[Bonus Episode] Introducing: Real Good

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Today we're doing something a little different in the feed. Today we want to share an episode of a podcast called Real good. When the COVID 19 outbreak hit, people and businesses alike stepped up to provide relief to those in need. While coronavirus created struggles we've never seen before, it also shined a light on problems our communities face every day. Intersectional problems concerning race, wealth, health, education, and so much more. Real Good is a podcast from Stitcher and U.S. bank that tells the stories of people trying to lift up our communities and give them a brighter socioeconomic future. This podcast is really inspiring. It's really inspirational to see what people are doing to help others. And that's why I wanted to share it with you in the podcast feed. You're about to hear the first episode of the podcast. If you like what you hear, you can listen and subscribe to Real Good. Wherever you get your podcasts.

This is real good by us bank, a podcast about helpers.

We were partnering with an organization that was taking an old building and rehabbing it and turning it into a cafe. But not just a coffee shop. A place that was hiring and employing and serving as a support organization for people wrestling with addiction.

I'm Faith Saley. The impact of the novel Coronavirus is hard to overstate. It upended life for everyone. It created a new normal full of new problems. But but it also shined a light on issues that have Long existed in communities across the country. This show is dedicated to the stories of people making a difference, folks who are fighting for those in need against problems old and new, isolated and intersectional. Each week, we'll talk with nonprofit leaders organizing vital aid, U.S. bank team members supporting their efforts, and those people whose lives they're changing. This week, our guest is Maurice Jones, the CEO of lisk, the local initiative support corporation. When we started these conversations, we all kind of thought they'd be about COVID relief, and they quickly became ones about race and poverty and privilege and everything. And what I learned by listening surprised me. I feel really lucky to be a part of these conversations, and I hope you will, too. Maurice, where exactly are you right now?

You're talking to me from my home in Norfolk, Virginia.

And is this where you're usually based in non pandemic times?

No, in non pandemic times, I'm in an airplane or on a train. So LISC has about 35 offices around the country, and our headquarters are New York. So I commute to New York and the other 35 places. Plus we work in 2,200 rural counties. So I am usually on the road four or five days a week.

Wow.

Before the pandemic hit.

So Covid has really put the brakes on the way that you execute what you do. But it has certainly in some ways accelerated what LISK does, right?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I'm working, believe it or not, longer hours now.

I believe it.

I'm just not on the road. I'm on Zoom and WebEx and Ms. Teams and conference calls galore.

Well, I just want to congratulate you for putting on a collared shirt for this interview. I can see you as we talk. Let's back up a second. What lisc? L I S C. What does LISC stand for and what does it do?

So it stands for Local Initiatives Support Corporation. And I like to tell people we're in the opportunity business. LISC works all over the country, urban and rural, with partners catalyzing opportunity, particularly in the toughest zip codes in rural counties around the country.

And they're tough because why?

They're tough because they. They don't have the assets that are commensurate to the talent that's there. And what I mean by that is there's talent everywhere in the country. What's not distributed in anything like a balanced fashion is opportunity. Right. It's the assets that you need, whether it's great schools, great housing, great nonprofits, or for profits that can provide jobs. Those are the things that we work on, we bring capital, we bring technical assistance, we bring consulting services, we bring a convening power to places to get that kind of work done. So we help to finance affordable housing in places that don't have a sufficient quality of it. We help to invest in minority and women entrepreneurs in those places where they have tough times getting access to capital. We help to build football fields in poor areas so people don't have to travel miles just to be able to play on high quality fields. We help to invest in the nonprofit infrastructure that serves as a social services organization or the workforce development organization. It's the comprehensive array. Or put another way, it's the ecosystem that we all need in order to maximize the talent that we have. Lisk is in that business.

