>> JORDYN JENSEN: All right. We'll go ahead and get started. Hi, everyone. My name is Jordyn Jensen. I am the executive director of the Center for Racial and Disability Justice, or CRDJ at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. I'm going to be moderating this panel today. But before we get started, I will give a quick image description for access purposes. I am a White woman with brown hair that is pulled back and I'm wearing clear rimmed glasses and a black sweater. I'm honored to welcome you all
to this virtual panel on the politics of psychiatric institutionalization, Before we fully dive in I'd like to take a step back and provide some brief historical context. So historically, people with disabilities, including people with psychiatric disabilities, were locked away in what was often known as asylums. These asylums or institutions quickly became overcrowded. People were treated inhumanely. And by the mid 1900s, over half a million people were locked away in psychiatric institutions,
The deinstitutionalization movement began in the mid 1950s due to several factors, including the exposed reality of the horrible conditions of these institutions. The deinstitutionalization movement focused on moving people out of these institutions and into the community while increasing community based mental health support and services. So the goal of this panel is to discuss reinstitutionalization under the guise of recent policy efforts across the United States to force and coerce people w
ith psychiatric disabilities and unhoused folks into treatment and hospitalization. I'm joined in conversation today with some incredible people who are doing work on the ground and who see the impacts of these harmful policies and plans. I'm joined by Luke Sikinyi director of public policy at the Alliance for Rights and Recovery. Andrea Wagner managing member at Lavoy Wagner, LLC and formerly the executive director of the California Association of Mental Health Peer Run Organizations. And last
but not least Stefen Short Supervising Attorney and director of the Prisoners Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society. This panel will run till about one or two for our East Coast folks, and then we'll use the last 10 to 15 minutes for a short Q&A. And during that time, we will invite attendees to post questions inthe Q&A section on Zoom. So before we dive into this conversation, I'd love for our panelists to introduce themselves and provide a brief image description. Anyone want to kick it off?
>> ANDREA WAGNER: I guess I can go. Hi everyone. As she said, I'm Andrea Wagner. Former Director, CAMHPRO and currently I live in western New York, but I really am a native Californian and spent the last nine years working in the mental health system in California and doing research and on the ground sort of qualitative research as well. And so thank you for having me. >> LUKE SIKINYI: I am Luke Sikinyi, as mentioned before, I'm a Black man with a beard and white shirt and a blue blazer on righ
t now. A little bit about me I am first and foremost a person in mental health recovery and that is part of what really began my journey within the mental health and advocacy field. I work with the Alliance for Rights and Recovery, but prior to that I did a number of years doing direct service work for people with serious mental health challenges, as well as substance use challenges here in New York State as well as in Maryland for some time and have a background in some research, but really foc
used on translating research and other data into policy measures to support people more holistically and more person centered service delivery. >> STEFEN SHORT: Thank you and good afternoon, everybody. My name is Stefen Short. I'm a supervising attorney with the Prisoners Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society of New York City. Use he/him pronouns. And I'm a Black man wearing a yellow turtleneck sweater and glasses. A little bit about our work at PRP. So we've been around for 53 years now. We'r
e primarily a test case impact litigation unit here at Legal Aid, and we primarily focus on jail and prison conditions. So conditions in the jails on Rikers Island and conditions in these state prisons in upstate New York. We litigated a whole bevy of issues from mental health care, medical care, solitary confinement, pure conditions, issues like heating, cooling, ventilation, the sort of name that we've we've attempted to address it over the past 53 years. And our work has also focused on disab
ility rights and disability justice, including litigation on behalf of individuals who are returning to their communities without needed community based mental health, housing and supportive services. We've been involved in litigating class actions on those issues. We've also been involved in lots of policy work. So really looking forward to being in conversation with everyone today. >> JORDYN JENSEN: Thank you all for those awesome introductions. So as I touched on at the start of this panel in
recent years, certain states and cities across the United States, some big examples being New York City and California, but not limited to those two places, have introduced policies to strengthen civil commitment in other means to force people with psychiatric disabilities into, quote unquote, treatment or involuntary hospitalization. So my question my first question for you all is what recent policies or plans have been introduced in your state or city or elsewhere that are contributing to psy
chiatric reinstitutionalization? >> LUKE SIKINYI: All right. I guess I could take a stab at that first here. It's New York state and city have been. Well, I think the first thing to understand is first, you know, I think the whole nation is really struggling with how to support more people as we're coming out of out of COVID pandemic, you know, the sort of height of the pandemic and a lot of service providers either closed shop entirely or were drastically reduced. And so we're kind of really se
eing this reaction to this increased need for mental health services. This increased need for especially housing, really, I think, is the crux of all of this. The lack of housing, the lack of services. We've really let people sort of dive into crisis quite often. And a lot of states, government officials and even providers are struggling to deal with this massive change. And also, you know, dealing with the ramping back up of services that were there before and services that were there before we
ren't even truly adequate then. So you're seeing governments try to create a quick fix. But we know, you know, people who have been working in this space for a long time know that there's no such thing as a quick fix for mental health and substance use crisis specifically. And so we're seeing a lot of governments try to resort to force and the use of involuntary treatment to really address an issue that is more based in social determinants of health that, you know, we need to find these sort of
services that support people at a very basic level, getting these basic needs before you start forcing people into treatment. But here in New York, two things that we have seen that really changed the landscape of involuntary commitment and outpatient commitment has been the changes to the criminal procedure law to make it a little bit easier for folks to be involuntarily removed from the street. It used to be this sort of national standard is if someone is in immediate risk of danger to themsel
ves or others. And what they've done through policy and through guidance around policy is take that standard and say you can interpret that to mean that if someone is at risk of not being able to provide food, shelter and clothing to themselves, that can be considered immediate risk of harm to themselves. And so they're using this sort of mix between mental health challenges, substance use challenges and people who are dealing with homelessness to really try to remove people from the street, kee
p them in institutions. And then for folks who they see as not being connected to treatment services but can't be institutionalized, they are utilizing forced outpatient commitment here in the State, you know, under Kendra's Law in New York State, but often referred to as assisted outpatient treatment or AOT, but really lowering the barrier for how to get into those programs and how to get forced into this these commitments has been the main goal for our state and a lot of other states. And I wi
ll I'll give some other folks some time to speak about that before going in a little further. >> STEFEN SHORT: So maybe it would be helpful if I jump in here again, another New York person with sort of the New York lens. And before I start describing sort of policies and practices that I think are burgeoning and problematic in this area, just to sort of take a step back for a minute, framing my understanding of institutionalization and what institutionalization means. I'm representing people who
are incarcerated and people who really have been institutionalized in one form or another throughout their entire life. Right. Even when they are released from jail pretrial or released after a term of incarceration, they have a target on their back. Their are subjected to state supervision in some form, whether they're being heavily policed or they're on probation or they're on post-release supervision, you know, living under that kind of threat and living with that type of target on your back
is sometimes indistinguishable from pure institutionalization. So what I think of is the term transinstitutionalization. When I think of what my clients are experiencing, my clients are often experiencing that dragnet and then experiencing a term of incarceration in jail and then a term of incarceration in prison and then released to a homeless shelter or released to a transitional living environment or a halfway house or a quarter house. Those are all these types of institutional environments,
whether they're literally living in an institution as defined by law or they're out in the community being surveilled and subjected to state violence. This is some form of transinstitutionalization. So that's a lot of what we see at the PRP. And I'm going to talk about how we've litigated those issues as well. But with that framing around institutionalization, you know, I can discuss some of the institutionalization policies and plans that have been introduced in the city and the state and some
of the plans that have really harmed our clients. Luke was mentioning the policy guidance around Kendra's Law, lowering the bar for you know, AOT lowering the bar for in-patient hospitalization. And I'm sure folks are read about that. Last year when Mayor Adams introduced his dragnet plan right to essentially identify people who the government believes simply can't meet their own needs and shunt them into some form of AOT or inpatient treatment. You know, this relies on a really strained, reall
y, really broad understanding of existing law. And I think the most terrifying thing about this is that a lot of these policy initiatives that are relying on what I believe to be an erroneous reading of the law have been parlayed into statutory proposals at this point. There is a new bill in New York that would actually enshrine this new standard into law that would sort of redefine the way an individual can be involuntarily committed or forced to endure, you know, assisted outpatient treatment.
