Breaking Down Barriers to Employment

- Hello everyone, I am Chris Hyams, CEO of Indeed and welcome to the next installment of Here To Help, this is our look at how Indeed has been navigating the global impact of COVID-19. Today, it's January 29th, we are on day 332 of Global Work From Home. At Indeed, our mission is to help people get jobs and that's what gets us out of bed in the morning and what keeps us up at night. And we started this podcast back in April of last year as a way to share how we were working to help people in the midst of this unfolding crisis. COVID-19 has turned the jobs market completely upside down, looking for work right now can feel extraordinarily challenging and there are fewer opportunities because of the pandemic, and many people have had their confidence rocked and feel they don't know where to turn in their next search for work. Indeed is here to help and that's why today I am honored and very excited to be joined by Chris Luck. CEO of Shaw Trust. Shaw Trust's mission is to improve people's lives through rewarding and purposeful employment, and, for those who are struggling this month, Indeed announced a new partnership with Shaw Trust and Chris and I are going to talk today about how that partnership developed, what we hope to achieve together, and what the future of work might look like. So, Chris, welcome, and thank you for joining me today.

- Good morning, Chris, I'm very excited to be with you.

- Well, let's start where we always start these discussions with just a check in, how are you doing today?

- Personally, I'm very well, I think this dreaded disease, I've managed to avoid it, my family have, so we're blessed in that sense and also as an organization, which is very much client facing, there's a lot of face-to-face work to be done. They're in pretty good shape as well, I mean, we've not been without some tragedy and some sadness, but, as an organization, our COVID impact rate is, in percentage terms, is about two and a half percent and what we're finding across UK business, is it's actually sitting around about eight to 10% impact, so I think some of the very early work we did to get our heads and minds around what this disease might do and to take some measures early, proved to be right and, of course, important, that means that we've been able to keep helping people.

- So your organization is UK based and I think well-known out there, for those folks who might not know about Shaw Trust or for the listeners in the US and other places, can you tell us a little bit about the work of Shaw Trust?

- Sure, Shaw Trust itself was founded as a charity to help disabled people, initially, into work more than 30 years ago, literally founded with a man and a minibus on a mission in a small village called Shaw, hence the Shaw Trust name. Today, we're a 300,000,000 revenue organization with 2,700 employees and also 800 volunteers across the United Kingdom, and we remain committed to employment as our core pathway to a better life. So we are a purpose led, not for dividends, I say not for dividends because the common expression is not for profits, but we are for profits because we want to put those back into social value programs, social investment, so we just don't disperse it in dividend terms as a social enterprise. So we do use a commercial model, we don't raise any fundraising, we go out and we win contracts, we compete with the best there is in the business through performance and then we deliver that as a social enterprise. Now, we still have the charity Shaw Trust Foundation as our charity top goal. Our mission is to improve life outcomes through access to rewarding employment and when we say rewarding, it has to be progressive, it has to be purposeful, and, I think, dignified as well. So we're sort of looking to make sure it's not just a job for a job's sake, it's got to help people move on, whatever level they're at and whatever the next step is for them, so we're very mindful of that. But we also, and importantly, recognize that success in employment and being able to be employed, and the good work that follows, is critically dependent on what happens in people's formative years and on the support they've received in that. So at Shaw Trust, we don't just do the big employability programs, what we do is we have a child to career framework and we go upstream as far as possible to help overcome some of those early year challenges that might make it subsequently hard to get work. So this means, for us, this is an end to end approach and therefore, as an example, our services do in fact include large scale employability programs, careers advice services, we have a large multi-academy trust, currently 30 schools, and that's based in an area of social disadvantages and social deprivation, so we give education to the kids who would otherwise struggle to receive a good education. We also have the 10th largest children's care home business in the United Kingdom. In order to give those children a chance for good employment later, so we're very proud of our children's care homes. With that, we have a fostering service and we do a lot in the young people's services area as well, the expression we use in the UK is NEET, so not in education or employment, or training. So how do you help those youngsters that are on the street corners and they're on the precipice of going the right way in life or the wrong way? So we do a lot of that. We also have a learning and skills training which particularly includes technical training and apprenticeships, we've started, and we have a care and construction academy to help people get into good work. And those are growth areas, Chris, I think your data would show that is the case and particularly pertinent at the moment, health and wellbeing services, and that's just to name some of what we do. But just to go back to our origins, we do traditionally work with people who have social, economic, behavioral, and health inequalities or perhaps a complex combination of all of those, which then, themselves, create barriers to work, so that's our traditional cohort. But COVID is such a national emergency, it has so impacted people's ability to keep work and be in work that we have widened our approach, using our skills and competencies, and now, of course, in partnership with Indeed, which I'm delighted about, to help minimize those downstream problems created by people being perhaps increasingly distant from work, which is something that you and I both desperately try and avoid for our people, so I think that's Shaw Trust.

