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Justin Hodge, a clinical associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work and a Washtenaw County Commissioner, discusses his journey into social work. He initially focused on clinical practice but later incorporated policy and political work. His field placement involved case management for kids with developmental disabilities. Hodge emphasizes the importance of the theory of change in creating positive outcomes and highlights motivational interviewing as a crucial tool in his clinical practice. He also worked on a children's savings account program, linking his clinical and macro social work interests. Did you guys hear that? I did hear it. Okay. So, just to start us off, can you give us a brief introduction of you and who you are and what you do? All right. Well, I'm Justin Hodge. I'm a clinical associate professor here at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. I'm the faculty lead for the Policy and Political Social Work Pathway, which aims to prepare students to be more engaged in policy and political work. And outside of my work for the university, I am a Washtenaw County Commissioner. I represent the southeast corner of Washtenaw County, which is most of Ypsilanti Township and all of Augusta Township. Lots of exciting work. So, what initially motivated you to enter the field of social work? That's a great question. So, my undergrad, I did undergrad and grad school at U of M. My undergrad, I double majored in psychology and Japanese studies. Prior to coming to U of M, I had been doing paraprofessional work with community mental health. So, I was doing a lot of work with kids that were receiving services from community mental health, where I would assist with either child care responsibilities or assisting the therapist with treatment plan related activities. I ended up getting a different paraprofessional position that was much more involved with the clinician. And that made me very interested in pursuing clinical practice. And when I was pursuing my undergrad, as with almost anyone that gets an undergrad in psychology, you know you're going to have to go to grad school for something. And I was exploring different grad school options. For quite a while, I was strongly considering getting a Psy.D. or a Ph.D. in psychology. Eventually, though, I was lucky enough to take one of the CASC undergraduate minor courses for social work. I didn't discover CASC until, I think, my senior year undergrad and just loved the class. And then that got me to look more into social work, and there wasn't really time for me to be able to take other classes in the School of Social Work as an undergrad at that point. I was reading all about social work and specifically our program at U of M and the focus on social justice and equity along with the clinical component is what drew me away from going into just the psychology direction and then going into social work instead. And at this point, I had some interest in policy, but it wasn't really like the thing I was doing. I actually never took a poli-sci course in undergrad. I was, of course, excited to vote for President Obama. Voting for President Obama was the first president I was all about to vote for when I was in college. So that was exciting. It got me interested in politics as it did many other people, but still that wasn't what I was thinking about as my career. I was really expecting my career to just be clinical practice. So that's how I came to social work. So then I ended up getting to the end of undergrad. I applied here, and the curriculum looked a lot different. We didn't have the pathways. But when I was here, I ended up doing, we had what was called concentrations. I did interpersonal practice concentrations, did a minor in community organizing, and then tried to get as much of a blend of micro and macro experience as I could while I was in the program. That kind of leads into our next question, which what your field placement was and what your kind of biggest takeaway from your field practice was. Yeah, so I really was set specifically on working at community mental health. In Lansing, I grew up in Lansing, and after I finished undergrad, I moved back to Lansing. And while I was doing my master's, I wanted to find a way to be able to, this was before we had the better systems we had in place to do employment-based field placements. So what I ended up doing was finding a way to be able to have a field placement at the community mental health in the Lansing area. Really we served the Enum, Enumclet, and Tri-County area, they call it CEI, CMH. So I ended up being able to create a field placement there where I was doing case management for kids with developmental disabilities. And part of the, back then the way that we had to do it is if you had employment at a place that you wanted to have your field placement at, you could do that, but the field placement had to be in a different department. So since I was doing paraprofessional work in the department that focuses on doing home-based child and family therapy, which is the work I wanted to ultimately do, I had to have the field placement in a different department. So that's why I ended up doing case management. So I did that, and it was a good experience because then I was getting two different kinds of clinical experience through the paraprofessional role that I was doing on the side and on weekends, and then doing the case management work got me a different experience. Yeah. So as a social work professor, students often learn about the theory of change. If the classroom of students were listening, how would you describe what is meant by the theory of change in like your own words? Yeah, I would describe that as figuring out what is the process by which or your strategy for creating the kinds of outcomes that you're looking for in a community or with a group of individuals or with an individual, and what is your own process or your strategy for that? Okay. You kind of answered that question. Okay. So you shared that you were interested in community and also clinical. What kind of inspired you to, once you graduated, to begin your career in a clinical setting? So when I graduated, I was, at this point, much more interested in macro social work. By the time I got to the end of the program, I took more policy courses. I ended up taking an elective course in the School of Public Policy. I started to probably, at that point, figure out that whatever I ended up doing longer term, it would probably be some sort of blend of micro and macro, but I was still pretty set on the trajectory of becoming a home-based child and family therapist at CMH. So the other thing to keep in mind, too, is in Michigan and pretty much everywhere else, if you want to do clinical work, you're going to have to have your license, and there's a window of time where you don't have your limited license, so I had to wait until I could get my limited license issued. Towards the end of my time pursuing my master's, I had started doing work with Trina Shanks and a faculty member that's no longer at the School of Social Work. They were working on a program to start a children's savings account program for kids in Lansing public schools. So I got involved in that work, and this becomes way relevant later in the story, after I become an election official, because they get us to start a similar program here. So I worked with them on developing a program for kids in the Lansing school district to get a savings account for college, trade school, any kind of post-secondary education. There's a lot of research that shows that having that account and saving for it, even if you graduate without a lot of money in it, you're still several times more likely to go on to college or any kind of post-secondary education, because you develop an identity that is that of a saver and someone planning for the future. So anyway, I was doing some work as a research assistant with them on that project in Lansing, and then started working closely with a nonprofit that did what I would describe as financial social work. And when I graduated, while I was waiting for my license to get issued, I continued doing the paraprofessional work at CMH, and then that nonprofit hired me to be a program manager for the VITA program, which is the Free Tax Preparation Program for Low-Income People. So then I was managing that program and doing a bunch of other financial work, also helping to continue to build that children's savings account program in Lansing. So I did that roughly until my limited license got issued by the state, and CMH and the department that I did my field placement in, they wanted to hire me after it was over, so they ended up hiring me to do case management for adults with developmental disabilities. Around that time, there was a bunch of political stuff going on in Lansing that involved that nonprofit that I was working with, and that nonprofit ultimately got, effectively got absorbed by the city, and the city started having what's called a Financial Empowerment Center, which is also something I helped to start in Washtenaw County many years later. We can talk about that later. So I was not one of the staff people that moved on to work for the city, but it was fine because I had gotten the job offer from CMH to be a case manager full-time. So then I was doing that, and then I continued doing that until a position opened up in the department I really wanted to move into where I could do home-based child and family therapy, and then that got posted. I thought I eventually got that. Yeah. So as you went into the family and children therapy, what was your experience discovering your therapeutic approach, and are there core components of practice you feel are important in your toolbox as a clinician that you still use today in the macro field? Yeah. So, you know, when I'm talking to macro students that are thinking about what, if they want to take an IT class or they're trying to think what is like a useful interpersonal class to take, I always say motivational interviewing is probably the most useful across anything that you're going to end up doing, so that's generally what I recommend people do. I've worked, so when I was doing clinical work, I worked at CMH, and I also later in my career worked at Michigan Medicine for a while, and being in significant contrast between being in a community mental health system and then being in like an academic research hospital sort of