On this episode of Municipal Equation. So these communities are actually in the process of re rebounding, resurging, and there's a lot of really exciting things going on. If you go into these communities right now, very dynamic, really exciting. The challenge that these communities face is that that renaissance, that rebounding of these innovation ecosystems are not demographically representative. And, in fact, it's leaving significant communities behind in these efforts.

Hello, everybody. My name is Durham. Guess you didn't think a city could talk, that a city has troubles and hopes and dreams and things to be proud of. Well, maybe there's a whole lot of things about a city that you hadn't thought of.

And so we always have more responsibility and more, obligations than we have time for. The trick is being able to figure out when you can turn it off. And I'm pretty I'm pretty I'm getting increasingly good about turning it off and basically saying, you know what? I'm I'm out of bounds at this time at this stage of the game. And That's a good way to say it. Yeah. I love that term. Indischargeable

And insatiable desire, I'm I'm actually not all that impulsive of a or addictive of a personality, but I but the indischargeable

Yeah. It's really important you ask that question. So let's define what we mean by, first, innovation and what we mean by inclusion. So innovation is all about helping to foster more entrepreneurial and small business activity in these respective communities because of the importance of economic dynamism and that being a way to do a couple of different things. One is, it is one of the major job creators in our economy right now. If you look at firms that are more than 16 years old tend to be net job losers. So they tend to find greater productivity, efficiencies, and they tend to shed jobs. Firms that are less than five years old tend to be in fact, the vast majority, if not almost all of the net new jobs are coming from companies that are less than five years old. Okay. And so innovation is defined as this idea of, again, entrepreneurial activity and small business growth in the way that is the way that we frame it up. So, we're looking at that question. How do we help these cities develop the support infrastructure to stimulate more entrepreneurial activity and small business growth in those cities? Inclusion, we define as traditionally disenfranchised communities that have not been as connected to the the small business and entrepreneurial engine, and have traditionally been disconnected from overall economic growth and economic development. They tend to be lower income communities of color, but they also include immigrant populations Mhmm. And communities. There are definitely examples of, women being excluded from this equation. But the principal focus of forward cities has been on lower income communities of color and immigrant populations is where we focus in on the inclusion

