[0:00] state policy advocacy clinicHello of the guest today is Alexandra Defray. She is the director of the Cornells State Advocacy Clinic, where Cornell students advocate for issues in the New York State government. Hi Alexandra, What what is the state Advocacy clinic? Hi Tony, so great to see you today. So yes, I'm the director of the State Policy Advocacy Clinic. It's a new program at the Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell. It is a year long class by which 30 students and my wonderful Tasmania and our wonderful policy advocacy fellow, Hattie Seton and I work from the initial policy design stage all the way through the legislative and administrative advocacy process to put into the real world evidence based sound public policies. So we work with three types of stakeholders who give us the ideas. First, we work with professors at Cornell University and in other universities to translate their research findings into actionable public policy, actual laws, actual regulations, and practices within New York and some other states. Second, we work directly with policymakers and legislators in New York State who have ideas based on problems that they've seen in their communities and request their constituents have made. They come to us and say, look, Alexandra, a constituent walked into my office. They talked about this problem they're seeing. They suggested this solution. What do you think? And so then my students and I go back and we do all the research and we go back to the legislator and say, yes, we understand this is a very serious problem. Here is the data, here's the research. However, the solution that they proposed might not be exactly the optimal solution, but let's do something that's adjacent to that. We envision the following of solution and then we explain the research and we design it. And then we work with the legislator to turn the idea into an actual bill, which we draft with them, and then to raise the public support for that bill through op eds, through public talks, through building coalitions, through meeting with the opposition, through talking with legislators, all of the parts of the athletes process. The third way we get ideas for our policy projects is by working directly with people in the community, often individuals with lived experience or organizations and nonprofits based in firmly rooted in the community. And again they come to us with the problems that they see day in day out and some ideas for solutions. And we work with them to develop the best evidence based solutions and then again to usher the solutions from an idea stage into real laws that are binding. We we meet those stakeholders and those nonprofits through another service that we provide. My students give trainings in the community to nonprofits, primarily in upstate New York in rural areas. The trainings are from one hour to four hours. And they they explain to nonprofit leaders how exactly they can advocate effectively for the interests of their communities in the state government. This is so cool. So I'm picturing an engine where input is these ideas from professors and policy makers and community and output is the the bills and the new policies. What does this engine look like? What are the parts of the engine are?

[3:32] how to be a good advocateTony, I love that analogy. It's perfect. I hadn't heard that before, but that's perfect. So yes. So we have an advocacy handbook or guide. It's about 175 pages. Our policy fellow, Hattie Seaton, who's a Rhodes Scholar from South Dakota who a generous funder has enabled to work in the clinic for two years. She wrote the handbook that explains the whole process. But I will explain it to you as well because of course it's my favorite topic of conversation and this is what the year long class focuses on. So you start in the policy design stage, you think of a problem, then you look at all the research. You check to see what other states have done, what other countries have done, what other jurisdictions within New York State have done. You can think of it as exporting best practices and learning from small places where people have done something innovative and creative really well. So we look at the evidence of success from smaller jurisdictions and then we try to spread the best practices and institutionalized them, turn them into a structure. So we're always learning from peer states, from peer countries, and of course from jurisdictions and people in New York who have piloted something super innovative that works. So you that's the policy design process. There's more details, but I'll move on. Then there's the advocacy process. And so my students writes op eds opinion pieces for the newspapers and they get them published. I think last year or the last couple years we've had 9 or 10 student op eds published, including in the Times Union, which is the paper of record in Albany for the state government. And those op eds usually combine both stories because people find stories of real people very compelling, but also data and research from the academic literature. We combine both the stories and the data and the research to make a compelling case about why the status quo should be changed. My students also write white papers. White papers usually take six months to a year. They're very in depth analysis based on data, often original data that another professor at Cornell has collected. And the white paper really documents and nails very precisely exactly what the issue is, where it is, and exactly what the recommendations are and who we request in the government should do what. And of course, the hardest part in a white paper, it's not very hard to document the problem. The hardest part, of course, is to come up with solutions that are tried and true, that will be justified the expense, and that will actually work. And to be super, super clear about who precisely in the government will be charged with implementing the solutions and how, and most importantly, how would success and implementation be measured. So I'll just give you an example. Last year, students worked with