- Yeah, that's fantastic, thank you for that background and I think it really underscores that work and success is about a lot more than just getting a job, it's everything that leads up to it and then it's all the support structures to help people through that. And you do extraordinary work, which is one of the reasons we're so excited about the opportunity to work together and we're going to dive into some of that in this conversation, but before we get there, you're relatively new in this role as CEO, you just took it up in 2019, you had a really fascinating career before that, can you tell us a bit about your journey and how you landed in this spot?

- Yeah, I have had a fascinating career, I'm very lucky. I had the opportunity to be in the armed forces, so I'm technically now a veteran and I know how important armed forces and veterans are to my colleagues in the United States. So, very much a 35 year military career, I started off as a bit of a enthusiastic youngster lucky enough to join the Royal Air Force as a pilot and spent many a year, many an hour in the air in missions all over the world including very familiar names, I'm sure, from Bosnia through to Iraq, several times in Iraq, I'm afraid, and various other trouble spots in the world. But, at the same time, the great thing about a military career is that it's actually a portfolio career, you have opportunities to do so much more and I was lucky enough to command at pretty much all levels all the way up to and including two star, which gave me fantastic insight into people, organization, mission orientation, planning, and being able to cope with uncertainty and with fog, and friction. So, actually, that transition from that career and I finished off as the commandant of the United Kingdom's Defense Academy, so responsible for education for all of our military. So being able to think about, you know, what you need to do was how I finished my last three years in the military and I was able to bring that all to Shaw Trust. Now, the timing couldn't have been better in the sense that, pretty shortly afterwards, COVID impacted and then you're into crisis planning, then you're into building teams, you're into reorganization, you're into reorientating to the threats, to your mission, and making sure that you best use the resources at hand, including through partnerships, to get back after what you need to do. So I'm blessed with, first of all, a fantastic and enjoyable career as a military person with some fantastic colleagues. I loved my flying, by the way, I thought that was extraordinary, but all of those skills working under pressure, working with multiple unknowns, and variables that you can't control, I think have translated really well into this role because it's a mission orientated role and I'd like to think that I'm doing okay, but I'll leave that for my chairman to decide.

- In some of the preparatory conversations you had told a story about your experience recruiting in the RAF and I love this idea of the portfolio experience in the military preparing you for this world, can you tell that story and how that influenced your thinking?

- Yeah, absolutely, so I also had an opportunity to be the commandant of the Air Forces college, which was a separate role, earlier on in my career, and with that portfolio, at the time, you also got to be the head of recruiting for the Royal Air Force. And that was really interesting for me because I hadn't been a recruiter at all at that stage, so this was new for me and it allowed me to really learn something new, understand a new world, understand something that was vitally important to the ongoing health of my organization, recruit the right people, in order to maintain military capability, air force capability. So in doing that, I discovered that the way we recruited, at the time, was extraordinarily traditional, we had a very traditional approach to recruiting and what that meant in today's terms is that we weren't particularly open to diversity because we were blind to some of our recruiting practices that meant that those diverse peoples, whether of ethnicity or of gender, or of sexual orientation, whichever measure of diversity you want to use, it meant that we were closing them out before they even got a chance. And there was some simple things, for example, my recruiters would automatically expect, let's say a young man, they'd expect them to turn up for their officer recruitment and to be in a nice suit and a nice tie. Well, when you look at the demographic of our country, there aren't that many young gauche males of 17/18 years old, who necessarily own a suit and they certainly wouldn't know how to put one together for the day. And therefore, that put off an awful lot of people but, more importantly, they might have come and they did come from communities where, if you leave your front door, everyone's seeing you, but if you're wearing this strange thing called a suit, suddenly you stand out and that can make you very conscious or it can alienate you from your immediate community, so there was a great reluctance to expose. Things like being marked on your haircut, did you turn up at your military first interview with the appropriate haircut? Well, if you've come from a community where short hair is not the norm, then cutting your hair, first of all, is quite a high bar for something that is still an opportunistic moment and, of course, it marks you out in your community again. Now there are communities, and it's the same in the States, where if you become an other then, straight away, you put yourself into a no-person's land in between. So that, in itself, was minimizing our ability to recruit that which we actually said we wanted to do and there were many other similar sort of unconscious biases or processes, or methods that actually went against what we wanted to achieve. So we worked really hard to start unpicking some of those, it wasn't easy, my recruiters initially thought I was the crazy one, but we started to work our way through that. But I think it's particularly pertinent for our organizations 'cause that's recruiting, you can be a very bad recruiter without even realizing it because you're not willing to ask yourself the question, is what I do fit for purpose, is it appropriate? Does it follow the values of the day? Does it tie into what the seniors are asking for and am I enabling it or am I disabling it? And I thought that was a really interesting moment for me, which allowed me to make some progress in it and, of course, I've carried that lesson throughout the rest of my career to date and it was quite a powerful one.