innovation. At the four cities that are participating in this are Durham, North Carolina, New Orleans, Cleveland, and Detroit. The reason we chose those four cities to participate in this collaborative and why they were excited about participating is because each of those communities are reinventing themselves. All of them, at one point or another, were, significant had significant industrial age engines behind their economy for a variety of different reasons, whether it was Katrina in New Orleans or the collapse of the automobile industry in Detroit, same thing in Cleveland, or the collapse of tobacco and textiles and Durham, is that the economy essentially collapsed. Over the course of the last ten plus years, each of those economies are starting to rebound through the innovation economy, trying to think about how we can foster more entrepreneurial activities, small business activity. There's a term now called economic dynamism, which looks at if a community has more firms being born than are dying. Right? So think about that as a ratio. Right. And economically dynamic communities have more firms being born than dying. 75% of communities across the country right now are actually in economic stagnation and decline because they actually have more firms dying than firms being born. This is coming out of a recent, report from a group called the Economic Innovations Group, which is really interesting. So these communities are actually in the process of rebounding, resurging, and there's a lot of really exciting things going on. If you go into these communities right now, very dynamic, really exciting. The challenge that these communities face is that that renaissance, that rebounding of these innovation ecosystems are not demographically representative. And in fact, it's leaving significant, communities behind in these efforts that are traditionally lower income communities of color. And so Forward Cities has been focused on this idea of how can we help these communities become much more intentional about inclusion as they build their innovation economies up? And how can they learn from one another in that process of inclusive innovation? And so Forward Cities, is a was a two year collaborative focused on, a, helping each of these communities accelerate their own efforts around inclusive innovation, bringing people together around the table who had not been around the table before, developing a clearly agreed upon set of outcomes and a set of strategies to achieve those outcomes, and then starting to marshal resources to put those strategies into action. So that's the primary outcome we were striving for is how could we help to catalyze, through this convening strategy a on the ground game plan for accelerating inclusive innovation in these respective communities. A second major outcome is how can we help these communities better collaborate and learn from one another through this process. And so we did that through four convenings over the course of two years in each one of the respective cities. And, and that was really exciting. So first one was in New Orleans, second one, was in Detroit, the third one was in Durham, and the fourth one was in Cleveland. And it really had a chance was an opportunity for these cities to visit one another around the questions and topic of inclusive innovation, recognizing the fact that this is hard, complex, challenging work, and just seeing how these cities were trying to work with it. And a lot of really interesting sharing of best practices give you an example of that. Detroit, for example, created something called the Detroit Biz Grid, which was mapping out their whole entrepreneurial ecosystem. They then codified that, put it into an accessible, PDF, print documents, website called detroitbizgrid.com, bizgrid.com. And now Cleveland's adopted that same strategy. Durham is built building its own, version of a biz grid. So there's some pretty exciting things like that. Durham, during the convening decided that one of the really important topics that it as it came to inclusive innovation, not surprisingly, but hadn't been direct directly addressed was the role that race, racism, racial equity played in these conversations. And so we actually hosted, here in Durham, a Racial Equity Institute as part of the convening powerful enough experience for all of the participants that now the Racial Equity Institute has been, carried forward into New Orleans and into Cleveland, as part of their work. So there were some pretty interesting things that came out in terms of collaboration and lots of examples of that collaboration continuing and that learning that shared learning continuing. The third outcome that we stro that we that we're we're striving for, which will segue into Forward Cities two point o Sure. Is to actually create a an opportunity for other cities that are interested that are struggling with these same questions of inclusive innovation as they're trying to, a, accelerate their own innovation and entrepreneurial activities and strengthen the overall ecosystem in their cities and doing it in a much more intentionally inclusive way. We wanted to create a national learning platform to help those cities do this work. Right. And so we launched a national website called forwardcities.org, which has a lot of this material and resources and information about the convenings, etcetera, in this work. And and it's now we had our final convening with Cleveland in June, last year, so almost a year ago. And then through the support of the Case Foundation and Kresge Foundation came they came forward and said, we wanna we want you to codify this work, so that it not only strengthens and deepens the work happening in each of the four forward cities, but then can help to accelerate a national conversation, related to inclusive innovation. Let me give you one quick snapshot of this from New Orleans. New Orleans is 60% African American, yet if you look at the overall business receipts generated, this is from a couple of years ago, only 2% of business receipts in New Orleans were from African American owned enterprises in a city that is 60% African American. And that's because New Orleans has that data. The trick in a lot of these cities is that, they they they lack the data to be able to do this kind of work and analysis. And that's one of the key strategies that we're trying to encourage cities to take on is actually being able to track that data,

Absolutely. And in fact, we had a data partner in each of the forward the four forward cities. Only one of those actually was a city government data partner, even though they are now spinning out a nonprofit. This is in Durham. They're now spinning out a nonprofit. The reason why I think it's important for these data shops to be a in an independent nonprofit organization is because they can be nonpartisan, and they are not it's not based on the whims of of who's in office and doesn't have Sure. Political, there are no political tensions associated with it. And it doesn't come across as being an arm of the mayor's office or city council or whoever it may be. So there's a nice way to be able to maintain independence. I think so New Orleans has something called the New Orleans Community Data Center, independent nonprofit organization. Detroit's got something called Data Driven Detroit, also independent nonprofit organization. So that's best practice from my vantage point. Now they get funding from the city, and I think that's an important piece here is that there is a line item in the budget that goes to support these independent data organizations. It's not entirely dependent upon government funding. They get outside philanthropic funding as well. From my vantage point, that should be a major priority of the Community Foundation, for example, to get good data about the community, etcetera. But, but there is, I think, good best practices around independent nonprofit data communities. And our data partner our national data partner for Forward Cities has been Urban Institute. Right. Urban Institute has a an effort underway called the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, NNIP. And three of the four of the Forward Cities data organizations are part of NNIP. And I think they've got now like 40 NNIP partners across the country. Durham is about to join. They're the fourth city that didn't have it. And that's a really really cool best practice, effort to try to get these data partners that are focused on municipal, what is the municipal data available, to become much more, to create this kind of support environment, for the NNIP partners. So for those who are listening, I would encourage taking a listen to that take a look at that as well. Okay. And and mentioning mentioning data,

