This recording is from the Future of Museums Summit held November 1-2, 2023.

This presentation delves into the intricate relationship between values, bridging and engaging audiences across a range of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, offering practical strategies for building empathy and trust. It highlights the pivotal role museums can play as community spaces, emphasizing their ability to foster a sense of belonging and strengthen community cohesion, ultimately mitigating tensions and creating more welcoming environments.

Big Idea Speaker: Rachel Peric, Executive Director, Welcoming America

Transcript

Rachel Peric: OK, welcome, everyone. My name is Rachel Peric. It is such a pleasure to be with you all today. I am joining you this afternoon from the Washington, D.C. area, otherwise known as the ancestral home lands of the Manahoac people. I’d love to hear where you’re joining from so if you have a moment, introduce yourself, let us know where you’re coming from and also what brought you to this session today, what you’re hoping to learn today.

I really want to thank the American Alliance of Museums not only for invitation for me to join you, but for featuring this topic at your conference. It’s really a pleasure to be able to share some of what we’ve learned here in my organization Welcoming America and also learn from all of you. So a little bit about our session today which is called building connected communities: Museums as bridges across divides. Here’s how we’re going to be spending our time and I hope some things that everyone can take away from today, my hope is that we’ll be deepening our understanding not only around some of the dangerous divides that we’re seen but the power of belonging and museums shaping that belonging. We’ll talk about strategies for creating welcoming places and spaces and exploring the role of museums in bridging welcoming and connected communities. And it’s awesome seeing the hellos pour into the chat and seeing folks from so many different parts of the country in so many different roles so welcome, everyone.

And I know that probably all of us are coming into this conversation with a lot that’s weighing on us, especially in this moment in history, and we’re coming into the session today not only with all of the professional hats that we wear in institutions that we work in where we’re trying to navigate some of these fissures and challenges in our society but also just as individuals navigating different, maybe family dinner conversations or conversations in our community. But what I hope that I can leave you with today is a sense of hope and possibility and the power that each of you hold to move through this moment not only as, you know, a moment in time where our history is being shaped but really to think of yourselves as curators in shaping this moment in time which will be our future history, there is a lot of effort at this moment in history to shape a narrative of who we are as individuals, as communities, as a country, as democracies and many competing visions at play in that. But your role and your power as museums to curate what I hope can be a vision of a world where all of us have a place in that world, are seen for our humanity and can belong is the call and I hope we can get into some of why that is important today.

I wanted to start as a big believer of museums even though I don’t work in a museum I spent my life inside of them and they’ve played a really important role in my own life and so I wanted to kind of start there with this image which is of a really beloved museum that I grew up going to as a child in the Washington, D.C. area. This is the national Capitol children’s museum and a very special place in it which is this Mexican plaza that was recreated by cure ratel Jill Wexler who went down to Mexico and partnered with Mexicans communities to create this place. There were cooking demonstrations there and I still can this early remember the smell of hand pressing tortillas and grounding chocolate to make hot chocolate. And those memories really stayed with me into adulthood and came back to me many times as I saw all around me these growing and really dangerous narratives othering not only Mexican immigrants but many other people in our society who haven’t been seen or portrayed for their humanity and I think for me one of the powerful that museums can really do is really complicate our narrative and bring us back to our core sense of humanity. I wanted to bring back this quote that I learned from Jill Wexler. She said “museums have a social responsibility to bring people together, not by watering down our differences but by presenting the vast array of human expression and accurate, dignified and accessible ways.”