system, where the modalities and methodology they want you to use in the academic research environment is very different. CBT, you know, like the gold standard, so you're going to use CBT, you're going to use elements of other modalities, and I think when you're working in more of a community mental health system, it's probably fair to say you're blending more approaches, and whereas when you're working in a hospital system, there's a particular way that they want you to practice, particularly if you're at like a research institution like U of M. So when I was at U of M, it was much more methodical in how they would have us practice. There was a lot of, we would do, there's tons of training opportunities. I even took field students for a little while, and you have the option to be behind the glass window to have while your student is working with clients, and then you're like, they have pagers over there, so like I would send a page if there's like something I wanted the student to do, but like to practice particular clinical skills. So some of that is very different depending on the environment you're in. That is very interesting. I've heard the horror stories of those double glass windows. That's definitely interesting. There's nothing like that when you're in a CMH system. Something else that's different for you all now compared to when I was a student, that was something that you would practice in your clinical classes. So the room on the second floor that's a studio now used to be, it was still a studio, but it wasn't the whole space. Half of the room was a glass two-way mirror. So I remember taking some of my IT classes where we would be doing role plays, and then you would be on the other side, and then the class and the instructor would be on the opposite side. So it was interesting. You got practice doing that back then, but we don't have that. The structure is different now in our school. We don't. We don't have that now. Okay, well, this connects then. So in terms of like therapy, progress can be defined differently. So how do you define progress with clients in that clinical setting and also like connecting that to your own skills that you've developed as a clinician? Yeah, a large part of this, and I think this is, well, there's, I mean, the research shows too that the effectiveness of therapy is largely dependent on the therapeutic relationship or the regard that the client has for the clinician. So part of it too is helping clients see their own growth and then being able to measure their own growth. That, for me, was always more important than like my assessment of it. Of course, I had to assess along the way, but part of it is you want the person you're working with to feel like they're making progress and that they're moving down the path that they're looking to move past. So it's tough sometimes that in social work, we're often trying to work ourselves out of a job. Like if you build rapport with a client and you do really well and they continue to do really well, the goal is to not see them anymore. And so sometimes one way to measure that is who are you discharging or who's off your caseload? Like who are you no longer necessary to be supporting anymore? That's one good way of doing it, trying to measure effectiveness. So we kind of touched on this a little bit before talking about like taking a social work class and then understanding that you were taking macro classes, but what was the catalyst from switching to clinical micro social work to like macro level policy, political social work and like bringing your skills of social work into policy? Yeah. So when I was working at community mental health, I was one of the social workers on the ground that ended up having to discharge a lot of clients because of changes in the state government. So this is under the previous governor, Governor Snyder. You may know him from the Flint water crisis, among other things. There were significant efforts during that period of time to try to privatize the community mental health system. So there was a lot of stuff that he and at that point, the Republican super majorities in the state house and state Senate were doing to attempt to dismantle the community mental health system. So at one point, because of changes in budget, CMHs across the state ended up having to let go of a lot of clients because you were receiving less funding. CMHs handled it in different ways. Our CMH became a Medicaid only serving agency. So anybody that didn't have Medicaid without, and that is the thing that was the catalyst for me really getting engaged because it got me thinking about who are the people that tend to be in these significant positions of power that are making hugely consequential decisions about the lives of the most vulnerable in our communities. And for the most part, it tends not to be social workers. There's a lot that's changed since that time. There are more social workers in elected office now. And a lot of that has to do with like the changes that we've done and the work that we've been doing here at the school. But back then, there were not very many. And for me, it was extremely frustrating to not have agency over who I could provide services to, especially when thinking about there were a lot of people that I was working with that needed to be receiving services. And then I just couldn't do it anymore. I mean, we couldn't. Like it was mass dropping of clients. And sometimes it was so quick, we didn't have time to come up with a good transition to getting them to someone else that took their insurance. So for me, that was the thing that motivated me to start getting involved in policy and politics in the ways that I could while I was still working full time as a clinician. So I started getting – volunteering on political campaigns and started working to get appointed to different local boards and commissions, which is always something I recommend that students do. It's a way to be involved in policymaking at the local, county, and state level without being an elected official. But as that started getting more experienced, I got involved at the county level. I got involved with the county Democratic Party. And then later when I moved to Washtenaw County, I ended up getting elected to the executive board. And there was a period of time where I was the vice chair of the party. And then continued doing other things like getting appointed to boards and commissions. But it was really bad. It's like figuring out how do I – even after I left CMH and then moved back out to the Ann Arbor area and then worked in Michigan Medicine, I was still finding ways to be involved with policy here. And continuing to do that, continue to affirm why we needed more social workers in the space, it's also what got me to be interested in academia. Because that was never part of the vision board to become a professor. But as I worked to get appointed to different local boards and commissions, I'll give you an example. The first one I got appointed to was when I lived in the city of East Lansing. And I got appointed to what was the equivalent of a civil rights commission. So the commission was responsible for investigating and mediating civil rights complaints made in the city and giving advice to city council on social policy issues. You would think that's a great spot for social workers. There'd be a bunch of social workers there. There wasn't. It was just me and everybody else in the most part were lawyers or business people. And then as I continued to have experiences like that where I kept being the only social worker in spaces – like I think social workers belong in all policy spaces. But as I'm in policy spaces that are specifically like social policy related issues, and I'm the only social worker there, that's really a problem. So that's what also motivated me to then think about how do I get more social workers to be interested and involved earlier in their career. And that led me to spend a bunch of time on the side researching policy and political social work and what academic programs could look like at the school or wherever to engage in that kind of thing. I was just doing that for fun on the side. I didn't work at the school yet. But – and I thought – I had this – came up with like all these documents that I pulled together that – with options that ranged from what would it look like if we did like a continuing education workshop on political social work for practicing social workers all the way to something I thought would be impossible like having a major in policy and political social work. Didn't think that was ever going to happen. But then I connected – I stayed connected with some of the faculty when I was a student, pitched some of the ideas, and all of this stuff was kind of happening simultaneously with the clinical work and then being on boards and commissions and then proposing some of this academic stuff. And they – the school was interested in having me teach a workshop on political social work. I did that and it went really well. They asked me if I wanted to expand it into an online certificate program. So I started working on that. And there were other opportunities at the school to be involved, which is one of the things that prompted me to start looking at positions in the Ann Arbor area, which I did. I wanted to be done with clinical work at that point, but clinical work wasn't done with me. So to find a job, I ended up doing – applying to a couple of clinical positions at Michigan Medicine. I got them both and they ended up combining them into one position and did that. The school hired me as an adjunct lecturer, teaching policy classes. Yeah. And then I ended up – the professor position I have now got posted. I applied for it and the nine months of interviews resulted in me getting the job. That was also the time – around the time I decided to run for county commissioner in 2018 in Washtenaw County and I did not win, but I got this job, which was cool. Then I ran again in 2020 and that's when I did win. So now I just threw a whole bunch of stuff at you. So ask whatever you want to ask. We appreciate it. You touched on a lot of stuff that we will get into a little bit more, but you were sharing about macro and micro and how the school now is a little bit more divided than what it used to be. We were curious what your statement would be to IP students who see entering the social work field as just therapy and they don't see policy as something that they can do or something that is going to be