>> I'm Dr.

Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., and this is "The Chavis Chronicles."

>> There's still a lot of empathy.

We just have to get back in conversation about the ways that we really build positivity and community in America to sort of restore some of what we've lost in this last decade.

>> Major funding for "The Chavis Chronicles" is provided by the following.

At Wells Fargo, we continue to look for ways to empower our customers.

We seek broad impact in our communities, and we're proud of the role we play for our customers and the US economy.

As a company, we are focused on supporting our customers and communities through housing access, small-business growth, financial health, and other community needs.

Together, we want to make a tangible difference in people's lives.

Wells Fargo -- the bank of doing.

American Petroleum Institute -- our members are committed to accelerating safety, environmental, and sustainability progress throughout the natural gas and oil industry.

Learn more -- api.org/apienergyexcellence.

Reynolds American -- dedicated to building a better tomorrow for our employees and communities.

Reynolds stands against discrimination in all forms and is committed to building a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

♪♪ >> We are very honored to have on this special edition of "The Chavis Chronicles" the president and CEO of the Public Welfare Foundation, Candice Jones.

Welcome.

>> Thank you, Dr.

Chavis.

>> How did you come to do this work?

>> You know, I had done work in philanthropy, the work of giving, giving grants to other organizations earlier in my career at the MacArthur Foundation.

I had also done quite a bit of work in federal and state government around managing large budgets and running big agencies around justice reform.

And so when this opportunity came up, it actually felt like a really natural outgrowth, the work of the organization and some of my prior experience.

It was also an organization that I had been familiar with in the field.

So it made a lot of sense.

>> Tell us something about the specific mission of the Public Welfare Foundation.

>> We give money to other organizations that do good.

So, it's an amazing mission.

We specifically give and focus on organizations that give around justice reform, adult and criminal youth justice reform -- so, organizations that are trying to say, "Actually, if we want to keep communities safe, it does not make them safer to send them into jails and prisons that are overcrowded, that see violence and isolation."

Those are the conditions that create violence.

They don't disrupt it.

And so if we want safety, we need to make sure that communities actually get resources they need, that there's strong diversion and reentry programs, that people have Maslow's hierarchy of need.

And so we work in 10 jurisdictions across the country to get grants to organizations that work on that issue, whether they're media and they do education around that, what's happening on that issue, whether they're researchers who do the data and analysis and make it public, policy organizations that educate people about that work, or organizations that engage in community organizing or direct service to build the type of diversion programs that we need to address those issues.

That's what we get to do.

We get to stand back and say, "You do incredible work.

You're incredible leaders and innovators.

Here's money to go do what you do even better."

>> So, you're originally from Chicago.

>> Chicago, Illinois, born and raised.

>> And how long have you been president and CEO of the Public Welfare Foundation?

>> I came to Public Welfare in 2017.

>> Since you've been head of the Public Welfare Foundation... >> Yeah.

>> ...what is your assessment?

Is our nation becoming more caring for the less fortunate over these past eight years?

>> When I came on at Public Welfare in 2017, one of the large publications in philanthropy had -- The Chronicle of Philanthropy had issued this article that talked about American giving, how much Americans personally give, coming out of the 2008 crisis, the financial crisis.

And it talked about that, because American families were struggling, their giving had decreased.

It's a fundamental American tradition to sort of give, to give to those communities, to give to those who we think are in need or less fortunate than us.

And we were losing ground there.

And I think the research around that, actually, the trajectory hasn't changed.

We're seeing that folks, as they struggle in their day-to-day, have less to give.

But I don't necessarily think that that has changed the tide on how much we care.

We certainly are seeing these hyperpolarizations in our society, people sort of falling prey to harsh rhetoric and losing sight of what it takes to build community, to be a neighbor.

But I think -- and we get to see this -- You know, I'm in the business of hope.

I work with organizations, as I said, that do good work every day.

So we get to see and have access to people every day who step out into their communities, see a need, and say, "I'm gonna fill this gap."

And I really believe on the ground in communities, there's still a lot of empathy.

We just have to get back in conversation about the ways that we really build positivity and community in America to sort of restore some of what we've lost in this last decade since I've been at Public Welfare.

>> I'm gonna unpack this term "empathy" a little more.

What is the difference between sympathy and empathy?

>> It's really -- I love that you asked that question.

You know, sympathy is, "I sympathize with you.

It's the same.

I feel like this is something that I've gone through.

I can see it in you, and so I have sympathy for that."

Empathy is, "I can see your struggle, and even if I haven't gone through it, I can care."

Right?

It's bigger than me, right?

It's not about me.

It really is just about my ability to see you, to care about what you're going through and to want to help.