So, museums are storytellers and our stories matter and they matter especially in a world that wants to flatten rather than broaden our humanity. Just to bring my own story a little bit more into this, this is my own family story. So this is actually an image that my grandmother sewed of her and my grandmother and my mother as an infant arriving in the United States in the late 1940s, they were refugees, my grandparents were holocaust survivors who really lost everyone that they loved in the world and hate can take a society and found themselves able to come to the United States and my grandmother recalled the moment when she saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time. She remembered feeling that finally she could be free to be herself, free from persecution, free to make a life for her family, and in a lot of ways this is the highest ideal of this country, that you can be from anywhere in the world of any background, race, or creed and call yourself an American and at the same time, of course my family arrived in the 1940s so this was really the hide of the Jim Crow era, this was, you know, a period of time when we had just recently put Japanese Americans into internment camps and in so many other ways were falling short then and in many ways continue to fall short of that ideal, and yet it’s a beautiful ideal and one that I deeply believe that we can keep striving for. And, you know, my family lost everyone that they loved because of the opposite of that ideal, but I believe that we can create a world where such a thing is possible. And it was that belief that brought me about 14 years ago to an organization called Welcoming America. And the origin story of our work is that our founder, David Lubell, had started an organization in Tennessee called the Tennessee immigrant and refugee rights coalition. And at that time in Tennessee, this was the early 2000s, there had been this really sweeping demographic change both in Tennessee and also in a lot of other parts of the country. And unfortunately, while there was some reaction to that, growing numbers of immigrants arriving in many communities across the U.S., there was a lot of kind of welcoming reception to that, there was also a lot of fear and backlash that was happening in places like Tennessee. And so, with that, with the arrival of a lot of new people in particularly Nashville, Tennessee, this is a clipping from ‑‑ from a news story that was describing Nashville as the white-hot nexus of new American nativism. Of course, this is a story we’ve now seen play out over the last decade in many communities in the U.S. But that was the context then. On the right is an image of a mosque that had been burned down in nearby Murfreesboro. So this was sort of the setting that the work that David was trying to do with its community and realizing that it was going to be impossible to talk to Tennesseans about the issue of immigration as a policy issue unless they were really able to get behind that and start from the values that the community cared about and begin to take it out of this very polarized and polarizing issue and start to get back to the basics of what communities wanted and where questions of shared values came into that.

So, David launched a project that was called Welcoming Tennessee. And that project was focused on trying to really bring people into relationship with one another. Again, take this topic of immigration out of a very polarized policy issue and really begin to help neighbors come together as neighbors, whether that was over a potluck meal or through community conversations, begin to see the values that people of different backgrounds shared which, you know, whether you were a newly arriving immigrant or somebody that has lived in the community all of your life, both of you might have felt unwelcome in this place, both of you might have wondered how to make a better life for your family. And so, to begin to share some of those values, connect around those values, and build some stronger ties.

And over time, with this work around trying to shape a narrative oriented around values to shape deeper community connections and also to engage leaders, both immigrant and non‑immigrant, the Welcoming Tennessee project really succeeded in helping Nashville and some other parts of Tennessee begin to turn a page toward a more welcoming ethos. And this is former national mayor Karl Dean expressing what I think is kind of the greatest expression of that idea, that when immigrants pick your city, that is a great honor which certainly wasn’t the dominant message being heard at the time that Welcoming Tennessee was launched.

And I think what that project showed ‑‑ and this was back in about 2009‑2010 ‑‑ what that project showed was that it was possible for communities to move through their fears and come out on the other side as neighbors. And what we’ve since learned over time is that that is often a really important starting point for communities, not only communities who are thinking about this issue of polarization as it relates to demographic change or racial and ethnic diversity but more broadly, the importance of neighbors coming together around shared values and really forging those deeper human connections is so important for so many of the deeply polarizing issues that we’re facing today in our country.

And then one of the key things that started shifting not only in places like Nashville, but many other parts of the country was once those kind of individual relationships and that individual sense of belonging in a community were taking shape, it became really important to, then, look at how communities were actually functioning in a more systemic way. So how were decisions being made in the community, who was part of those decisions, how are we thinking about power in the community and who has the ability to really be part of shaping the decisions being made around us and solving problems together as a community.

So how we come together as leaders to represent our communities obviously is a kind of key pillar of what it takes to be a strong democracy, and as our communities change being really intentional and deliberate about is another key tenet of what it takes to be a truly welcoming community where everyone is able to belong.

And that brings us up until today, to the work that we do day to day at Welcoming America in building a nation of neighbors. So really helping communities in a variety of different ways that I’ll talk more about as we get a little further along, but helping communities really come together, first just on that human level to see one another as neighbors and then to think about how to remove the barriers that each of us might face to being full participants and able to solve problems together, which, of course, is the foundation for a thriving democracy and for thriving communities.

And this is just a map of the places where we have members, both inside of and outside of local government, including some museums. I really see museums as key partners and leaders and I’ll give some examples of that, again, as we get into some of the sort of how‑to part of this presentation.