incorporated into their postgraduate work. So what would you say to them and those students who see it very separately and they want to just stay in therapy? Yeah. I actually think it's less separated now than it used to be. So back in the day, the way the curriculum worked was that – so you had practice area and practice method is what you had to pick in the program. So the method was the thing that you do. So interpersonal practice or community organizing. And then the practice area was sort of like a population or the space that you wanted to work in, and you had to take classes in both areas. So as an example, I picked interpersonal practice as my practice method, and then you had to pick a practice area. I picked community and social systems, which is like an unusual combination to get that macro perspective with that. But most other people picked older adults or children and families. They were population-based for the most part. What I would say to students that – so that's a pretty loaded question for a couple of reasons. One of them is that if you're a student and you're already in the program and you only want to do the IT stuff, I sometimes feel like that's an admissions problem. And that I don't have too much of an issue with, let's say, 75-plus percent of the students that we admit are interested in being clinicians. Understandable. That makes sense. The majority of clinicians across the country are social workers. So there's going to be always an interest in people coming to be clinicians, particularly at the number one school of social work in the country. But I think the problem is when we get people that want to come and see getting the MSW as a fast track to being a clinician, because in Michigan, in many ways, it is. There are other degrees you could pick that are master's degrees or doctorate degrees to be able to be a clinician, but you can get an MSW in 12, 16, or 20 months here if you're full-time, depending on what you have as your undergrad. The issue that I have is with students that do that and they pick it and they're like, I want all the IT stuff, but hold that social justice and equity. I'm not interested in that. That's a problem. For the students that do care about the social justice and equity elements of our field, which are the main thing that social work is about, but are still very singularly focused on IT, I'd say you're doing yourself a disservice by not being more thoughtful about the broader world of social work. It's one of the things I think is really beautiful about our field is that it's a competency-based field with nine different competencies, and then for we at PODS, it's like a tenth one, like a pseudo-tenth one. But if you think about it, the thing that makes social work, I think, so effective for making change and supporting change in communities is that you have to get competence across this wide spectrum of services and skills. You have to take policy classes. You have to take classes in community organizing. If you're a macro-focused student, you do have to take an IT class. You have to get competence in all of those areas. You're really doing your job right as a social worker when you understand how all of those things connect and work together. Let's say you're a clinician or aspiring clinician and you do care about the social justice stuff, but your goal is to run a private practice. You still should care about all of the other elements out there because, one, even for your own personal interest, your ability to bill insurance and be reimbursed at whatever rate you're reimbursed at for your service is a policy decision. It's a policy and an advocacy decision. I remember when I worked at Michigan Medicine, my office neighbor was a psychologist, and I remember her mentioning to me one time, she's like, you know, it doesn't really seem fair that we are literally doing the same job, but Michigan Medicine is able to bill me doing it at a higher rate than you. I'm like, yeah, thank you. I agree. It isn't fair. A lot of that has to do, though, with the kinds of advocacy that social workers and the National Association of Social Workers has engaged in to get insurance companies to reimburse our work at whatever rate it is. You should care about that because it's a policy decision and that requires organizing and advocacy. You should care about how the policies that impact your clients are changing or having some sort of effect on their lives. If you are a clinician and you're working with a family who, because the federal government is shut down, lost their SNAP benefits and doesn't have enough to eat, that's not something you can ignore in a session, and you need to be aware of that and understand the policy implications and be able to connect people to resources. That's not training that other people that are potentially clinicians, if you get a master's in psychology or a master's in family therapy or a doctorate in whatever other field you might be interested in to be a clinician, they're not getting training on those kinds of things. It's important for you to know that you're occupying a space as a social worker, that other people that may be similar at work to you, they're not trained in that same way you are. Does that answer the question? It did. It did a lot. Thank you. Yeah, so you're often quoted saying social workers are the best equipped people to engage in policy and political work. I am quoted saying that. Where did you find that quote at? That is for our people to tell you later. Okay, wow. I do say that a lot. That's interesting. Okay, well, let's catch it up. You jumped into it in this own interview. Yeah, that's true. I did, yeah. I have a lot more to say. Sorry, continue. You're back. I wanted to say the thing I just said, yes. Can you elaborate your experience in that? I know you kind of talked about the civil rights one, but maybe something in Ann Arbor or your first experience running for office and how that kind of shaped where you are now? Yeah, so I'll give you some more examples, and I'll go back to the social work competencies because I feel like this is my opinion, was an opinion based on my experience and knowing social work education. So if you think about the kinds of things that elected officials have to make decisions about, it's a wide variety of things. Can you think of any other field that trains its people to understand management of human services, to understand community organizing, to understand interpersonal practice, to get some training in policy, to think about different organizational structures in the systems and institutions in our society and how they influence and impact people? There isn't another field that does that, and those are all the kinds of things that as an elected official, I have to make decisions about all of those kinds of things. So I'll give you an example. When I have to make a decision or I have to vote on a thing, and let's say it's related to human services, which the main reason I ran for county commissioner is because I see in Michigan county government is largely the service providing level of government. So much of what I spend my time doing is thinking about our provision of human services and how we engage with human service providers that are external to the county, like our relationship with them, and that's county government in Michigan. So when we think about service delivery, people that aren't trained like social workers aren't thinking about there's the person receiving the service, there's the person delivering the service, there's the policy related to all the services, there's the funding that goes through the policy, there's the way you write the policy to think about how it gets actually executed on the ground, and then there's the person that ultimately is going to be the recipient of that. We can think holistically about that because of our training, and we can think about other services or other connections in the external environment that other people aren't going to be thinking about. If you have just a background in public policy or you have a law degree or you have a business degree, and I've seen this because these are people that I interact with in my capacity as an elected official, they think about things very differently. I'm not going to say it's good or bad. I certainly prefer the social work way, and there is value in, I think, hearing other people's perspectives and from their expertise. When what largely you're focused on is trying to improve society and trying to deliver something to people, having the perspective that you only gain through your social work education is unique and extremely useful. Thank you. We're going to quote you again, and it connects to what you just said and why social workers are more aware of the connection between policy and how it affects people's lives. In 2022, you spoke at the Congressional Research Institute for Social Work and Policy, and you were the president of the CRSP Board of Directors. You said that, historically, the Commission and the Bureau has advised and focused on providing crisis services, but you are going to move us in the direction of focusing more on the root cause of poverty and supporting services that will disrupt generational poverty. Over the last three years, how has this priority been reached and what have been some barriers to achieving this goal? I've got to be careful about what I say. Goodness, it's coming back on you. This is the first time I think I've been interviewed. This is my fifth year in office where people are actually pulling quotes from stuff that I've said. It's a good thing I stand by all these things. Okay, so for context, what you're referring to, I think, is I chair the State Commission on Community Action and Economic Opportunity. I'm appointed by the governor to chair that commission, and the focus of the commission is to address poverty across Michigan, but it also oversees community action agencies across Michigan. Community action agencies in Michigan are mostly non-profit. They get this federal designation to do work, and they receive certain federal dollars to be able to address people that are experiencing poverty. There are still some community action agencies. Originally, all of them were county government, but then there's a change. There's a specific thing in the law where if you lose your community action agency designation as a county government, you don't ever get it back. It just has to be a non-profit after that. Washtenaw County is one of the few