About this episode

In this conversation, we explore the distinction between “fixing” people’s mental health and building systems and institutions that don’t cause harm in the first place. We are joined by Wizdom Powell, a psychologist, tenured professor, and nationally recognized expert on racial trauma, healing, and health equity. She is now the chief purpose officer of Headspace, the provider of the world’s most accessible, comprehensive digital mental health platform. We peel back the curtain on Black masculinity and medical distrust and get into the heart of what’s needed to create more equitable health care systems. In this episode, we reestablish that evidence is more than just data on a page, it’s lived experience too. 
 

Interviewer

Kimberlyn Leary, Executive Vice President, Urban Institute

Guest

Wizdom Powell, Chief Purpose Officer, Headspace

Transcript

Sarah Rosen Wartell, cohost:
Welcome to Evidence in Action, a podcast from the Urban Institute. I’m your cohost, Sarah Rosen Wartell. I have the honor of being Urban’s president.

Kimberlyn Leary, cohost:
And I’m your cohost, Kimberlyn Leary, executive vice president of the Urban Institute.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
In this podcast, Kim and I are going to explore the role of evidence, what it is, who makes it, who can use it, who should be using it, and how it can help us to shape policy and achieve better social, economic, and environmental outcomes.

Kimberlyn Leary:
And on every episode, we’ll be joined by a brilliant guest ranging from federal policymakers, local leaders, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, and those who meet community needs.

Sarah Rosen Wartell:
We’ll be asking them how they use facts, data, and evidence to improve lives and strengthen communities, and also about the limits of these tools in today’s complicated world.

Kimberlyn Leary:
On today’s show, I’m speaking with Dr. Wizdom Powell, a psychologist, tenured professor, and nationally recognized expert on racial trauma, healing, and health equity. She’s also taken on a new role recently and is now the chief purpose officer of Headspace, the provider of the world’s most accessible, comprehensive digital mental health platform.

Dr. Powell’s research expertise rests on investigating psychological and social factors influencing the mental health and physical health of African American men and boys. She investigates male depression, health care utilization, and cancer, and she studies the impact that beliefs about masculinity and socioeconomic factors have on the health, behavioral health, risk-taking, and help-seeking choices that men make. Dr. Powell was a tenured associate professor of psychiatry and the director of the University of Connecticut’s Health Disparities Institute. She currently serves as a chair of the American Psychological Association’s task force on the health disparities of boys and men. And she is a cochair of the health committee for president Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative. Wizdom and I also go way back—we started our careers together at the University of Michigan. And so welcome to the show, Wizdom.

Wizdom Powell, guest:
Thank you so much for having me, Kim.

Kimberlyn Leary:
You have worked in multiple sectors throughout your career, from senior levels of government, to sponsoring state-level policy for mental health, to working in the community, and now, you’re working in the private sector. Tell us about that combination of activities, how did that come to be and what’s different as you move from sector to sector?

Wizdom Powell:
It’s interesting that this journey that I’ve been on was absolutely not planned. The adage that you go where you feel you’ll be most needed and where you can have the most impact is probably the way I would characterize the ordering of my footsteps on this journey. And so I started my career in academia, really intent on elevating the discourse around male health disparities because, at that time, what I was observing was this continued pattern of men dying earlier than women across populations and around the globe despite having more socioeconomic advantage than women, on average that is. And I was curious about this pattern of outcomes, but I was also called to the space because of a very personal experience in my own family. My grandfather, my maternal grandfather, passed away prematurely from a cancer that we know was preventable—in fact, I believe, was probably the culmination of many lived experiences.

My grandfather had the unfortunate circumstance of having to flee from Alabama in the middle of the night to escape a potential lynching. And in so doing, had to leave behind his family, his connections to his community, and a lot of his identity. Of course, like many men of his generation, he kept those experiences really close to his vest. He was strong, stoic, and silent. And at the age of 53, my grandfather passed away.

And so it became clear to me that our bodies keep score. Male bodies in particular keep score because they’re taught to take stress like a man, to move through life with this relentless and unmitigated sense of self-reliance. And I got curious about what would happen if we were to help men to reimagine what it means to be a man in the world and to reframe their health-seeking choices as an opportunity to be around for the families, the women, the girls, the children that I know that they hold dear.