I was watching a video on the Lisk website that really depicts what you do, and I was struck by both the breadth of it, but the specificity of it. In the video, we meet this woman who was in jail for 20 years and wanted to find a job. And she's told, she says in the video she was told no by everybody. And then Lisk stepped in to this, this urban beekeeping community in Chicago that makes honey. And, and this woman was told yes. And then you're also helping a theater on the Lower east side of New York City. So it seems very surgical what you do.

It's very local, right? That's where local initiatives come into play. So different places have different assets that need to be maximized or, or different opportunities. So you're right. It can range from a theater on the Lower east side of Manhattan or in Brooklyn or the Bronx, to this beekeeping enterprise is in Chicago. And literally this is an organization that has started a social enterprise that has people coming out of prison. These are previously incarcerated folks whom they are employing to make products from beekeeping and honey. Right. And it is a way that this organization in Chicago is actually employing people who are coming back to the neighborhood who need to get back or reenter society. So you're right, it's. It's surgical in the sense that it is local and it is partnering with local organizations and helping them to address the demands and most importantly, the opportunities that exist in their neighborhoods.

So I think of you as the CEO of Lisk, who in non pandemic times travels all around the country identifying communities who need assets and, and access. I think of you as kind of like a talent scout. Like you see opportunity here. Like, here's where we want to water the seeds we plant. But it also Makes me wonder, how do you say no? I can't imagine that you come across a community and say, nah, we can't help you. We have to choose somebody else over you. How do you do that? Part of your job.

So typically, the issue isn't how do you say no, it's how do you get to yes. And so how you get to yes will differ from one market to the other.

How.

How do you decide? And I guess it's not just how do you get to yes, but how much yes do you give? Right.

The Bay Area is an example. The Bay Area has one of the most challenging. Well, let me put it this way. Before COVID the Bay Area had one of the most challenging housing markets in the country in terms of trying to produce housing of quality that people across the economic spectrum could afford. And one of the ways to solve the problem there was we had to figure out how to build a private sector complement to what the public sector was already doing in the housing development and preservation space. So there we partnered with Facebook and with the San Francisco foundation and with a host of other folks in the technology and the healthcare and the philanthropic world. And we created a $500 million fund to finance the creation and the preservation of housing affordable to folks who are at 30% of area median income, all the way up to 150% of area median income there. What we needed to do was to develop a vehicle through which these very, very wealthy entities could place their money and feel confident that it would be used well to pursue the housing aspirations that people have. That's the Bay Area's challenge.

You keep using the word assets, and I also think closely related word is. Is access.

Right.

I mean, I guess they go side by side.

Yeah. And I should be careful when I say assets. I mean, you know what I mean? More than money, if you will. I mean, what are. Who are the partners who can help get work done? It's usually some combination of local government, philanthropic folks or entities, community residents, community based organizations that, you know, it's that collection of folks that I mean by assets. The other thing is, it means land, it means buildings. That, for example, we do a number in a number of places. We are going in with partners, and we're taking old schools or old hospitals that are no longer being used and converting them into incubators for businesses or housing for seniors. So when I say assets, I'm talking about all of the above. I'm talking about people place, physical money, all of the above, and even technology.

I was looking at your Twitter feed. And, you know, you can create opportunity in a rural area, but they have to have broadband, Right?

No question. In fact, if I were. If I could only do one thing in rural America, I would be trying to bring broadband to all of it. That is, you know, broadband today for economic development is like oxygen for humans to breathe. You have to have it if you're gonna get economic development. And the challenge is in rural areas, we have too little of it.

I think that is a real eye opener, or ear opener, as it were, for people to learn who aren't in rural America. We just assume, does a fish know it's in water? We all live such connected lives that we assume everyone has the same access to communication and technology.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. So our job is to aggregate the assets, broadly defined, that are needed to catalyze opportunity in different places. And we believe that the most important assets for catalyzing opportunity are local. Local people, local land, local buildings, local coalitions, local. Local resources, local government, local leadership. That those are the most important assets for catalyzing opportunity, that proximity matters.