One of the things that we’ve learned as we’ve built out this work is that some of the things that really we think of as maybe controversial are actually pretty widely embraced and one of the I think dimensions much polarization that can be so complex is it’s hard to know exactly what ‑‑ what are the set of things that Americans agree upon. But one thing that I always come back to is this research that was done a number of years ago by the Knight Foundation looking apartment the question of community attachment. What makes us feel rooted in a community, what makes us want to put down roots and stay in a place. And they asked that question of a very broad set of Americans, and I think about 27 different cities and towns across the U.S. and came back to these three key things and I want to highlight them because I think museums play a big role in all of these but particularly this element of openness, how welcoming a community is to different types of people. And then the Knight Foundation also connected the dots between community attachment and GDP. And there was a very direct correlation made between being able to offer these things and a community’s ability to thrive.

So we do this work because it’s the right thing to do but we also have found over time that it’s the pragmatic thing to do not just for community well‑being but also for prosperity.

So again, before I get into some of the how‑to here, I want to talk a little bit about polarization. I know that this is the main topic that we’re all here for. And just start from this very basic question, are we polarized? And I think a lot of us in the day‑to‑day interactions that we’re having feel like the answer to that is yes. Maybe it’s the complicated dinner conversation, maybe it’s somebody coming into a museum and expressing a sense of not being represented or not being heard. And I want to complicate a little bit the narrative that we have about polarization because so often when we hear this term we hear about it in this political binary because polarization has huge implications for our society is a big piece of this but it’s not the only piece of this. And I like to think about when we talk about polarization sort of these related questions of stratification, segregation, and ways in which our country is divided.

So, I just want to bring in a couple of data points here. This first one being the wealth gap when we slice it in terms of education level. So maybe not a big surprise here to see really the vast difference in wealth, average wealth by education. This is data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

And then, of course, a lot of conversations happening now about the racial wealth gap and I think when we look at this number, these numbers, you can’t help but see how stark this is and I think regardless of our political views, I think most of us would agree that, you know, being able to support a family and thrive should not happen on the basis of our race or our ZIP code. Again, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

And I like to point this out because I think it’s helpful to also see what this could look like if we were able to close this gap. There’s some great data from policy link showing that if we were able to close the racial wealth gap in our country that would lead to about $1.5 trillion in GDP growth for all of us. So huge implications for all Americans.

This is digging a little bit deeper to look at earnings and looking at some of the disparities there both on the basis of gender and also race. And you can see in this that, you know, there’s still a lot of disparities and gaps to be closed here as well.

And then just to, I think, bring in some of the factors that are both contributing and also the result of some of these gaps I think we may see this happening, and I know I certainly do with my own kids’ schools that racial, economic segregation is not only present but has been growing for the last couple of decades. So white/Black segregation in schools increased about 35% since the ’90s and segregation between poor students and non‑poor students increased by about 47% since 1991. So I think it’s really interesting to think about how this all relates back to the question of political polarization and so I wanted to share this chart which was put together by the Othering and Belonging Institute. And basically, what this is showing here is a strong correlation between racial residential segregation and political polarization and so they haven’t said, and I think we can’t determine from this whether there is a causal relationship but clearly there’s a strong association between these two things. And I think one of the things that that points to is the way that communities are being or have the potential to be gerrymandered which I think is really painting a larger picture about how the divides that exist in our country along lines of race and segregation are able to be used to fuel the politics in our country and vice versa. And this is creating sort of a doom loop but it’s not a doom loop that we can’t escape from and it’s also not a doom loop that we can’t escape from in a transpartisan way and I way that is able to be transcendent around the narratives of polarization that we’re hearing around us.

This is data from More in Common which I think is great and kind of complicating our narrative around who ‑‑ complicating our narrative around our own perception of polarization. This is looking at how Democrats are consistently underestimating Republicans’ willingness to engage in conversations around our history and our racialized history. So, we ‑‑ I think are hearing more and more about these sort of two competing narratives that are polarized but that we’re perceiving ourselves as being more polarized than before in a way in which our country has been divided. I want to emphasize about been divided because I think in these conversations to not just talk about the fact that we are polarized that we are being polarized. There’s a lot to be made in political profit and in financial profit in a America that’s divided. But at the end of the day, I think most Americans don’t want to be divided. Most Americans are expressing a yearning to be able to get back to solving problems in our communities, to seeing one another as neighbors, and to moving past some of the flaws in the American system that need fixing.