Kimberlyn Leary:
First of all, let me say that your grandfather’s story is, I know, a powerful story for your family, but it’s also a powerful story for the nation, the way in which health and history have come together for Black men and Black boys experiencing the kind of challenges that you’ve described. Throughout your career, you’ve had an extensive focus on the mental health of African American boys and men, and you’ve been able to shed light, important light on the health challenges that reduce longevity.

Wizdom Powell:
So I started out in the academy really ambitiously wanting to do all the things that we are taught to do on the tenure track: writing papers, getting grants, doing all of the work that, I think, speaks to this desire in me to explore the curiosities that exist in me, to meet those curiosities with scientific rigor. And then, as it would happen to many of us who have a desire to do more than just pontificate about these challenges, I started to hit this wall where I was seeing a lot of evidence being produced, but it wasn’t being followed up with practical action. And I wanted to expand both the aperture through which we view solutions for wicked population-health problems, but I also wanted to do something about them. And so I moved on to the University of Connecticut, where I was able to lead these really innovative statewide health equity initiatives, bringing arts together with health equity to center the voices of community, to meet them at their highest intentions for radical healing, but more importantly, to present a set of solutions that were culturally responsive, sensitive, and humble.

And that was exciting work. I got to do that work, and it really spoke to that part of me that was like, raring to go, raring to get into a more action-oriented position. And yet even at that point, I started to see that there was a gap in the capacity of public-sector institutions to do things with rapidity and at scale. And so enters Headspace, with this amazing opportunity to take what I had learned in science and in policy and really to integrate that into the products, content, and solutions that we are developing to improve the health and happiness of the world.

Kimberlyn Leary:
So you were a White House fellow earlier in your career in the Department of Defense under Secretary Panetta, and you have also worked directly in communities where you’ve held conversations with men and boys. What are some of the beliefs that the culture at large has about masculinity and Black masculinity in particular, and how does that affect the culture around help seeking and the choices that boys and men make?

Wizdom Powell:
I really love this question because I think one of the largest misconceptions, and I think something that disrupts our radical imagination when it comes to planning and developing solutions to improve men’s health, is this perception, if you will, that men and boys are operating in ways that suggest that masculinities are static, like this belief that men and boys are hardwired, if you will, to be strong, stoic, and silent, and that those ways of being are immutable. And what I have come to understand more and more as I do this work is that it’s not necessarily just that men and boys hold tightly to these rigid cultural standards, it’s that we sanction them when they don’t. And so there is a way in which the world and society is a little bit complicit in sustaining this sort of rigid way of being that can disrupt men’s tendency to seek help when they’re in trouble.

We teach boys and men to walk it off, take it like a man—visit any playground, Anywhere, USA, and watch a young boy fall down and watch the responses of those around him who will tell him, “Shake it off, be a big man.” And I think, while those may seem like innocuous scripts or schemas, they can actually be integrated and embraced in a way that, over a male life course, can set up this sort of barrier, if you will, for men and boys to seek help. And I think that reimagining the ways in which boys are taught to be in the world could be a clear first step that we could take to upend some of the patterns of resisting help seeking that we see.

The other thing that is really important to think about when it comes to the health of men and boys is that, and particularly Black men and boys, is this notion of mistrust, which I think is largely misunderstood because we treat mistrust similarly as solely an attitudinal barrier when, in fact, we know that mistrust in Black, brown, Indigenous populations are grounded in a really unfortunate set of historical realities, and largely ones that point to a history of medical malice and maltreatment, the weaponization of mental health systems, and particularly during periods of high protest. In the 1960s, one of my really dear friends, Dr. Jonathan Metzl has a book called The Protest Psychosis, and in that book, he talks about high rates of schizophrenia during the 1960s being an outgrowth of systems trying to sort of control the men at that time who were outspoken about injustice.

So the point I want to make here is that it isn’t just that men are thinking that they shouldn’t seek help or they’ll appear “weak.” It’s that systems haven’t even risen up to meet men, even when they have desired to seek help. And when some populations have raised their hand and said, “I need support,” they’ve been met with systems that weaponize that vulnerability and ways that militate against the trustworthiness that they put in systems. So I think there’s a lot to unpack here for men and boys that isn’t just about teaching men to see their masculinities differently. It’s about creating a world in which men and boys can heal, grow, and thrive and have access to a radical permission to display a range of their humanity and their emotional and interior lives.

