Geoffrey Canada & Ray Dalio | Supporting Education in Underserved Communities

this. I finally got to my board numbers and said, okay, let me turn that question around. you have children, yes, you have a spouse, yes, we are both college educated, you live in a nice wonderful place and your children go to great schools yes, when could you give up their life for four years when you are young? No, no, God, no, Jeff, no, when they're young, you hang out well, how about when they get to high school? Oh my God, they already know about drugs and sex in high school, so I said, why do kids come from the best neighborhoods, the best families?

You're all afraid to go away for a weekend, right? and they expect us to abandon our children's lives for years and their life is going to be fine and they said: you know what I think you're right, there's no reason, no, you know, the most important moment in a child's life today is when you save them, you can't decide if I do something between zero and three, their life will be fine, not if they grow up in one of these

communities

because there are a lot of obstacles that can trip you up, it's not just academic obstacles, there are the drugs, there is the crime , there is violence, this depression, there are mental health problems.

All of these things impact young people in a way that interferes with their ability to perform well and we want to celebrate the ones who come out, oh yeah, look, they're wonderful, they went to an Ivy League school and that's all they have to go on. What i can think. everyone who never had the opportunity to go out, so we start from birth, something we call baby college, we help parents understand brain development because that's real, as I tell people, my wife Yvonne and I , we have four children, the oldest is 50 years old and our youngest son is 22 years old, there was like a 20 year gap at that time, we thought it was a good idea, it said about 1 day raising those children, that was not so difficult, you forget why you should have children while you are young. but what happened during that interim is we found out from 0 to 3, we found out about everything that was going on in those young brains and we didn't really realize what was happening, but now we know this toxic stress that you're talking about .

About this not only does it have an emotional impact today, the evidence is increasingly clear that it affects your physical health as you develop and grow, so this doesn't go away, so I'm thinking of all these children who They grow up traumatized and how they are. We're trying to create a world for them where they have this different set of expectations and I'm just telling you one of the things that happened. I'm with my youngest son, he's 22 now, but he was only 12 then and we were visiting one of our schools and every morning the kids come and they have to say their Creed and the end of their Creed is I'm going to college.

I will succeed this is my promise this is my Creed so here we are in the hallway my hundreds of The children are lined up and my little son says as he looks at me he says dead you are brainwashing these children and I said, yes , that's what I'm doing, and this year, at graduation, a group of kids that started with us in baby college were graduating, why 20 years later they graduate high school and say the same Creed they've been saying throughout their entire

education

al experience and, in fact, that is what we are trying to establish a set of attitudes. and beliefs that are backed by actions, not just good words, how can we help them overcome these obstacles so that these young people have a chance?

They're in our great city in New York, tremendous achievements and it's nothing in the context of the size of the problem, okay? So we talked about this. I said, "Okay, Jeff, that was great, but how are you going to deal with this? Because we're dealing with my wife and I with Connecticut. Okay, so I don't know if you know, but." My wife for the last ten years has been in that community and helping with the cheese. I'm not going to go into much detail, but we have created a mission beyond what she is doing to make a hundred million dollar donation.

They will make a donation of one hundred. state, we brought together this group of wonderful people that is bipartisan, etc., to try to get high school kids who were dropping out of high school to be able to get a job which is not easy because it doesn't just help them finish high school . But who is your community and what is your path to an income? His community may be largely gangs and whatever, and getting a job is not like you can make money in other ways and he knows that very well, so you have to work at it and that's one of the things. reasons why Jeff has ears because we're brainstorming and I like Jeff, how do we do this?

So when I look at that, I would say it was amazing a hundred square blocks, okay, but that's nothing to the problem, okay, so we tried it in Connecticut, okay, that's nothing, yeah, and then I was asking him, okay, so what are you going to do to have some kind of big impact? How do you handle it? with that problem, yeah, so Jeff, what are you going to do? So, Ray-ray and I know each other pretty well, we don't know each other enough that why do you do what he said, what he said, which was yeah, that was cool, but that's nothing and Not many people have talked about me. race that way, but man, he's right, he's right because it's one thing if you don't know well and there are a lot of people who don't know, honestly know what's going on when you actually know what's going on. is happening and you honestly believe there is an answer and you don't do everything in your power to try to share that with this country.

