Resilient Leadership in a Dynamic World: Tonya Allen

00:09 Bowman: Thank you for joining us for Ahead of the Curve, a new speaker series from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. We're grateful for your participation today, and we're looking forward to welcoming an esteemed guest in Tonya Allen in just a moment. My name is DuBois Bowman. I am privileged to serve as Dean of the School of Public Health here at the University of Michigan. This is our inaugural event for Ahead of the Curve, it's a speaker series that will bring conversations about leadership to our campus and beyond. Leadership is a critical component of navigating complex public health challenges and building a better future through improved health and equity. We are experiencing important leadership lessons first hand as we watch the novel Coronavirus affect all corners of the world. As problems become increasingly complex, we must turn our attention and resources to developing leaders. Building on the well-known assertion of Warren Bennis, a pre-eminent scholar in the study of leadership, leaders are made rather than born. Regardless of the inequalities that an individual brings to leadership, development is clearly important. Throughout this series, we will bring contemporary leaders spanning many sectors to share their insights, their vision, their experiences and perseverance. We want to hear about those important factors that shape great leaders and learn about how leaders continue to evolve and grow. That in turn will help us determine how to prepare the next generation of leaders.

So with that, I'm delighted to welcome Tonya Allen to Ahead of the Curve. Tonya serves as President and CEO of the Skillman Foundation and is a proud alumna of the University of Michigan. Tonya, welcome and thank all of you for joining us.

02:02 Allen: Thanks for having me, DuBois.

02:04 Bowman: So today's topic is resilient leadership for a dynamic world. All leaders are encountering new situations in 2020, and the Skillman Foundation I'm sure is no exception, and this will be a common thread throughout our conversation today, leading during a pandemic. And I would imagine that you're having to call upon a reservoir of lessons learned during your career to best position your organization. So I'd like to just start with a series of questions that touch on your personal and professional leadership journey. So to begin, would you please tell us about the Skillman Foundation and your position there.

02:44 Allen: Yeah, I'd love to. So again, thanks for having me. I'm so honored to be here with you today, particularly because I just appreciate your leadership in moments like this as well. So the Skillman Foundation is a private children's foundation. So we have about a half a billion dollars in assets. And we give away about 5% to issues facing children in Detroit. Our mission is for every child in Detroit to be able to learn and lead so that they can have an effective life. And we really believe that because the future of Detroit is inextricably tied with its children. And so what we attempt to do is to try and make sure that those young people have opportunities to be successful and that they have opportunities quite honestly, to inherit their birthright and be prepared for it, which is the city of Detroit. And so my role there, as you can imagine, is just to manage the foundation, manage its resources that we're making good investments, and both are philanthropic purposes, but also in the markets, so that we have resources that will sustain our organization for the long term. The last thing I would just say is that that's my basic role, but what I've chosen for my work to really be, is to make sure that the resources we have are really leveraged. That the sum of the parts should really equal more than the total of those parts. And so we really try to make sure that we're working with partners, that we all are coming to some agreement to have a common agenda for children, and we will invest in that with the intention of sustained impact and really essentially to try and convince them to tackle the hard and stubborn problems that most people don't want to tackle. That's what I really see my role as, is being this fierce champion and advocate for Detroit's children and helping to bring other people along with me.

05:05 Bowman: Terrific. Such a wonderful focus and goal of the work that you're doing and that you're leading at the Foundation. And you touched upon this actually in your response, but I'd like to just ask it even more directly - if you even put yourself out of your position and think of the mission of the work at the Foundation, why is leadership important in that work?

05:36 Allen: Yeah, I think, okay, well, that's a great question. I think that leadership is not about an individual person doing a great thing, it's really about how that person enables other people to do great things. So that's how I kind of come at leadership, and I think you see it show up at the Skillman Foundation at our ethos, which is, this is not about taking credit, this is actually about creating an enabling environment where we all get to win. And so I think that having that kind of, what I would call a selfless approach to leadership doesn't mean that you're meek, it doesn't mean that you're not confident, it means that you're actually bold and you're confident enough that you don't have to own the impact. You don't have to have credit for the impact of your leadership. What you want to do is have co-ownership of that whatever you're trying to accomplish, because then that gives us a muscle memory of how we get hard things done. And that's how I think about leadership, is how are we enabling others, how do we make sure that what we're doing isn't about ourselves, it’s about others, and about creating a pathway for the future generations that will follow us.