[6:19] example of farm worker housingMary Jo Dudley, who was in Global studies, on a report about the health consequences of substandard farm worker housing in upstate New York. In large part on the large dairy farms that are such an important part of our economy. And Mary Jo Dudley had taken data with farm workers and really knew of the actual conditions. And then all my students took that data, put it within the larger context, and then figured out, based on other States and the research, the most appropriate policy solutions for New York State. That's just one example. We've done many one papers, white papers. I'm pleased to say that a white paper on ID AS or Industrial Development Associations agencies was just on the cover of the Ithaca Times. That was another report done by my students. OK, so we've talked about op eds, We've talked about white papers. My students then meet with legislators. State legislators are often delighted to meet with students because they are so happy that students at Cornell are interested in the workings of democracy at the state level. And my students are very, very well prepared for the pitches that we never allow students to speak to a legislator unless they had been in our hot seat. Hot seat in class is when four students on a team sit in the front of the class and they pitch their idea or their bill and the rest of the class grills them as if they were legislators. And, you know, it's, it's really fun. It gets really intense. They play the role of different legislators. And they are very, very, very, very tough. That's over preparation. So that then when my students have a 10 minute meeting or 15 minute meeting with a legislator or their staff, they're prepared for whatever question comes their way. And we've gotten feedback from legislators a multiple times that the student pitches they heard were the best pitches they had heard. The secret sauce for us, which I'll go ahead and share, is to always bring to a legislator meeting district level data about how the bill effects their actual district. And so the students usually do the data analysis in advance and end up telling the legislator or sharing with them more information about the constituents and how the bill would affect them that the legislator would have already known. So we meet with legislators, we go to Albany with our stakeholders and partners and participate in what are called Albany days, which are really great in that the students can then meet as many legislators as possible as quickly as possible and also be together in a room with our partners with shared lived experience. For example, earlier this week by students when Albany for a bill that other students actually drafted with a partner. It's called the Care Act. It would be a Bill of Rights for pregnancy and parenting people in prisons and jails in New York. The stakeholders are people who themselves were mothers in prison and had their infants in prison. And it's really meaningful for my students to get to talk with people who've actually had gone through these very, very difficult, very trying circumstances and to get to meet them and work together with them to make the best pitch. That combines both the story of the lip experience and also the data about why it's so important, for example, for mothers to have skin to scan contact, for example, with their infants, regardless of whether they're in prison. So great, Tony. We've talked about the op eds, the white papers, the meetings with legislators, the Albany

[9:37] cost analysis and writing memosdays. We also do a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes. We do cost analysis. We do the actual drafting of the bill often. We often draft sponsors memos. We do a lot of the work that normally a policy maker or legislator would do. But because they are spread so thin, they have so many issues they're working on and such few resources and such terrible time constraints, we do a lot of that back office of work. We always classify it as the unsexy or the, you know, not dramatic work, but it's the really, really important for the quality of the bills. So we will do that. We do our homework and then we give it and share it with the legislators so that they're really well prepared to make the best case so that they then can, for example, question agency heads effectively. We also do work with the executive branch sometimes. And then the last thing I'll leave you with is we're very engaged in coalition building. So for example, we have a bill that came to us through a Doctor Who's the doctor for the local school system. So it's her idea. It's certainly not my idea, but her idea is that she had seen so many opioid overdoses in upstate rural New York. And there, of course, they're very tragic. We all know someone who has been affected by opioids. And unfortunately, many of us know someone who has passed away. So it's very, very close to our hearts, especially in rural areas. And so she said, wouldn't it be great if high school students in New York were trained on Narcan, which is naloxone or the antidote to opioid overdoses, just as students are trained in CPR or the Heimlich maneuver. So this was her idea. It's a great idea. We've talked to our local legislator about it. She's introduced a bill, which is fantastic, but a bill doesn't just pass because it's a good idea supported by research. That's only the beginning. The only way a bill can turn into law is with huge community support. And so something our students did, for example, is 2 years ago. It takes a long time to get a bill passed. Two years ago, they organized a community forum for the legislator by which she could hear from experts in drugs overdose, pediatricians, parents, students, school administrators, school teachers, everyone in the community to see how they were affected and what they thought about the actual implementation, how we would actually turn this idea into concrete work. So that's a long way of saying that a huge part of our work in the clinic is to bring people together, to convene them and to build coalitions and to basically facilitate conversations from a diverse group of people, whether they be Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals, it doesn't matter. But to bring people in our community together so that we can solve real policy problems that we all agree have to be solved. Super. Does the engine get more effective the more the years the clinic runs the more policies you pass? Like