Kimberlyn Leary:
I think you have just underscored something so crucial. We tend to think of health, or it’s easy to think of health as though it’s just an individual set of behaviors that you go to the doctor or you don’t, or you take time off from work if you have sick leave or you don’t. But you’re really helping us to realize that when we think about health, that there are messages that the community is delivering and that we are part of the challenge, all of us who live in community, and we can be part of the solution.

Let me take you to another historical moment. You’ve been telling us about the critical importance of historical evidence, and we are a think tank, the Urban Institute, that focuses on evidence, economic policy, social policy. But you’re reminding us of how critical it is to think about history. So recent history for all of us is the COVID pandemic. That doesn’t mean COVID isn’t still with us, but the moment when there was a collective focus on mental health, especially among youth, and we see some of that continuing right now, as we recognize the high rates of anxiety and depression among kids and young people. What are some of the most crucial gaps in access to care that you and your colleagues have identified through research, through community conversations?

Wizdom Powell:
Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that we know, and we’re tracking this as a nation, is that the mental health workforce is woefully undersupplied. And that lack of an adequate mental health care workforce has real implications for every human, but particularly for populations that have been at the margins of our systems for so long. And what that means is that there’s a lack of providers who can deliver culturally responsive care and that the care that men and boys in communities that are more vulnerable receive are often not high quality. It’s not speaking to the specific wounds that Black men and boys, and men who again, come from vulnerable communities may be facing. For example, we, still, in our Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—

Kimberlyn Leary:
That’s the DSM, right?

Wizdom Powell:
Yes, the DSM. We do not have a clear designation or even recognition of the potential for exposures like racism-related stress to produce trauma-like symptoms. And we don’t recognize those exposures as potentially traumatogenic, even though we know that when we look at the data, the key catalyst for depression, anxiety, and other negative behavioral health outcomes in men is exposure to racism-related stress. And so I think we have a structural challenge here, not just a help-seeking or an attitudinal challenge. It isn’t Black men resisting care, it’s the lack of culturally responsive, inclusive care that really is high quality, that speaks to the unique wounds that Black men and boys may carry or be negotiating or metabolizing. And we just don’t have enough providers in our ecosystem to meet the demand.

What we saw during COVID-19 was the emergence of a shadowing mental health pandemic at the very same time, as you have already lifted up. What’s also troubling, and should be troubling to us all, is that during that same period, Black men lost several years in life-expectancy gains. And Black men in our nation still live the shortest lives relative to all other humans. And any loss in the gains in life expectancy set us back, not just years—decades. So I think we have to think about the systems that we wrap around Black men, particularly those that are designed to address their mental and behavioral health needs because it has significant population health risks.

When we lose men sooner than we should, we lose the potential talent, the innovations that they can bring to our nation, and we lose our competitive edge. And I think that should keep us all up at night and have us deeply invested in addressing the systems that we need to put into place to ensure that Black men who want to get mental health care, who are courageous enough to raise their hand and rail against those rigid masculinity standards, when they say, “I need help,” we should be ready to meet them at that intention.

Kimberlyn Leary:
And I know that the mental health workforce challenges are not only real and compelling and very much connected to, really, the strength and health of our nation. I also know that it’s a long-term challenge and that to open the pipeline to provide the kind of financial support for people to enter into the behavioral health workforce, that those are multisectoral challenges that will and need to be addressed over time. Now, what you’ve done at Headspace, it strikes me, is develop an adjacency to the mental health workforce.

So I’d love to hear about how the platform hopes to influence the experience of men and boys, even as we have this workforce crisis.

Wizdom Powell:
I mean, you’ve really hit the proverbial nail on the head, and that is that we’re not going to solve America’s mental health crisis with brick-and-mortar care structures. And that would be wonderful if we could have adequate mental health care providers in every community, in every space where there’s a care desert or a vacuum, if you will, in care provision. But that’s just not where we are, and I don’t see that being where we’re going to end up. And so the fact that digital health companies have entered the conversation and have provided a suite of solutions that allow individuals to get care in the moment when they need it most without having to navigate these more complicated structures is, I think, a way to address this challenge, and I think Headspace is stepping into that space in a mighty way.