And that legislation for folks who are interested is called the Supportive Interventions Act. And I'm not going to go into detail about this legislation, but I do want to pull out the framing so that we can talk about the framing right. When Mayor Adams introduced this plan and when the legislators introduced this bill, it was framed as a benevolent initiative, an initiative that recognizes the humanity of people with psychiatric disabilities, an initiative that matches people with psychiatric
disabilities with the services they need to survive and thrive. And that's very dangerous for many reasons, but it's particularly dangerous when you consider the social determinants of health angle that we mentioned earlier. What we are essentially doing is framing some form of institutionalization as the solution to a lack of housing, a lack of services, a lack of food, a lack of basic things that build safe and stable communities and keep people whole. And that framing, if we don't meaningfull
y push back, can really do great damage to the public discourse around what people with disabilities need. So I just wanted to mention that right out of the gate now, there are many other initiatives too, that are that are similar or closely related. One is this initiative that Governor Hochul recently piloted to move the National Guard into the New York City subways. We already know that the New York City subways are overpoliced. The NYPD is all over the place. The National Guard would provide
yet another opportunity for individuals with disabilities to interface with agents of state violence while availing themselves of the public good. And Governor Hochul, when she announced this initiative, she herself said this initiative is essentially an overreaction to aberrational events, an overreaction to really isolated incidents of violence on the subways. And, you know, we're going to talk a little bit later about how these sort of initiatives that are framed more generally, specifically
impact people with disabilities. But we know through data that individuals who most frequently interface with police and interface with other agents of state violence on the subways, there are people with with psychiatric disabilities and people with diagnoses, and that oftentimes manifestations of a diagnosis can be misinterpreted, sometimes intentionally misinterpreted as pure violence by agents of state violence. And that's how, you know, oftentimes our clients end up in jail or end up in som
e other institution. And then there are a couple other initiatives that I want to mention, because there are initiatives that we've worked to litigate at the Legal Aid Society. One one initiative is an initiative that New York State piloted five years ago to hold people with serious mental illness past their release dates in prison because of an unmet need for community based mental health, housing and supportive services. Right. So in brief, the state is responsible for funding our community ba
sed mental health, housing and supportive services system here in New York. The state has underfunded and under-resourced that system for many decades. As a result, people who are being released from prison don't have community based mental health housing to go to upon release. And five years ago, rather than close those funding and resources gaps, the state chose to hold people past their release dates in prison while housing was in development or becoming available. We challenged this through
a class action at Legal Aid. That case has taken on a life of its own, and I'll talk about that a little bit later. But but that's another sort of initiative that is within this category of institutionalization, reinstitutionalization, transit, socialization, folks who are already being institutionalized, having that term of institutionalization prolonged because of a lack of services in the community that is holding the government's thought. And we see this in other areas to people who need som
e other form of services upon release that's not available immediately. They're being prolonged in their confinement and the one other kind of practice I wanted to just briefly mentioned, we call them 730 delays. C Section 730 is a statute by which an individual can be transferred to a hospital or sometimes receive outpatient treatment to restore them to competency so they can continue with a criminal proceeding because of a shortage of beds in the hospitals and a refusal on the part of prosecut
ors to consent to outpatient restoration. Our clients have spent an extended period of time in jail waiting for restoration to begin, and we've worked to litigate that as well at Legal Aid. But that's just another form of transinstitutionalization. Some of these folks shouldn't even be sent to a hospital. They really should be restored in the community. And we've got intransigence on the part of various actors in the process that prevent that. And then we have a lack of resources in the in the m
ental health system that leads to people being held in jails for an extended period. So and there's a lot more going on, but those are some of the initiatives, both policies and practices that that are really causing ballooning institutionalization for our clients and other directly impacted people here in New York. >> LUKE SIKINYI: I just wanted to really harp on what once was something that second said here was really talking about the fact that institutionalization is the product of failure o
f the government to provide these services, the funding for the continuum of services that we know keep people out of institutions. So part of what's really frustrating from our end is you're an advocate and a policy person here is that you see that a lot of funding that could be go into these community services, those areas, you know, housing, other social determinants of health are going to institutions partly to deal with the fact that we're not funding the other things in the first place. So
, you know, we don't fund this community behavioral supports and then we end up having to fund more hospital beds because everyone is ending up in the hospital because there's no other place for them to go. But that also means that that money is staying at the hospital. It's not going into the community and following people after they leave the institution. And oftentimes policy stops short of just the institution, you know, funding the institution. And then it's kind of we're done there, that'l
l be enough. But just really wanted to harp on that as a as a major issue within that, the field at large and all the different institutions that we end up dealing with. >> ANDREA WAGNER: And I appreciate what my colleagues have said and absolutely see that as well. And I think I just like to add to what I've seen in California as well. You know, so I come historically, I come from a lens of working both at a county level and as a statewide peer advocate and myself and my own experience with hos
pitalization and being incarcerated and also working in those same systems. You know, I always say I had the key to the door that I was once locked behind, you know, and that's an actual fact. But and so I came at this from that lens of like, we can do better and sort of have approached it of looking at like, how can we fix policies or change policies to make it better. And what I've seen going on in California is is actually a reversal of of really positive policies that were put in place and n
ow are really quickly being eroded from the top down, which I think is a little bit different than what, you know, I worked really closely with Sally Zimmerman as my mentor and she talked a lot about her first person accounting of of what happened over the last 50 years. And as far as like the progression of deinstitutionalization and what's been happening in policy, especially in California, particularly not, you know. Yeah. And so what what that has shown you know, is is that right now we're s
eeing a change in how these policies are coming down. You know, we've seen over the last, you know, since 2004, the Mental Health Services Act was was passed in California, which is a 1% tax on everyone who makes over $1,000,000. And that pays for now about a third of the mental health system in California. And it has been primarily built it was primarily built within the consumer community to be an alternative source of funding for those alternative community programs that we so wanted and so n