what parts of it becomes more effective overtime? That is a great question. I'm so glad you asked that because that's something we always talk about in the classroom component of the clinic. We have 4 hours together every week outside of the 8 hours per student that I ask of every student to work with their stakeholder. And we're always iterating the process. We're always learning from our mistakes. We're always trying to get better. So yes, you touched on a really important point there is cross fertilization and learnings that we can learn from one issue area, for example, health that bleed over or we can use in the other areas. So for example, we have a good governance team, an environmental justice team, criminal justice, immigrants rights, children's rights and health. I'm probably forgetting something, but we have a lot of what we work all across the spectrum. We basically do everything except for higher education because we would of course, never want to conflict out with Cornell. So there's a lot of cross fertilization across the areas go into a problem. At first we're thinking of it as an immigration issue, but then later we really see, well, no, that's really a children's rights issue. No, that's really a good governance issue. It's actually the intersection of many places. And then that enables us to make friends in unusual places. We might have a group that you might think might not see things the same way as we do on some issues, and that's fine. In a democracy, people are allowed to disagree. The more voices, the more competition, in my view, the better. You want your ideas to be challenged by someone. That's the only way to make them good. And if your idea isn't good enough, the opposition will win and as well they should so that that competition, let's say, can bring out the best. And it can often be that on one issue we're aligned with some people and on another issue we're not. And that, and that's fine also in terms of the learning, if there's not just the cross fertilization across the issues, but just with more and more time, we're learning the tricks of the trade. So I had done this work extensively in Connecticut, but actually when I pitched this idea to Cornell and the Brooks School was generous enough to run with it, I was new to New York. And as you can imagine, New York State politics are legendary. New York is a state with 20 million people. It's very vibrant. It's very different in many ways from Connecticut. And so I was able to bring in a lot of the strategies I had successfully used there, but not surprising that a lot of things are really different here. So each year we learn more and more of the inside game of how it's played. And then the last thing I'll say is the clinic is growing, I'm proud to say, or rather the students are growing a very strong reputation in the community. And so they're able to bring in more stakeholders. And then there's a very strong word of mouth. So for example, we'll give a training, my students will give a training to one group and then another group will call me later that we can say, oh, I heard from my friend that your students were great. Can you come see us? So over time, we're able to build more and more relationships, which means there's more and more people in the community who can help us and help my students, help them learn, help them get jobs. And in exchange, there's more people that we can help. So it's a, it's a broader web. So we are getting better at our game. We are not perfect. I make mistakes all the time, the students make mistakes all the time. But the great thing about having being in an educational environment is that when we make mistakes, we can learn from them, right? There's no shame in our game. We can reflect and think, okay, that did not go well. What can we do better? How can we take lessons from this so that the next time we make new mistakes instead? So democracy, it's like so important and it's so big. There's all these things, there's all these agencies. How does the state advocacy clinic fit into like a bigger picture of the overall democracy? Does every well functioning democracy have a state advocacy clinic within the university to teach them? Yes. So my long term dream is that there would be a state policy

[16:13] Cornell is the only state policy advocacy clinic at the undergrad leveladvocacy clinic at every land grant university or maybe private universities. That's a different question in every single state. Unfortunately. To our knowledge, we are the only state policy advocacy clinic in the United States. At undergrad level. Most of my students are undergrads, 27 are undergrads, and I have 3 masters of public administration students. Normally clinics are found in law schools, so there are some elite law schools in the country that have legislative advocacy clinics that are similar to ours. But ours is really unique in that it combines the in depth policy analysis and the expertise from my research professors, colleagues here in the Brooks School with the legal skills that I have as a lawyer. So we're grounded in a public policy school, and I think that's really unique and very powerful because empirical evidence is extremely important to design policies correctly. So we're out on our own, the vanguard. We have a wonderful peers at Princeton at their public policy school that has a wonderful clinic, but they do not focus exclusively on state work. We think state and local work is essential for the following