Do you think that that is a hallmark of what? Well, clearly what not only makes LISC effective, but singular in that you're not this kind of monolithic nonprofit that doesn't know where your good intentions and good money is going?

I absolutely think it's one of our brands. It is a distinguishing piece of our core values and our brand. We're called local for a reason. We believe that that's the most important asset for opportunity. Yes.

What's an example of an organization you've partnered with at LISC that you feel stepped up to meet the challenges of the community they were in?

Recently I was in rural Pennsylvania in a place, little town called Tamaqua. Tamaqua, like other places, is grappling with the issue of opioid addiction. Addiction generally, but definitely opioid addiction and what that's doing to people and the workforce, if you will, that's available there? Well, it turns out through our relationships there, we were partnering with an organization that was taking an old building and. And rehabbing it and turning it into a cafe, a coffee shop, but not just a coffee shop. A place that was hiring and employing and serving as a support organization for people wrestling with addiction.

Wow.

We invested in the rehabbing and the launching and the sustaining of this organization that was, yes, a coffee shop that was providing people and everybody working in the coffee shop was someone who was going through the journey of recovering from addiction, battling addition. And I went and I got hot chocolate because I don't drink coffee. And when I got it, they took me back to a little room where they basically had a gathering of about 15 people. And the gathering was about battling addiction. This had become a social support organization for people battling addiction. This was unique to Tamaqua.

Yeah. And truly a network in a place where I would want to spend $7.50 on a small Americano with oat milk and steel tip.

You absolutely would.

Yeah.

And there are places like that all over the country that are, you know, unique and that are a reflection of the particular stories of the people in that community and the particular story of that community that, with partnerships, can become, you know, much bigger than a coffee shop.

You know, you have, like, a birth connection to rural America, don't you?

Well, that's true. Yes.

Tell me. Tell us a little bit about where you come from.

Yeah, yeah. I was reared by grandparents in A town of 1200 People in rural Virginia. I was a tobacco farmer for the first 25 years of my life. So, yeah, I'm a farmer. The first job I ever had was feeding the pigs that were in the pig pen about 30 yards from my bedroom window, whose fragrances I. Whose fragrances I received every morning.

And if that was your job, what did you get paid in Maurice? What'd you get paid for taking care of those pigs?

I got paid in the most important currency that anyone can get, which was the unqualified love of my grandparents who raised me, who, for me, were the game changers in my life. So, yeah, I got paid much more than the work that I did, that's for sure.

Why were your grandparents the game changers in your life? What did they teach you?

Well, I went to live with them when I was three months old, and they taught me a number of things. Hard work was one. Perseverance was another. I mean, these were people. My grandfather was born in 1914. My grandmother was born in 1919. They had seen a lot, Right. They lived at a time when lynching was still practiced. They lived through the Great Depression, through the civil rights movement, through the black codes, through. Through segregation. They had a cross burned on their front yard. They had seen so much, and yet they. They lived each day with joy, with gratitude, with faith. And so they. They taught me that. My grandmother used to say to me all the time, yeah, just keep on living. Just keep on living. They taught me that you had to be resilient, right? You had to have the ability to bounce back from a lot of stuff. My grandmother would say, you're going to keep seeing a lot of stuff. You just keep getting up, keep getting up. So they taught me that they wanted me to be nice. They wanted me to get as much education as I could. They wanted me to help people. My grandfather also wanted me to be a preacher, and so I let him down on that end. But otherwise, I mean, the most important lessons that I've learned, I learned from them, really.

I have a feeling you haven't let your grandfather down.

Well, on that one, I did.

When you come into a new town representing Lisk, what do you think it means to the people you're helping for them to be talking to a person of color who comes from an area maybe as remote as theirs?

Yeah, I think it's hard to ignore that it means something to people when you show up. And I'm a person of color, particularly because 66% or more of the people that we serve are people of color. And so when I show up and you have, you know, a young man, a young lady, what have you, of color, and she's talking to me, at a minimum, we share a lived experience of being African American in America.

Right.