- So you joined Shaw Trust and one of your first orders of business was to develop your 10 year strategy, which you unveiled and launched just before COVID hit. So how has that 10 year vision been tested by the pandemic?

- Great question and I'm delighted to say that it had stood the test. Now, as an ex military officer and somebody who was responsible for educating the strategists for defense, I'm pleased to say that I was able to put together a strategy that could stand first contact with difficulty and complexity. 'Cause the way I view a strategy is it's a load star, it's a direction of travel with the parameters for your organization to focus on, it's not the plan, it's not the exact detail. The idea being, what I wanted it to be was, if other direction or other orders were not forthcoming, the whole organization would know what its broad direction of travel was so they could continue to act and if you had a problem or a challenge over the term of the strategy, then the structure, as long as it was strong enough to hold, then it didn't matter if you lose the odd battle. And again, just using some military analogy, a strategy should be able to withstand a loss of a battle, but you want to win the war and it may well be that on your route to winning, to getting to your mission accomplishment, you might lose some battles, but it shouldn't mean that you have to completely change your strategy. I was particularly taken by some early study of FDR and Churchill very early on in World War II before America joined, or just after America joined the war, where they had a very simple strategic decision, was it west first or east first? In other words, did they fix the German regime or did they fix the Japanese regime first? Because they couldn't do both at the same time. So I thought that was wonderful because they didn't try and over-complicate this, so strategies should be relatively simple and understandable. So the strategic decision for the whole mechanism below, whether it was Eisenhower as supreme commander, MacArthur out in the east with Nimitz, was quite simply west first, east second, and that's what drove the whole war. So I think you can, even something as complex as a global war, you can simplify it to a strategy that all our people can understand, can focus, and can contribute to, even if absent any other orders or instruction. So I like to think that our strategy has held up and we are still on strategy, despite COVID.

- So let's talk a little bit about the impact of the pandemic, specifically in how unequal that impact has been distributed specifically on the jobs market. So we just launched our partnership in the last week, let's talk a little bit about why we joined forces in the first place.

- So I think that COVID has been a very cruel and very uneven disease, as far as employability and work, same on your side of the Atlantic, same on our side of the Atlantic, the industries and the sectors that have been absolutely devastated are hospitality, for example, retail, another example, but those are also the traditional landing pads for relatively low skill, low wage, entry-level jobs whether they're for the young or for those that don't have higher level skills, so those were relatively comfortable landing pads to get people ready for, but they've gone. At the same time, those job losses are, by definition, for the low skilled, low pay who can least bear the cost of not being in work, where the critical margins for them to be able to keep their head above water is much much lower. You and I have been impacted by COVID but actually I've had the luxury of working from home, I've got my own room to work in from home and I don't have to worry about anything else, so COVID is very unequal. And I think the big challenge for us now is how do you help compensate for some of the unequalness? So those that suddenly find that their sectors have vanished and the likelihood of them recovering anytime soon is low, and, at the same time, they're being encouraged to get into all these new jobs, you talk about green jobs, you talk about digital jobs. But that's a real challenge when you're already low skill end of the market, 'cause those need skills, so we've got to be in a position where we can rapidly start to produce programs that can re-skill, up-skill, and new skill, but we've got to do it at scale and you've got to be able to do it at pace, and that's quite challenging. One of the facts from our employability programs is that 27% of those we help have no access to IT. So in a world that's about up skilling and digital, and knowledge economy, well, if those individuals, if 27% of them don't even have access to IT, you've got a real problem there in A, helping them in the first place and then being able to give them the confidence to get the jobs and to hold the jobs that they need. And digital poverty is extraordinary, again, it's very uneven, digital access, digital competency is not evenly distributed. Now, put COVID on top of that and it absolutely exacerbates the problem again, so we need to think really hard about how we help people. And even if you gave them a computer, Chris, you've still got a problem of they might not have WiFi, they can't pay for WiFi. So the whole digital access piece is a big question when you're trying to get people into work and when you're trying to get them up-skilled and re-skilled. And I think that's a challenge for both of our organizations, I know that Indeed's got some fantastic digital products and methods to get people into work but, as I said, you've got this very large chunk of the population who, despite that, can't access it, so how do we help them? And that's something that we, at Shaw Trust, are looking to, which I hope will then connect quite well, once they're digitally competent enough, then we can connect with your organization and find those jobs.