I want to bring in this quote, the nation is rapidly moving toward two increasingly separate Americas and I think many of us could say this today, but this is actually a more than 50‑year‑old quote. And I’d love if anyone wants to pop into the chat and can guess where this comes from. Any of our historians out there? Can you guess where this comes from? OK., well, I don’t have the “Jeopardy!” countdown but I’m just going to go ‑‑ yes, the civil rights movement. Thank you. This is a quote from the Kerner report otherwise known as the national advisory commission on civil disorders. So, from 1968. And I think there’s a lot that still rings true not only in this callout to sort of recognize this moment in history as one that we have to act and act quickly but also in seeing how our moment in time is really connected to this broader arc of history around trying to forge an America where all of us can be able to thrive and not be divided on the basis of race or other factors of identity.

And that brings me to one last piece around polarization. Some of you might be familiar with Great Replacement Narrative. If you’re not, we could probably spend a whole hour talking about it. But in short, it is a ‑‑ I would call a mythology, a conspiracy theory that is a kind of fringe story that’s rooted in white nationalism that really paints this idea of a threat to white society by a whole variety of people deemed other, including immigrants, including Muslims, including some tropes about ‑‑ some antiSemitic tropes. This shows up in a lot of ways in our society. It was part of the manifesto of the shooter at Tree of Life which we’re just marking the anniversary of this week, also of the shooting in Buffalo and El Paso and it really connects the dots between a lot of the kind of underlying fears that are being driven about immigration, about race in American society, and roots them back to really what I think of as a myth that we, in this moment in history, have the opportunity to replace.

And so, what I want to bring us to next is as we work to counter all of these forces, as we work to replace great replacement what does that vision look like, what is the society that we actually want to create. And there I think, again, museums have such tremendous power to really bring us back into a vision of an America where all of us belong and a society that’s able to really cohere and live together and do so in a way that helps all of us thrive.

So, one of the terms for what’s needed to get to that is social cohesion. So social cohesion is often talked about as having these two dimensions and one is about reducing disparities, inequalities, and social exclusion and the other is about strengthening social relations, interactions, and ties. And so I think that there’s a lot of ways to come at both of these but what we’ve found is that if you do one in isolation from the other you’re really only getting to half of the equation. So if we think about bridge‑building or addressing polarization just in terms of trying to reduce prejudice and connect neighbors to one another, while that’s powerful work, there’s sort of a missing piece that still needs to happen around disparities and inequities in society and how communities share power and make decisions and govern and at the same time, if we don’t think about how communities solve problems and govern together without this human side that helps us work past our prejudices, then there’s a lot that gets left on the table. So I want to talk about both.

So, for us at Welcoming America, we’ve really come back to this idea and this value of being welcoming as encompassing what it takes for communities to create the conditions for belonging and well‑being for all of us and inclusive of immigrants and that’s kind of the area we specialize in and lots of other folks working the road toward belonging from other angles. And we have created something in partnership with communities that we call the welcoming standard which looks across all the different kinds of community institutions that really play a role in shaping whether we can thrive and be active participants in our community from civic engagement to economic development to this really crucial piece around connected communities and the trust and relationships that we have with our neighbors.

And I want to kind of take a lot of what I’ve been talk about in sort of theory and bring it into real life with one example from our work that I think is kind of representative of a lot of communities but also involves museums in a really important leadership role. And then I’m going to talk a bit about what else museums can be doing in communities.

So, Charlotte, North Carolina, is another city that went through really rapid demographic change. And there were many efforts taking place in Charlotte to try to make sure that there was a sense of belonging being created in the community. But it wasn’t really until the community came together to look at that as a whole community and really have a conversation about what it would take to move Charlotte toward being more welcoming that a lot of different players in that work could express, you know, the role that they could play as different community institutions or as neighbors in making Charlotte a more welcoming place. One of the key leaders in that effort was the Levine Museum of the New South and Emily Zimmern who cochaired a multi‑sector task force, welcoming task force, that led that work which produced over years a series of recommendations one of them being the city needed to create an office creating a more welcoming environment. That office was stood up, it’s part of a broader office of equity and together with many community‑based organizations has a strong ongoing effort to make Charlotte a welcoming place. Welcoming America certified Charlotte as a welcoming city a few years ago, so we’re really proud of the work that’s happening there but also really proud of the role that the museum played in shaping this conversation and really recognizing that this wasn’t just a policy conversation but really a cultural conversation.