I think it is a big mistake and I am convinced that in that old position ayat I have retired and told him. My mission is to help at least one million additional children in this country. I've reached the next level, so I was working with a group at Blue Meridian and partners with another entity. You know most of the people there, the terrorists and some of the other people and we were thinking about the country and our biggest challenge with this job, so Ray and Barbara are going to contribute a hundred million dollars to help Connecticut, that's great and one of the reasons and it's a drop in the ocean, but one of the reasons I wanted to come here I didn't know I was talking to all of you because I didn't come here to talk to all of you, but that's cool.

I'm glad everyone is here. I came because because of this topic about how it is. This Connecticut effort needs to be successful because one of the things we did at Harlem Children's Zone we showed that it could be done in a neighborhood, but no one has shown that it can be done in a state and if we are going to scale things up, I have to go out and show people what things I'll be up to, but I have a real interest in helping Barbara succeed in what she's trying to do, but the big problem is that this should be part of a public initiative. funding strategy so that public money is spent more efficiently and effectively delivering at scale what we know works for children and a problem arose.

I explained to Ray and I won't tell you all the details, but Mike Bloomberg. I know for many years, when he was mayor of New York City, we did a lot of

education

reform things together and Mike wanted me to help him with his campaign and for many reasons he didn't want to go out and be identified with one more candidate. than another because I am associated with Harlem Children's Zone and I don't want people to think that I own Children's Zone is playing sighs, I thought there is one thing that would make me really support Mike and if that is if he put up ten billion dollars in a federal program if he's elected to help us do this work across the country, so I went to Mike and said, "I'm with you if you make ten billion dollars in a federal program that this guy does." of replications where we hold people accountable but where we're not afraid to invest in places that historically have had this massive disinvestment and Mike and his team said yes, so I'm not here to make a political commercial, I just want you to know if You see me on TV talking and talking about what the deal is and I think because of this it's been a problem that you write, you lose and I necessarily want to be sold to the public and I won't.

Mike is in a bad place, but the problem is the problem since Ray brought it up, the problem I say when Mike was because what if I do all this to try to help him get elected and then he ends up dropping out or not winning the election ? nomination and I said that with the amount that you are willing to spend on your influence, you will support this program, win or lose, this program is directly related to the highest risk

communities

in this country, particularly communities of color, and Mike said that he Win or lose, this is something he's going to stand behind.

I guess I just did a commercial. He was trying to make a commercial. Okay, but that's real and you can look it up because he mentioned it out loud in public. He was doing this so that this isn't just between us here, but now he's raising ten billion dollars publicly, that's big. Wow, well, I think, you know, my wife, who, as you and Barbra know because everyone knew her, is a deeply religious lady, oh, and she said to me, Jeff, if you're going to do something like this, make sure you getting what you want, it's enough and my feeling is part of what many of us in this space do what we think. we can afford it, but it may not be enough to do the job and I think this is like investing in anything else, in my opinion, if you know that this investment will be necessary to be successful and you invest well here.

Do you expect this to happen? It's not going to work and we've been doing it in this space working on poverty for all the years of my career. People have not been prepared to invest. Now part of that is that they don't believe in certain things. It works, but once we know something, Mark is why don't we make the kind of investment because people tend to not believe that these communities are worth that kind of investment and I think that's American, yeah, first of all they come to me. mind a couple of things that you could look at what an incredible man is right and what a great Hera the cat, the quality of the character, etc., and I don't think almost anyone could become like that if they didn't have to go through obstacles and didn't have the parental love nor the guidance to do that and I mean when I see other people, I can say others, I would like to bring others here, who and so that we can realize what incredible heroes they are for us to admire and some of them like the biggest heroes and they also need heroes if that population needs role models because I'm saying um in all of that like it's me.