how have you measured progress, and and what have you seen? What are some of the milestones that you've hit along the way? Yeah. Great question. So, again, I mentioned we've got a national we have a a national evaluation partner with the Urban Institute. They were primarily looking at the three dimensions which I talked about. Right? Have we been successfully have we been successful in terms of catalyzing inclusive innovation in these respective communities? Are we have we increased collaboration between the communities? And have we been able to stimulate a or at least contribute to a national conversation around inclusive innovation? I wanna take each one of those in turn. Sure. The first one is and I'm gonna caveat all this and basically saying, this is hard complicated work. Right? You can't snap your fingers and basically hope that communities that have been essentially disinvested for the last, well, hundred years Of course. Through systemic racism will all of a sudden come resurging back. And within two years, you can point to a lot of small business activity and entrepreneurial activity. Right. This is gonna take some time to to be able to to make it work. We, recognizing that, created short term, medium term, and long term outcomes as it related to this particular work. The short term outcomes were really focused on, could we increase awareness and attention to this effort? And could we increase social capital and social connections between the disconnected communities and the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem? And early indicators from the Urban Institute study, which, by the way, is on the Forward Cities website for anybody who's interested in going and checking it out, indicates that we've been relatively successful in terms of helping to shine a light on this important conversation, bring people together that have never been around a table together, and starting to increase

That's it. And so now is that that's an early indicator that we are hopefully are on the right path. The the medium to long term outcomes are are, really hard, but relatively relatively straightforward. Are we able to grow the number of locally owned, minority owned enterprises in these communities? Have these efforts been able to strengthen currently disconnected commercial corridors within the communities and neighborhoods that each of the respective cities focused on? Because when we got started, each of the cities recognized that this is a this is a big challenge. And so let's get started with a community or two or three, a neighborhood, you know, that essentially serve as be could be beachhead strategies that could then be ultimately replicated in other neighborhoods and communities. And the neighborhoods that were chosen for the forward cities work were in, again, disconnected, lower income communities of color that had a vibrant, commercial corridor, or or had the potential for a vibrant commercial corridor. So are we able to see growth of small business activity and connectivity? Are we able to see greater density in these commercial corridors by these locally owned enterprises? Do these locally owned enterprises actually also own the physical assets in that community, which is really important Right. Because, some of these communities are in a real risk of, displacement and gentrification, if we're not careful. Sure. Yeah. And then and then are these enterprises creating livable wage jobs, increasing the number of livable wage jobs that are being filled by the local community? So those are the medium to longer term outcomes that we're striving for, And I would say there's some there's some exciting things underway in terms of now, support organizations coming together, working much more closely together to be able to create the support environment for these emerging enterprises to get connected to the resources and relationships they need to be successful. But we don't have any indicators yet that, that that's actually starting to to pay off. But that's that's where we're going. And the good news is that there's now agreed upon set of outcomes, and there's agreed upon set of strategies to get there, and and resources are starting to go in to support those efforts. Right. So that's the first major indicator that that we're that that we've been paying very close attention to, and that's gonna be years in the making. Okay. And then the second is, are we able to did we see greater collaboration and connection between the communities? Sure. We saw really good collaboration between the communities during the convenings. There was a lot that people got out of those convenings. Harder be to to sustain and maintain that, between the convenings and even now that the convenings are over, there have been all these cool relationships been built up, but the reality is that most people are just, like, heads down, trying to get this work done. And when they need to plug into folks, they do. So, I would say that we did pretty well on that, maybe a B, B plus, But, but I think we did as well as could be expected given how busy everybody is. And then the third indicator, which is interesting in what we're really working on now is have we been able to influence the national conversation? And there, I would say that, you know, it's whether we did it or whether this is just I like to think that we're actually surfing a growing wave Mhmm. In this work. I think people are becoming much more aware of the need for inclusion. I think people are clearly focused on this idea that the current level of economic inequity is unsustainable in our cities, in our communities. And I think more and more cities are really trying to think think this through. I'll give you a quick example of that. There's a entrepreneurship summit from the Kauffman Foundation in, in June, and, we're a partner in that effort. It's with all these enabling organizations, that are focused on creating these enabling support environments for the entrepreneurs. And to Kaufman's credit, which is relatively new for Kaufman, I mean, they've been at this entrepreneurship game for a long time. Yeah. I think they've come to recognize systems change, systems work is important, and that inclusion is important. Now, did we influence that? You know, I think that we positively contributed to that. We we are really positively contributing to that effort now, and the more the merrier. I mean, we want as many people to be on this as possible. And what we're we're really trying to do now, and this may again segue to this Forward Cities two point o, is we're trying to think about, how we can help more cities who are who have at least recognized that they wanna become more intentionally focused on this work, start start to give them