And there was a great report that was done by the museum and some researchers from Kennesaw State and UNC‑Charlotte that looked at some of the other things the museum did during that time to support a more welcoming community including a series of dialogues around the changing demographics and I just love this quote from one of those dialogues where somebody said, “it made me question my own personal responsibility to embracing the changes.”

And I think, again, this is one of the things that museums can do is really bring a sense of agency into conversations about large‑scale changes that are happening in our communities, whether it’s demographic change or technological change, that kind of bring people back to the sense that they have power in moments that often can make us feel pretty powerless.

So, I want to talk now and spend a little bit of time on how museums can be part of building a bigger we. And then I hope we’ll have some time for questions as well, but I want to leave you with some examples and maybe some practical things that you can be doing.

So, again, I just want to stress, because this was such an important learning for us, that there are many conversations happening now in our country about who belongs. And one thing that we learned was that we can’t make belonging exclusive. That if we wanted to make sure that new arrivals in a community felt welcomed, we also needed to focus on how people who lived in a community all their lives also felt welcomed so truly making conversations as inclusive as possible.

Leadership really matters and a lot of times we have strong biases around who is considered a leader and who is worthy of our trust, and I think with so much conversation now happening around trust in institutions I think it’s incumbent on institutions to put their trust in people. And this is a great example. Out of Portland, Maine, natural helpers that started before the pandemic that really made its value known during the public health response. In tapping people from immigrant communities who had a real expertise in connection to engage people from their own in language communities as sort of emissaries or ambassadors between residents and in this case local government, but it can be any institution. And over time these leaders not only help to be a conduit of information and insights both for residents and for those institutions but also have emerged as and have been recognized as the leaders that they already are and are starting to move into roles on boards and commissions and more formal leadership roles in the community.

There is a huge body of research around the idea of intergroup contact which I can’t get into here, I’ll leave you resources around it, but a lot of communities have tapped into the power of bringing people together on equal footing over time to work on common projects to help move past prejudice but also to create the conditions for just good civic health. So, this was a community gardening project out of North Carolina. I think there are many other examples of this but all of them really, I think stress the importance of building trust and relationships and the importance of those things to set the stage for partnerships. So, a lot of time in our work we want to engage with maybe communities that we haven’t worked with traditionally or want to create partnerships and it’s just so important to start that by going to where people are and starting to build those relationships and starting up with them.

And I think arts and culture can play a huge role in breaking down barriers and helping people come together on equal footing. So, there’s a whole guide that we have here on creative place‑making and welcoming that have some great examples in it. One of them is from the wing loop museum in Seattle who I think ‑‑ wing Luke museum in Seattle which is not just about engaging community but about community sort of at its core and probably many examples from this network if you are a museum that’s doing some interesting work around this feel free to let us know about that in the chat, we’d love to know those examples here.

And I think museums can also just play a role in making themselves more accessible. So, in Lincoln County ‑‑ in the city of Lincoln in Lancaster County, Nebraska, they are one of the communities who has created a welcoming plan and as part of that, have been partnering with the Nebraska History Museum to make history and that museum more accessible.

A lot of organizations are exploring what belonging can mean as artists begin to create new projects or try to build bridges in communities. I want to give a little hat tip to Arts Midwest, they have a great resource page here that kind of brings some fundamentals of belonging, we worked with them on some components of this but I think it’s a great tool if you’re just starting in this work and want to get some ideas for how you can bring this idea of belonging into your organization and also into your community. I see somebody asked about the guide to integrating arts and culture. I’m going to leave our website up as the last slide and you can find all of these on our website.

Lots of talk these days about the power of third spaces so places that are not our work or our home but that we spend a lot of time in and can be much more deliberate about creating a sense of community. One of the places where that is happening is in public parks. And this is the trust for public land, put together this great resource around how not only just the existence of public parks but the way community members can be involved in shaping public parks can be a way to build community and bridge divides. And I think a lot of this really translates well to other third spaces like museums where that cocreation can be so powerful not only in shaping a museum space but also shaping people’s sense of agency and ability to engage civically, both immigrant and non‑immigrant in our case.