I'm saying that Sean Combs told the same story and the community And he doesn't know that and that his father was murdered in - okay, he had a great mother, his mother worked three jobs, she had to do this and there are many like that and you Never you'll get that kind of character that you know from going through something normal, let's say, okay, you live in Greenwich Connecticut, you rate them, you can raise good kids, but wow, those are heroes, right, that's why they should be recognized as heroes and also as roles. models, how can we do it better?

I think you raised one of the issues when you think about how it seems like we're in America, it's a capitalist country, I think it's the greatest economic system ever invented, but you tend to assume that your value is based on how much you've earned and not necessarily on what you've done well in your life, so I think there's a real disconnect because there are people. I mean, one of the things that surprised me and my early heroes are the people who actually knew they were sacrificing their life and still did it anyway and I thought you know dr.

King and I thought it was an accident, they knew he had every week, they warned him they were going to come get you, they were going to kill you and you know, I tell people one of my biggest Harold heroes is Harriet Tubman, everyone You know Harriet. right, and I tend to think I was brave, ah, but the day I was friends with Harry and she said Jeff, I got this idea: I want to go back to the south, uh, and I'm going to go get some and I'm thinking they're They won't just kill you, they'll torture you too, I mean, we wrote an op-ed here or something, Harry, do we have?

I like to think that maybe I would have done it again and again, so for me there are people who have done it. I have done things in this country that simply go unnoticed because we don't put ourselves in their shoes, we don't really think in those same circumstances what I would have done and, in trying to live up to some of these heroes and heroines, I will only give you another example that really bothers me if you see hidden figures. Yeah, look, I grew up. You have to realize. I was a teenager when we were trying to win this war to go to space.

Do you know what it would be? Do you know how many black students would have majored in math if they thought they had seen a symbol of this? Keeping this kind of thing intentionally away from a group of people undermines their belief in themselves, don't you see the examples, yeah, it's okay to do that because that's all it is. I want to admire you, yes, okay, let's move on to a couple of questions, let's open the debate toResult Space type questions You talked about success in getting people you know, kids all the way through college, a lot of times when I start to understand the problem that you've been addressing your entire career, I start to feel like squeezing a balloon because you're like, it's well, everywhere I go another problem pops up or it's somewhere else where you have to go solve it but he talked a little bit about how you really think about success and what results you're looking for, yeah, so that's a great question because I'm very clear about what our results are.

That is, children who graduate with a degree connect to the labor market. evidence of what happens in communities when jobs disappear one of the seminal books that changes the way I think about this is written by I think probably one of the greatest sociologists turned out to be the African American William Julius Wilson, his book when jobs disappears talked about what happened in Chicago when Jobs left and a study just came out that looks at what happened when the factories closed recently and they were watching and guessing what happened substance abuse suicides depression child abuse divorce all the things that were associated with the poor in the cities, the black people happen everywhere, my friends, Lou's work actually breaks the fabric of the community because we haven't told people that you are something different from the job you have, we define ourselves by what we do and when you lose that definition you are a victim of all the other social ills in the world, so my results are very clear: a child with a degree and a decent job, that is what matters to me, I also care about third grade exams , yeah, but You can do really well in third grade, but that doesn't mean anything to me if ten years from now you're standing on that corner hustling and you're not on your way to school, so we're about nine.

One hundred and forty of our children are in college and eight hundred of our children have graduated. We're focusing on connecting these kids with jobs because it's like squeezing a balloon and my board sounds like a board member of mine for a while, they kept saying. when it ends well and I said well, when we had them in college, guess what we saw in the data that they were dropping out of college, not that, we have to help them through it and then we like, okay, you're good and then I know what that we found out, you're good, but you have no contacts, no one to call, no way to figure out how to get a job, an interview and the rest of that stuff, so we said we have to do more to connect them with this and then. when they came to see me for grad school I said, Hey guys, it's over, you're done, figure out the rest of this.