- One of the important themes that Shaw has focused on is this idea of confidence and the role that it plays, that once you have a jolt to the system, like we have here, not only are people put at risk but the lack of opportunity and the lack of of resources affects their confidence, which makes it even harder then to find the next opportunity from there. Can you talk a little bit about the role that confidence plays and how long-term unemployment has been affected through this pandemic?

- The shock of suddenly losing your job and everything that comes with that, the security, in particular, the security around that, can unsettle anybody. I mean, I have put myself into a thought experiment, how would I feel if suddenly overnight, that which I've been doing, which is effectively leadership for the last 35 years, the job's gone and suddenly I'm catapulted into an unknown area, an unknown sphere, an unknown future, and yet everything else is still crowding in, you need to pay the bills. And I consider myself one of the fortunate ones in life to those that we help, especially those with disadvantages and disabilities, goodness knows how they must be feeling and that is a massive hit on your confidence. Well if finding work is all about confidence, confidence in your self projection, confidence in your core capabilities, competence in being able to interpret that and explain that, and then to actually demonstrate it, then confidence is everything, Chris. And I think that is a key part of what we need to do, is to give people the belief that actually their value, their worth, has not suddenly vanished, to give them the belief that what they have can be repackaged, can be reinterpreted, can be retranslated into new opportunities. And that's really, really difficult, especially if you're at the low end where it's blue collar, 'cause that's quite hard to say, well, that job, it can be something else. It's hard enough if you're just thinking of it from a white collar perspective. So confidence is everything and it's easily lost, and it takes quite a lot of rebuilding. And sometimes just a slap on the back and say, don't worry, everything's okay, is not enough, we need to be far better at helping people build confidence and then, of course, maintain the confidence. Because, again, I don't need to tell Indeed, every time you put an application in, doesn't mean you're getting a job. You might put one, two, three, four, five applications in what happens if you get knocked back, what happens to your confidence? So that part of how do you still keep holding hands with these individuals whilst they get knocked back, which can be devastating, is a real critical part of what we need to do. Connecting it to those already distant from work, which, a short while ago, less than two years ago, we particularly concentrated on those with, effectively, barriers of one sort or another to get into work, because it was a tight labor market, there was a high demand, and it was getting them into work. Well, they find themselves in a situation where they were already worried and anxious and lacked confidence, and belief in themselves, because of their complex issues and challenges, suddenly, there's the best part of 2,000,000 people in front of them. We've got airline pilots stacking shelves in our supermarkets, those are the jobs that these entry level, first time back to work in, sometimes years, needed just to build up, but it's gone. So for those distant from work, we are very concerned and we are coordinating with the government and with the department for work and pensions, we are looking very closely as to whether the programs that we had, whether they actually are fit for purpose and serve the purpose in this new dynamic of, suddenly, not having a tight labor market and not having much opportunity, and having a whole queue of people ahead of you. I think that's really difficult, Chris, and there's a lot of work to be done there yet, and I think that's going to play out for the next year, two, three years. My worry is it's going to make them even more distant, so we need to do something and we need to do it quick.

- So one of the things that we are doing as part of our partnership is this series of job search workshops that we've announced that are free online monthly employment sessions. My understanding is we just launched our first one yesterday, we had more than 3000 people attend. How do we hope that these sessions will start to address some of this confidence gap that we're seeing?