07:02 Bowman: Absolutely. So as I think about prominent leaders, I'm often fascinated just not by the current position or posts that they hold, but the richness of the journey. And so you now serve in a very prominent role, a very impactful role as President and CEO of the Skillman Foundation. Will you take a moment just to tell our listeners about the pathway that you took to get there? 

07:30 Allen: Yeah, well, I'm happy to tell you about it. I don't know how interesting it is, but I'll tell you a couple of things because I think they're important. As a leader, and particularly as an African-American woman, I often say, I'm gonna lead like an African-American woman, and what I mean simply by that is that if we don't lead from our lived experiences and from our diversity, then we're not really showing up the full breadth of how and what leadership looks like. And so for me, I'll tell you one of the things that probably was most defining in my career, well not my career, probably in my life and then I'll get to my career in one second, was that I went to nine different schools through my K-12 experience. I went to one high school. So that just tells you how much I moved around and a lot of children have that experience. And I was lucky enough to have that experience and to translate it into something different. I'm not afraid of change. I actually thrive in it. I know how to build authentic relationships. And I also remember what it's like for people when they experience change, so as a person who likes to be a purveyor of change, so I have to always keep that lived experience in mind. And I think it kind of fuels the work that I do.

And so my career was simply I started off being a community organizer and I learned a very important principle, which is power is organized people or organized money. And as a community organizer, I was learning how to organize people and really getting people to believe in a shared agenda, a shared faith, how to work collaboratively on that, and I did it mostly in public health and community development work, issues that we're dealing with, the issues that are connected to health disparities. But what I didn't know how to do was the second half of that power equation, how do you organize money? And so I was very intentional to go into philanthropy with this view of how do you begin to organize money. Not just how do you deliver or distribute the money inside of your own institution, but how do you use that money to attract other money and how to use that money in conjunction with organized people to get enough power to change the rules. And that's what I define power as, the ability to rewrite the rules.

And so that's basically been the driver behind my career, and so I've gone in between organizing people, organizing money, sometimes organizing both at the same time, which I think I do now. And that's been working locally at community development organizations, creating the Detroit Parent Network, working on national initiatives at foundations like the Annie Casey Foundation and the Mott Foundation. So it was just this collision of all of these experiences all in the pursuit of building up enough power to create change for people who need it.

11:04 Bowman: That's terrific. That's terrific. So I'd like to follow up by, you touched on some things in your journey and your experience that help you do the work that you do today. I often think about also the contributions of people along the way, and I would imagine that in your journey, there were many people who touched you and shaped you and helped you evolve to allow you to do the work that you do now. I'd like to just probe you to talk a little bit about the role of mentoring in your own career, and maybe even in turn, how you from your position think about mentoring the next generation of leaders.

11:51 Allen: What a great question. So I have been mentored by lots of people. My first mentor was my grandmother, who was a black club organizer, and whenever I would say something like, “Grandma, you see that trash out there? Somebody should clean that up.” And she would say, “You're right, but you know you're somebody.” And so her first lesson to me was that, if you have an ambition to complain about something, then you also should have the ambition to do something. But I've also just had lots of both men and women who have been great mentors to me throughout my career. Particularly at the Stillman Foundation, Carol Goss, who was my predecessor and also a University of Michigan alum, really taught me how to lead with grace. I think before I've tried to lead with brute force and that didn’t always work. She taught me really how to be graceful in these moments and to be patient with people and to give some space. That even if you have high ambition, that ambition should never overtake how you show up in terms of thinking about people individually. I also have had just great mentors who have been leaders of corporations who saw in me like talents that were not about whether we were in the same industry, but whether or not they thought that they could be effective, and would give me advice over lunch and different things like that.