And that is an immediate connection. And so, yeah, it matters. And anyone who thinks that it doesn't, they're blind to something. Right. And there's no reason to shy away from it. It matters.

How often in your role as CEO of Lisk do you have the opportunity to be face to face with individual people whose lives LISC has helped change?

So before COVID every week, you know, part of the reason why I traveled is I wanted to interact with the people who we were fighting for. I wanted to walk through the neighborhoods in the Twin Cities just to name a place now that's in the news and talk to the people that we were trying to be helpful to and to find out if we were really relevant. Right. If we were really helping them to get the jobs done that they were trying to get done. So that was a big piece of why I wanted to travel so much. I wanted to connect with the people that we were ultimately trying to assist.

When you think about the people you've helped and the work you've done at Lisk that you're proud of, what comes to mind.

So one of the things we do is we have a comprehensive sort of workforce development program. We call them Financial Opportunity Centers. I was visiting one of our Financial Opportunity Centers. These centers do three things. They help people, people with financial literacy coaching. They help people to access services that they need to be productive workers. Like healthcare, childcare, it's usually transportation, housing and childcare. And then thirdly, they help individuals acquire the skill sets that they need to compete for jobs that pay a livable wage. That's ultimately what it's about. Put them in a position to get a livable wage job and to retain a livable job of a wage job. I'll never forget. I was talking to one of the individuals that had been served by this financial opportunity center. And he said to me, I just want to thank you for what you all do. And I said, well, tell me what we've done for you. And he said, this was a young man, he was in his 20s. He said, he said, man, I spent seven years in jail on a drug charge. He said, I came out of jail and I was helped by one of your financial opportunity centers. And ultimately I got a post secondary credential in welding. And he said now. And he got an American certification, American Welding Certification Society certificate, ultimately. And now he's a welder. And he, what he said to me is, yeah, and I'm making more money than I ever imagined. He said, but that's really not the important piece. He said, I have, I'm moved every time I remember this. He said, he said, I've got a seven year old daughter. And he said for the first time, I can be her father. Yeah, that's what it's all about. That's, that's what it's all about.

Yeah.

And you said he was in jail for seven years. So he missed out on that seven.

Years on a drug charge. And this guy went from being in jail on a drug charge to now he's a manager and he's got a welding certification that will command good money in the marketplace. And as he said, he can be a father.

How important in this economic time, you know, certain individual donors are shrinking, right? This is, this has hit everybody hard. Government funds. How important is it for donors like US bank to step in right now?

Who it is, it is invaluable. It is hard to overstate the importance for the US Banks of the world to step up at this time and to recommit to the kind of work that we're talking about that's needed here. Because look, we're going to go through stages. There will be the relief stage just to try to keep nonprofits and for profits from having to close forever and to help people to stay in their homes and to pay their rents. There'll be that stage. And that stage will go on for a while. But after Relief. You've got true recovery, and then you've got to reconstruct. I mean, this is not a pause or an interruption in our journey. This is a reset.

This. Yeah. This isn't just triage. This is the beginning.

This is a reset. And so it will be important that the public and the private sector and individuals and companies and philanthropic organizations choose again to try to address these issues that have been brought plaguing us and have been keeping us from being a perfect union or a more perfect union for quite some time.

Marie, thank you for sharing your stories. It makes things so real and so resonant when we know the human lives that are attached to donations to. To the stories of need. Right. It's so hopeful. And I just want to say, you know, wherever your grandfather is looking down on us, I do think you're a kind of preacher. So I do think you've made him proud. And to quote your grandma, yeah, we just keep living, just keep persevering. Those were the messages we need today. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. Nice to be with you.

LISK is one of the many organizations that U.S. bank is working with to provide Covid relief. We spoke with the people who are leading U.S. bank's partnership with LISK and other helpers across the country to provide urgent relief now while also addressing systemic inequality.

I'm Reba Dominsky, Chief social Responsibility Officer at US Bank.