What we are hoping that we can provide to folks is not just a single-point solution, but an opportunity for folks to get the kind of care that is tailored to where they are on their lifelong mental health journey. In our platform suite of services, we offer self-guided meditation and mindfulness, which we know science proves can significantly reduce anxiety and depression and can really be a bridge for many people to other forms, higher-acuity levels of care. But we also offer coaching because we recognize that not every challenge that we’re facing emotionally requires therapy. Sometimes a person just needs a coach to help walk with them, partner with them around a set of defined and circumscribe goals. And then if you need it, we also have an opportunity for you in the same suite of services, continuum of care to step up to psychiatry services or psychology services, and that kind of continuum of care that is easily to access, that’s affordable and that’s high quality is what we are focused on bringing to the marketplace at Headspace.

Kimberlyn Leary:
That’s terrific. I’m going to ask you another couple questions about Headspace and digital care in just a moment, but I want to go back to the mental health system. The great Paul Farmer talked about accompaniment and the importance of looking at systems and preferentially reconfiguring them for those that need care when they need it, and your work is very much in that same spirit. But what we know right now that Black and Latinx youth, in particular, Native American youth as well, initiate health care at approximately half the rate of white youth. If you could, what three interventions would you ask systems and practitioners to take on to close the equity gap?

Wizdom Powell:
So I think the first thing we have to understand is that folks want to come into systems that see them whole. And what young people, as we listen to folks both in the UK and in the US through a series of listening sessions, what we’re hearing most is that young people, first of all, say, “Stop fixing us, fix yourself. Fix the structure, fix the systems.” They are very aware that their mental health isn’t just about them feeling better but living in communities that have therapeutic landscapes, communities where there’s safety, where there is access to high-quality education, where their transportation and housing, unmet needs are bridged. Young people see that void in the ways that we provide care. So I think the first thing in introducing mental health services to communities that may not have as much experience with or interest in navigating formal systems is to devise culturally relevant on-ramps into the system of mental health care that warm the water.

And so at Headspace, one of the things we’re doing, and we have a partnership with the City of Hartford, and this is the first of our public-private partnerships that we’ve ever erected as a health care entity. And what we’ve done is partner with the city of Hartford’s mayor to provide access to anyone who lives, works, or gets educated in the city of Hartford.

And to ignite that movement, we held a fishbowl dialogue with young people who are at the center of that intervention to ask them, “What do we need to do to speak to your wounds?” And what we heard from them is that, “We want to be introduced to mental health in language that we can appreciate. We don’t want to talk about ourselves as problems to be solved.” And as I’ve always said, young people aren’t problems to be solved, they’re wonders to behold. And what young people told us is that they want to be able to access these resources both in digital spaces, but they also want to be able to have brick-and-mortar places to go where they can congregate and talk about some of the challenges that they’re having in their communities, in their schools, and society that disrupt their mental well-being.

So I think that the solutions have to be multifactorial. I think that we cannot therapize our way out of this challenge, that what we have to do is really create therapeutic landscapes around young people, create the kinds of schools and communities in which young people can heal, grow, and thrive. And that means that private-sector entities like ours have to bridge that digital-community gap so that we are not just dropping interventions from the sky to young people, but we’re engaging them as codesigners in their experience. Another thing that I would highly advocate for, we often bring young people to the table after we already have the thing designed in our minds or we’ve figured out a set of steps we’re going to take, and then we say, “Hey, come over to this table, and how does this look?” Rather than starting with them on day one as codesigners, as covisioneers in their own outcomes. And I think when you start with young people, build it with them, they’ll come.

Kimberlyn Leary:
I think that is such an important message that young people have lived experience that is expertise. They can join us in a conversation that leads to better products, better on-ramps, and give us a perspective on the very systems that we want to be welcoming to young people and too often are not.

As we think about digital platforms and data, which is, as we think of it sometimes, an entry point to equity, thinking about data, thinking about stakeholder engagement and reducing what’s called administrative burden, all of those things seem to very much figure into the work that you’re doing. But right now, there’s a lot of talk about artificial intelligence, generative AI, and I’m wondering if you can share any thoughts that you and your team have about generative AI in particular and the role it will have in the next generation of mental health tools. What can we expect?