eeded. And that was going to fill in that gap of missing services and an initially, I think that's what it did. But so far over the years, there's been a series of legislations that has eroded that policy, eroded it, and now we have just they've just by a very narrow margin passed Prop 1, which completely dismantles the the Mental Services Act in the way that it was intended and the way it was written and diverts 30% of that funding into strictly housing. So taking money from actual services tha
t maybe even aren't even billable services that are targeted towards marginalized groups, certain communities, counties are now going to have to decide, do I pay for my crisis care services or do I pay for these community services? And mostly they're going to go towards billable services. And so what is going to happen is that 30% chunk is going to come off the backs of those voluntary services and be moved into carceral services. Along with that in that proposition was a bond measure for six th
ings, around $6 billion that is going to be used for and for carceral services. And I say that because initially it was promoted as this bond that was going to pay for community based cottage like voluntary unlocked facilities in the community. And that's the way the administration pushed it from Newsom's administration, Governor Newsom's administration. And then at the very last minute after the door closed for any amendments on that prop on that bond measure that had to go through the legislat
ure first, the very last day after all those doors had closed, the administration came in and added the words involuntary locked to that bond measure so that housing money can be used for hospital beds. And so we've been seeing and I and I bring that up because the way that those bills and those measures are coming is completely different from the way the MHSA came, which was grassroots organizing from the people. This proposition came from the governor himself and his agenda and not was any col
laboration with the stakeholders that were actually involved in the implementation and actually are the recipients of that money. And so it's it's a very different landscape and I it to advocate and when it's the grassroots organizers sort of pinned against in opposition to what the governor is pushing through the legislature with almost almost no opposition among legislators and like bulldozing it through and actually getting it on the ballot. And you can see from the ballot coverage that, you
know, the governor put millions of dollars into this campaign and he barely, barely passed it. So there's definitely some some politically some things going on that are very, very frightening in that, you know, that these policies are coming from that direction. But very quickly, if, you know, policies in general, we had peer court initially that went through this similar process, which is, you know, basically circumventing the Lanterman Petris Short Act, which is that, you know, as Luke describ
ed, the reasons that somebody can be put on hold. This is an entirely different civil court system that's being built in county levels where anybody from a roommate to a policeman to a neighbor can file a petition to have somebody brought into a civil court. They've done no crime. They've not been convicted of anything. But they this person decides that they need to be court ordered into mental health services and so they can be brought into the civil court and a judge can order a care or treatm
ent plan for them. And it's initially one year, it can be expanded to two years. And by the end of this year, all the counties in California have been mandated to implement this new court system. That was initially what came out. And then we had Prop 1 this year. So and then along with that, you have some other bills that are coming through, primarily authored by Senator Eggman from Stockton. And they they do erode the process of incarceration for mental health conditions. There's a brand new bi
ll that she just introduced, SB 1184, which would expand the length of time that somebody can be involuntarily medicated through hearings while they are in already on a hold and they refuse medication and then they have to there's now a process where they have to have a hearing in order for them to be forcibly medicated. And there's very strict rules on that. This bill would lighten those rules to where that person could be forcibly medicated for a longer period of time without a hearing. And so
that's just one of many. Senator Eggman was also successfully able to pass a bill SB 43 last year, which expands the definition of what is gravely disabled. So like Luke mentioned, you know, if somebody is at risk of being homeless or not feeding themselves, they can be put on a grave disability hold. And now they've also added alcohol and drugs. So if somebody is, you know, on alcohol and drugs and it may not even be a mental health specific issue, they can be put on a grave disability hold fo
r not being able to care for their basic needs. And that passed and will inevitably increase the number of people that are put on hold in California and also grave disability holds are the only holds in California which allows you to have be held. I think it's up to 120 days on consecutive holds. There's different stages of that. So it's the longer term hold that's being expanded and I will say, yeah, I mean, I could talk more about that as well. I did used to work. I was one of the people that
actually did hospitalization on the county level. And I've looked at many of the forms that people write in order to put people in the hospital, and I've had to analyze them for accuracy and merit many, many, many times over and that and it's like my colleagues were discussing, oftentimes people put people on holds on involuntary holds because there aren't any services in the community that they can find for them to go to. And they don't think that it's the best thing just to send them back home
. So they may send them to a hospital just to have a place for them to be, but essentially taking their rights away in order to get them help. And so I'll leave it there. >> JORDYN JENSEN: Thank you all. I mean, you all spoke to such important points and policies, plans that are happening in California and New York in particular. I want to emphasize to that what I'm seeing in some of these communities, which we'll get to later, that this is happening across the country and this is a huge issue,
these policies being introduced, huge issue for a wide variety of reasons. So as a follow up question, I want to ask you all to speak to why these policies, these plans being introduced and civil commitment in particular, why is it a problem for the disabled people that you serve? >> LUKE SIKINYI: Well, I think first and foremost, it doesn't work. I think that using this as a solution to a problem, that it's just not a solution to from the first part is a waste of funding and from a money scient
ist think a waste of energy from creating policy aspect. And then, you know, purely just we're taking people's rights away. We are taking people's liberty away and their self-determination away. And for what you know, we're doing this in the guise of supporting people, but all it is is incarceration. And then we go and say, okay, we've helped you. Great, now you're on your own. Otherwise you're going to be incarcerated again. You know, figure it out or otherwise you're right back in this situati
on. So we create this system of fear and unnecessary negative interactions for people that retraumatize those people who are traumatized. For the first point. And then we're not actually dealing with any of the actual problems. It seems a lot of the legislation, a lot of the policy goals are less about truly supporting people and more about removing people from the public eye. And that's the most concerning thing, because if that is the way that we operate, it's not going to be too long before b
ack into a 1950s sort of style where, you know, we have loads of people in institutes for mental health challenges and then loads of people in jails and prisons. I think it says quite a lot about us that, you know, our jails and prisons are often some of the largest providers of mental health services and substance use services for folks who are low income and then you double that. And it's not that that the service provision there is any good. It's just that it's oftentimes the first time that