But the other thing that they did in that mentorship, DuBois, is that they also offered sponsorship, and sometimes sponsorship is more important than mentorship. Are you basically saying that you will put yourself out, you're lending me or trust, you're lending me your reputation when you sponsor me into a room or into a community or into some space. And that has been a really important part, I think, of my journey. More recently, I've been thinking, I've done a couple of things that have been in leadership positions, and I've noticed in the conversations with some of the organizations or things that I’ve done people have said, “Well, you're the first African American woman to do this”. And my inclination is, I will not be the last one. And I know that Kamala Harris said that, but I also said it too. So I’ve been working more recently, quite honestly, if I'm a Chair of something, I'm lining it up so in the next successions or in the next two successions you'll see people of color in these leadership positions. So that we can stop saying “the first”, “the only” and that we can say that there are opportunities for everybody and you have to just be intentional and creative.

14:55 Bowman: Absolutely, really, really, really powerful. And before transitioning, I want to follow up connecting your final statement. You said it first, we'll get that on the record. But then also tying it to your earlier statement about bringing your own experiences with you in your role, and that if you are sort of honest and sincere to your leadership opportunity, why you, why now, you have to bring all of that. And so will you talk just about the importance as you see it, of diversity on many fronts in leadership generally, and in fact, advancing that goals of your organization and other organizations?

15:42 Allen: Yeah, well, I think that, I think it's important that if we believe that diverse leadership matters then we actually need to show what diversity of leadership looks like. And so if I were to mimic the way that I saw white men lead, then basically, I'm not actually bringing diversity, I'm bringing physical diversity, but not leadership diversity. And so what I attempt to do is to just bring my whole self into that conversation and be comfortable not necessarily with what are the rules of leadership, but what do I think are the rules of people management. How do I understand people? How do I bring my experience in a way that would be convincing to them that this is something we should do?

So I just really think about it from that advantage because then the last thing is, is that we do need diversity of thought. And diversity of thought is not just whether or not you're on one side of the political line. It is really about differences in your professional training, or even if you had professional training, the differences in your lived experiences, the differences of how you view the world because of maybe your race or the color of your skin, and the way that you’ve had to navigate the world, and you might see something different that other people will, and you might value assets in a way that other people don't. And I think we saw an example of that, particularly in the election, where I think you saw people of color who were voters that were actually valued as people and contributors and not just value for what they can do, which is the cast a vote. And that distinction, when you start to value people for who they are and understand that diversity of their experiences and their different viewpoints, it actually makes and enriches you as a leader, as an institution, as a problem-solver. So that's why I'm just a big believer in including diversity in our leadership and making space for it. I always say, diversity should be king.

18:02 Bowman: Absolutely. Well, thank you for those very insightful thoughts and reflections. I'd like to transition a bit to talking about the pandemic. As mentioned in the intro, this has been an incredible year for all of us, and I know it has presented leadership challenges and opportunities. And so the Skillman Foundation serving the children of Detroit, I'd like to ask, how do you advocate for the underserved, but importantly, how has your work shifted this year during the pandemic?

18:40 Allen: Yeah, that's such a great question. At the Skillman Foundation, if we were talking about the foundation or in a meeting or something like that, I'd start by saying, “how are the children?”. And we ask that question because it's rooted in the Massai Tribe who used to ask that question when they would greet each other, and it was basically an equity question. They were basically saying our society is as strong as the people who are the least of or who have the least or may be the weakest. Like your society is defined by the strength of your children. And so that would be the question we would ask any time we were in the room. Now that the pandemic has happened, we have actually been asking a different question, which is, “where are the children?”. And I just think that we don't really understand that there are large numbers of children who are not showing up. They are opting out or their families are opting out of systems, out of schools, out of services, out of picking up food if they need it. And so we really don't have the systems that we need in our society to make sure that families cannot fall through the cracks and no one knows it.