[17:24] why state and local policy is importantreasons. People know right now there's a lot of polarization at the federal level and so the federal government is often gridlocked. Secondly, any individual person has a significant more voice at the local and the state level. And then third, what people really, I think, don't fully understand is that so many of our rights and the quality of day-to-day life for individuals, particularly vulnerable individuals, it is determined not by federal law, but rather in state and local law. OK. And that's because of our Constitution that delegates certain issues exclusively to the federal government, certain issues exclusively to the state government. And then, of course, some issues are shared responsibility. It's called cooperative federalism between the federal and the state government. But we really think that where it's at when we're talking about actual human rights on the ground, with some notable exceptions, a lot of the action really is at the state level. So yes, about the democracy. The last thing I want to leave with Tony, and this is I'm very passionate about this because of the moment that we find ourselves in, is that there's a lot of talk about polarization in the United States and the polarization becoming so extreme that people, even, for example, cut off their loved ones because of different political beliefs. It's a very challenging time in our country. I think everyone, regardless of their political beliefs, understands that. What is wonderful about the State Policy Advocacy Clinic is that we have students who identify as Democrats. We have students who are leaders in the Republican Party at the campus level. We have students who are very, very far left, right, more on the socialist front. And we have students who are libertarians. And because we spend so much time together solving or trying to solve real concrete problems, we call it pothole policy, meaning we're trying to repair the roads, We're trying to make sure there's no potholes. Because we're working on concrete community problems that we can all agree need to be solved, We very, very, very quickly learn to work together. And then in terms of the community, we bring together people who have different political beliefs. That's fine. Again, that makes it more fun, more vibrant to solve shared problems. You know, you can be very polarizing or very, I guess, indignant or alienate the other side. Maybe at the federal level, maybe you can do that. But I promise you at the state and local level, if you're going to see the other policymaker when you're shopping in Wegmans or when you know your kids soccer team, you can't get away with being rude or not seeing their full humanity. It's just you can't solve problems that way. So it's really, I think, inspiring to me to see how well my students get along with one another and how well they do with people in the community and also policymakers, regardless of any political differences that they might have. That makes sense. I'm I'm still trying to figure out like, like let's say if there wasn't a state policy advocacy today versus there was like 10 years later, what's like the 10 year impact whether there was one or there wasn't one. Thank you for. Asking so there's two types of impact, actually three, I think there's three. So first is the concrete policies that we succeed in

[20:30] long-term impact of the state policy advocacy clinicactually turning into law and then making sure that the laws are implemented. OK. So it's commonly said it takes about three to five years to usher an idea through the entire legislative process, which actually is a good thing because your ideas, as we were talking about before, they iterate and get better the more that you refine them with input from the community, right? Democracy is famously slow, but that's a good thing, right? It ensures or helps ensure that we get the policies, right. OK. So there will be the actual policies that exist in the world that did not exist before. So, for example, we're working with a legislator on a bill that would require public meetings to be live streamed so that people who are not able to travel, particularly in rural areas, to the seat of local government can nonetheless testify and participate. This helps our vets who might be injured. It helps our elders. It can help students like my child, who's a high school student who's very active in his community, who before he had a car, would want to testify here in Tompkins County from his computer in his bedroom when I wasn't willing to drive him in to people with disabilities. I had a wonderful student my first year who was blind and very, very active in politics but was not able to drive a car. And so she wrote, for example, a beautiful op-ed about this idea, how important it is for someone who's politically active to be able to participate in live stream public meetings. So that's just one example. That bill I'm confident will pass, that will be in reality because of the clinic. Now, we're not the only people who have that idea, but without us, that bill will not pass, right? So that's one issue. The other way, 10 years things will be different, is that I'm training students, as my colleagues are as well, to become public servants, right? To run for public office, to serve in the executive branch of whatever state or the federal government or a locality, or to serve in the legislative branch or, you know, any way, any place within the government. So, for example, I have alumni who work in Albany now. I had a student who was an aide to the Assembly's finance team, essentially, and then one at the State of Finance Committee as well. So one on the Assembly side, one of the Senate. These students right after graduation were doing real hard budgetary analysis, very, very sophisticated work. They were not just pushing papers. They were doing real analysis to serve the government, to figure out the best way to do the budget. I've had students go off to law school, students who are going to run for office. I have a student who helped write our handbook who now is the state legislative director for a very, very large NGO. So I'm training students to use their tremendous Brooks and Cornell education for good in the world. Right. And then the third part, Tony, is that we're we have this belief that knowledge is not to be a gate kept or hoarded. It's a tremendous benefit that