people even get any sort of services. So I think that's the massive negative here. And, you know, we're also continuing continuing to push these items instead of what we know actually works, just takes us further and further into this whole as new generations come up and less people get these services, this will be the sort of go to option again. And that is something that we've worked tirelessly to push back against. I always think I get to work with a wonderful advocate in Harvey Rosenthal, wh
o, you know, is a great mentor to me and my boss right now. But, you know, when we discuss this, it's it's similar to what Andrea was saying. It's we're going backwards. You know, we worked so hard to get to this place to really move us into better services, person centered services and looking at how we protect the rights and value of people's input and getting people to that table. And now as those those doors are really being shut on folks and more people are being institutionalized, there's
less chance for us to really get back to what we know works. >> STEFEN SHORT: Just to add to that briefly, you know, there's sort of this remarkable phenomenon happening in New York where our prison and jail populations are dropping as a result of various statutory initiatives as a result of charging decisions on the part of prosecutors. Other phenomena, you know, that that's that's really happening. But at the same time, these interventions that we're talking about are carceral interventions, r
ight? So this is when we talk about transinstitutionalization. On the one hand, the government is taking credit for decarceration in prisons and jails while simultaneously proposing various initiatives, policies, practices, statutes that balloon other forms of incarceration. So it's really unbelievable when you consider that both of those things are happening simultaneously. The other thing I think to think about is how this burgeoning institutionalization movement is part of a long arc of frami
ng carceral interventions as the only solution to societal problems. You know, there's real discursive power in putting forth all of these past institutionalization to remove, you know, certain people from the streets that convince individuals that, hey, once these folks are removed, we're safer. Right? This is the kind of the power of the carceral system has as a as an intervention. And so that does real harm to our social discourse, that does real harm to our discourse around how we actually b
uild safe and stable communities. It also moves us further in the direction of simply stigmatizing people with disabilities and just making disability a crime grant, making disability an offense against the public. And I think we'll talk later about some of the work that's being done to challenge that framing both work that's being done at the legislative level, the work that's being done at the organizing level, litigation work. But that to me is something that I spend a lot of time thinking ab
out the discursive power of framing incarceration as the sole solution and framing disappearance as a meaningful intervention. A lot of that is what is happening here and grappling with that is definitely something that we need to do. >> ANDREA WAGNER: And I think just, you know, appreciate what's happened and looks at it. And I think that, you know, when we talk about reinstitutionalization, we have to, I think, look back at deinstitutionalization and why it happened and how it happened. In ord
er to analyze our policies. Now we have to really and I don't think that that's being done because on a broad level in our culture, we have sort of this capitalist view of mental health care. We go and we purchase a solution and we purchase a bed for them and then we send that person to that. So they're not we're not seeing it and we feel like we've done something right, but we're not looking at historic context of like this has been done before. This is the way it was before and that didn't wor
k. And why didn't it work? And what did we try to do differently and how did we do it? Did we do it? Well, you know, and I part of my research when I was at USC was looking at that historical context and actually looking at the data of what that hospitalization, those those trans hospitalization and trans and trans in carceral systems, what that really was in the data and what we were looking at. Because oftentimes in the mental health community, you see, you know, a researcher, you know, quote
unquote, researchers that will bring out data and say, look at this graph. It shows the prison levels going way up when we closed the hospitals. But when I really dug in and actually gather the data in spreadsheets and graphed it myself, I saw that there was a piece of that that they weren't looking at. And that was the 20 years between when deinstitutionalization began under Kennedy and in 1981, when Reagan defunded the community health facilities. That was the other half of deinstitutionalizat
ion that was never realized. And you can actually graph it and see that during those 20 years there wasn't a spike in in jails and and and prisons and hospitalization was continually going down. However, after 1981, you see that spike go up and there is there's no talk about that 20 years and what was working. And I think, you know, we as policy people need to dive into that. Okay, Why was that a phase where it wasn't changing and why did and, you know, a lot of times people use that exact same
jail data to point to, you know, the war on drugs and it's like, how is it both how is it all these? And well, maybe it is all of these things. But I think the easy solution is get people out of our face in a way so we don't see them. Because now with our protections of privacy, you can't get Heraldo sneaking into a hospital. I'm filming in the back of the hospital to see what's happening. People aren't seeing that in their face and there's this general assumption in the general public that hosp
italization is a cure and an answer and that it's a safe, nice place for people to go because we don't have that reality check that we had, you know, 50 years ago of like seeing it firsthand and a camera lens and someone being talked to in a hospital, you know, about what that experience is in real time. And I think, you know, we have to look at if that promise of building up the community facilities wasn't fulfilled. Is deinstitutionalization really a failure or did it was it never fully implem
ented? And I could say the same thing about the Mental Health Services Act. It's often touted as a failure, but it was never fully implemented and started to get eroded before it was even implemented fully. So I think, you know, as as legislators, you build a policy and you pass it and you don't look and then it's up to the the other parts of government to in in implement that. And there's no like big picture of like, okay, this happens and then this happens. So I think I think in the public eye
it can be very confusing. And if you don't understand that whole flow and it's easy to point fingers, right, and look for those quick fixes. But yeah, I'll say I'll leave it there. >> JORDYN JENSEN: Thank you all. I want to also ask you guys kind of as a follow up to that question, how well or do these policies or plans that have been introduced or implement and implemented disproportionately impact disabled people of color in particular? >> LUKE SIKINYI: Yeah. I mean, I think what we often see
is this compounding of unfortunate situations to be honest with you. So on one side, if you are a poor Black man who lives in a under funded neighborhood, you are less likely to get, you know, from a mental health and substance use side of things, you are less likely to get quality services in the community that are provided by people who look like you. You are more likely to be policed because of both of these reasons. And then third, you are more outcast by society. So when you compound all o
f that and you have, you know, someone who has a mental health crisis in the street and a place that doesn't have a quality crisis response system, you're going to get a police officer show up. And then if that police officer doesn't have the skills to really de-escalate the situation or even communicate with you, then you are more likely to either be incarcerated because of it because of that negative interaction or killed in that regard. And then people are also more likely to see you as viole