- Well, I think there's two ways of doing it. One is I think when people realize that we're there for them, that's a confidence hit, a benefit. So suddenly there's something different that they can look at, engage with, with a promise of new skillsets, new ways of looking at things. And, secondly, it's by seeing people who have lived experience and can give comfort, if comfort's the right word, but can give confidence to those tuning in that, actually, there is work, there's a way of re-evaluating what your skillsets are, and there's a pathway to success. So I think that's really what the benefit of this is, is to, first of all, make sure that they don't believe they're forgotten and lost, that they know that an organization and a partnership such as ours, is going to hold their hand, they're going to step them through, and we're going to add value, rather than just saying fill in this paperwork and we'll see what there is. And I think that in itself will help them get out of bed because when you're down, when you've been knocked back, when life looks dark and bleak, sometimes it's hard to even get out of bed. And I think if you've got something like this, something constructive, something that they can focus on and get value out of and be stepped through, then that's going to get them out of bed in the first place, that's going to get them focused. And then, we hope, get them into work as quickly as possible because they're open to work, rather than just closing down and thinking that there's no hope. Confidence is about hope, you've got to make them think there's hope. And I think what you're doing with access to your online workshops and you have got my chief of staff, who's acting as one of your confidence ambassadors, I think that's absolutely the right thing to do.

- So one of the things that you talked about when you told the story about recruiting at the RAF was the importance for employers to actually be looking to hire more diverse pools of talent, what are some of the things that we can do to help influence employers to want to take this challenge on?

- Yeah, it's a great question, Chris. COVID has changed things, it's changed the dynamic, employers are not desperately seeking people for work now because there's a lot of people looking for work, I think the challenge of opening their eyes, employer's eyes to the talent that resides in those that traditionally found it really hard to get work is one thing, but trying to get them to open their eyes, make reasonable adjustments for people with challenging circumstances in a COVID economic crisis, is a whole new ball game. So I think for what we need to do is keep messaging, is keep clearly and articulately demonstrating that these people that we're looking after, as well, bring diversity of background, bring diversity of challenge, bring diversity of perspective, which can be really valuable to organizations. And, again, I know Indeed is absolutely data alert, data-driven, the data's quite clear, if you've got an organization that is diverse in all senses, both in the protected characteristics but also in background, in life challenges, that it drives those businesses on to be better and better and better, but you've got to be able to show the data, prove the data and then we've got to make sure that those candidates that we put forward are prepared. And we got to make sure they are genuinely prepared, not just ready enough for a quick exchange and a quick buck, and we're out, that's not what we do, it's not what Indeed does, and it's not what Shaw Trust does. We get these people so that they're ready for the opportunity and then we make sure we help them sustain in work, that's what we do at Shaw Trust. How do you hold their hands for a little bit longer, rather than just saying, well, we've got them the job, we're done, let's go and find somebody else to get a job. That's not what we do either, it's about good work, which is sustainable as well as rewarding, as well as dignified. And those are really difficult because we can't not have some empathy and sympathy with employers as well, they're in a pretty dark space at the moment, we just need to look at the economy. In the States alone, your new president is trying to get a 1.9 trillion economic package landed to help, that's 8% of GDP, that's a lot of help required. So I think the task is enormous, but for us the key thing is not to be overwhelmed, this is our calling, actually, this is our moment. We're almost counter cyclical, when it's easy, it's not really a mission, when it's challenging and we've got to really help people and come up with innovation, come up with alternative pathways, come up with different ways of acknowledging the environment and then changing and morphing into it, that's our job to do. So quite long winded on that one, Chris, and a little bit ethereal but I think the key thing is the principle behind it that we got to get after.

- Yeah, I could not agree more with everything you just said and one of the things that we think about and I'd really love to hear your thoughts, is obviously going from an incredibly tight labor market to the world that we're in right now, a huge amount has changed. We're trying to help carry people through this and obviously the work that you're doing is trying to do that in a sustainable way, when the market returns to something, we don't know what it will look like, but something that is more stable, what long-term effects, do you think, of this upheaval will still remain? And what will that new normal look like, you think?