And then thinking about civic participation a little more broadly, citizenship is one of the areas that a lot of museums had been playing an important role around. This last month there was a great citizenship day ceremony at Crystal Bridges Museum in northwest Arkansas, recognizing naturalized Americans and I pulled this quote because it’s so powerful about this person’s family and this choice, but I love how they use the word “choice” three times in this quote. Again, just coming back to this idea of really creating the conditions for people to feel a sense of agency and power in their communities.

If you haven’t seen it there’s a great partnership between U.S. citizenship and immigration services and IMLS for a ton of resources for how museums can get involved in this. Again, something we can spend an hour on but won’t today, but I wanted to point you to this resource. Thank you, eye legal for popping the creative place‑making tool in the chat.

Another resource we partner with communities to run an event every September called Welcoming Week, it’s really a platform for all the creative ideas that communities can come up with to express this idea of welcoming. I wanted to give a little shoutout here to the International Museum of Art and Science, there’s a few more examples on the American Alliance of Museums’ blog but I pulled this one because, first of all, it was on the U.S.‑Mexico border and second because I think it really speaks to how museums can be part of the national conversation and also how the national conversation can reinforce the work that museums do to engage their communities around issues that might be fraught but ultimately are about our shared humanity.

We also have seen some great examples during welcoming Week throughout the year from museums like the San Jose Museum of Art partnering with our any the city of San Jose to really pass the mic and involve immigrant community members in sharing their own stories and the importance of that during COVID‑19.

In Georgia, little hat tip here to Kennesaw State and this great role for bringing history into conversations about the present with this welcoming Week event focused on U.S. immigration history.

And then again, I think I’ve probably said the word “narrative CDC and “story” more than any other word in this presentation and I can’t emphasize enough how important your roles are in shaping your communities not only were and are but who they are becoming and who belongs in them. This happens to be from some of the collateral from the government of Canada around welcoming Week, just emphasizing this very simple value‑based message. And there’s so much research out there and again a ton of tools on our website about how to bring some of these fraught conversations back to shared human values emphasizing our humanity and this is just a great example of that.

So, a couple quick resources, I mentioned certified welcoming, and I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it other than to say that I know that all of you are looking for ways to make sure that everyone in your community feels valued. It was great to hear about the American Alliance of Museums’ work on its own standards and bringing diversity and inclusion and belonging into that and we’d love to help you in making sure that that happens and connecting you to our partners and communities. We have an annual conference which we’d love you to be a part of called welcoming interactive. I mentioned some of the tools we have, there are sot webinars and resources including this family cookbook with some recipes of my own in there but also some strategies for bridge‑building in communities. You can find all of that here. With that maybe we can take a couple of questions.

Eileen Goldspiel: Hey, Rachel, this is Eileen backstage with the questions. I want to address one is there a particular order to the welcoming standards?

Rachel Peric: I think, you know, one of the things that we have recently done is reissue the welcoming standards. So we spent a lot of time taking it back out to communities and asking what’s working, what’s not working, what does the latest data show us, so there’s a 2.0 standard and that goes along with our certification process which now has a star system. So there’s some kind of fundamental steps in there that are really about building kind of some foundational coalitions and getting this work started in local government or getting this work started in your own organization and then the star system kind of breaks downtown how this work can progress over time. I would say for museums in that ‑‑ that connected communities’ area is a great place to start in just thinking about the role you can play in beginning to foster relationships and trust with maybe a broader segment of your community for using your platform or your materials to help bridge those connections.

Eileen Goldspiel: OK. I’m going to give you a little bit of a tough one with just such short amount of time so do with this what you can, it looks to me ‑‑ this is from Salvador ‑‑ it looks to me when the huge inequalities in our society affect white folks is when the polarization started to be more apparent what is your opinion about this?

Rachel Peric: Salvador is saying the quiet part out loud and I appreciate that. I think again that could be the subject of another five‑hour‑long presentation. I think, you know, one of the reasons why I wanted to complicate our narrative on polarization is to say what are we really talking about here and from where I sit, you know, the problem is the inequality. So I think if we can begin to start tackling that and then also bringing people along in the sense of grievance that’s being fomented by of the conflict that pitting us against one another that that creates I think we would be in a very different place.

Eileen Goldspiel: I want to thank you, Rachel, for joining us today and everyone else that is online with us. I hope you enjoy the rest of the summit and don’t forget that we do have some networking opportunities later in the day and we encourage you to join us with that and with that I’m going to say thank you for being with us and enjoy the rest of your day.

Rachel Peric: Thank you all so much.