counties that still is a community action agency for the county. So there's some of the things that I talked about earlier around financial social work, children's savings accounts, and financial empowerment centers, and so on. Those are things that really stuck with me from earlier in my career because they create generational change, and I've tried to find ways to support policies like that in Washtenaw County and with this position I have with the state government, working to get us to focus broadly at the state level on that too. So to give you some specific examples, I had been working before I got elected. I served on the board for Washtenaw County's community action agency just as a resident. In my role there was to advise the board of commissioners and staff around what could we be doing, and from my perspective and my knowledge as a social work expert, what do we think? So one of the things that I helped to start down the path on was starting a county-wide children's savings account program and then working to be able to start a financial empowerment center. That stuff took years, and those things got to the finish line after I became a county commissioner. So now we do have, and these are included in what I call Justin's Greatest Hits. These are the policy wins that I get whenever I'm feeling bad. Sometimes I go and look at Justin's Greatest Hits and I'm like, okay, we are doing something bigger. So we launched what's called My Future Fund. It's the county-wide children's savings account program. So kids in Washtenaw County public schools get a savings account for college, trade, school, and kind of post-secondary education. And as we were doing the work and I was working to get the votes to be able to make this thing happen, I really wanted to be equity-focused. So the metric we were ultimately able to land on is that if you're a kid and you get free or reduced lunch, the county gives you $500 in your account. Everybody else gets $25. And we partnered with the Washtenaw Intermediate School District who operates the accounts for us. And for me, it was really important that this all be government, because I believe part of this too is that people need to see and understand that government can work and government can do good things for people. It's because we make government, right? Government is all of us. So there are a lot of programs where people would say, particularly when I talk about financial empowerment centers, that a nonprofit should do it. That is typically not my perspective. Like if I want us to invest public dollars in the thing, I want the government to take responsibility for it and for us to do it. So we launched My Future Fund a couple of years ago now, probably about three years ago when I said that quote. And now where we're at with it, I actually just was the emcee for their annual breakfast where we talk about updates from the program. We had surpassed more than, I think, $2 million invested in all of the accounts across the county for the kids, because the accounts are interest-bearing and people can make their own contributions to the accounts. So what we're hoping for is that we continue to get funding for it and we find other people that want to contribute to the accounts. And I hope next year when I hopefully emcee the fundraiser, that's not a fundraiser. I ask for money, of course, for the accounts. But when I emcee the event next year, I want it to be beyond $3.5 million saved for the kids. And the wonderful thing about it, too, is that even if the kid graduates with, let's say, a few thousand dollars in the account, that's not going to pay for college. But it's still going to make them about four times more likely to go on to post-secondary education, whether that's a trade school or it's college, because they know that there is a future for them and that people are invested in their future. Their loved ones are invested and their government is invested in them having a future. And that is the kind of thing that can create generational change. The other one I want to talk about, too, that's also financial-related, is the Financial Empowerment Center. Financial Empowerment Centers, it's a national effort and there are programs across the country that become Financial Empowerment Centers. Some of them are governments that do it, like is the case in the city of Lansing and Washtenaw County. There are non-profits that run it in other places. Financial Empowerment Centers do things, I'll tell you what ours does, but you could do multiple things. Ours focuses on providing free financial counseling to anybody in Washtenaw County. If you're a person in Washtenaw County and you want financial counseling, it's free and it's provided to you from the government. We work with people on helping them pay down debt that they might have and to improve their credit score. And if we can find additional funding, I want us to be able to develop having a debt-matching fund. Let's say you have $500 of debt that you need to pay off. I want to be able to say, hey, we got $250. If you got $250, let's pay your debt off. Those kinds of things are possible. The thing that's so great about the Financial Empowerment Center and the Children's Savings Account Program is that you get information for the whole family through that. If you go to a Financial Empowerment Center meeting, you will learn about my future fund and you'll learn about the additional work that you have to do for your kid to get the additional $475 so you get the full $500. You can connect families with these resources so everyone is benefiting from something there. So those are two of the financial generational things that I've been really focused on. Well, congrats on passing that and having such a successful policy. Thank you. We're talking about how you landed on the amounts in the account. That made me curious about how do you go about compromising on the policy you propose without compromising your social ethics or your ethics as a social worker and still getting a reasonable goal that you were hoping for? That's a good question. My future fund example is a really good one. So I got elected in 2020, so then I take office in 2021. Right around the time that I go into office, here's a fun fact, and this is going in the book that I'm writing, I was sworn into office on January 6th, 2021. That was a pretty wild day. I had family members calling me worried about seeing what's going on at the Capitol. I'm like, are you actually going to be sworn into office today? Are you feeling safe? I'm like, I mean, that is D.C., but we're still going to do this thing. Shortly after all that stuff happens, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act, which was the act that was aimed at the COVID Recovery Act. What that did is it gave state and local and county governments the option to receive federal funding to help respond to the pandemic. There were a lot of things that qualify for it. Believe it or not, there were many governments that refused the money because they quoted. There were even some in Michigan that refused the money. Washtenaw County did not refuse the money. We got about $72 million when that happened. For me, the thing, particularly right, I'm just now elected, and this is a lot of money to have that we didn't have before, and thinking about how do we use this to benefit the people that are in most need, and particularly the areas in the county that are hardest hit by COVID, which was largely my district, along with a couple of other districts. There are some commissions that had been around for a while that had been working on other projects, and some of those projects did qualify for using those federal dollars, and they wanted to come right out the gate on, I'll say, broadband. Broadband, lack of broadband access is also a public health issue, and it's important. Washtenaw County had been working for years prior to my election on figuring out a strategy on how do we connect every area in the county that doesn't have access to the physical infrastructure to get on the internet, because there were a lot of parts of Washtenaw County that just didn't. You couldn't get on the internet. Particularly during the pandemic, this resulted in people having to drive to a library to use the Wi-Fi for a kid to get on class. So the county had been working on figuring out how are we going to do this, and what's going to be the cost. So shortly after the American Rescue Plan Act passed, the team that had been working on figuring out the broadband issue had a proposal, and it was a multimillion-dollar proposal to do that. And several of the commissioners had been working so hard on that for a long time that they just wanted to fund it right away and just go. From my perspective at that point, important, very important, and there are public health reasons to make sure that everybody, we start working to lay the infrastructure for broadband internet for everyone. But there are other more immediate things that need to be done right away. We're talking about this is the era where even COVID testing was scarce. So I wanted us to find a way to not make that our first allocation to broadband, because I didn't want the public to feel like, okay, so the board or the county government had got $72 million aimed at responding to the pandemic, and the first thing they do is spend on internet. That doesn't necessarily send the right message. There are other things I wanted us to work on. So I negotiated with the other commissioners to get to a point where what we did instead was we ultimately started passing packages. So we passed the first Washtenaw. We called it the Washtenaw Rescue Plan. So the first package included broadband, but it also included some of the more immediate public health-related things that we needed to do, like funding for community health workers, the initial funding for the My Future Fund funding. So that kind of stuff was included. But we could have just done it, and they could have just voted on that and did it immediately, and they had the votes to do it, but I found a way to engage them to find a way where how do we make the whole of the county win on this, and how do we make sure that we're setting it as a priority responding to the public health emergency? I am curious. Thank you for sharing so much. Sir, you mentioned earlier the difference between government and non-profit, and then when you were just speaking, you shared about the public perception of what might be beneficial versus the narrative of