Because that can take a while too. How is all that kinda playing out? Yeah. So I think there's a couple of different things. We do get cities that reach out to us on a fairly regular basis and say, We we are collectively committed to this work. We don't want to have to reinvent the wheel. We'd love some help to think this through. Can you help us? Mhmm. And so there's some of that inbound traffic. Where we are now, though, is that we're in the process of of doing three things. Again, with the support of the Case Foundation and Kresge Foundation. One is to go into each of the respective forward cities and go tell the story about what's going on with inclusive innovation in these communities with some of the richness and the storytelling component to to bring it to life. The second piece that we're working on is actually developing a case study about the Forward Cities experience, and how did the community pull together what we call the Innovation Council. Who was around the table? How did they agree upon the set of outcomes that they're striving for? What neighborhoods did they just choose to focus in on and why? What were some of the strategies that they've come up with to address those kinds of outcomes? What's the progress? Where are the gaps? Mhmm. Where does city government play into this? Right. And and again, not just in the abstract, but paying attention to how is this playing out in the four forward cities that we've been working in for the last almost three years. And then the the final piece of what we're trying to pull together right now is a toolkit that will help these cities put together a clear game plan for accelerating inclusive innovation in their particular communities. So it's essentially a how to guide based upon our experiences, not just with the four forward cities, but we've talked we talked very briefly about this in our last conversation. We've also done this in five cities across North Carolina with something called Innovate NC. So we've now done this in it's been road tested in nine communities. And so the toolkit is includes things like, how do you put together an innovation council? Who should be around the table? How do you invent how do you invite them? We have this really robust, asset map, asset mapping tool that we we are building out and and wanna share as widely as possible, which helps cities look at all of the assets they have in their community, that could be leveraged to accelerate inclusive innovation in the community. We've developed an attitudinal survey that that a city could send out to its citizens to understand what the citizens think in terms of what are the assets and what are the gaps, and what does that look like. We have a strategic planning, road map in terms of how do you ask the sets of questions around that. We've got a storytelling strategy associated with that. Important. So there's there's a lot of things that we've got built out into this toolkit, and so we're now in the process of codifying that, putting some good, user experience, and user design around it. And we hope that would all of this is gonna be available, this fall, as as we put it down. Now relevant to this conversation too, we've been fortunate in the fact that, we have been working closely with a with a guy named Matt Hellauer, who is actually, just finishing up his master's in public policy and his MBA at Harvard, who actually did his thesis on forward cities to look at what the policy levers are and has developed a really cool municipal policy toolkit. Okay. That, that we're rolling out and we're going to be rolling out the next couple of months. So we're really excited about that. And where are we going to be found that's available? That's going to be at forwardcities.org. Okay. Yeah. So the whole goal here is to actually make all of this as publicly available as possible. And, and and our hope is that this is really gonna be open source. Right? That it's dynamic and and and and widely available, and just tries to get more more cities interested who are interested in this work, give them the toolkit. And, you know, invariably, what cities are gonna discover is that it it's gonna require some facilitation and some help to be able to do that. But, but we're you know, we wanna we wanna try to be as supportive as as we possibly can in this effort. And these are conversations we've been having with folks like, US Commerce, Economic Development Administration Mhmm. Is deeply interested in this idea of how do you create, sort of a national learning community, how do you make these kinds of tools available. So we're excited to be, spending some time with them in how to further disseminate these tools once they're available.