So what we've seen is that kids who tended to be absent from school, and we've defined that as kind of chronically absent, those kids who have missed more than 10 or more days from school, are our kids who are more likely not to show up at all. Maybe they've come to school one day, but they're not signing in on multiple days. And so though we're working on this issue from a public health issue of thinking about how we keep and retain people from being safe from COVID-19, we have spent very little time thinking about how children are faring in their homes. Whether we've heard numbers from our state about the number of sexual assaults with children, the number of child abuse cases have declined mostly because they don't have access, the mandatory reporters are educators, and so this issue of how children show up is really important.

And I have one last thing, because I think it is really important, is that what we're finding is that kids, like last year when we close down schools, kids, we call that the COVID gap. And many of those kids ran into the summer gap where you lose learning and usually kids go backwards, and now we're into a school year where we know that there is really, truly uneven education. And I think that as a society, we have to actually begin to prepare ourselves that many of our children at minimum, will be six months behind even if they're coming from more affluent households and where things are more stabilized. But if you're coming from a community where your family doesn't make enough or may have significant challenges, we're talking about a potentially two-year gap by the time you add those two summers in. And so we have a real issue in front of us as a society about how are we gonna go back and repair the damage from this pandemic to support kids and not just push them through the system and expect them to catch up, because we already know any of these children who are most disadvantaged, they can't catch up. And so adding this extra layer of burnen on them will really prevent them from being as successful as their tallent. Their success won’t match their level of talent and intelligence.

22:52 Bowman: Absolutely, absolutely, and we have to be intentional, as you mentioned, about addressing those emerging inequities. And so pursuing on that theme for a moment, illuminating health inequities will undoubtedly be a legacy of the pandemic, and the pandemic is also revealed inequities in many other areas including as you just described in education. During an interview that I tuned into that you did back in April, you spoke about not letting government leaders take their foot off the gas, and so seven months later, as you just painted a picture of some of the emerging inequities that we're facing, what else needs to be done? How do we need to hold government leaders accountable? And what do you feel the role for cross-sector partnerships play in addressing these inequities?

23:53 Allen: Yeah, so I think that, so when all of this was happening, and particularly when it was happening and we saw how hard it hit Detroit and other urban areas, and particularly to your point DuBois about people of color, because I hit black folks and his Hispanic folks depending on whichever geography you were in, and what I felt very strongly about was that we were ready to distribute accolades for people who acknowledge that it was harming a certain group of people, and I wanted us to hold our accolades until they started doing something about preventing it from harming a group of people. So I think I'll give you one quick example and I think we need to do more of this. Brian Stevenson, he used this notion of what does reparation mean, and I love his definition, which is simply to repair the harm. And what I've been hoping that we would see from government and from other leaders in general, is how do we repair the harm? How do we go beyond what we believe will actually fix the problem? And usually what we do is we offer a little bit of what we think might alleviate some of the pain and I think it's time for us to move beyond that. And this pandemic has shown us that. And it's also shown us that this country is equipped to do it. So when we look at the stimulus packages that came through, the CARES package, all those different ways that the government showed up, sending individual checks to people, suspending fees for health insurance or different ways...if we could do that for the pandemic, then why can't we do those things to have a thriving society? And that's what I mean about we need to be pushing hard now. That's great, you did it. Now tell me, how are you gonna sustain it? And how do we help you sustain it? It's not just your responsibility, it's our collective responsibility.

26:05 Bowman: Absolutely, absolutely. So in addition to the challenges that we have all faced in some of the complex issues that we've been discussing that have been brought to light during a pandemic, many have tried to look for opportunities, maybe things that we've discovered during this time that might be beneficial as tools moving forward. I'd like to ask just in terms of your leadership role that's within the foundation or maybe even on behalf of the work that your foundation pursues, can you point to anything that you see as opportunities moving forward that have been brought to light during this challenging time?

