's really the goal in most of what we do is unlocking bolder action towards justice, if that makes sense.
Pavitra Raja: Tell me a little bit about JusticeRx and how that's going under Warner Brothers. That was a very exciting project for you. It launched two years ago now.
Phillip Atiba Goff: So JusticeRx was it was actually a sort of reluctant gift that I received. In the height of the summer of 2020, I received a couple of phone calls from folks in the entertainment industry wanting to know how they can help.
And one phone call was from the head of Warner Brothers television group who wanted to see whether or not there was a way to develop content and to change the way that they structured deals, that would be more in line with the things that people were learning about how race structures inequality.
And I, of course, said, 'That is incredibly generous and a crazy idea. Thanks, but no thanks. I already have two jobs.' It felt like an invitation to Black failure. I have two jobs. There are people who spend their entire lives trying to make it in that industry who are brilliant and have marginal success sometimes. Right. It's a lot of good or bad fortune, but a ton of sweat equity. And I've watched that happen with friends of mine who have been able to be successful in those spaces.
But then a colleague and friend of mine said, 'Phil, sometimes there are doors that you can step out of the way and someone else will walk through. And sometimes there are doors that are only open to you. So your goal is to walk through and hold it open. And this is one of those second times.'
And it turns out that she was right. I got a team together. We started developing original content, as well as consulting with Warner Brothers on everything from the content of their shows to the way that they do deals, to the way that they're thinking about engaging with audiences. And it's been incredible, a wonderful learning experience for me.
Our goal is to untell the lies that we tell about ourselves and to use the most powerful artistic medium, which is the power of storytelling, of literally recreating a truth in someone else's mind, trying to use that medium to hold storytelling itself accountable.
Because if you think about the power in storytelling, the power that it is to recreate the truth or a truth in someone else's mind. When have we ever held Hollywood accountable for the power it wields? So the goal in this is just to say Hollywood has lied and most severely about the most vulnerable people in our societies.
How do we undo that? How do we untell those lies? And so we got one show sold in development. The goal is to untell lies about how the criminal legal system works and about how justice and optimism works.
Our other projects in the works are in similar vein looking at sexual orientation and gender identity, but never wagging a finger, literally just showing people as close to the real of what it is to live in someone else's skin so that they can see the lies of these narratives and a bit of the truth about it.
And at the same time, trying to help Warner Brothers, which is, I've got to say, undergoing a very difficult transition right now where it is not at all clear how committed they or anyone else in the industry will stay to any of these issues.
But for the last couple of years, trying to help Warner Brothers figure out ways that if they wanted to do the right things on issues of race, gender, sexual orientation and other vectors of vulnerability, they could. And the way they do business and the way they tell stories.
Pavitra Raja: That's such a powerful initiative and such a powerful room to be part of. Tell me a little bit about your journey as a social entrepreneur. You've been an academic. You have started two organizations. You've just taken over the JusticeRx. Tell me a bit about this journey and what's been some of your highlights in this journey of yours.
Phillip Atiba Goff: Yes. So I didn't know that social entrepreneurship was a thing. I had literally never heard the term until I won the Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year award. As a journey, I understand the term to mean the vital ecosystem that exists between people who have power and people who have problems.
We have a saying, especially in Black organizing, that the people who are closer to the problem are also closer to the solution, but frequently kept furthest away from the power to implement them.
And so social entrepreneurs are a bridge between those people who have the solutions and the problems but don't have the power, and the people who have the power. And so I think one of the sort of perennial challenges to social entrepreneurs is to resist any invitation to speak for the voiceless, to give voice for the voiceless, and to instead pass the mic.
And my journey into it, has been a journey of figuring out the right ways to use the power that comes across the bridge and deliver it more and more directly to the people who are closest to the problems and the solutions.
Pavitra Raja: We're not going to fix this tomorrow. We might not even fix this in the next 50 years. Maybe it'll take a generation. Maybe it'll take even longer. But if I could really press you to maybe tell me one thing that can happen today that will bring us closer to dismantling these systems, what would that be?
Phillip Atiba Goff: So my hope is that we're moving closer every day, that this is not something that you're going to measure in terms of policies or public opinion, that it really is measured in days of lives committed to the the constant mechanisms of producing a more equal society, a more just society.
The kinds of things that we're focusing on right now, harm reduction and accountability metrics that we try to put into place. So my general thing is performance management is a good idea – it should be used for our systems of governance at least as much as it is used for our systems of business.
If we measure employee retention and net promoter score from our employees, because those are problem areas. It's a way you know that you've got a toxic culture or morale problems. And we know that the better the morale, the more productive folks are, we can do the same in terms of engagement with government. We can do the same in terms of measuring the ways in which we use our systems of punishment to do harm. And we don't. Nowhere in the world are we tracking the harms that our criminal/legal systems are doing with the same verve that we are tracking the ways in which our criminal legal system is reducing violence.