we've got there have been six policy levers that essentially have been identified, in in in in what we're looking at. And so let me just read through them fairly quickly. The first is, you know, access to capital, which is which is key, especially in, again, these underconnected communities. And so how well do these, city governments or city county governments work with existing equity and debt capital investors to try to incentivize more capital investment, into the entrepreneurial economy Right. Community. And there are lots of pretty cool examples of that, like the Minority Loan Institute out of Chicago, for example, has done some interesting, things. Or in Portland, you've got the Inclusive City led Start Up Fund. So there's some pretty interesting examples of where cities have become proactive on the access to capital question. The other one is around access to information. Right? Are you able to essentially, create a very transparent open process for startups in terms of regulations and effective market market market available resources. Like, what are the resources that are out there? How do you make them as transparent as possible? Both in the regulatory side, but also as a, positive, you know, product of building. Talk about Detroit Biz Grid as one of those, but like, if you look at Albuquerque, for example, they've got this one stop shop web portal, focused on this. Third is how do you improve the talent pipeline? Right? And so how do you create programming to inspire entrepreneurship and provide education to improve business success rates, in these communities. And that's in partnership with the community college system, which has been a huge partner and support system with us. Obviously, the universities, etcetera. Minneapolis, for example, has a whole set of set technical assistance programs. And, Detroit, you know, has these startup boot camps and underserved communities in partnership with TechTown and Wayne State, and some pretty interesting things going on there. Fourth is, how do you repurpose the physical infrastructure? Right? So within these communities, we talked about this fact that, you've got underdeveloped commercial corridors. Right. And so how do you think about ways that the city can help to ultimately subsidize the development of these physical structures to create these entrepreneurial co working spaces in these underdeveloped areas where there's still gonna be market failure. Right? You're not gonna get a traditional developer to come in because the the economics of it don't work yet. But if you provide some subsidy, you can incentivize private developers to come in and and be supportive with you. Give you an example of that coming out of Raleigh, which is where we do a lot of work with our HQ, activities is there's something called the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center. The city was helpful to get this off the ground in partnership with Shaw University and the Carolina Small Business Development Fund. We're trying to do a similar kind of thing in Durham right now. So there's a real role that the city can play. Using the same kind of incentive dollars they have with private developers in downtown development Sure. Efforts, but this is focusing in on, again, the the communities that have traditionally been marginalized. How do you use the same kind of, financing structures? And anytime that there is a capital investment, structure, city should be thinking about how do you make that as equitable as possible. So if you're gonna put significant amount of incentive resources into your downtown corridor, how do you make sure that you're also keeping some powder dry to help to catalyze private development Okay. In in a really intentional and thoughtful way that doesn't contribute to and accelerate gentrification, but actually does it in such a way that contributes to affordable housing, contributes to more local ownership, can help to support those, those underdeveloped commercial corridors, etcetera. Okay. So here's the the fifth is how do you become clearer about intentional local governance? So how do you actually have somebody within city government whose job it is to be able to focus on inclusive economic development? That is often missing from this equation. Okay. Pittsburgh, for example, has this whole Inclusive Innovation Roadmap, and they hired somebody named Deborah Lam as their chief innovation officer, who for a while was really focused on trying to implement that Inclusive Innovation Roadmap. Unfortunately, she's now gone. And so now the question is, like, okay, who steps into that role? There's great organizations like Fusecorp, for example, that actually places really high level executives into city government, for a period of time. Some of the city, the mayor's office, for example, have used that person to be able to focus in on inclusive economic development. Rockefeller Foundation has this, this whole effort on resilience Mhmm. And creating these chief resilience officers. A handful of them are focusing in on recognizing that resilience is gonna come from inclusive economic development. But it is imperative that we have more and more city cities actually hire somebody to be able to have the capacity to be able to to do this kind of work and help to support this and figure out ways what are the additional policy levers. And then finally, intergovernmental coordination. So how do you as you think about this I mentioned EDA earlier. Right? EDA has a whole effort around regional, economic development. Right. And and embedded into the EDA mandate is a focus on inclusion. And there are opportunities for cities to tap into more federal and state dollars to be able to help strengthen their efforts around inclusive economic development that often goes by the wayside.