26:48 Allen: Yeah, I think they’re, you know what's that old adage that there is opportunity in crisis? And I don't actually know if it's true that they say the Chinese sign for crisis, part of the words mean opportunity. I don't know, but I like to believe that's true. And here’s what I would say, is that I think that we have lots of systems that have figured out that the way that they've done things do not work. And instead of trying to tinker around with those systems, how do we help them isolate what those problems are and think about is there are new way of doing business. And I talked about power, the ability to rewrite the rules. Our systems are nothing but a set of rules, and most people who have the power to change those rules don't actually understand that they do. And so this is a time for us to remind them that they have the ability to rewrite the rules, to shift and to change the policies that are affecting people in negative ways. And then I think particularly in education and healthcare where we've gone to this remote system in which we also know is a less expensive way of delivering education or delivering health care, why wouldn't we be looking to exploit the opportunities there?

So an example of that is in Detroit, we worked on a project called Connected Futures. The goal of this project initially was schools are closed, how do we get 60 thousand plus kids connected laptops into their homes? And how do we figure out how to continue school? If we were just trying to solve that problem, it would be an expensive solution. But then when we started to talk to people in workforce development and in government and people who have resources and benefits that could get to families, how do you begin to compile all of that into the technology, how do you make sure that parents and young people are trained to be able to use that for both school and also for personal needs or other resources that help them? Now we're actually starting to exploit the opportunity to solve more than one problem with the one solution, with a singular solution. So I think there are more opportunities like that, and I think we have to push for them and really demand that. And I know it's tough for people right now, because people are stretched just trying to figure out how to transition from pre-COVID to COVID, now we gotta move from COVID to post-COVID and post-COVID has to be better than pre-COVID.

29:48 Bowman: So for many leaders, the pandemic, addressing some of these issues that you've been discussing, has come forward with the relentless pace of just challenging activity. I know for myself, the sense of time even seemed to be warped during the last several months, and I can only imagine how busy your schedule has been during that time. And so I'd like to just inquire about the leadership lessons that you've learned. In particular, if you can talk about the importance of self-care that has become more apparent during this time.

30:30 Allen: Yeah, it's amazing to me how time goes faster when you're sitting in one room than it did when you moved all around. And I would just say, I often say that sleep is a leadership trait. And what I mean by that simply is, is like for me, if I don't sleep, I'm not my best self. I'm not a good leader. I don't show up listening to people, hearing people, supporting people in an adequate way. I just lose my patience and I actually even lose my vocabulary. It’s really hilarious when I don't get sleep. But the point that I'm making is, is by saying that taking care of myself is a leadership trait, then I take it from more seriously than just about like, “Oh, this is this something I choose to do for myself”, or “is this something that I choose to do for the people around me?”. It's kind of like a mask. Like not all of us want to wear a mask for ourselves, but we do it because we wanna protect those around us and the people that they love and care about. And so that's what I really believe. In this moment we need to be thinking about what are the traits that actually make us stronger and better leaders, and also how do we take care of ourselves, because my mother used to say this to me on the time, she used to say, “You can't take care of others before you take care of yourself”. Now of course, when she was saying it to me and I was younger, I completely ignored her. It took me 40 years to figure out that it was such wisdom in those words that we have to take care of ourselves if we wanna take care of others. And that's our responsibility, I think, as leaders.

37:16 Bowman: And so you've mentioned some things that you've recognized to make you your best in the challenging job that you have and leading your organization forward. How do you spread that message within your organization at a time where there's a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done as a leader? You lead a high-functioning foundation, people step up and do the work, and you still need to deliver, but to give people permission, if you will, to help people to understand that it's okay to take care of oneself in the process, because after all the complex work that we're doing, probably resembles much more of a marathon than it does a sprint.

33:05 Allen: Yeah, absolutely, and you're absolutely right. So we've done lots of different things at the Foundation. One is we just gave people time off. Like take more time off. I know you're not going anywhere, but it's really important for you to disconnect. And we were checking on all of our people pretty regularly. How are you doing? What's going on? If people needed time, we just basically said, “look, we need you to take the time”. That's the most important thing. And we've also integrated, I think, in our work day, all kinds of things. So from even pre-pandemic, we used to call this thing we do on Thursday, Therapy Thursday, because it was like therapy but it wasn't really therapy, but we would have fun together. And so we've integrated yoga and meditation into our work day where people can take an hour, take a half an hour, to actually relieve themselves of some of the stress and the trauma that they are experiencing so that they could show up as their best selves, not just for us, but for their families. We don't want them to be stressed and that stress, because you're literally were living at work now, we don't want that stress to permeate your home, because that doesn't do well for us or the foundation, nor does it keep our team together, nor does it keep us high functioning. So those are some practices that we looked at DuBois that I think have been really useful.