[23:29] share the knowledge of policy advocacywe get to be at a place like Cornell, but such wonderful resources and alumni and students, it's a true honor. But we're not going to hoard our knowledge. That's why the students go out into the community and our handbook is free. Our trainings are free. The students go out and they teach, whether it's high school students, whether it's organizations, lived experience, whether it's nonprofit CEO's, how the advocacy process works and how the public policy design process works. And then we work with them to build their capacity so that, you know, one day I won't be here, but it doesn't matter because there will be all these students and all these other people who have learned the process and can use it and then can teach other people. We believe that democracy is not a spectator sport. Democracy only works when everyone who lives here has their the possibility to have their voice heard and more importantly, where everyone who lives here has a chance to share. How do we solve these problems? If we don't open source or Crowdsource the solutions, we are not going to find the best way to solve very, very, very challenging problems. So I think that's what I would want to see in 10 years. That's what will happen. And then the icing on the cake is, of course, as I mentioned before, I would love to see this model spread to every single state. So like. Earlier when we were talking about the engine, there was like the policy design phase, advocacy process, the white papers, like if they if somebody wasn't part of Cornell, would they still be able to do that themselves as well? Yes. Absolutely. So that's the point of our training. For example, we just gave a four hour training for my students did to for one of the community foundations of South Central New York, right. So these are nonprofit leaders who work in very under resourced rural areas, really doing God's work, right? Or trying to make sure people are sheltered, making sure that children have food, making sure that our elders have food, right? Very, very centered human needs work in difficult environments, particularly given the very severe federal cuts to basic services. And these are super smart people, but they're busy. They're running nonprofits. Most of them did not have experience with the advocacy process. But what we try to do is demystify it and explain it in four hours with Hattie's handbook and my students handbook that they wrote. And we break down all of the skills and we show how or my students can do it. They can do it too, right? Writing an op-ed is not rocket science. There's a method to doing it, getting it published. It's not magic. People always think, you know, I have a lot of my students have a lot of op eds. I have a lot of op eds published. It's not magic. It's just you need to know how it works. And that's something that we can explain to people. People with lived experience, people who've been in prison have tremendous stories and insights and experiences to share. Like it's important that everyone be able to share what they've seen, whether they be non citizens or high school students or people who are very, very sick. Everyone has something to share and it it's not as difficult as people think. So we try really hard to demystify the process and to teach people how to do it. Now, there are some skills that other groups will not be able to do simply because they're busy, you know, making sure that the soup kitchen keeps running right, They're busy cooking the soup. And so there is a division of responsibility. So we try to do a lot of the very heavy research that's very time consuming and as I said before, not very glamorous. We try to do that to take off the burden from our stakeholders so that they can go visit the people in the prisons and help them. And we can be behind the scenes of reading the papers and doing the data analysis and doing the cost. For example, white papers do not think it's reasonable to ask our stakeholders to white write the white papers. But that's something we can do right? And we can do it for them with them. And we can remove some of the burden and share the gifts and the time that we have. It's, I don't think it's that other people can't do the work. I don't think that at all. I think it's just a matter of the time management and everyone participating in the process, giving the part where they're best able to contribute. Like I meet a lot. Of nonprofits over funds like who run nonprofits and they're usually thinking of building up their capacity and then they're also think of fundraising and writing brands at what points should they start thinking well I should do some advocacy as well to scale up yes so that's a. Great question. This is something we actually talk about a lot in the training. A lot of nonprofit leaders are under the mistaken impression that they are not allowed to

[27:56] how nonprofits can advocateadvocate. There are some concerns about tax ramifications. You do need to be very careful and make sure that you differentiate between advocating and lobbying. For example, we have a whole training about this, but the short answer is that there is a lot more freedom than people would think for nonprofits to advocate. And in fact, the entire process, we rely, we need nonprofits to be out there sharing information because they're the groups that see what's happening on the ground. So it's one of the tragedies is that you often don't have of full empathy or understanding of someone else's journey until you're in those shoes. And not everyone is of course, able to have all the experiences. So just give an example. I'm very, very sick now, but I've been blessed with a tremendous health my whole life. And of course, it's not until you're very, very sick that you start to realize of all the things that the healthcare system depends on and you understand more fully what it has to be like for people who do not have the resources to access the healthcare they, they, they need. You have a new perspective. But we do not everybody is going to be able to have every single person's perspective, right? So nonprofits really, really play an important role in sharing with everyone else on the experiences of the people they serve so that so that policy can be well informed and so that it can actually work. So something we're really trying to do is to, again, demystify the process, but also walk nonprofit leaders through the lobbying rules and the advocacy rules so that they feel completely confident that they're within the bounds of the law and that they're compliant, right? That there's no risk, but that they're also exercising their First Amendment rights. The most important right I think we have in the Constitution is the right to petition our government for a redress of grievances. And that's right there in the 1st Amendment. And we try to embolden or encourage or enable and teach other people how to exercise fully that right. Very cool. I see a. Lot of Cornellians, they've run for office. Yesterday I went to a Cornellian who was running for state Assembly for New York. Like from the elected official perspective, how can they be a good steward of democracy and listen to the state advocacy clinics more? Great. Thank you so much. For that, so we have many guest speakers from all levels of