Okay, they got a degree, but I'm being serious about this. It's about making a generation right in the whole set of experiences and people are opposed to this university thing with me, but this is because always about 90% of our children go to university, but we get the 98% of them go to university and mine is that they don't. I don't want any kid to say I took this job because I didn't think I was smart enough to go to college, it just means you're someone who thought you were smart enough to go to college, which is just a self-definition and I think that That prepares you. thinking about work and not thinking about hustling, which is where a lot of our kids fall when they try to think about how I'm going to make a living, a remarkably successful version of this.

I mean in studying these things it's like we could only give like three things right, the three things are a parent or a mentor who cares about you, okay, it's almost a defining thing, a good basic education like, you know, no. I grew up and then a sufficiently non-violent upbringing. and poverty and trauma and society pays a huge price, not only is it unfair, but if society pays a huge price for that, we're going to review it, but we really believe that's the way it will be. It's so profitable because the state of Connecticut spends six hundred million dollars a year on incarceration costs, so when you start taking everything else aside from the human tragedy, if you can deal with that, the return on investment economically and the equity of it, I have not talked about how it is possible not to create an acceptable fund and by the way this is not just a question of the black community, this happens in educational programs, the average I looked at these upper quintile quartiles 2020, the next 20% and so on.

For the 40% of the population, their children's education costs five times more money per capita than the bottom 60% of the population, so you see a cycle and it really should be that remediation should be the other way around in order to do it. because they would. I need more to overcome, so we as a population are getting almost what we deserve. So what do you think about how that should happen? It's fascinating because I've received a lot of criticism around criminal justice issues for

supporting

Mike. because I was stopped and frisked, which bothered him for a long time, but part of what happened and this is part of what was happening, people forget what was happening during the crack epidemic that happened in the late seventies and early 80's. homicide rates were off the charts, people were trying to figure out what are we going to do, there was a belief and it was just bad social science, there was a belief that what we were missing was a tough approach against crime and that was going to be the answer, so we started locking people up and we did it in a discriminatory way, so we locked up African Americans for having small amounts of drugs and we didn't even look for white Americans, so when the police are where you arrest and no one puts those two things together and we end up locking up hundreds of thousands of people for the most insignificant things and that has created, I think, this huge kind of group of people who fill every job role because they have had arrests. for serious crimes and the numbers are staggering, particularly among African American and Latino men.

I had a situation where I knew someone and what he did was he came home, he had a bad temper and he didn't hit his wife, he yelled at his wife, his neighbor. He said okay, let's call the police, they arrested him, he needed to calm down, he couldn't go to work that night, he was working very hard, what you know as a 3:00 in the morning to 10:00 in the morning shift . morning or something lost his job, I mean, these are obstacles that, by the way, are difficult obstacles and they are the most expensive, we choose not to participate in something and people always talk about what it costs to save a child and you know that it costed us. about $3,000 on top of school things or things for kids and families and people would always argue with me about granting that right and then I would say, but if you look around the country, the average incarceration rate nationally is about 30 percent. hundred $30,000 in New York state about 60 I can't even guarantee you that you don't know what it costs to lock someone up for a year in New York City. 300,000 now.

It used to say 147, but what happened was we reduced the population, but it didn't reduce the cost. Now the cost per person is skyrocketing. I haven't heard one person say we can't lock up more people, one of these, so saving them is not scalable, but locking them up is scalable, that to me is just bad policy, it's bad science. and it has been devastating when that is done in a way that affects a community, poor people of color are disproportionately because it seems like we have a solution and there is no solution here and in fact we have done harm in the studies that we have done in perform well , I'll give you another Connecticut statistic, so you're in Connecticut, there are disengaged and disengaged students, a committed student is one who goes to school, but oh, has an absenteeism rate over 25 percent or is failing classes , so school doesn't work for them.

A disengaged student is one who doesn't know where they are, they have left the school system. 22% of high school students in Connecticut or one of those is fine, so it's going to be them. If you're going to be on the streets, the economics of getting them between 8th and 9th grade is really measured in a few thousand dollars, but the incarceration costs are in the fall of each year or those other numbers, so how do you are you profitable? I have a question, yes, so Ray talked about having to pass gangs on the way to school and you talked about having a fight in your neighborhood, how do you guys think?