34:41 Bowman: Terrific. So your experiences highlight I think the importance of resilience as a leader, and I'd like to now actually shift and focus more squarely on that theme of resilience. And we've talked about COVID-19 and the challenges brought forth over the last several months, but we've also as a society, continued to face manifestations of persistent racism. And those two topics are not mutually exclusive, linking it to some of the disparities that were revealed. And so I just want to ask you, during this period, what has been your most challenging decision or moment as a leader, as we shift to this topic of resilience?

35:31 Allen: I'll tell you my most challenging tension during this period. So yes, work too hard, do too many things, all that is always a part of it. But my biggest challenge was that I agreed to serve as the chair for the Governor's return to school commission. And this was important work. How do we return our children back to school safely? There was nothing more important for a children’s foundation leader to do than that. And after I made that commitment, of course, what happens is basically the uprisings all across the country after the senseless murders of George Floyd, and Ahmaud and Breonna, of the most recent killings. And I was in this position where I literally had to give all my time to one of the most challenging and important topics for 15 million children in the state of Michigan, and my heart was saying, I need to be spending my time and attention and thinking about how as a city and a state that we begin to really wrestle with these issues of racial inequities and how do we usher in racial justice at that particular time. And so that probably, I carried more weight feeling like I was...I could not split my time appropriately to do the two things that I felt were the most important things for me to do. So I eventually had to just settle with I gotta do one thing at a time, and I gotta do each of them well and with excellence. And so I just doubled down and dug in on getting kids back to school in a safe manner. And that of course, lingered longer and continues to linger as the numbers have gone, but now I've really put my attention to how do we build our communities capacity to really think about what does equity mean and how do we actually usher it into our community in a systematic way that will undermine and undo all of these systemic barriers that have essentially harmed black people, people of color, Indigenous people in significant ways.

38:05 Bowman: Terrific. So I know that you know this, but your time was very well invested. There can't be two of you. I happen to have actually two school-aged children here in Michigan, I thank you for your efforts and the opportunities and the challenge and the struggle will continue on the other front. So there will be many ways that your leadership will continue to be beneficial.

38:26 Allen: Thank you.

38:28 Bowman: So continuing on the topic of resilience, one of the other factors that comes up is risk taking. And I think the biggest advances often require that we as leaders take risks and bring our organizations along to taking risks. And I just want to probe a little bit about how you approach those decisions, how do you decide which risks are the right ones to take, and then if you encounter adversity in those decisions, how you remain resilient.

39:10 Allen: Yeah, that's a great question. So I tend to be more on the risk taker side, and just in general, that is. But the way I look at it is, is this good for everyone? Is it doable and achievable? And then if we fail, what would be the worst thing that would happen? And so those are kind of like the scenarios that I run through my head, and when I'm running them through my head, I'm also talking out loud with other people about it. If you are out there taking risks by yourself, then it's usually not the right risk, right? And so what I attempt to do is to hear what people are thinking about, what the different risks are, and really inform me of my decision of  how I would go about doing it. And I'll tell you this, my whole thing is, is if you can take a risk, if you're gonna fail, but if you're gonna fail, if you can fail forward, meaning that you're gonna learn from this, it puts you in a better position to tackle this issue again, I don't think there's a downside from that other than a bruised ego. I say go for it. Right? Because it's not about you, it's about moving the work forward. And now you know how to do one, two, three, four steps already because you did them the first time, and now you know you gotta change steps five and six so that you can get to step ten, that's a bet I’ll take any day. And I think that's part of it. Failure does not mean that you are a failure. It means that you did not succeed implementing that task this time, not the next.