[30:19] elected officials come visit the policy advocacy clinicgovernment come a lot of them are my former students or colleagues from my very long career, but we're really always open to meet with have any public service servant come and share their experiences with us. We've had a lot of legislators and pretty senior executive officials both in the from the federal government, so we can learn the federal, state perspective, but from the state and local, local governments. And my students love meeting with them. My students are very, very intense, very disciplined, very well prepared. And I promise we'll ask very precise and interesting and very profound questions. But one thing that it's really important to me is to show role models, public servants to my students because again, I'm trying to encourage them to run for office themselves, right, or to serve in the government behind the scenes in some way. And so the best way to do that is for them to see people in different stages of their careers, who've had different perspectives, different life paths, a whole variety and diversity of public leaders so that they can see someone and say, you know what, I could be that person, right? In 20 years, I could be them. So I would encourage you, if you are a Cornell alone, we're familiar with Cornell and you serve in the government, please, please do get in touch either to visit my class or second, I'm going to make a pitch now is my students when they come out are very, very skilled. I really hold their feet to their fire. I'm really tough in the class. We have very, very high standards of professionalism. And the corollary of that and impact of that is when they graduate, they are ready for a government relations job in a major firm. They're ready to run campaigns of a student who just joined the new governor's office in New Jersey, a wonderful student. I have students, the ones I mentioned before, who work in Albany for the committees, doing very sophisticated analysis. So please do get in touch because one of my goals is to make sure that any student who wishes to go into public service has the tools and the knowledge and the confidence and the role models to make it work. And then another goal is to help students who might be tempted to go the private sector path. I mean, there's nothing wrong with the private sector, but students who feel that that's the only path forward for all sorts of reasons, I want to open their field of view and have them understand that there's more possibilities. You can serve in government or most likely, you can have a career that combines both private service and public service. So, for example, yesterday, a young woman who had worked for me 17 years ago who was very, very senior in Michigan State government and then very senior in the Biden administration, when she's in private practice, she was at McKinsey. Now she's at a new firm. And then when she was in a public service, she was in these jobs. And so she gave a really inspiring talk to my students and explained the career choices she made and the strategies and it, it, it was great. It was great. So please, if you're an alum, please get in touch. You will be very impressed with my students. They're super inspiring. And it's also just fun to meet young people. I just want to reiterate, legislators love meeting with my students because they they they find it's inspiring to see people who really believe in democracy and really care and really work very hard to make the world better. Gotcha. I meet a lot of students over the years. At what point should they sign up for the class? Sure, thank you. So the. Class is open to 3rd and fourth years of any school, any major here at Cornell, we're hosted in the Brooks School. And so of course I have many public policy students, but I also have students from all over the university. One of my best students is a plant scientist and that knowledge that she as is extremely useful for our environmental algal balloon project, right. So only 34th years. And then of course I have MPA students in Brooks. We have an application process. We have a series of questions that we ask students in April around the time of pre registration. And we have an open house where we informational session where students talk about their experience. The clinic is not for the faint hearted. It is a tremendous amount of work. So it's important that students not try to sign up unless they know that they can clear out the time in their schedule and the students that share their experiences. And then there's a time in that process where I actually leave the room so that the students can speak to their peers very candidly about how much work the clinic is. And then it's unfortunately, it is competitive. So last year we had three applicants for every spot and we took 30 students. We're trying to raise money, as you can imagine, to hire another fellow so that we can expand the class so that we don't have to turn away so many students. Students, I can assure you that the students that I had to turn away were wonderful students who I would love to have in the clinic. So there is a resource constraint issue. But yes, we will start to advertise in April and then there's a sign up process then. And do they usually? Come in like knowing which issues they want to advocate for sure, Yes. So they come in often having a broad area of interest like criminal justice or the environment, but then we tell them which 20 projects we have. We run about 20 projects a year with about 20 or 25 stakeholders. And then we have an elaborate spreadsheet system where we try to match people with their interest. We cannot, of course, guarantee it, but we do have a rule that no one is ever asked to work on a project with which they have a philosophical or a personal objection, right? And that's really important because I would never ask a student to put their blood, sweat, and tears into a project that they did not feel good about. And that's usually no problem at all to accommodate those desires. And it usually works out that people have one project that is in their core of each. Each team has a three, three or four projects and then a few projects that were not their first choice but that they end up reporting they're glad to learn about. Even if a student, for example, knows that they're going to go into hospital administration, it still can be very helpful for them to learn about a good governance issue or an environmental issue just for exposure and breadth. What was your? Personal path to this kind of work? Sure. Thank you for. Asking So I'm a lawyer. I spent many years in private