I mean, how do they think about taking care of the students when they're gone? in the classroom, I mean, I think it's a great question because it's part of the essence of what we do. We think it's the time outside of school that most kids get into trouble and, as I've told people, You haven't done yet, you know, hours when one of our buildings is on the hunt when T 5th Street eyes still walk down 125th Street and see a group of kids reading Langston Hughes on the court, but they never got a good look at it, so when the kids are out of the watchful eye. of understanding adults are that sometimes they do dumb things now if you're 19 you're here at UConn and you do something dumb you probably drank too much maybe you threw up in the trash can he said well don't do it on 25th street and you're drunk and someone thinks of it brilliant idea we go rob the chinese restaurant and you know you do something stupid there goes the rest of your life so part of this is limiting the amount of time my kids have to do stupid things because we're watching them and they all They know, and a lot of us live in the community, so they all know that we're always looking for signs that they're not, you know, living up to a number of expectations that we have for them, so I think that en Time out of school is essential, programs are open in the afternoons on weekends and during the summer.

We try to make sure our kids spend more time with us everywhere else because look, we all grew up, we all had parents we didn't have. I didn't hear everything they said well, but the big things that we used to hear well, the small style, yeah, maybe we did some things here to come home, they don't go with that person, but you know you didn't think that maybe I. We will take a weapon and go to restrain someone who was not on our conscience. It's with children who wouldn't have loving adults around them. Children do it with their friends.

If your friends are all hustling and getting high, guess what you do. We'll end up putting pressure on me not to get peer pressure, it will overwhelm most kids, so we try to create environments where the pressure is the opposite and I think it all happens outside of school hours, where most of our kids. are in our program, we find that the after-school programs are great because the infrastructure is there so the kids can go right after and there they get very good tutoring and guidance so that they get good social influences as well as education as well as taking them outside. from the street after school programs are very good they get a great deal Hi, I'm just curious about your program, which sounds fabulous, what are some of the other parties interested in that and are thinking, so I'm thinking about gangs, the police, especially when you started, what some of those obstacles were and how they feel about your program in the midst of their community, by the way, I'll tell you, I'll interrupt you for a minute, someone, just him.

I could because I want to say that he took his school, he built his school right in the middle of the projects in this place and the goodness that radiates from that school is an impact like something pressure to see, but go ahead, I just wanted him to you would do. We knew that and we realized that it was better to tell you the story that I was going to tell you and that from now on it will go directly to Ray, so this is part of this, it is historical, so there is a historical business problem that they have had African Americans. with the right police departments and their history and in Harlem in particular there was a group there was something called the dirty thirty xxx precent it was right in the middle of Harlem it was so corrupt that everyone knew they were in league with the drug dealers so La Last person you would call if you had a problem, who would be the police?

Because they were with the criminals. Now, when we started our effort, they decided to clean the entire compound and replaced everyone. That's great news and all I replaced with people who were actually honest police officers and came to the community. We want to help. Nobody believed them. Nobody trusted them. That's why we couldn't, we couldn't make Harlem change if there wasn't proper policing. so we were the intermediaries with the police department, the community members talked to us, we talked to the police and then they saw and after a while they started talking to the police themselves because part of the problem was that people in Harlem I thought there was this really sophisticated network of criminals where they were smart, they were talking to one who said Jeff Fizzle, they weren't really a bunch of dumb kids from time to time.They accidentally discovered something that was a problem, but we saw how the whole situation changed. upside down when now we have a really decent relationship with the police because they know here's the other problem, they know our kids are kids that are on the right path, so there's this whole group of kids that maybe it's a kid from the Harlem Children's Zone. and we know that they are trying to do the right thing, so it's not that the problem is solved for all black people in Harlem, but it certainly has gotten better, but this issue that Ray talks about is one that I think is important and one of the most important.