nt. So the initial interaction is not going to be one of you know, we're trying to help. There's going to be this idea of we need to control the situation. And because of that, it's it's no coincidence that you see, especially here in New York with outpatient commitment and the court mandated treatment we see upstate in New York, three out of five of those court mandated orders are placed on people of color. And then when you go down to New York City, it's even worse at four out of five are plac
ed on people of color. So you really seeing this, you know, intermixing of either disabilities and race that creates a problem where you're you're being hit with many negative discrimination, so much discrimination from different aspects, you know discriminating because of you disability because of race, because of social and economic status. And that's why we end up seeing a lot of the same people not in services, not or being institutionalized, whether it's jail or prison or the hospital. And
then once they're out, Boston being overpoliced over monitored so that there's this kind of sense of these are the people that we need to be afraid of and that really reverberates into the public and I think in New York, the perfect example is that the tragedy that happened to Jordan Neely, where you see it's not just the by creating this sort of this sort of concept that, you know, people with mental health challenges, especially if they're people of color, are so violent and so dangerous. You
get situations like Jordan's where civilians are beginning to think that they need to protect themselves and beginning to make assumptions about people that further furthers this discrimination against us. >> JORDYN JENSEN: I want to see quickly if you've ever other panelists want to speak to that question. >> STEFEN SHORT: I thought that was perfectly stated. >> JORDYN JENSEN: Beautiful. Agreed. Thank you. Look, so you've each spoken so well about how these policies, plans, how transinstitution
alization, how incarceration disproportionately impacts disabled people, particularly people with psychiatric disabilities. And Luke, you just spoke really well about how, you know, this disproportionate impact on disabled people of color for a vast array of reasons. You've all talked, for example, Andrea, you talked about how Prop 1, for example, was initially language was using voluntary and then it changed to involuntary. Luke, you've talked about how these policies and plans don't work and h
ow it's, you know, aiming at taking people's rights away under this guise of helping people. We've seen in New York City, for example, Mayor Adams has quoted several times about having this moral obligation to help people and stuff. And Stefen, you've talked a lot about this long arc of framing, of carceral, you know, involuntary incarceration as the only solution. And I want to ask you all what efforts are happening to challenge these policies or plans? What about groups or organizations that a
re working against, you know, or opposing these policies or plans? What's happening on the ground? >> STEFEN SHORT: So I can I can speak briefly about some of the litigation that we've been involved in at Legal Aid, and that litigation started with, you know, direct contact from incarcerated people who are being subjected to the prolonged confinement that I referenced earlier. We filed a case in 2019 called M.G. vs Cuomo That is the class action I referenced earlier that challenge prolonged conf
inement of people with serious mental illness because they need a community based mental health, housing and supportive services. But none was available. I want to really talk about what happened after that case was filed. So the government moved to dismiss this lawsuit. And you know, I know we have some some lawyers and law students in the audience. The government essentially tried to moot the case by releasing all of the name plaintiffs to homeless shelters and other institutions rather than t
o community based mental health housing, and then arguing that those folks no longer had live claims the claims are no longer justiciable. So we amended our complaint and added a new Olmstead claim. And I just want to kind of talk about this claim and why we think it's a potent way to challenge some of these things. And and to seek funding for community based services. The new claim that we added is an Olmstead risk of institutionalization claim, and that's named after the case, Olmstead versus
L.C., which is a famous Supreme Court case handed down in 1999. Folks probably know about that case. It construed the ADAS integration mandate and the court held that where an individual's eligible and appropriate for community based services and is retained in an institution instead, or what the court called the segregated setting. Despite their desire for integration and despite the fact that the government could accommodate that integration, that is discrimination under the ADA, we added at O
lmstead a risk of institutionalization claim to our lawsuit, which is slightly different. That claim is based on a theory of discrimination whereby the government knows it needs to provide a service to someone to prevent a risk of future institutionalization, but fails to provide that service. So we were arguing that for the folks who were released, the homeless shelters and other institutions, despite their eligibility and appropriateness for community based services, the government had actuall
y determined that those folks needed those services to prevent future institutionalization, but failed to provide them. And that's discrimination. under the ADA. This claim is a statewide claim for our class and the relief that we're seeking is a massive infusion of resources into the community based model housing and supportive services system in New York. And we're specifically seeking a diversion of funding from the Department of Correction and Community Supervision in some of their parole pr
ograms and parole housing into community based mental health housing instead. And so I wanted to raise that because it's a novel claim. You know, it's something that we're trying for the first time, but it's a way that litigators can try to actually redirect resources away from carceral interventions and into community based interventions. And, you know, we've been speaking with litigators across the country who are trying to sort of pilot similar claims. But I just wanted to raise that because
I think almost it's a very powerful tool. And I also wanted to raise this because, you know, we had extensive conversations with with grassroots groups, with our plaintiffs, with other directly impacted people who are prolonged in their confinement. And we sort of asked them, you know, there are things we could do here. We could file habeas petitions to get you released quicker. We could file individual actions to seek damages for the fact that you were released without services. And to a person
, these folks wanted us to do something bigger, that sort of sort of bigger, a bigger remedy to address the gaps in resources that have plagued the community basement of housing system for so long. And so, you know, we're following the direction and recommendations of folks on the ground and folks who are being impacted by these issues. And hopefully we can get some systemic relief out of it. I wanted to mention one other one other claim that we brought initially in the lawsuit, a criminalizatio
n of status claim under the Eighth Amendment. This is just something that I want folks to be aware of. The earlier I said, what a lot of these initiatives do is they criminalize people for their mental illness, right? They shunt people into some form of incarceration for the fact of their mental illness. There is a doctrine, an Eighth Amendment doctrine that was developed out of a case called Robinson versus California, in another case called Martin versus Boise, called the criminalization of st
atus doctrine. And essentially that doctrine says that it is a violation of the Eighth Amendment for the government to criminalize status or criminalize conduct that is inseparable from status. This is often a doctrine that is leveraged to where government criminalizes public drunkenness, for example, or sleeping in public. We brought this claim in our original set of claims and M.G. arguing that the government was criminalizing our plaintiffs mental illness by holding them past their release da
tes simply because they couldn't avail themselves of a certain corpus of services. This entire doctrine is actually on the chopping block in the Supreme Court right now in a case called Grants Pass, which was actually recently fully briefed and is set to be argued, I would encourage people to take a look at that docket to see some of the reactionary arguments that are being made by the City of Grants Pass, which is a city in, I believe, Oregon, essentially seeking to overturn this entire line of