Greg. I'm Greg Cunningham, Chief Diversity Officer at US Bank.

You both work for and with US bank, and people hear bank and they think money. And you're really in the people business, and you're putting your money, the US Bank's money, where your mouth is. You are looking at people and figuring out how funds can change their lives and all of our lives for the better.

Yeah. I think one of the ways that we're doing that is something that's happening across CSR or corporate social responsibility, which is this realization that philanthropy is not enough. Philanthropy is great, but philanthropy alone will not address these serious issues that we have around structural racism, racist policies and practices. The real work that needs to be done. One of the efforts that we're leading, and Greg is helping with this, especially in light of the killing of George Floyd, is really thinking about how we can bring the whole bank to help solve some of these intractable problems. So I'll ask Greg maybe to talk a little bit about that very specific work that he's doing that moves us beyond philanthropy to thinking about all the resources, human and financial, that we have, that can help solve problems yeah, you.

Know, and faith, you're right. We are in the people business. You know, our mission and our purpose as an organization is to power human potential. We just happen to use banking as the vessel to deliver on that purpose. And so as Reba said, there's a lot of work happening across the bank to actually look at many of these disparities. If you look at the racial wealth gap alone, the average white family has over $171,000 in family wealth. The average black family has 17. And so as bankers, you know, we are prone to using data to make informed decisions. When we look at that data as learned people, you have to examine that data and ask why and ask questions why. Is it because white people are smarter or more ambitious? We have to challenge ourselves to really look at these disparities, to look at the data and ask different questions. And what can we do and what may we have actually in our own behavior contributed to it. And so part of what we're thinking about and taking action on to Ray was point is really understanding how we can be a catalyst for economic revitalization in many of these communities. And it starts with supporting small businesses. It doesn't mean singularly, but it means that if we can help black owned small businesses become sustainable and scalable, that we can create jobs and we can start to build economic vitality in these communities. Combined with philanthropy, looking at for our customers, what products and services and experiences can we offer that help our customers achieve their dreams? Looking at our own workforce and understanding the representation of people of color and women and black people in particular, why we don't have a adequate representation of black professionals and senior management positions in our company. This is not just U.S. bank and it's not just our industry. It's across corporate America. The call to action is for everyone. And two years ago we actually signed a pledge. There was a CEO National Pledge, a CEO commitment to diversity. Over 950 companies, including US bank has signed this pledge. But the pledge was essentially about taking action to ensure, at least in our own workplaces. Back to the earlier conversation. What each of us can do is we can each take control of the situations that we can control. US bank signed that pledge which committed us to ensuring that every person in our organization took unconscious bias training, that we would have courageous conversations like we're having today and we're having tomorrow, a company wide conversation hosted by our CEO in our African American Business Resource Group to talk about George Floyd and to say his name and to talk about privilege and to talk about systemic Inequity and how that's preventing us from fulfilling our mission. Faith. I have one single job as the Chief diversity officer at U.S. bank. And I'm going to give my boss, who has inspired a lot of my career and given me the license to do what I do. But my single objective in my job is super clear. My job is to ensure that the purpose of our organization that I shared with you earlier, to power human potential, that that's true for everybody. That's it. That's my job. That's it. It could not be more clear.

You have a great job. It sounds demanding, it sounds challenging, but what a job.

Imagine getting paid to do that.

How did your partnership with LISK start?

So I don't know when our partnership with LISC started. I've been at the bank for five years and for me, our partnership with LISC has always been there. And it's strong because we share common values. I listened as you talked to Maurice, who is an amazing leader and partner, and when you listen to him talk about the fact that talent is everywhere but there are gaps in access, that is exactly the work that we are doing at U.S. bank. And we know we can't do it alone. So we look for partners who share our values and who want to get to the same place we want to get to. And then we say, let's do this together. So that's what our partnership with lisc, our partnership with the United Way, that's what those partnerships are about. They're about mutual respect, mutual goals and mutual trust and accountability that we can do the real work and help improve people's lives.