41:01 Bowman: Absolutely. Do you feel that the disposition that you just described is that you? Do you think that is you plus, it was fostered somehow in your upbringing and your early experiences, or maybe even a mentorship?

41:22 Allen: I don't know, I think it’s may be a little bit more me than it is probably mentored around that, but I would just say that most of the risks that I take are not oriented for me for my personal gain. So I feel a lot more braver in doing something for other people. I feel a lot more courageous in doing things that I think will benefit more, a collective of people, rather than doing something for myself. And I think that that actually equips me with the boldness and also knowing that you sometimes look and you think and you see leaders and you say, “Well, why wouldn't they just do this?” And it's because they're usually doing the calculus of whether or not it's gonna make them look good or not, or what will people say about them. And I guess when you went to nine schools as a child, you know that people are going to say plenty of things about you, and that's not what drives you, how people view you, what prides you is what you can accomplish and what the impact you want to achieve.

42:33 Bowman: Absolutely, absolutely. Alright, so transitioning now to just the last question, that there are aspects of our daily lives of things of national significance that transcend the work that we do, and this includes as one example, last week's election, and you commented on this earlier during our discussion. Last week, many people were glued to their televisions and phones watching election results come in, and for many, this election season, and perhaps the political climate more broadly, has been unlike any other in recent history. I read with interest a powerful statement that you released this week and titled, “A house divided cannot stand”. And it touches on a message that has biblical connections, it's come up in really, really important times throughout our history, and I wanna just ask you to elaborate a little bit on your thoughts about things that you think will be really, really critical for you and your organization for us as a society as we prepare to move forward during this time.

44:00 Allen: Yeah. No, thank you for that. I'll tell you, I read an article, a research paper many years ago, which actually talked about the most effective communities. And what this basically said was that the most effective communities, the communities, that got things done more for their people than any place else, where the communities that were not driven by national politics or partisanship rights, they were places that said, we're gonna put the best interests of our people first, and then of course we will do our political thing, but that's not gonna drive our behavior or our commitment to each other. And quite honestly, that's the most American thing I can think of. Is that as a country, we were founded by a set of imperfect men who were in pursuit of a more perfect union, and our inheritance as citizens of this country is to continually work to perfect it. And I think that when we look at how politics and how divisive and vitriolic the elections were and you’re listening to politics, they're telling you very clearly that we are divided, that we don't have anything in common, that we are working against each other. And I just do not believe that. I believe that when we look at any data that tells us about how Americans show up, the first thing we say is that we need to be and we want to be more unified. And then it starts to say, we want to have a strong agenda for our children, we wanna have strong businesses in our community, we wanna have great jobs for everyone. Now we might disagree on how we get to that, but we can't be distracted by that. And we cannot thrive as a country, we cannot solve these problems if we're not working together. And I think it's time for us to just call on each other and remind each other that it is really our responsibility, particularly as leaders, to be looking for the common ground, the common agenda, because we have painted futures before us and it's our responsibility, and I think I said in that piece that the future isn't finished, and we owe it to our ancestors, and we owe it to our children and to those who are yet to be born to figure this out. I was going to curse, I’m glad I didn’t.

46:45 Bowman: Speak from the heart. So we're just about out of time now for our first episode of Ahead of the Curve, and Tonya, I want to thank you so sincerely for your time for being gracious enough to participate in this kick off of it for us at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. I really, really appreciate your thoughts, your heartfelt reflections, your leadership, and comments about self-care and resiliency. So we'll be making this recording available in a few places, including our University of Michigan School of Public Health website, should you wanna share it with others or visit to view it again or missed portions. We’ll also be making it available through a podcast series that we have here at the School of Public Health. The podcast series is called Population Healthy. I encourage you to check it out and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. And then we'll be back soon with another edition of Ahead of the Curve. Thank you all in terms of the viewers and participants, again for joining us. Tonya, again, thank you, really, really delighted to have you. And to all be safe and stay well and go blue.