Wizdom Powell:
I have to be honest here, Kim, and say that I was one of those folks when AI conversations first began in mental health spaces who was highly resistant to its integration because of the sense that I had that it may somehow change the quality of the human interaction, it will remove some of that element of warmth that we know is critical to developing strong therapeutic alliances. And the more I’ve educated myself and been more at the center of this at Headspace, the more I can see its potential, but not without some caveats. The caveat I would call out the most is around the equitability of AI solutions. And a caution for us all is something that we’re talking about at Headspace around algorithmic biases and making sure that what we design isn’t, the inputs for those designs, aren’t just extensions of some of the biases that have kept us bound up in inequities in our health care system all along.

And these aren’t small challenges. I think we really have to be careful about the potential for scaling inequity, scaling bias, because the rapidity of technological solutions means that once you program something into open AI and a person taps into ChatGPT, “Tell me why racial biases affect mental health,” the responses that come out of that need to be grounded in a holistic science and not a revisionist version of our history. And that’s really critical to ensuring that these AI systems that we’re using to integrate into clinical care are going to be inclusive, that they’re going to be equity focused, and that again, that they’re going to contribute to dismantling racial disparities and not contributing to exacerbating them. And that’s the danger with any technology. At Headspace, we’re doing the work to better understand the ecosystem. We are partnering with thought leaders to ensure that the algorithms that we’re laddering into our product content and services are ones that reflect an inclusivity that we hope to see in the world, and particularly in mental health care.

But those are real threats to health care provision at this stage that I don’t think just exist for Headspace, and they certainly don’t just exist for mental health care because increasingly we’re using AI for quick, clinical decisionmaking, for coaching and all kinds of care delivery modalities, and making sure that those inputs are equitable are critical in this moment. And so to me, that means we need to be thinking about how do we diversify the digital tech space so that we have more developers who are grounded in an understanding of racial injustice or of inequity and of casteism, which can affect the way that we shape our products, content, and services.

Kimberlyn Leary:
A really critical set of conversations, and we at the Urban Institute really share the framing on both the potential and some of the challenges. Our Racial Equity Analytics Lab, REAL we call it, and our Office of Race and Equity Research and colleagues throughout the Urban Institute are actively considering algorithms used, as you mentioned, for a number of different systems, including valuation models for real estate. Our colleague, Michael Neal has led important work in that area. So I think you’re saying that there’s opportunity here, but we also have to make sure that we just don’t replicate and promulgate the same biases at hand into these new systems ahead or current systems because ChatGPT has taken the world by storm.

Let me ask you another question about racial equity and underserved communities. I know your area of expertise is Black men and boys, but increasingly, we’re thinking about all the communities that have been underserved by too many of our systems, including rural populations and people with disabilities. And I remember my work in the Obama administration, the data that told us that with respect to school expulsion and school discipline, Black girls with disabilities were among those most affected by exclusionary school discipline. So when we think about underserved communities, from rural communities to persons with disabilities, what is Headspace thinking about mental health care at the last mile? And how can tools and platforms like Headspace make mental health care more accessible to people with disabilities, to those in rural areas that may not have broadband access and to even older persons who also are not receiving the mental health care that they need?

Wizdom Powell:
Well, there are a number of ways in which we’re taking all of those into consideration as we design. One of the first things I did as a consultant at Headspace, which is how I started there, was to help the organization design principles for inclusive product content and services development. And through this really structured process, we cultivated a set of principles that every designer uses, that—we actually created these tarot cards that sit on the desk of designers, and they say things like, “We design to disrupt single stories.” And then on the back of that tarot card, there are a set of guidelines that designers can use or reflect upon as they’re building the product content and services. That was important because we wanted to ensure that every single person who touches a product or content or care services model at Headspace understands what these principles are, how to tactically integrate them, and that there’s a shared sense of accountability on ensuring that our inclusivity standards are high.

We also have recently gotten one of the highest ratings from the Disability Equality Index around both our workplace practices, but high accessibility standards of our products, content, and services. So that is a key design feature that we pride ourselves in, making sure that we take into account a range of abilities that exist among our current and prospective users. Our decision to expand our solution set to include the stepped-up care options was done exactly to address some of the challenges that you just mentioned. We understood that we were world-class in terms of our mindfulness and meditation content, but we also understood that people in rural communities and those who are living in geos where there are care deserts really needed to have access to a fuller solution set because for them, there may not be no brick-and-mortar clinical facility within 50 miles. And so that was a key motivation for us in developing a more fused product solution.