Eighth Amendment that would do great damage to to the folks about when we're speaking today, because that has been a really protective doctrine in cases like ours. And so it's just something to be aware of. But but those are some tools that I think litigators have been trying to use. Of course, I'm an advocate for using those tools at the direction of directly impacted people. Right. So so we're always trying to communicate with our plaintiffs, with our class members, ensure that our litigation
is serving their goals. But for the litigators and future litigators out there, those are just two legal tools you should be aware of. And then there's lots of grassroots organizing going on that the other folks can speak to. >> LUKE SIKINYI: Okay, I guess I'll take this next one. Yeah, I think Stefen put it perfectly. I think that I always think about this as sort of five different avenues to tackle the first. And probably one of the most important is, as Stefen was saying, is legal action. An
d under Olmstead, I think a lot of the work that the litigation that we're aware of and we utilize to to kind of push or even the threat of litigation itself when we know that someone is doing something egregiously wrong can be a big support and a big push. I know the Department of Justice has been very active in pursuing own said violations, and that has really helped a lot of our advocacy from the policy side of things. When you can go in and say, you know, the just DOJ just came in against Al
ameda in California and said that you need to provide these types of services because of somewhat similar to what someone was saying was, you know this you're increasing the risk of institutionalization by not providing these and you know that you can. So utilizing that, I think before you even get into policy, I think two of the other areas that are really critical is, you know, media work. Oftentimes a lot of this, a lot of the policies determined based off of the way people feel not necessari
ly on actual data. So it's reaction to public outcry, public sentiment that is often driven through media work. And as Andrea was saying before, it, you know, when you don't have someone to go do an exposé like Willowbrook, oftentimes people, if you go to someone who is not involved in mental health services and say, you know, we're going to end voluntarily remove someone to a hospital, they think that's a good thing because they know what the hospital's like when they go in for a broken leg. Yo
u know, people are very kind of thinking about what they need, but not necessarily what it looks like behind a locked unit and noticing how close and similar that is to a prison. You know, and those that kind of education for the public in that media being out there in the media is helpful to want educate the public and educate policymakers. Then the next thing I did want to mention is around collaboration. I think oftentimes for the grassroots movement, having folks who are doing policy, having
folks who are doing providing services directly, and then having folks who are doing the litigation aspect of things, all kind of coming together at this table and saying this is this is what the people on the ground need, this is what's going on that's wrong. And when we are you know, when you're if you're successful in litigation, this is the kind of set up that it actually would support. People think that kind of collaboration is critical to creating better systems. And then the last thing I
'll talk about here is really around policy advocacy. That's kind of my bread and butter, but really pushing policies and programs that are alternatives. You know, often, you know, we I talk to my boss, Harvey often about, you know, people will often say you're against coercion. You know, what are you for? And often for us as advocates, I think a lot of times we make the mistake of saying we're just against something. But knowing that there is a genuine problem that needs to be solved and being
able to say not only against what you're trying to do, but we can do it better, we can provide this program that can engage people who you think are unengaged. And here in New York, you know, we've really been pushing a number of programs and pushing for funding for these programs to really push back against this and reduce the use of involuntary treatment. Some. But I'll quickly just name here is the inset program here in New York. The intensive and sustained engagement teams. This is a program
that our agency and one of our members, the MHA of West Chester, piloted and the goal of this is to utilize peer supporters and other mental health experts to go out to people who are on the who are on who would otherwise be eligible for outpatient commitment or involuntary commitment in-patient wise. And they go engage. Folks, a lot of the times, the argument is that a lot of these people are or people who are in the situation are unengaged people. They they don't want services. They can't tak
e services. It must be forced upon them. So to show that this program was successful at engaging that same group of people shows that, no, you're wrong. You know, we can engage people. We just have to be intentional about it and we have to take the time to do it. And that INSET program has found that the people that they are trying to engage, they've been 83, 85% successful in doing that, getting people into these services and getting people to support that they want and need and developing plan
s together. And that's far more successful than the Kendra's Law orders that often people have to be on for a number of years before they can fully come off of it. Two other two other things that we have really been pushing for here just to try to quickly ramp up mental health first responders so people who can respond to crisis calls for substance use or mental health challenges without police. Because often we know that's really that that the crux point of when people could either go into an i
nstitution or, you know, whether it's jail or prison or hospitals or get that sort of support to help them out of the crisis and connect them to further services. So we've been pushing for Daniel's law here in New York State, but in other a number of other states have begun this process. But we want a statewide system for that. And then the last thing is really improving discharge and reentry services, so discharged from hospital and reentry from carceral settings, making sure that people have w
hat they need when they get out versus having to come out of these settings and then scramble to figure out what they need or how to get it. And it's incredibly important, especially for folks coming out of jails and prisons, when you have these requirements for getting a job, getting certain types of housing to remain out of jails and prisons because of parole. So one thing that we're really pushing for is the Medicaid reentry waiver to get Medicaid turned on for people before they're released
up to 90 days prior so that we can get them connected to services, get them some peer support, and then also connect them to needed services in the community like housing. The last thing I will say is making sure that people who have lived experience are at the table in making these decisions. Often we are cut out from these conversations. So no one raises the the issues that we know are clearly going to come when we see these policies. But because we're not in those rooms making those decisions
with people, we're completely cut out. And, you know, as they say, if you're you're not in the room making the decision or if you're not at the table, you're on the menu kind of mentality, making sure that we are at every table possible and bringing as many people as we can. But I will stop there. I know I've talked quite a lot here. >> ANDREA WAGNER: I don't have too much to add to that because I think my fellow panelists covered it really well. But I think that also I would like to say to tha
t I really feel in my heart of hearts that there needs to be a widespread information gathering and campaign. I think that there have been a certain entities that that are, you know, targeted towards building the pseudo research to support these propositions in these bills. And I don't think there's enough of the actual data reporting from people with lived experience and these programs that Luke has mentioned that that can really show because a lot of times talking to legislatures, they're like