[36:39] how Alexandra got into state policy advocacypractice at large corporate law firms and then clerking for a judge on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals and then working for various nonprofits, mostly in the field of immigration, immigration, immigrants rights, and also children's rights. As part of that, I did a lot of policy advocacy, and I have to say that the idea came from one of my mentors, Shelly Jabal, who runs the Legislative Advocacy Project of Yale Law School. OK, So when I worked at Connecticut Voices for Children, she was the executive director, she was my boss, and then when she was at the law school, connected Voices for Children were the client of the legislative advocacy process. So I saw this from the client perspective. Lots of years past. I went to Zurich and started a human rights clinic there at one of the Swiss schools. And throughout my career I've had a lot of experiences. I put the different ideas together. I've always loved working with undergrads. I've been teaching undergraduates even when I had other jobs at Gale and then in Switzerland, Boston College, other places throughout my whole career. And because I was teaching undergrads, I was very aware of what they could do. And I think I saw a niche or an unmet market, if you will, a place in the market that other people necessarily didn't necessarily see. And that is that an upper class person, a junior or senior or recent grad is capable of doing professional level political advocacy and work. And so all those experiences came together that when my spouse and I were coming back to the United States with our family and on the market, I was able to pitch the idea of to the new Brooks School of Public Policy. And I was really, really, really blessed in that it was a new school. The Deans had a very entrepreneurial, creative, open mindset, and then Dean Maria Fitzpatrick saw the value of the idea and took a chance on it. And so I'm just really grateful that that happened. It's super, super excited. And it's my goal to, you know, pay Brooks and Cornell back handsomely for they're taking a chance on me because it turns out I wasn't sure when I pitched the idea, but I am confident now. The model actually really works. It really works, actually even better than I had hoped. So that's many different mentors through a very long and diverse career contributing to finally crystallizing this idea that is, as we mentioned before, very innovative in the United States. We're the only one who does this right now. That makes sense. And in terms of a scaling across the all the other states as well, like does a handbook need to be updated for each state? Find a fellow for each state? Like what's the process of scaling up? What's the second state for example, that you would go into? Super. Thank you so much. For that. So yes, we are starting a campaign to raise funds for an endowment so that the continue the clinic can continue. As I might have mentioned before Tony, I personally am very, very sick. So I am really interested in making sure that this model that works continues to exist even when I, when I have to retire. And so to expand it, what we would need is more fellows like the Rhodes Scholar that we have right now, because she double S or triples the capacity in the clinic right now. It's really her, me, and then my wonderful undergraduate TA's for a team of 3025 clients, 20 projects. We basically work around the clock, as you can imagine. So I would we're looking for funding for another fellow that can help. And then in terms of scaling to other states, yes, to answer your question, the handbook

[40:11] expanding to more stateswould need to be written individually for each state because the principles are the same. But the strategies and the details of how the government works and sort of the quote tricks of the trades that you only learned through practice are are locality and state specific. Also, some of the political culture and as you can imagine, professional lobbyists hold their cards close to the vest and do not have a professional interest in sharing the secrets of the trade. They want to keep that to themselves. But that's not how we roll. We want to spread information to the people about how democracy works. And so we are looking for partners always in other states who might be able to use our book as a a template and then I'll write their own. Certainly we cannot write the same book 449 other states had he spent, you know, months by student who had the idea as part of her MPA master's thesis. You know, she's off to other big jobs. It's a it was a tremendous amount of work to to write the book. That said, Tony, something I do want to share is I have a dream that my students are going to make recordings of our advocacy trainings and put them on the Internet and make them public to everyone. We've so far, we've done it for stakeholders, for example, a World Health Collaborative coalition to professional coalitions, and we've tailored them. They're bespoke for a special sector, but I would like to make them public to everyone in New York so that if you're a small community, let's say immigrants rights or farm worker rights or whatever small businesses organization, you can go on YouTube and see the tools of the trades. That's a dream that I have. I think we will realize that dream. And then in terms of spreading the idea, I'm trying to meet as many people in other states as possible, write about the idea of the clinic, write op eds. Thank you for inviting us to this podcast. We're trying to spread the love like I am, not