For that group of people, we’re addressing the challenges in a couple of ways, not just through what we do in terms of our product design, but in terms of what we advocate for in our policy and legislative affairs side of the house. So we are partnering with folks like The Kennedy Forum through their school-based mental health industry council in particular, to think about schools in rural communities and what we can do to align resources for those folks.

I think you’re hitting the nail on the head in terms of that the aperture in which we think about inequity needs to be broadened. It isn’t just about racial inequities. Those inequities often intersect with other layers of vulnerability, like ability, status, as you mentioned, Black girls who have disabilities, who are living with disabilities being more likely to have these outcomes that you mentioned. So I think that intersectional lens is always front and center, and we’re thinking about place, we’re thinking about how place and product intersect, and we’re thinking about how do we ensure that every single person, no matter where they live, work, play, pray, or get educated, has access to a mental health care solution that meets them where they are.

Kimberlyn Leary:
I think you’ve just told us what it means to be a chief purpose officer, and I appreciate a look behind the scenes at how your designers think about the platform and what they’re trying to achieve. It’s been such a pleasure to be in conversation with you Wizdom, and we always end our interviews on this podcast by asking our guests about their most favorite example of where high-quality evidence has informed a choice that resulted in making people’s lives better. Can you give me your favorite example of evidence in action?

Wizdom Powell:
So I would go back to some evidence that I started to generate at the very beginning of my career that sort of became a little bit of a claim to fame. That was the research around medical mistrust. As you know, I testified before the president’s cancer panel around trust in minority populations, and that information informed our national strategies for how we were going to upend race-related cancer disparities. And what that evidence revealed to us, again, many of us who are closer to these challenges understood this anecdotally, but it was great to be able to build or contribute to the evidence base that helped us better understand it.

So a long-standing folklore in health care and population health has been that Black folk, particularly Black men, were less likely to seek help for their health problems because they had this mistrust that was connected to the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis among the Negro Male. While that egregious medical harm is prominent in the imaginations of many folk, when we really started to investigate the correlates or the antecedents of medical mistrust in Black men, what we came to understand is that it wasn’t distal factors in the past that were shaping Black men’s decisions, but things that were happening to them more proximally.

Kimberlyn Leary:
In the present.

Wizdom Powell:
In the present, in the present. In fact, we learned that Black men who have had more experiences, everyday experiences with slights and bias and microaggressions were less likely to trust health systems. Holding constant health insurance status, other attitudinal beliefs, it was the fact that yesterday, someone treated them as if their humanity was undervalued, and so they rationally assumed that a system that takes care of their whole body might do the same. And we also learned that if we, among the same population of men, that when they reported experiences that were “patient centered,” those experiences that communicated high respect, that were warm, that were inviting, and where men felt like they had a degree of autonomy, or a partnership even, in their health care and the decisions that were made about their health care, these men were more likely to trust medical systems and to forgo that to seek health care.

So it meant that medical mistrust, despite what we’ve been talking about, isn’t an immutable. That as Kramer, one of our premier theorists has taught us, trust thickens and thins as people transact with systems. It is not a state, it is the result of a more dynamic processes. And I think that helped us reengineer solutions that weren’t about, “Let’s change their mistrust,” but, “Let’s create trustworthy systems.” And that, to me, was an evolution in the science that really promoted more action around systems’ redesign that were gender responsive for Black men and other men of color who found themselves operating at the margins of health systems.

Kimberlyn Leary:
I can’t wait to introduce you to some of my colleagues at Urban’s Health Policy Center, including Dr. Brian Smedley, who I imagine you know already, who is looking into the landmark studies of health disparities and where we are now 20 years later, which unfortunately isn’t as far as we would like to be.

So Wizdom, thank you so much for joining us today on the show and for helping us to think about the importance of history as evidence and to index what goes on in individuals’ hearts and minds with the systems in which they live, work, and pray and get health care, and reminding us that it is our collective job to think about how we can ensure that we do have that warm pathway in, and that when we’re engaging with people, that we are thinking about the whole person and with such respect for the expertise that they also have about their own health care and their own lived experience.

Thank you so much, Wizdom, for being on the show. And thank you for joining us this season on Evidence in Action as we’ve had conversations about important ways to drive change with our talented and captivating guests. If you’d like to learn more about us, go to our website at urban.org. And you can listen to all of our episodes from this season and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you listen to your podcasts.