what actually is necessary. How do you, as a politician, balance what you might know to be more true versus a public perception slash a public desire, and balancing that and how you sell what is going to be part of your policy plan? That's great. I mean, that's a lesson I had to learn just from experience, because My Future Fund, that is really one of the signature Justin policies, so I talk about it a lot. But I'm trying to get My Future Fund passed, and I start getting calls from people, constituents, people saying stuff about me on the internet related to it. Now, see, here are some of the things. One person called me and said, this is funny. I called the lady back and talked to her. Justin, you better not be planning to vote to give money to them kids. Call me back. So I called the person back, and I'm like, okay, just want to tell you. Not only am I going to be voting yes to give money to the kids, it's my program. So absolutely, I'm going to be voting. But could you explain to me why you don't want me to do that? And she went into this long thing about how nobody gave her a statement of account for college, so why should we be over here spending money on the kids when she didn't get an account? So I talked about that, and I talked to her for a long time. Then she went on some of this totally unrelated transphobic rant. I'm like, okay, we're not going to be able to mesh here. So there's that. Then I had people on the internet talking about how, well, this is discriminatory because you're only trying to give the money to kids in public schools. My kid is in private school. You don't want them to have a statement of account for college? If your kid's in private school, you probably have a statement of account for your kid for college. You're paying for them to go to private school. So don't tell me you need public dollars for a private school. That's absolutely not something I'm going to do. Then there's other critiques about, well, you could give savings money for saving accounts for kids. That's not going to make anybody's life better tomorrow. I'm like, yeah, that's true. It's not going to make anybody's life better tomorrow, but that's part of why we have the challenges that we have. It's not the only thing that I'm working on. So to directly answer your question is that I have learned that when I want to do something that should create generational change, like that is the focus of it. At the same time, I have to talk about the thing that's going to help people right now. People don't want to hear about, oh, you're going to make a savings account for kids for college. Oh, that's going to help them in the distant future. What about right now? People are struggling. I'm like, yeah, I understand that. Here's this other thing that I'm doing too. So I started talking about the Financial Empowerment Center and My Future Fund at the same time. It's like, yeah, right now people are struggling financially. Here's this program that we do that will help you balance your budget, that will help you figure out how to pay a mortgage or how to get involved with finding all of that information and how to help you get your credit score up. That will help you right now. And while you're doing that, let's also plan for the future for your kids. So that's something that I've learned. And part of the difficulty with this too, and I think also speaks to why we don't get good public policy that's based in prevention or generational change in the positive direction, it's because politicians have to run for office and campaign. It's hard for a politician to campaign on a problem they prevented. If you can't prove you prevented a problem, which is like the challenge of public health, or I did this thing and it's going to create generational change. Let me again. Those things are really tough. So what ends up happening then is most politicians instead stay pretty focused on, I do this thing right now. I got us to give X number of dollars to this organization right now. Fine, that can be good. But if there's not longer term strategy and thought for about how things affect the future, then we're just throwing money out the window. It's unfortunate, but so many of the problems that we face in our society, we know what to do about them. There are existing strategies, but people are just so afraid to invest in preventative work, which is why public health is at the worst level of funding it's ever been in because of the federal government. But even without the RFKs of the world, still public health does not get the kind of investment it needs. Because if we invested in public health appropriately, we would prevent so many more costly and save so many more lives, but preventing so many more costly challenges. But people don't do that. So you've got to do both, right? If you want people to not attack the future focused behavior, you have to make sure that you show them that you're doing something in the present too, which can be difficult because some problems are complicated and take more time to resolve. But there's always this inclination by a lot of politicians that I need to be seen doing this thing. I had numerous conversations with various politicians about them wanting thing X to happen, even when they're presented evidence that thing X will not solve problem Y, but thing X will get a news article and you'll get a picture doing something, but that's not going to actually solve the problem. So there's a tension there that is really difficult. So that's something too that falls on the public to the extent they're able to be more critically thoughtful about what you want your elected officials to do. If you want people to continue doing stuff for a good photo op that's not going to change or attack the root cause of an issue, then you've got to keep on voting the same way you've been doing. But if you want people to actually try to tackle the root causes of issues, you've got to be more dialed in and be thoughtful about the thing that we invest public money in. That's some very helpful insight. Thank you. This is fun. These are good questions. Given how many roles you have, do you have any advice on how to maintain personal and professional life? That's a nice way of putting of how in the world do you have the time to do everything that you have to do? Yeah. So this is a skill I wish I learned earlier. So I try to tell this to students all the time. Two things. One, the most important thing that you can do is manage your time effectively. It's the one resource that you have the same amount of every day is your time. And you choose how to spend your time for the most part. So being thoughtful about the commitments that you make and what cost that's going to have on your time and thinking about the hidden cost or the hidden added time commitments that a commitment might have. And then two, saying, starting at no before taking on another responsibility and then having to really get a coherent and strong argument to move to yes. There was a period of time where I have this job here, county commissioner. I chair that state board. I was the vice president or the vice chair of the county Democratic Party. I was the president of two nonprofits. What the hell was I thinking? Like that is just somehow I did it. It wasn't great on me personally. It wasn't good on my time. But I've got those things done. And at a certain point, you get to a place where people ask you to do stuff if they know you get it done. And there is always the old adage, if you want to get something done, look for the busiest person in the room and ask them to do it because you know that person gets things done. The busiest person in the room starts needing to say no to stuff. You got to be able to say no. So the thing that I've tried to, I had to put a lot of effort into this. Actually, one of my goals for as I got to the end of 2024 was to figure out how do I roll off some of my current responsibilities and be okay about that. And that had been a first for me to not say yes to everything and to not take on every possible thing. And that's okay. You have to be okay with that. So there's that part. And then to me, the other thing is maintaining control over my time, including time that I want to spend for myself or recreational time. So for example, now, well, I had been doing this for a little while. But if I want to go to the gym, I'm putting gym on the calendar. Well, what I used to do is somebody wants to meet with me. I'm like, oh, this is the only time I can meet with you. And I look at my calendar. I go, let's meet at the gym. Eh, whatever. I just want to go. I'll meet with this person instead. You don't do that. Like if you are putting time in your calendar to do that or to spend time with friends and family or to maybe read a book or to do or watch TV or do whatever it is that brings you joy and fulfillment, you can't always reschedule yourself. That's just not fair to you. And generally, another tip is that other people's emergencies are not necessarily your emergency or an emergency at all. You know, I try to, I always respond with empathy and compassion when I get emails from students. But when I get, you know, extremely anxious students emailing me, I need to meet with you immediately because I need to figure out what classes I'm going to take. Two semesters from now. That's not an emergency, right? Like that's not an emergency. And you don't need to be panicked either, right? Like that's, you can't respond to somebody else feeling like it's an emergency and you taking it on as an emergency. So there's that too. Learning to say no and controlling your time. That sounded like a very therapist response to pause and consider the burdens of other people's anxieties. Going back to also those calls that other people had where they were angry, do you feel that your experience as a clinician and as a politician, like do these two identities, does that support your skills as a communicator and how you feel you're able to communicate with people? Or do you feel there are times they can sometimes clash because that therapist wants to come out when you are trying, you have to kind of drop that a little bit? So that's a good question. So I am frequently trying to think about which pieces of me or skills of mine do I use in what environment? Generally, my behavior is about the same all the time. I have students, some students that when I was the chair of the board of commissioners would really like to come to my board meetings. And I've heard it described