Can you sort of give us a.

Sense of why it's so important for your work to be done at a local level?

The localization piece, it's so critical to our work because it means that we are in touch with real people and real issues that are happening for people on the ground. I really love the work that LISC is doing and the localized support that they offer. I think it's really consistent with who we are as an organization and the work that we do, certainly under rebus leadership. We talked about this earlier. Our work is about. It's about people and real issues. And I just have always found it critically important, important to make sure that we are connected to local communities and doing work and driving outcomes at the local level. Because it's not just about getting credit for it, it's about driving real outcomes. And real outcomes happen block by block.

When I first started at US bank, we had lots of conversations about our grant making and should we kind of nationalize it? Right. Because while you have to have local impact, you want to have natural national reach. And so there were lots of conversations about how do we do that. And what we realized is that our grant making has to be local. Because I can't sit in my office in Minneapolis and know what the issues are in Kansas City. I just. I can't. So we rely on. On our market leadership, we rely on our community affairs team, we rely on partners to really help us understand what are the local issues and then what are relevant solutions. And, you know, before I started doing this work, I used to sometimes, you know, read an article here and there and I was a little skeptical about, you know, come on, these issues can't be that local. Right. It feels like every community is talking about the same things. We're all talking about racism, we're all talking about gaps in education, gaps in wealth and access to wealth for wealth creation for everyone. But when you really boil it down to the people and the needs in every community, they are a little different. And they require a really surgical approach to drive for the right solution. And what I love about lisc, what I love about the United Way, is they are on the ground in a way that we can't always be. They're listening to community members. They are doing the real work of understanding what the community needs are. And so that's why I think it's so important for us to be in local communities. U.S. bank is local, the needs are local, our teams are local. So our partners have to be local. And LISC is in every major metro market. And really importantly, they're in a lot of rural markets that are sometimes harder for us to physically get to. Our community banks serve those markets. But LISK is on the ground there.

We've said it before, but doing real good isn't just about donations, it's about actions. So we reached out to the people on the ground taking US bank funds and turning them into positive change in their communities.

Hi, my name is Nikita Bethea and I'm a graduate of Operation hope's entrepreneurial training program, coached by Andrea Rea. I initially heard of this program through a friend who was a previous graduate of etp. The program consisted of curriculum and guest speakers that outlined the foundation financial and marketing tools to start and run a business. I appreciated each class, but had no idea how soon I have to use the information that was presented. I was equipped with the tools to anticipate and plan for threats to my business model in our first session. Granted, I did not foresee a global pandemic affecting the launch of my business, but I felt I could find a way to ride it out. I was preparing to launch my business when the first documented case of COVID 19 hit the state of Georgia. Like many others, I wasn't sure how to navigate my personal finances or business needs when this all started. My full time job is commission based and I essentially sell high end plumbing fixtures. Although my industry technically falls within the essential business guidelines, let's face it, our customers just didn't have the need for $2,000 faucets to stay afloat. Although I had an amazing first quarter, my sales dropped significantly in April. I soon realized I would need to take a step back and figure out exactly what I needed to keep myself afloat and how I was going to go about it. This uncertainty led me to reach out to my coach to inquire about programs or steps I could take to keep my business and personal affairs in order. Luckily, the Principles of Financial Literacy I learned in this course helped me stay afloat. I met with my former coach Andrea, and we reviewed my budget, ensuring I had an assignment for every dollar and that my bills would be covered despite low sales leading to lower income. After our meeting, I adjusted my business model to support a fully online offering, keeping my customers and myself safely distanced until it's responsible to meet in person again. The entrepreneurial training program was comprehensive and not only gave me the knowledge but also the confidence to run my own business by ensuring my personal finances and discipline mimic the same traits in a successful business owner. Thank you Operation Hope and thank you to US Bank.

Thanks so much for listening to Real Good by US Bank. If you like what you heard, listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you next week.

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