proprietary. I think Brooks has the confidence that it took the risk first. It can afford to spread the idea because we have the confidence that we do it really well in Brooks. So yes, the more the more people are interested in running a clinic like this in other states, please just get in touch. We need more, not less. As I always say in the clinic, this is a certain mantras that the students all know, they all have memorized. You know, you could play bingo or a drinking game based on the things that I say. And one of them is there's enough pie for everyone. There's always enough pie. And if there isn't enough pie, we'll just make more pie. There's always enough in public service. No one needs to be competitive and no one needs to gatekeep. No one needs to be territorial. No, we need more engagement in democracy. We're not competing with anyone. There's always enough pie. How will it go? Like after you create like the content like is it like Evergreen? Like you have to update every election cycle like every two years the assembly changes, you have to update it every two years. What's like long term Evergreen? That's a great question. The Advocacy Handbook is Evergreen in that the structures of how New York works are consistent. However, it's not Evergreen to the extent that we're always learning and we're always optimizing and learning more nuance because through these trainings that we give, we learn from the community what they've seen in their experiences. And that's how it goes. The ideal is we'll train you, but in exchange, you got to talk to us. You need to share your experiences out so that the learning goes both ways. And every time we talk with a legislator or someone visits our class or we meet with a stakeholder, we're all taking notes and saying, gosh, I, I knew maybe 80% of what that person said, but I didn't know that detail. And then say, how do you keep notes? Go change the book. So how do you, our wonderful fellow, we'll keep updating it every year or so, but that's not necessarily because the information has changed so much is that we're getting better and better at our game and iterating and just making the handbook better. However, I will give you an example of a product that we're very proud of that will need to be updated. So, for example, Hattie and the students who are on the immigration team just released a series of very, very detailed maps. It's one map, but then when you click on it, it's actually like 20 maps where you can go to any locality in New York State and click on it and see all of the different immigration policies sliced very thinly across all sorts of dimensions. There's a famous saying that all politics is local. And even though one tends to think of immigration policy as being federal, in reality there's a very interesting and intricate and nuanced and complicated interaction between the federal laws and then what States and localities actually have the freedom to do. This is an issue, of course, we're seeing at the nation. I think everyone knows we're seeing these issues in the news all the time. And so, for example, that map is very resource intensive. It was very resource intensive for Hattie and issues to create because it will become obsolete in three or four months, you know, every time one of the many, many jurisdictions within New York changes its policy. So some of our researchers, like resources like that do need to be updated. And that's an obligation that we take very seriously. And that's another reason we're trying so hard to raise money because one day, you know, you can't keep a Rhodes scholar like Hattie forever. She needs to go on and have her whole huge brilliant career. I will need to have the resources to hire someone else in their in their 20s who is a good fit for that, for that job. So for the closing. Question I always ask for the guest What's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you?

[45:49] closing questionWow, that is. Such a great question. As I mentioned before, I'm quite sick. I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer right before the fall semester started and I'm feeling quite well now thanks to my doctors. But at that time, I just come out of the hospital and I was truly ill. I had trouble breathing, trouble walking. I couldn't make it up the stairs. I couldn't finish a sentence. I had to miss part of the first class because I had an appointment with a specialist in New York City and I could not reschedule that. OK. I was devastated emotionally. I love the clinic. I love class. And as any professor knows, the first class is super important because you set the culture and the expectations and you don't want to let your students down on the first day. So I was really frankly distraught. And then I had an idea. So one of the best things about the clinic is our alumni. And I'm still very close with all the students in the prior classes, including other students I've taught in big lecture classes. And I had a wonderful TA who works as a communication director now in Ithaca for our locally a local assembly member. So I trained her. Now she works as the communications director. Not bad for a 22 year old. I invited her back to class. And then I invited a TA who's at Harvard Law School and who was a wonderful TA back. And he came up on the bus from New York City right before his classes were going to start. He came up for the bus. Both those Tasmania and then my Tasmania who were on campus came in and taught the class for me. They did a wonderful job and that was really, really kind. It meant a lot to me. And the other beautiful thing about it is I know that had those two students not been free, there were about 20 other students anywhere on the East Coast that I could have called up and they would have hopped on a bus or driven over the night to come and teach my class for me. And that was very kind and it meant so much to me that I could be vulnerable and have, you know, a quote, weakness, but that I had trained and worked with people who are in the prime of their youth. They're very strong, they have energy. And that they wouldn't even think a minute before traveling to come up to give an hour, an hour, hour talk. So I think that's my answer for the kindest thing. That's so wonderful. Thanks so much for sharing.