resources database focused on inclusive economic development. Okay. It's not gonna be, like, all of the federal resources that are available for anything. Sure. It's really got a specific focus on this question. But there are resources out there, that are federal resources that that cities often don't have the capacity, or awareness of what what that they're out there. And so part of the thing we wanted to do is make that more readily available.

I mentioned it earlier in the fact that based on the Forward Cities model, I was deeply interested in figuring out a way that I could apply the same multi city learning collaborative within North Carolina, which is where I live Mhmm. Where we live. And, the the reason I wanted to do that is, one, is that, you know, when we talked about this in our first conversation, I believe that the future of our economy and our communities are based upon our ability to innovate. That innovation typically typically happens in very place based ways. Mhmm. In order for that to truly be sustainable and long term impactful, it has to be inclusive. And in order for it to be as effective as possible, it should be as connected as possible. So that's the premise of Forward Cities and now also the premise for Innovate NC. Mhmm. So in partnership with 10 partners across North Carolina with the back of an organization being called the Institute for Emerging Issues and the UNC System and Duke and Research Triangle Park Foundation and a variety of others, UNC TV, we launched something called Innovate NC. And this is a multi city learning collaborative focused on, trying to help North Carolina communities accelerate their efforts to transition into the knowledge based economy, the innovation economy, outside of the Triangle in Charlotte. Because what you find in most states is that the entrepreneurial activity tends to be very focused and concentrated on one, maybe two cities. And so this is an effort to try to do this in cities outside of those major entrepreneurial hubs, which for North Carolina is the Triangle and Charlotte in particular. Right. Interestingly enough with Innovate NC, when we launched Innovate NC, 18 communities across North Carolina applied to be part of it. And it was not an insignificant application process. So it spoke to the hunger of what this looked like. Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. And we've got this really cool RFP process that we built out for if other states are interested in doing something similar.