- Yeah, that's another great question, Chris, that could have me talking for an hour but I'll try not to do that. I think the biggest challenge at the moment with the change in the labor markets is, first of all, it's a significant collapse of traditional sectors, hospitality, retail, aviation, are easy ones to reference. Now, those will recover, but we have no idea of scale and pace, but we've got a lot of people looking for work now, so there's a sector that we have no real sense of when it's going to recover. Our governments also tell us, oh, but don't worry, because actually we're going green, and new work and new jobs, we're going digital, we're going knowledge economy, we're going up the value chain. Well, first of all, you got to have people and resources to help make that journey and, secondly, there's a disconnect between the timings of people needing work now and new jobs, new careers, new work, in what are, for many people, are in these exotic new areas of green and of digital, and of knowledge economies. Our blue collar colleagues who have used their hands to do good work, someone telling them, don't worry, there's a job for you in that, first of all, you've got to get them the resources and the training to get there, secondly, where are these jobs? It's a five to 10 year cycle to suddenly change your economy. I mean, if we talk about green and green cars, for example, most governments and most car manufacturers have committed themselves to change and what they've said is they're going to be all electric. There was a another car company, I can't remember their name, but just yesterday announced that they would be all electric and by 2035, they would be. Well, if you're going to build an industry off the back of that growth in that green sector, then 2035 is a very long way away. And it's the same with energy, there is a lot of promise and it's right and proper, by the way, to go for green, but the scale and the pace doesn't match with the scale and the pace of the current COVID emergency. So that worries me is how do you synchronize the need of today with the opportunity space that everyone talks about? 'Cause the gearing doesn't work at the moment and you and I, we're in the business of shaping people for work that exists, or near exists, and connecting them to work that exists. But what we can't do is create the jobs, we're not in that game and I think our economies are going to take a while to spool up and start to create the jobs. So, as an employability organization, as a recruiting organization, that's a real challenge. And I think that's a whole conversation with government, that's a conversation with the departments that we normally work for, to say how do we synchronize? And then what's the safety net in the interim? So I think there's a bit of advocacy work there as well. Now, we do have a policy institute, which aims at advocating for good work and shaping the future of good work, so I think they've got a lot of work to do. So my policy institute are working hard in conversations, both with government ministers and shadow ministers, so those ministers that are in opposition, to try and have a one view, one approach as to how we shape the employment market going forward. And education's a huge piece to this, huge piece of this, and it's really, really challenging. In the United Kingdom, we spent the last 20 years really dismantling our vocational approach to education, technical training, and just going all in for universities and degrees. Well, they've just discovered that that is not sustainable when you have a transformative event such as this, when suddenly, it's about work, it's about skills, it's about the ability to quickly change into and do something different. Well, a three-year degree program doesn't do that for you, what you need is the intervention that gets you back into work within six months, 12 months, at the most, and you're supported on the way, and that's a huge political debate in the United Kingdom today, and will be for a while yet. So there's a government white paper out on education about skills, technical competencies, qualifications, and how we fund that, so that's quite a challenge coming ahead but we're fully engaged in that debate. And having a multi-academy trust ourselves, having a learning and skills company as well, that's really important to us, making sure we're doing the right thing so it all connects to good employment at the end of the day, which is what we want.

- We could go on for hours here, this is really vital conversation but with time running out, just to wrap things up, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how the experience of COVID-19, the pandemic, the last 10, 11 months, how has this changed your perspective personally for the future?

- I'm going to say it hasn't, because my view of the world and life has always been one that it is contingent and it's contextual, and black swan events are not uncommon, and that the baseline human nature of creature comfort and certainty is ephemeral, it's not real, that's not what life is. And I think as a military individual, as a military leader, as a military strategist, that sort of contingency and what happens if it goes wrong, because human nature actually is more inclined to missing the lion in the bushes, as it were. So, actually, COVID and its impact has just proved to me that you need to have organizations which are robust and are resilient, and can have scope for contingency, in order for them to keep being able to deliver their mission. What COVID has shown me, again, is that good people will do amazing things despite the odds and they are precious people. For example, my children's home staff, you can't abandon children's homes because government tells you to stay at home, 'cause the children are in the children's homes for a reason. And it's face to face and in some of our children's homes we've had 50% COVID cases, and then we've had people have to move in and willingly volunteer to move into the children's homes, so you minimize the in and out of staff to minimize the transmission rate as far as possible and, effectively, abandon their families. And normally you only do that when you're in uniform and you get sent to a foreign land to do the commander-in-chief's bidding, but my people are doing this and they're doing this willingly, and I think it's extraordinary. So, I don't get too fixated on those that keep going to parties and reveling, I get fixated on these amazing people that will do the right thing despite the challenges, despite the risks, 'cause they believe in the mission. So I'd better make sure that my mission is purposeful, is believable, and is supported, and I think that's what I do, I know it's what you do, Chris, so that's how I view the world now.

- Well, thank you, Chris, that's a really inspiring way to wrap up this conversation and we do care about the same things, and our missions are intertwined, but it's also so clear that the experience and the remit of your organization is quite a compliment to ours. There's so many areas that we care about the end result but that we can't have the reach that you have and we're so excited and humbled by the opportunity to partner with you to try to solve some of these larger problems that it takes a larger coalition to really tackle and we're inspired for this fight ahead, so thank you so much for joining me today.

- Thank you, Chris, thank you for having me.