, well, if not this, then what? And you know, I like to be able to provide them with like here is some substantial reporting and data which there are there is is a lot of it going on, but I think it needs to be exponentially increased. You know, there's a recent study by the disability rights California about, you know, people in Los Angeles being held, hundreds of people being held longer than is legally advisable because there aren't places for them to go and they won't release them. You know,
there's there's a study that just came out from Leisha Astro, you know, regarding employment of people with lived experience. There's there is research going on. But I think we need much more of it to really, you know, kind of have that academic backing in what we're doing, because a lot of times it's overlooked, as, you know, pseudoscience or none, you know, not really a solution. But there are a lot of things like peer respite. You know, there are, you know, a lot of things like Soteria house
models that have been around for a very, very long time that haven't been funded and at the level that would be able to demonstrate their their their efficiency and their efficacy. You know, we have a lot of programs that have been saving lives and doing things. But I think across the board, we need to create sustainable alternative funding still always, you know, when it comes to the status quo and what has been done, generally what's going to be funded is, is the medical model of hospitalizat
ions, because that's where that that's the system that we're in. Right. So we need to really aggressively find alternative funding. You know, I've gone into the private sector because I feel like that is an opportunity to grow that way as well. You know, you've got big Pharma funneling millions of dollars into candidate funds to promote their agenda, but you don't have that for people have lived experience because we tend to be very grassroots as at that level and not cohesive. We're not one gia
nt lobbying group, right? We have a bunch of little lobbying groups that are wonderful, but we don't have the money and the and the finances in that in that movement to really make a big difference politically. So I think we need to create alternative funding streams, you know, get more funding both from the public and the private sector. I think we need to fund more research. And and really, like Luke was alluding the media, we need to change that. The attitude around this tour in the general p
ublic, we need to really show people and not tell them, but show people and hear from people what is really going on. Because I think in the general public, you don't hear or see that. >> JORDYN JENSEN: Thank you all. I want to emphasize one really critical point that Luke brought up, but we've all you've all touched on that it is so important for people with lived experience to be at the table when these discussions are happening and to be involved at all levels of, you know, plan making, polic
ymaking, implementation, etc.. So often people with lived experience are left out of those conversations, which is harmful in so many ways. So I want to emphasize, you know, really, really besides the importance of people with lived experience. And thank you all for touching on that. Before we turn it over to our brief Q&A section, I want to see if there is anything else that our panelists want to share or add or emphasize on quickly. All right. So we have several questions in the Q&A section on
Zoom, and we're unfortunately not going to get to all of that just given the time constraints. But there are some questions that I will read and I'll leave it to our panelists to jump in to answer some of these. Let's see. So one important question from Emily Wu says, How do psychiatric survivors join these class action lawsuits? And I want to broaden that question a little bit and frame it as how do psychiatric survivors, how do people with lived experience, you know, join in on these movement
s? How do they get involved in policy efforts and then also, of course, you know, to this question, class action lawsuits, I think Stefen you can maybe speak to a little bit. >> STEFEN SHORT: So I'll say that I have a sort of very specific context here at PRP for how we develop these class action lawsuits. PRP has a hotline where incarcerated people can call us for free and tell us about the prison conditions issues they're experiencing. We also have a letter practice where we get about 200 lett
ers a week from the state prisons and over, you know, the last half century. Right. That that hotline, that letter practice have provided us with consistent real time information about what's going on in the prisons and jails. We've brought so many of these cases, both both individual and class action cases that people know to write us. So, you know, we're we're just getting real time information about what's going on. We're connected with people in real time. We also do lots of work in various
coalitions, mental health alternatives to solitary confinement, Jails, Action Coalition. You know, a lot of the bigger coalitions in New York where we're sitting there alongside coalition members discussing these issues. So, you know, we're committed to doing that kind of work, you know, building these class actions alongside directly impacted people. That's a specific type of learning called movement lawyering, Several other principles that we're really serious about adhering to to the best of
our ability when we're litigating these cases. But I will say there are a couple of things that we do to make sure that we go beyond the sort of typical holistic, client centered class representation. When we were developing M.G., for example, we we back into a list of all of the individuals in the state prison system who were held for this reason. And, you know, than just sort of connect with a couple of people, determine who the best plaintiffs were and go from there. We spoke with every perso
n on that list. We traveled up to the prisons. We had long conversations. The people were really committed to sort of talking with people about remedy in a really meaningful way, about litigation strategy, really committed to the idea that our clients are strategists. The lawyers aren't the only strategists in the room, which, you know, is really sort of transgressive of the ethics rules that say, the lawyer determines the strategy, the client determines the goal. So there are just certain thing
s that we do within our practice to prioritize meaningful engagement with people. And I think I'll leave it, I'll leave it there, you know, for for people doing this work sort of outside of the carceral frame that I'd, I'd personally love to hear strategies for how they solicit directly impacted people. I have this hotline, I have this letter practice. It makes it easy for me as a prep lawyer still really important to meaningfully engage with the principles and align yourself with the principle.
But we do have that source of information that some impact litigators don't have and have been trying develop with various degrees of success. >> JORDYN JENSEN: Next question says, What is your perspective on the intersection of guardianship or or conservatorship and institutionalization or the risk of it? >> ANDREA WAGNER: Well, I mean, I can I know that they're very closely aligned from my experience. You know, a lot of times, you know, you know, the holds are written in in a way that that is
, you know, and notes are put in systems, in health, health records that kind of can fast track people to an, you know, conservatorship or guardianship. You know, and I think care court is a perfect example of that as well. You know, if a person is on record of not complying with their care court plan, then that can be justification for a more fast track to guardianship or conservatorship, as they call it in California. You know, and I think that they're very closely aligned, because I've seen w
orking in crisis services, people come in, you know, the people that they call high utilizers, they have a list of them and they know who they are and they track all those times that they come in. And at a certain point, those are the ones that are sort of red flagged as we're going to try to get them into this next level of life, you know, taking their rights away. And I think they're just closely, hand-in-hand. And I hope that answers the question. Maybe somebody else wants to comment further.