And the five, just by background, are Wilmington, Pembroke, which is a very rural community, Wilson, micropolitan community outside of the Triangle, Greensboro, and Asheville in the mountains. So for the last two years, we've been running this multi city learning collaborative called Innovate NC. Anybody wants to take a look at it, it's called innovatenc.org. The challenge that these communities face is that even if they've they've put a lot of really good energy into pulling a community together, determining the outcomes, developing a strategy to achieve those outcomes, but they lack the resources to actually put those strategies into action. And so with that in mind, I helped to draft a piece of legislation to create something called the North Carolina Community Innovation Fund. And it's designed as a public competitive grants process focused on micropolitan communities and underdeveloped metro areas to be able to create public dollars, which would be matched by private dollars to invest in the enabling infrastructure to help these communities accelerate their efforts towards inclusive innovation. So that's the concept behind the North Carolina Community Innovation Fund. And the way it would be the way it works, the way it's designed to work is that the city would compete or the community would compete to get an initial tranche of capital, to be able to put this investment into work. And I'll give you the current model is a $125,000 of of public money and a $125,000 of private money, to be able to invest in this enabling environment, to put those strategies to work. If these communities hit certain metrics, related to their business plan that they submit to do this work, then they would be eligible to receive a second tranche of funding, which would be $250,000 of public money matched by $250,000 of private money, so 500,000. And then if they if they again hit a set of metrics and they're building something that could be replicated and other communities could really benefit from, then they would be eligible for a $500,000 grant on top of that. And so it'd be three tranches worth a total of $875,000 of public money that would be matched by private dollars. We're really excited about that, and it and it would be it would go a a long way to do this. Now, communities would also be part of a learning collaborative, so we would have a annual convening and bring these communities together. There'd be a lot of shared learning. They'd be provided with, additional capacity and support on the consulting side. We're actually also building a whole storytelling infrastructure around it. So we're partnering up with UNC TV to tell the stories about what's going on in the future. Yeah. Super cool. So, the good news is that we are now in the governor's budget. It it's designed as a $12,500,000 five year initiative. We're doing it the budget here in North Carolina is a on a biennium. So it's $3,000,000 for the next two years is what's currently in commerce. It's run gonna be run out of commerce Okay. Out of something called the Office of Science, Technology, and Innovation. It's got State Department of Commerce. That's right. That's that is got experience running these kinds of grant programs. And, so it's got a lot of potential. One of the reasons the governor liked it is because it's got real bipartisan appeal. In North Carolina, we have a Republican legislature, Republican led legislature. And so now the effort is to try to build support among the Republicans, in this work. And it turns out that, I think we're getting some pretty good traction in part because of our focus on micropolitan communities, which are communities that are 10 to 50,000 people in population, smaller communities outside of major metro hubs, because we don't have to get deep into this, probably, a future conversation, but where states are going is also around this idea of hub and spoke relationships. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Major metro areas. Mhmm. What's the relationship to the micropolitan community? How do you strengthen that regional effort, and and then ultimately do that statewide? So we've got we're we're excited about the North Carolina Community Innovation Fund, and I hope that, we're able to get that legislation through.

we've talked a couple of times, and one of the reasons I I'm enjoying our conversations is that so often these kinds of efforts are hidden, and and and I think one of our challenges is to figure out a way that we can amplify these efforts and help people learn from other efforts that are going on across the country and and within these state structures. And and so the storytelling piece is really important here. Mhmm. And I think one of our big efforts needs to be on amplifying the solutions Oh, yeah. And helping those solutions scream, and sharing them with as many people as possible. So I appreciate the opportunity to sit down and talk this through, and, and I hope other people are interested in in joining this conversation. And if anybody is interested in joining that conversation, again, I've talked about forwardcities.org. My contact information is is on that, and if people are interested in reaching out, they can do that through that mechanism. We also have innovatenc.org. And then we've got a, a a Twitter feed that we have, for at forward cities, which we're we're really trying to, build a conversation around this whole question of inclusive economic development and inclusive innovation. I encourage people to to follow that. And then if you go to forwardcities.org, you can also sign up for a newsletter. And every month, we send out a compilation of some of the most interesting stories coming from cities across the country focused on inclusive economic development. And so that's another way to to join the conversation. And we always encourage, if there's some really interesting stories going on in cities that, people are part of and and trying to, trying to get off the ground, a, we'd love to to help in any way we can, advance those efforts, but we'd also love to tell those stories. And and that's what the newsletter is about, and that's what the Twitter feed is about to try to help help in the amplification process. Great. Well, yeah. We will, share all the information and the links in our show notes, soundcloud.com/municipalequation.

I've been around here a long time. Seen a lot of changes in my day, and maybe I have a right to be proud. Proud of my thriving industries. Proud of my flourishing businesses. But most of all, I'm proud of my people.