It's a powerful thing that drives society, the ability to care beyond yourself, beyond your own lived experience.

>> So, how does one care about those who you may fear or understand or even have some prejudice against?

>> Yeah.

So, this gets to the point on empathy.

How do I care when we don't have what I feel like is an obvious shared identity?

You know, they did these tax-policy studies years ago that showed when you look at communities that are homogeneous -- everybody's the same race, they look alike -- people are like, "I love taxes.

We need to pay for the schools.

We need to pay for the roads."

But when you look at tax policy in more diverse, integrated communities, all of a sudden people challenge the taxes more.

"Oh, well, why is my money going to that person, that group?

They don't deserve it."

And so the challenge is that nothing changes about the needs of a community to thrive with a strong tax base in homogeneous or more integrated communities.

It is really that lack of empathy, that othering that we do as a society, as humans, that makes that much more complicated.

And that's something America has always struggled with and something that we're gonna have to overcome as we become a more diverse nation.

As soon as they started projecting that by 2050, the next generation of kids in America will be majority diverse, you saw a real erosion.

This is where that divisive rhetoric started to come.

It's fear.

It's fear-based.

It's, "What does that mean for America?"

The truth is that it means that we will be a more competitive world leader.

The truth is that we will have more expanse language efficiency, more ways to look at issues, more diverse perspective.

But we're afraid of that.

>> So, as I listen to you, I see that diversity is an asset, not necessarily a liability.

>> Absolutely.

>> At the community level, state level, and national level.

It seems to me that the majority of schoolkids in public schools are already children of color.

Simultaneously, there's a withdrawal of support of public schools.

>> That's right.

>> Private schools.

How does the Public Welfare Foundation get people to be empathetic as a part of their life, as a part of their being?

>> Part of our messaging is very much about educating people and about what we like to characterize as sort of messaging hope, right?

One of the things that we were doing this fall is a giving campaign, right?

We took the position in our public narrative work that, around this time, you pick up your phone, you open up your tablet or your computer, what do you see?

Somebody selling you something, right?

They're talking about their sale.

Your favorite influencer, if you're on social media, is telling you what you should buy, right?

Nobody has got a proud and loud list about how they give, how they volunteered over the Thanksgiving holiday.

It's a season about gratefulness, right?

It's like, I don't need to know what you bought.

I want to know how many plates you served up at the soup kitchen.

And so public welfare, we wanted to turn that on its head.

We wanted to promote a giving list.

We wanted to talk to our neighbors and partners and friends about how they were personally giving, what giving has impacted them in their life, what it means to them.

We want to make sure that if we want to build the world and community that we see, we have to be a part of that mission.

And that's in dollars if you have it to give, but even for those who don't, it can be in your time, in your empathy.

>> What is your perception of what needs to be done over the next 5, 10 years to improve empathy being part of the lifestyle of American people who say, "What is an American?"

>> Yeah.

>> Is part of that answer an American should be a giving person?

>> I would love for that to be a part of that answer.

You know, so much of American identity is about this sort of scrappy, you know, ground-up building.

>> Rugged individualism.

>> Rugged individualism, right?

Which is antithetical to faith, right?

We're a country that's sort of like family, freedom, and faith, but rugged individualism can be antithetical to faith because faith teaches that you care.

It's not just about you and yours.

It's about your community, right?

Whoever you worship -- God, Allah, right?

-- it's all about saying that it is bigger than you.

It is about how you give and show up.

10-10-20 is something I learned, right?

You give 10, you save 10, the 80% you live on.

I learned that from a little girl.

That's where I first learned how to give.

It's really important that we re-instill the need to be participants in our society.

And that's both in the giving sector, but it's also one of the reasons in public schools we don't learn civic education anymore, right?

We don't learn that democracies rise or fall on the participation of individuals.

All of these things about a healthy society means that we can't just retreat to our phones, to our quarters, to our, you know, small slice of the world.

We actually have to step out into it and participate in the fuller part of it.

>> You've been giving since you were a little girl?

>> Yeah.

>> How is that even possible?

I mean, did you -- You must have been brought up in a family of givers.

>> That's right.

My mom.

I tell the story.

She ran our church soup kitchen, Chicago, West Side, in the dead of cold.

And, I mean, cold in the '80s is not the cold of today.

On the West Side of Chicago, I had to get up every Saturday morning, drive to the West Side.

They'd get out.

They'd cook.

You know, I'm not doing much.

I'm opening cans on a step stool and handing off things.

Women would cook all the food.

Then she'd make us put on our coats, go out, find people sitting on porches, sitting on sidewalks in the cold and say, "Come in and get some food."

And my mom would always tell me, "We're not preaching to people.