Important things we are going to do for this country. Housing projects have always been the same in Harlem. The worst outcomes for our children and families occurred in the housing projects. The most crime a family of four had was living on about $18,000 a year, which is new. In York City, it's amazing that 62 percent of the people didn't have any adults working at home, so we decided we wanted to build our new school right in the middle of that housing project and the community summit was controversial. of the people on the council were against charter schools and they gave a lot of importance to it and what we had said to focus, we are building this for you, they did not believe us, not even me, they did not believe me, you are not going to build a hundred million dollar building for us and they fought against us and my biggest opponent, this woman who lived in the housing projects and everywhere we went, all the things that this lady told me, I would tell them that I had to do it.

Tell my staff, I know everyone thinks I'm special, but I won't be special at this meeting when this woman contacts me and she showed me the day we opened that school and I showed her all the kids from the housing project that were at the school, She came up to me afterwards and said: Mr. Canada You know who I am, yes I know who you are, she says, I want to apologize, she says I was wrong, my grandson was passing by a school and he said to his older cousin, who was like 18 and 19, I'm going to that school. when it opened and they said no, no, don't say that kid isn't just in school and she said they never thought anyone would open a school in the housing projects for us and my grandson is in this school right now and I You know what I recognized in these communities there's a reason why people are suspicious, their reasoning is hostile, there's a reason why they think people are going to take advantage of them because that's been their experience and if you're doing the right thing. and I tell you, people don't believe that people are going to clap and say how wonderful you are because there's a lot of suspicion about what your motives are and why you're doing things and I tell people they often think, "Oh, yeah." You know, it will be harder for me." because I'm white I look at my wife with some Harlem I lived in Harlem with it I didn't mean anything no one thought this was an attempt to exploit them and even after I spent 15 years proving other words people were still suspicious about this so the person The one who faced all the people in the community was the tenant president of the San Nicolás houses, she understood why we were doing this and simply told everyone to wait and see what happens.

I'm telling you, you can trust these guys. "We're doing that for our kids, so now no one knows that story anymore. The building has been open for five or six years. Everyone is there for Thanksgiving. We do a big Thanksgiving dinner for the community and we do nice things at Christmas and the holidays. Everyone says, "Oh, they." They're wonderful, they're wonderful, they didn't think that when this was happening, but that's just part of the challenges that I think about working in communities and I've told people that I'm sure Ray and Barbara face for every person who thinks you're doing something good, there's a person who hasn't believed that you're doing something that's selfish and just for your own benefit and they're being used and exploited and There's nothing you can say to change that until I see the proof.

And I kept telling my team that it won't be until this building is open and people come in that they're really going to believe us until then, we're just going to take the kind of anger that they are bringing to us as a cost. of doing business, yes, like in Barbara's case, it took two, ten years of being in the community, knowing that the people who do it build trust, so everyone is bipartisan, but it still takes education because that It's absolutely true, anyway, what occurs to me is that I should find a way to take anyone who wants to go to the Harlem Children's Zone or Bridgeport or whatever and show them who our neighbor would be or what it is and what's going on with what I've found and I absolutely believe that until you see it you don't understand it, that's all these people that come in and I talk about what we're doing here, I go, yeah, I love it, I love it.

I look every time they come in and say. oh, now I really get it, I really did well, so I think if you care about these issues, I think one of the most important things that happened in our work before we said we were going to try it and now you have to remember the In old Harlem, 30% of the buildings were abandoned. Graffiti everywhere. Garbage in all the streets. Open air drug markets everywhere. We said we would change this community and then people believed that something like that could be done. They just didn't believe it. Now gentrification has a different set of challenges just when that happened, but no one ever thought that Harlem could be gentrified, it was like Detroit, it was like a new ride, it was like all these places that have been falling apart for decades and one of the things we want.

Telling people it's doable, it's not easy, not that everyone can't do it, but it is doable and those who can do it should do it in places if you care about this country and believe in America. Esther says in theory, that's what this country represents, we have to turn that theory into a fact and that's how I think it can be done at scale. Well you can see why this man is a hero of mine, and as a hero he should be here for everyone and I just recognized him so you know we're waiting for Superman.

You're our Superman man, so thank you very much.