that I run the board meetings like class on steroids, basically the same thing. So through that, this might be surprising, but the research shows this too. Social workers in elected office tend to use their clinical skills more than the macro skills. And that speaks to something interesting in the dynamics of our politics in that if you want to be an elected official, you have to win an election, right? If you want to be a policymaker, that's what that means, right? You want to make policy, you have to win an election through a campaign. Well, the people that are good at policymaking and good at governing, those are different skills than the skills to be good at campaigning. So what we frequently get in our country is that you get a lot of elected officials that are great campaigners, they are charismatic, they have like the celebrity element that people look for in their politicians nowadays, but then they're really bad at the actual governing. So it's very rare, I think, that you find people that are in elected office that actually have both of those skills, that you're good at the campaigning piece, which is more of the macro skills, but then you're somehow also good at the policy governing piece of it. And a lot of the being a good person in a governing position involves having strong interpersonal skills. So much of what I do is negotiating between people. It's one-on-one conflict resolution, or maybe group conflict resolution. Because the thing is, you win an election, you don't have absolute power, right? Like anything I want to do, I can only do My Future Fund, or I can only do Children's Savings, or Financial Empowerment Center, or a lot of the other things that are on Justin's Great Assist because I got a majority of commissioners to agree this is a good idea and vote yes with me to do it. And that's all interpersonal stuff. Maintaining your relationships or relationship management, that is a key thing, and that's extremely useful. Now, the part that conflicts with probably the therapeutic side or the interpersonal nature part of me is the other thing about politics is that this is how we decided to distribute power in our society. And in a lot of these situations, it is winning or losing. At a certain point, you have to win. If somebody totally disagrees with you, this is not a matter of me sitting down and talking to you forever, and I can convince you or I can help you find, I think the lady that I talked to on the phone that says I shouldn't vote to give kids savings accounts for college because nobody gave her a savings account for college, and then went on a transphobic rant. What am I supposed to do with that, right? I'm never going to get that person to agree with me, and that's okay. My idea just has to be the idea that wins. So figuring out at what point is it worth it now to stop the interpersonal conversation, and now do I have to focus on how do I just win, and that's a thing. But so much of this stuff, and another reason why social workers are so good at it is that you're using the social work skills all the time. I have this one constituent that calls me multiple times a week. Not everybody answers the phone every time he calls me, but I think the guy is largely calling me because he has interacted with a lot of other elected officials or attempted to, and nobody makes him feel heard. He has a problem that is not in my ability to fix, like it's not in county government's ability to fix, but I will listen to him. I will affirm that he is experiencing something that I think is wrong. I will try to connect him with other people, but a lot of that is me just engaging in a somewhat therapeutic experience with him where I listen to him talk and try to calm him down. How does that mindset shift, well not a mindset shift, but an acknowledgement that you have to win, how does that connect to your experience of running in 2018, and then running again, and then winning the election? Well, I was better in 2020 than I was in 18. That helped. I had learned a lot. I don't think I would have won in 2020 had I not lost in 18, and there were other political dynamics that were at play, well, in all my elections. Well, in all my elections. I've had very challenging elections for a number of reasons every time, and the large part of it is because the local politics in my part of the county has largely been run by three political families over the last 50, 60 years, and I ran against one of them in 18 and didn't win. That person didn't run again in 2020. A different one ran in 2020. I ended up having to beat her, and then after that, it's just been beating these politicians that have been around for a very, very long time. It's tough sometimes for me to think about, I have empathy for my opponents, and I can understand a lot of it. My opponents, the people that I typically have, one serious opponent in a campaign, and then maybe two or three non-serious candidates that are also in the race, and typically the serious person is an elected official, either currently or past, that is in their late 70s or early 80s, and their whole life has been being in elected office, and the thought that that's not going to happen anymore is distressing to them. It's all they know, and that's why they had to find a way to beat me. For me, I have empathy for that, right? This is a total, it's a way of life for you, but that's also not what politics is supposed to be about. It's not about you feeling good about yourself. It's about stewardship of public resources and trying to make good public policy to make people's lives better. And for me, that's when I can take the, I can have empathy for you, and now I will destroy you, and then I win. That is a terrible quote. What? Maybe we should open the podcast with that. I really like that quote. That's how politicians win. Yeah, so you graduated from U of M, and you began your position as a professor at the same university. You kind of talked about how you created the political pathway and stuff. What did you wish you could have learned while you were there, whether that was the political stuff that you put in, and what do you think is critical for students to learn now, before they go into the field? And also on that is, what did you wish you had learned? How did you go about putting that whenever you were creating your classes? Yeah, the way that the pathway is largely designed is that I want all of you to know what I wish I had known, and so you can be successful in the space earlier than me. And so success is going to look different. So for me, ultimately, the direction I moved down was I became a politician. I run for office, and I keep winning. That's not going to be for everyone, and that's okay. When I first started teaching here, for a number of reasons, I would always harp on that I want all of you to think about running for office. That's not realistic. And I remember a student talked to me about that at one point, about how my asserting that isn't always necessarily helpful for everyone that hears it, because there are some people that it's not the path for them. And I understand that. For me, sometimes I don't know that it's the path for me, but they keep electing me, so I'll keep doing it. What I want students to get is that there is a place in government policy and politics and this whole thing, and in civil society, like the society that we're building that is based on us understanding civics and being involved. There is somewhere for everyone, and there's something for you to do. And whatever it is that you choose to do, find the thing that helps you fulfill your ethical obligation as a social worker to engage in social and political action that advances social justice. That is one of the requirements of us in our code of ethics. That's not going to be running for office for everybody, and that's okay. But what that might look like is being involved with, if you live in a community that has a homeowner's association, that's the government for that, but being involved in the governing of that. Maybe it's getting people registered to vote before an election, or doing voter education about something that's really important to you. Maybe it's informing your clients about a decision that the board of directors of the community mental health is going to make about their services. That's really important. Just getting people involved in the area that makes sense for them is the thing that I want to impart on all of you. That's why I really enjoy when I get IT students that take my classes as an elective, because I'm not trying to get everybody to run for office. It's unrealistic. Now, while it would be a fantastic scenario in which we have people who are going to run for office against each other, and we're going to be in a good position either way, probably a little far off from that. That's okay. But what I do want is, I want the IT students to come to class and to understand, I should be involved with, let's say, NASW when they're sending me emails about this bill that's going to affect how licensure works, or this bill that's going to affect reimbursement rates, and I should be able to join with my other social work colleagues and talk to them about that. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do. A lot of government stuff isn't as bad as people feel like it is. There's this tendency to look and see what the federal government is doing, and be appalled by it, and think, well, all government is bad and sucks. I disagree with basically everything the federal government has been doing. But I can tell you not all government sucks, because my government gives savings accounts to kids. My government provides free resources to people, free financial counseling. We have community health workers. That's still government. It's just a different government. It's important for people to know that what your city council is doing, your county board of trustees, your school board, your board of commissioners, and to some extent your state government, those are things that are affecting you on a day-to-day basis. If you're not paying attention to that stuff, you're missing out on a lot of good things that could be happening. You're not participating in making good things happen, or you're not stopping bad things from happening. There's just a whole world that's out there too for you to be involved with beyond whatever the big headline on your news media choice is saying about what's going on in the federal government. Do you feel that the profession of... when you're running and you're announcing yourself as a social worker, are there drawbacks or positives as attaching that to your identity in policy or when you're campaigning? Are there people's responses when hearing you're a social worker that can be positive or negative? We have a branding issue as a field, and one of the things that I'm personally committed to with the field is trying to change how people perceive it. Back when I was a student, and then shortly after I graduated, I'm looking for jobs, looking for more macro jobs. A lot of those jobs would not list social work as one of the relevant degrees for the job. What I would have to tell students too is you always apply, you're one of the relevant degrees listed. That's changed though now because social work is popping up as an option and more of those things. About 75% or more of the people admitted to our program want to be clinicians and will be clinicians. That's why a lot of people hear social worker and think therapist, CPS worker, or somebody giving away gas cards. Generally, that's what people think when they hear about social workers. For me, it's important to make them think about or see something different. My campaigns very much think for my social work identity. I almost always have my campaign kickoff event in social work month on purpose for social work month, and I highlight that. I want people to think, okay, I'm not wrong in thinking that social workers are therapists. That is true. Social workers can also be community organizers. They can also be policy analysts. They can also be elected officials. For me, it's important to try to give that example. I'm glad when it's election day and I'm working at one of the polls and trying to convince people at the last minute to come vote for me, and people point at me and say, hey, you're that social worker guy. I'm like, I am. Get in there and vote for Justin Hatch. I like that because I want people to associate that with me and if they have a negative association with social workers, for good reasons because there's a lot of bad things that social work has been involved in in the past, I want them to be able to see maybe it's not all bad. I like that guy. That guy's a social worker. Maybe there's more to social work than whatever I think it is right now. That's also one of the reasons why for a period of time after I graduated and really wanted to make a shift into policy but was having a hard time doing that, I had considered going back to school to get a Master's in Public Policy and I didn't for a couple of reasons. Two of them being one, I wanted to prove that this can be done without a public policy degree and that social work degree is sufficient to do that and it is possible to do it and excel with it. And then two, if I am going to say these things that I say to students all the time, I want them to say, I don't want them to look at me and say, well you also have an MPP so how much can you really speak to it just being social work as long as you do that. And that's not what that's not reality. My reality is I have MSW and that's what we're doing. So I it paid off in the end because now I'm quite successful. Yeah. So our final question is we've reflected on various times during your career as a social worker so it's important to ask what has been your proudest moment professionally or personally since graduating with your Master's in Social Work? Oh, well winning the 2020 election. I mean that's, yeah. That campaign is extremely difficult. You remember how I told you I like to start my campaigns in social work month? Okay. Remember what happened in March 2020? COVID. So that was extremely, that made the campaign extremely challenging. The opponent that I had to defeat was extremely challenging. So to be able to defy the odds and win that election narrowly was fantastic. I was lucky enough to have my friend that's a photographer was present. We were the last race to be called in the county so he got a great picture like right when we figured out that we had won around like 3 a.m. that night. And the person that was running against me was the clerk of the large township in my district and was the person counting the votes. So that was one of the reasons why it took a long time. There were some shenanigans that also occurred but we won. I'd say outside of that though the big policy wins like my future fund, having financial empowerment center, some other things we didn't talk about related to public health that I've like done, I do, I end up doing one or two events a semester in the school of public health because I've become so public health involved now. But investments I've got to make at the county level in public health, investments I've got to do prevention work, like those actual things where, and you're working at local and county government, where you want to do this thing, you find a way to do it and if you can get the votes you can make it happen. And that's not always what you see in federal government or in state government. So when I got the news that we, there's more than 2 million dollars now invested in these savings accounts for kids. Yeah, that's not going to make anybody life better tomorrow, but let's say 10 years from now we're going to have a group of kids that know that their government really cares about their future has invested in them and I hope thinks about public service in a different way and is really excited to figure out how can they give back to the community. Do you have any kind of goals in mind because you spoke about wanting to when you're planning policies to come with a more generational long term solution. Do you have any goals looking forward to like add to Justin's Greatest Hits? That's a good question. What do I want to add to Justin's Greatest Hits? So that's a, this is somewhat of a challenging thing but also a good thing is that when I ran and I won in 2020 and we get to 2021 and we get this large sum of money from the federal government, which can only be used for certain things, but by being able to be used for certain things or freed up other dollars, almost everything I campaigned on doing in the first time when I won so really the same stuff I said I would do the first time when I lost, I did. Like I got us to start the program. So then when I was running for re-election it's like look, I did the stuff I said I was going to do, you want more of the same? Like what we want here. So a lot of what I'm focusing on right now is making sure that the stuff I was able to get us to start, that we continue it. Because that is not a definite thing. Right, like if I don't find a way for us to find people that want to invest, like I want Domino's and Toyota and other big local businesses to invest in my future fund. If that doesn't happen and I don't find other ways for us to find more money at the county level to invest in my future fund, we're not going to be able to enroll more kids in the program. I don't want to make a program that was great for like the three cohorts of kids that got it and then 10 years from that, like that's not going to make the generational change broadly. So what I want is I want to, the stuff that I've been able to lay the groundwork for and get started, I need it to be successful. I need to continue working at it so we get to a point in two, three, four years where I don't have to worry about the future of my future fund, right, or the future of the Financial Empowerment Center, like that one. The funding that I initially got us to get for that, we're getting to the end of that. So I'm going to have to be in a phase where I need to convince the other commissioners that this is a worthwhile investment and I have metrics from the successes of the people that have gone through that program to demonstrate this is a good use of money. Right, so there are other things I'm sure that I would want to do. I'll just give you an example. One of the things that, there are two things right now that are big on my to-do list and they're both expensive. One of them is prior to now, with the federal government doing what it's doing around cutting Medicaid and everything else, a goal of mine was to be able to say, and have this be true, that if you live in Washtenaw County and you want access to health care, you can get it and it will be quality and affordable. And for a period of time, because of the investments that the Board of Commissioners and in partnership with other partners were able to make in the program we have called the Washtenaw Health Project, the Washtenaw Health Project is a health plan that we have that is for people that can't get other health insurance. So let's say you don't qualify for an Obamacare plan or they're too expensive, we have the Washtenaw Health Project and you can get health insurance for that. The Medicaid cuts, though, have now made that not a true statement anymore. That anybody in Washtenaw County that wants access to quality and affordable health care can get his next. That's technically not true right now because of the Medicaid cuts. So what I wanted to find is several million dollars annually to be able to continue to fund that program and expand that program so everyone can get access to it. Another thing I would like to do, you may have heard of RxKids, which is a program that they're launching a version of it in the city of Ypsilanti and there's some other places that have it. It is a program championed by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, who's the person that discovered the Flint water crisis and is like the face of trying to combat it. One of the things that she found is that if you give effectively what's like a guaranteed basic income to pregnant people for the duration of the pregnancy and then for some amount of time after that, it basically zeroes out cost of CPS for families with kids two and under. That, I would love for us to do a version of RxKids. They call it the program RxKids. If we could do something like that in Washtenaw County for every person in Washtenaw County, that's going to cost a lot of money. Someday, I'd like to be able to do both of those things, but in the meantime, these other things I've worked to build towards, which are really focused on economic opportunity, focused on health equity and addressing community violence. I want those kinds of programs to continue to be successful. I have one more question. Jim, you have one more question too. I'm remembering the non-profit and that you were not a fan. How do you balance so many