There is no requirement that you have to engage in faith.

We owe them dignity.

They need to be able to get warm, to use the restrooms if they need it, and then to fill their belly."

That was the point.

She was always like, "If you have, you have to give."

And I learned that from little.

>> And one of the problems that we have today, one of the reasons why there's fear, is because there's not enough exposition... >> Right.

>> ...of the benefits of giving... >> Right.

>> ...exposition of the benefits of having hope, even participating in a democracy.

>> Right.

>> You know, half the people not voting is not good for the democracy.

>> Right.

The most powerful thing that you can do in a society is isolate people from one another.

It's how you see fear, right?

If I'm spending all my time on a phone, you know, thumbing through and listening to things, you could tell me anything 'cause I don't know.

It's very difficult to other people if I'm out in the world meeting them, If I'm looking at someone who's houseless, who's struggling, and being like, "I have incredible empathy for this -- This person's funny, They're clever.

I'm learning about their family.

They're asking me this.

They're telling me other things."

Like, it becomes much harder to dehumanize them.

If I work with somebody who's returning from incarceration and I get to meet their family and understand their struggle and what they've been through, it becomes much harder to terrify them and just make them a caricature of their self.

It also forces me to get out of my small enclave and be a citizen of the world.

>> Most people don't understand that when a person is incarcerated, it's just not that person in jail.

>> Right.

>> It impacts the family.

>> Their whole family.

They did a study years ago on the parole system in Wisconsin, where they looked at how many were people on parole.

They found most of the people on parole in the state of Wisconsin, in the entire state of Wisconsin, came from two ZIP codes in Milwaukee City.

>> For the whole state of Wisconsin?

>> For the whole state of Wisconsin.

>> Two ZIP codes?

>> Two ZIP codes in Milwaukee.

Both Black communities.

Now, to your point about not just impacting the individual, imagine that.

So, in this study, they listed all the things that you could be -- they call it a violation -- all the things that could send you back into prison after you've been paroled.

And a lot of those things were not new crimes.

It was a lot of stuff.

You know, you hadn't got a job.

Well, if there's no job available to you... You know, like, it's this long, long list.

And the point of the report was to have a discussion about whether or not the policy was set up in a way to improve outcomes -- to your point.

But also to your point about impacting a broader family, think about not just the family.

If two ZIP codes drive most of the parole in the states, think of the economic devastation to that community of having all of those potential taxpaying people pulled out and to impact all their future earning potential now that they have a record.

That's what happens in communities, particularly communities of color, all over this country every day.

And we don't see that compounding interest on a community and how it devastates.

And then you're sort of saying, how can we achieve safety?

Well, we know how to achieve safety in America.

If you drive to northwest D.C., it's safe, right?

But it's not just a conversation about policing.

It's a conversation about investment.

>> How does AI, artificial intelligence... >> Yeah.

>> ...impact your work now with the Public Welfare Foundation?

>> You know, first we have to make sure that AI is empathetic.

There are really talented people right now, technologists, who are building AI, but also some trying to make sure that we don't build into AI racial disparities that we've seen in the humans that create it.

>> Right.

>> You know, making sure that -- Right now in justice reform, in particular, AI and predictive tools can be used in policing, in tools that sort of look at areas and say, you know, "If you've heard gunshots in this area, we might predict where another harm will come."

Tools that are used to think about how you may assess risk.

But there's a lot of work in that technology to make sure that we don't bake in biases.

And I think that's where we have to think about the whole field of people, not just building AI, which can be an incredible tool for big-scale machine learning, but at the same time, can also really create the kind of technology that can feel black and white in a way that harms communities of color.

And we need to make sure that that empathy, that thoughtfulness, that acknowledgment of racial issues and disparities are baked into the way that technology is built.

Communities of color should have a healthy skepticism, right?

Tons of things -- science research in the past, the Tuskegee project -- have been weaponized against communities of color.

So I think there is a need for a healthy skepticism.

However, technology is going to be our future.

It's coming.

And so it's important for communities of color to position people in those.

Their future job's there, you know, data and programming, you know, warehouses of big data that hold that information.

Some of that resource investment, some of that job training and workforce should be positioned so that communities of color -- Black, Latino, Native, and Indigenous -- benefit from that 100%.

It should not just be about Silicon Valley and only rural white communities.

Those communities should benefit, too, but we have to position the future of technology so that people of color have a seat at the table, both in the workforce development, but also, as we were talking about before, in the design and implementation of these systems so that bias isn't baked in.

>> What are the top three initiatives today over the next five or five years of the Public Welfare Foundation?

>> We're really focused right now on youth justice, on youth that are impacted by the law.