I want to see more and more people – and it'll happen because young people will pick this up and are picking it up right now – understand that everybody who touches a criminal legal system, who touches state punishment, is a policy and a social failure. We have failed that person, and it doesn't mean that there's a lack of individual responsibility. People do jacked up stuff all the time. People mess up. People make terrible decisions all the time. But the ones that lead you to need to be separated from society – people with resources, people with the things that they need to keep themselves whole – very rarely make those decisions.
And the ones that do, are almost always suffering from some kind of mental health, substance abuse, or family dysfunction. If we were able to proactively engage in the risk factors for terrible behaviour – and I'm not talking about Big Brother. I'm just saying give the resources, make them available to the people who need them – we'd be driving the folks who we think of right now as needing to be locked up or needing police intervention or criminal intervention.
We'd be driving those folks so close to zero that we would really have an existential question about whether or not we need the systems at all. That's the direction I want us to be moving, is to understand every one of the people who ends up in the, 'Well, see, they need to be locked up', that's because we in some way failed them. Every single one of them, with maybe one or two exceptions. Maybe one or two.
Pavitra Raja: Tell me, firstly, what is a piece of advice that you share with someone who wants to do work like you?
Phillip Atiba Goff: It was advice that was given to me, or counsel, I should say, that was given to me when I was an undergraduate by one of my undergraduate mentors, Cornel West.
I had come in really dejected. I think I was in the middle of a bad breakup because, like, college. And I said something to the effect of, 'Yeah, well, I kind of thought this, but like, who cares what I think?' He put his hands on the desk and said, 'I need you to understand that you are important to the things that you care about, and I need you to treat yourself that way.'
He went through a number of things that I had said during the course of the semester. Then he said, 'No one is thinking this, no one is putting these things together except for you. And if you think that they're unimportant, if you are bored by yourself, go do something else. But if you were excited by these ideas, if you think these ideas matter at all in the world, who else will do it? You are important to the things that you care about and no one will do what you care about in it but you.'
So treat yourself as someone who is important to the things you care most about. That's the single piece of advice that I give to, the first piece that I give to anybody who's in the space, because it's easy to imagine that maybe since you can't measure it or it takes a while, or you spend so much time doing HR and hiring and firing and rehiring and trainings, that you don't end up making a real difference. But you do. Even if all you did was stand up, I think that becomes a model for the next person. What you did has ripple effects.
Pavitra Raja: So tell me a little bit about what's your 'Why?' When did you realize that this is something you wanted to dedicate your life to? And why do you continue to every single day wake up in the morning and fight the good fight?
Phillip Atiba Goff: The origin story for me is high school. So there were three students who were the smart students in my grade. We were always treated like the smart students coming from first grade on up.
And then I got to senior year and we had an instructor who was new to teaching AP English – that's the Advanced Placement one. that's like the good English class – and I was out the first couple months.
I was sick. I had mono and I also got the hepatitis that you get from shellfish. So it was just is terrible the thing that you would get. And when I started going back to school, I only went for the second half of the day, so I was missing this class.
And the long and short of it was he was so abusive and so targeting of me, he just didn't like me. I was not used to it. So I went to talk to the guy who used to teach the AP class, who was a Black gay man who happened to be a friend of the family. I was like, 'I'm really having a problem with this guy.'
And this guy said to me, he's like, 'I'm so glad it's finally happening to you.' I was like, 'What? That seems awfully mean. Like, why?' He said, 'Because he does this to every Black kid and he's not going to be able to get away with it with you.'
And it didn't even occur to me at that moment that what was happening was racism. It didn't look, the dude wasn't wearing a sheet. He didn't use the N-word or any slurs, but apparently he targeted Black kids in every single class. And the two other, quote unquote, 'smart kids' relied on the racism of the school to be seen as smart kids, to get other people in trouble, I hadn't seen any of it.
So I spent a year of high school a year, about 17 years old, every single class, it was torment. But what I realized when I got to college was I was trying to develop a language to make sense of racism that had not been given to me. And that is a fundamental lesson to me on lots of levels.
One, that we do not supply that kind of language to people. Also, that it evolves because it's not like my parents weren't active around issues of racism. My parents were at the March on Washington. They were active activists as they were going through college. They didn't have a language that was going to make sense of how I experienced racism.
So we need to equip generations with a new language. And so in all that I do, from narratives in Hollywood and the deal making consultation to the way we set up the science to look at public safety, it's all storytelling to equip vulnerable folks with language that centres their experience, their historical and lived reality, and gives them the moral authority to name what is unjust and what the path towards freedom could look like. That was me at 17, trying to find a path to me at 45.
Pavitra Raja: That was Philip Goff, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity and JusticeRx.
Want to hear more ways social innovators are fixing it? Then check out our website, schwabfound.org.
Thanks to our guests today, Cheryl Dorsey and Philip Goff. Please subscribe to Let's Fix It wherever you get your podcasts. And please do leave us a rating or review.
This episode of Let's Fix It was presented by me, Pavitra Raja, and produced by Alex Court with thanks to Amy Kirby and Jere Johansson for editing and Tom Burchell for sound design. Special thanks to our partners Motsepe Foundation and thanks also to our executive producers Georg Schmitt, Robin Pomeroy and Francois Bonnici. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned for more inspiring stories.