>> LUKE SIKINYI: Yeah, I think, you know, often the it's similar to Andrea saying here, it's it's really about making sure that individuals rights are protected and making sure that people's own determinations are at the center for any sort of service provision. I know often, often times and this can get a little complicated, especially when we're dealing with families, oftentimes people feel like that's the only route to get certain services, to get certain support for either their children, a
dult or otherwise. And I think making sure that people know what their options are from the family side can really help that and understanding what actually happens to this individual after you've gone through this process. You know, this can be very detrimental to not only your relationship with your your child, whether adult or under 18, but also looking at the long term effects of that and how you can how it's not actually supporting the people the way they expect it to. I think often people
are sort of sold a dream that, you know, this is going to be the fix to your problem. And then often they find out after the fact that it really wasn't. And I think that's the part that we kind of comes to the educating the public more about how this works and what actually happens once people are put on these types of orders or guardianship programs. >> STEFEN SHORT: Yeah. And just very quickly, just to add to that, very quickly, you know, obviously guardianship, unbounded guardianship can shun
t someone into institutionalization very easily. Right. But the other thing I wanted to raise is, you know, in New York, we have a statute called Surrogate's Court Procedure Act, Section 17 A, which is one of our guardianship statutes. The other one is in the mental hygiene law, Section 81. But the 1780 process contains virtually no no due process protections. You know, essentially an individual can fill out a form and get guardianship over something, and, you know, that is institutional in its
own right. Right. Because what institutionalization is about is coercion and this that entire process, the existence of that process and the utilization of that process is a form of coercion. Now, lawyers, civil rights lawyers have challenged this statute as unconstitutional more than once. I know disability rights. New York did it once in federal court. They have an active case in state court challenging the constitutionality of that statute. But, you know, if you consider how easy is for someo
ne to take essentially sole and unbounded control over someone's life just by filling out a form, it's quite terrifying. So, you know, that's part of what I mean when I say sort of reframing the definition of what institutionalization is and what it means. It's not always about a brick and mortar location. It can also be about a statute that allows someone to wrest control over someone's liberty without any meaningful protections. And in an unbounded nature, I know that statute is is has been an
exemplar for other states and other guardianship statutes in other jurisdictions. So that's a pretty terrifying reality. And, you know, so in addition to this, a classic way guardians can facilitate institutionalization. Guardianship itself can also be a form of institutionalization. >> JORDYN JENSEN: The last question that I want to raise that a few attendees have proposed I think Stefen, this is in particular for you. It's in regard to is the Fifth Circuit Court's decision on U.S. versus the
state of Mississippi and the impacts of this case. So wanted to see if you could touch briefly on that. I know we're short on time, but seeing a few questions on that. >> STEFEN SHORT: So, you know, I'll say this first is that the DOJ is Mississippi case was an exemplar for our M.G. amendment. So, you know, these are closely related cases. The DOJ case challenges the entire community based on all the housing and supportive services system in the state of Mississippi. And DOJ is the plaintiffs. S
o the federal government is the plaintiff. There are no no individuals in the caption. The federal government is the sole plaintiff, and because the federal government is the sole plaintiff and this is a risk of institutionalized action case, the federal government utilized experts for most of its proof at the merit stage. And so there are a couple of different sort of issues. The case went up to the Fifth Circuit. One was the sort of viability of the risk of institutionalization theory. Wholesa
le and questioners have flagged that sort of how do we deal with the fact that the Fifth Circuit called into question the risk theory itself and the Olmstead integration mandate theory wholesale. The other issue is the proof issue, right? So not only did the circuit hold that unjustified institutionalization is not discrimination under the ADA. The circuit also held that even if it were discrimination under the ADA, the plaintiffs federal government didn't actually prove up the claim because the
federal government didn't introduce evidence of what treatment professionals thought was the necessary corpus of services for the individual right. So there was no evidence in the record that the person was placed at risk from the perspective of the treatment professional that was treating them at the time. They were not provided with the service. There were also there was an insufficient number of chart reviews. So what the experts did in this case is they reviewed charts for people who would
have been in the putative class to determine whether or not the services they were provided could forestall a risk. But the circuit held not enough charts couldn't extrapolate from those charts to a conclusion as the entire class being placed at risk. And as a result of those holdings, the circuit abrogated the remedial order from the trial court and the remedial order. What it essentially had ordered was a wholesale resource infusion into the community based services system in Mississippi. So y
eah, that was a devastating decision. Now, it also created a circuit split because other circuits have advanced theories like this readily and endorsed the integration mandate theory that the DOJ was advancing in Mississippi. But what it did for a lot of these cases is it totally changed our plans, right? So, M.G., when this case came down, we're in the middle of briefing class certification. We're now briefing merits. We have constructed a proof plan that resembles what the Fifth Circuit called
for in the Mississippi case, that those choruses of evidence have been built out in the case in direct response to what the Fifth Circuit said was insufficient evidence in the Mississippi case. In terms of the conclusion as to whether the integration mandate is a viable theory of liability, Luckily, that's not going up at the Supreme Court right now. We're going to take advantage of the circuit split that we have already seen a little. In our case, You know, we're in this reality both in the Ol
mstead context and in other contexts, right. Where really potent civil rights tools know the Civil Rights Act context, the Voting Rights Act context, the Olmstead context are on the chopping block in the Fifth Circuit. In the Sixth Circuit, there are Supreme Court justices, whether it's Alito or it's Thomas, who have voiced disagreement with these theories of liability. And we're kind of playing a game where we're trying to keep things out of the Supreme Court and litigate things, favorable circ
uits and on the merits, in addition to developing proof plans, that's really the only way that we can be responsive to this type of stuff. But I am happy to have a longer, more detailed conversation about how we sort of factored all that in. And M.G., it's a scary moment for civil rights litigators. It really is. And that's why a lot of this stuff, a lot of the work we're talking about today has to have a direct organizing component and a state level component and a policy component because liti
gation cannot be the panacea where courts are reactionary and where judges are going out on a limb to kill civil rights doctrines that have been so protective of the rights of this population. >> JORDYN JENSEN: You know, we're a little over time. So I just want to take a moment to thank all our incredible panelists seriously. You all are incredible and doing such amazing work. This panel was recorded, so we will be sharing that to our CRDJ website at a later date and also to our social media. Yo
u know, we've gotten some questions about that. But again, thank you all. And, you know, this conversation is just the start. So appreciate it. >> STEFEN SHORT: Thanks so much, everyone. >> LUKE SIKINYI: Thank you. >> ANDREA WAGNER: Thank you so much.
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