You know, in the last 30 years, the number of youth in custody, the number of youth being arrested in America, has greatly declined.

That means there are less young people in our jails, there are less young people in long-term care facilities.

That's less people being harmed, less people being subjected to rape, less people being locked out of the job market for the rest of their life.

What we're seeing right now is a resurgence of rhetoric.

Whenever you look at data on crime in a city, it's like, "Oh, my God."

People are wringing their hands.

"These kids, these kids, these kids are out of control."

But when you actually look at research, the percentage of youth committing crimes in a jurisdiction is often less than 10%.

>> So, Candice, why -- It seems to me the public perception is just the opposite.

>> The opposite.

>> When people think of your hometown, Chicago... >> Right, it's, "These kids, these kids."

>> That the kids are wilding.

>> Yeah.

Jackson, Mississippi.

>> People are scared go to out to have dinner or lunch.

And that's not the reality.

>> That's not the reality.

>> How do we do a better job in getting -- I would say demystifying... >> Yeah.

>> ...the myths that are out there about youth crime?

>> We have to talk about it.

That's why I love platforms like yours that's trying to get good information out there.

It's so dangerous.

It's dangerous for two reasons.

When we have misinformation.

One, because we are villainizing our own youth.

We're talking about, "Oh, it's these youth.

You think youth, you know, commit 98% of crimes, when they're this small fraction of what's going on.

And then when we have targeted interventions, when we're focusing our resources, law enforcement, policing, diversion, other resources on crime, we're targeting the wrong people because the 90% -- You know, our focus isn't on the right place.

And so it could be so dangerous when that information, when that rhetoric gets out there.

We actually have to try to still live in a world where research and data matters.

And so that's something that we're really gonna be focused on over the next several years.

We're also talking a lot about public safety, having a conversa-- People want to be safe, and in this country, they have a fundamental right to safety.

And we need to start to have a real conversation about the ways that we achieve safety.

Sometimes they can say it's only with law enforcement, only with a militarized force.

We need targeted law enforcement that's working with communities, but only when communities trust law enforcement is that effective.

>> I don't know what happened to community policing.

>> What happened to community policing?

>> I mean, that was working, and then for some reason... >> We got away from it.

>> ...there was a withdrawal.

>> Right.

And we need community investment, right?

You can't intervene on a crime but a whole generation of youth don't have job opportunities, right?

We can't gut the public schools in certain areas, but have world-class schools in others, right?

Communities can tell when they're under-invested.

That juxtaposition isn't working.

And the only investment in communities can't be -- It's like, "We'll give you law enforcement, but we won't give you anything else."

>> Today, what gives you your greatest hope?

>> There are a lot of things that give me hope.

One, our partners give me hope.

You know, we have partners, even in the face of everything that's going on, you know?

There's an organization down in Georgia called Atlanta PAD.

They worked over years to say, "We're arresting people who have substance-abuse issues.

We're arresting people who are houseless.

And that's not the way to do it.

What we need to do is actually build a massive service center for those people."

They got that service center funded.

They are now diverting those people out of jail and prison and running something that is effective, that's gonna become a model for this nation.

That makes me hopeful.

There are partners all over this country that we get to fund that work with that.

And that gives me hope.

Looking in the faces of my niece and nephew give me hope, you know?

It reminds me what we all do it for.

Like I tell you -- You're talking about a civil rights background.

We stand on the shoulders of a generation that fought and sacrificed for us.

This moment in history is giving us the opportunity to remember that sacrifice, that service is still required.

And we do it for those little faces that we look into today.

>> All the great work that you're doing now, what we did in the 1950s, 1960s was not in vain.

>> I appreciate that.

>> You're fulfilling the dream.

>> I appreciate that.

>> Candice Jones, president and CEO of the Public Welfare Foundation, thank you for joining "The Chavis Chronicles."

Thank you, Dr.

Chavis.

It's a pleasure.

>> For more information about "The Chavis Chronicles" and our guests, visit our website at TheChavisChronicles.com.

Also, follow us on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Major funding for "The Chavis Chronicles" is provided by the following.

At Wells Fargo, we continue to look for ways to empower our customers.

We seek broad impact in our communities, and we're proud of the role we play for our customers and the U.S.

economy.

As a company, we are focused on supporting our customers and communities through housing access, small-business growth, financial health, and other community needs.

Together, we want to make a tangible difference in people's lives.

Wells Fargo -- the bank of doing.

American Petroleum Institute -- our members are committed to accelerating safety, environmental, and sustainability progress throughout the natural gas and oil industry.

Learn more -- api.org/apienergyexcellence.

Reynolds American -- dedicated to building a better tomorrow for our employees and communities.

Reynolds stands against discrimination in all forms a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