social workers kind of their vision turns to you go to a non-profit and that's where you do work compared to getting funding from other sources? What is kind of a more, just speaking more to non-profits in general and social work? I'm not anti-non-profit, but I do have a strong feeling about non-profits, particularly in Washtenaw County because we have so many non-profits. I forget the number, but we have the percentage of non-profits that we have in Washtenaw County far exceeds what would make sense for the population and relative to other places. We have this tendency in Washtenaw County where someone has an idea and I'm going to start a non-profit. Then what you end up having is this ecosystem, this funding ecosystem where we have 10, 15 non-profits that all probably do the same thing, but now you're competing with all these other people that are trying to do the same thing, but the money that's available has not increased and the funders have not increased, so now you're competing with other people that have the same mission as you and now has to make it harder to work for everybody. I would love for us to be in a space where now there's more collaboration between non-profits and that we get to, there needs to be some mergers of the hot take. There needs to be some non-profit mergers, but that's tough for people. The other piece I say about non-profits, non-profits provide critical infrastructure and support to community members. Largely we have the structure of non-profits being tax exempt organizations because we've decided as a society and we continue to decide this and choose this because we make government, we decide government does these things and these things are important enough for government to do. Now these other things might be important, but they're not important enough for government to do it, so we'll have a non-profit do it and we just won't tax them. That's why they get to be tax exempt. For me, a lot of what I think about is, is this a thing that I think is so core to what we need to be doing that government should be doing it or should they not be doing it? I got into a conflict with several non-profits actually when we were trying to start the Financial Empowerment Center because there were several non-profits that wanted to be the Financial Empowerment Center. They wanted to be get the designation for that and they wanted to get the funding associated with doing it. And there was this interpretation because I was the person championing that we do the Financial Empowerment Center at all, but also that we do it and we have it run by us as the government. There were some non-profit executive directors interpreted that as me either saying, I don't like your non-profit or I think you'll do a bad job, which I had a lot of conversations about this. It's not any of those things. For me, it is a philosophy thing around, I believe that the government should be responsible for making sure that people have access to economic opportunity and are supported in trying to get out of debt and other challenges. I don't think that is a thing that we should farm out to a non-profit to do. I think a lot of people's economic challenges are because of the government, so I think the government should be responsible for fixing it. And that's my logic for why I want us to house this program and for us to do it. And I want people to also see that the government cares about me. The people that are running my government care about me enough to try to have a program like this. So, there are plenty of other programs in the community, non-profits in the community, that I think do fantastic work and are better as a non-profit than having the government do it. But then there are certain things that I think and this is, you'll get different answers from probably any politician you talk to about this, where is that line? I know some politicians that basically feel like we should, government shouldn't do a lot of things. Government should do police, fire, trash, sewer, core infrastructure things and call it good. And non-profits or business should do the rest. I have people on a further opposite end of the spectrum that think government should do absolutely everything. I don't think that's realistic either and there are probably some things I wouldn't necessarily want the government to do. So, finding that balance between what's appropriate, what makes sense for government to do, and then getting up to do it, and then thinking about alright, this is important and I want to support this non-profit in doing it. But then it becomes a challenge when there are like 50 non-profits trying to do the same thing. I appreciate the information. Yeah, there's 1,500 registered, that's a lot of non-profits. That's a lot of non-profits and if you really try to break it down, there are even within the same geographic area, you'll probably find places where there's five non-profits on the same street or in like the same block and they do the same thing. And why can't we pool our resources and save funding and put more money into supporting people? I'm thinking about a couple of particular non-profits that are all in the same area, that are all youth-focused. One of them owns a bus so they can have transportation, the other ones don't have transportation. Okay, why don't we just be one and you use your transportation to get all of the kids to all the places they need to be, right? There's that kind of thing. We don't all need to find money for a bus and then they all want to come to government, typically county government, and say, I want money so I can have a bus. Alright, well do you really need a bus though? I don't think you do. There's not more people. Your non-profit is serving the same people as non-profits over there that already have the bus. Maybe you can use theirs. Makes sense. Thank you for that. Learned a lot. Yeah, I think that's all of our questions. Did you have anything else that you wanted to add or anything you feel like that we missed that you wanted to be included? I really think the questions were fantastic. This is the most thorough interview I think I've done. I appreciate the quotes from me. I'm glad I stand by the stuff that I said years ago. The thing I'd leave you with is find that thing that I talked about that fits for you regardless of what area of social work that you think is going to be your primary area of practice. There is something for you to do to influence policy to improve people's lives from a macro perspective. For I think the vast majority of the clinical social workers out there, maybe the thing you do is you join NASW and you sign up for their advocacy emails and you do the thing that they suggest that you do when it comes out. Because there's a lot of change that we could make as social workers given how large our field is that we're losing out if the vast majority of our field is not engaged in that way. I'm sure they largely agree with the kinds of things that the macro social workers want to do, they just don't know about it. I say the same thing to the macro social workers in that there's a lot to be learned from the IP focused social workers. Getting that direct one-on-one experience is really helpful for thinking about how are you going to go about organizing, how are you going to go about coming up with policy. There's so much more we can all learn from each other and that's the thing that we really need to be focused on because we've got so many social workers across the country. If we spoke as one voice or close to one voice on a lot of issues, I think we could make huge progress in the big challenge we're trying to solve. I definitely agree with you and again I appreciate all your insight. I was excited to talk to you because I am again an IP person and I'm friends with a lot of macro people and they will often insult the IP people for not getting engaged at all and I feel like I have to defend a little bit and be like guys, I'm really charming. I can talk to people and we can have a ... I'd probably be a better policy person than you guys in certain ways but I don't know if I got to learn from you guys in the policy and then there's a beauty in social work being balanced and the ability to have because you need both which goes to show your ability that you have both and it's paid off in your career and what you've been able to do. You also think about it too. I'll pitch running again. Maybe you run your school board or a library board and you do that and you maintain a practice. That's totally a thing that a lot of people can do. There was Felicia Brabeck who used to be a county commissioner and then she used to be a state rep and now she's running for state senate and she teaches as a Leo here now. She's a psychologist and a social worker. When she was on the board of commissioners she maintained a private practice and was a county commissioner. That is extremely helpful. She's a very clinical person but she also finds ways to still be involved. Other people do. As I try to do more research into the social workers that are out there, I learned a lot about social workers that are on some of these super local offices like library board and school board who I didn't know they were social workers because they don't necessarily advertise that but there's space to do that and still be able to do the thing that you really, really want to do for your paycheck. Yes. Definitely. Well, thank you for your time. Do you have any other questions or any other thing? No, I just wanted to thank you for your time. I'm very interested as a macro person so it was really cool hearing that. I actually wrote about you in my entrance. Oh, cool. Really? Yeah, I was researching you so I was really excited to hear that we get to interview you. I just wanted to take the time and say thank you and for you taking your time out to do this. We really appreciate it. Well, thank you both. Of course, registration time so I'm teaching several things next semester. Keep me in mind. I graduated. I'm out of here. Well, I was going to say you might get an email from me. It's hilarious that I also asked to interview because, again, I had that class with you. You talked a lot about RFJ. Yeah. But you really did sell me on a lot of stuff. Well, I appreciate that. It's good to know that stuff is being received in the way that I hope it is. The whole reason why I'm here is to get people to think a little bit more about it. Mm-hmm. Thank you for your time. Thank you both. Have a good day. You too. See you later.