Dr. Neil Boothby: Education, Engaged.

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0:00:09.7 Audrey Scott: Welcome to this modern education podcast that explores learning from the everyday exchange of thoughts and ideas to the theories and practices behind entire systems. Think education is cool? So do we. So we pair two conversations, learn about our guests, then learn from our guests, share your takeaways and come back from more. You're listening to Think. Pair. Share with me Audrey Scott.

 

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0:00:43.0 AS: Today, we'll focus on learning through doing and on ways to create sustainable pathways out of adversity for children and youth. We'll consider the compelling intersection between inner-vulnerability and outward resilience, and for all your conspiracy theorist out there, we'll explore the conspiracy of goodness, as well. So, without further ado, I'm honored to welcome Dr. Neil Boothby, to Think. Pair. Share. Neil is a professor and Director of the Global Center for the development of the whole child at the University of Notre Dame. He's an internationally recognized expert and advocate for children affected by war, displacement and abject poverty. As a senior representative of UNICEF, UNHCR and Save The Children, he has worked for more than 25 years with children in adversity around the world. I'm eager to begin the conversation.

 

0:01:33.8 AS: Neil, thank you so much for being here, I really appreciate it.

 

0:01:37.1 Dr. Neil Boothby: My pleasure, Audrey, nice to be with you.

 

0:01:39.3 AS: Nice to see you as you're holding down the fort on the East Coast, so thanks for joining me via Zoom today and I look forward to the conversation.

 

0:01:47.7 Dr. Neil Boothby: Great.

 

0:01:48.9 AS: How have you been? 

 

0:01:50.0 NB: I've been good, under the circumstances... Gosh, I think it's... March 13th was the last time I was sort of out of my little cocoon, thank goodness at the country level, we're able to continue doing things. So, that part is good. How about you? 

 

0:02:05.5 AS: Yeah, same, absolutely. Our filming has been quite curtailed, but we've had chances to boost up the audio stories and... Sure, appreciate you joining us. Ready to go? 

 

0:02:17.4 NB: Okay.

 

0:02:17.5 AS: If you could pick up one new skill in an instant, what would it be? 

 

0:02:21.4 NB: One new skill in an instant, I think it would be Creole. I would like to be able to speak Creole because we spend an awful lot of time in Haiti, I get by a bit in French, but Creole allows you to talk to people within the communities in a way that I can't do at the moment.

 

0:02:41.8 AS: If you could live with any fictional character, who would you choose? 

 

0:02:46.9 NB: So, I'm a huge Walker Percy fan, and there's a novel called The movie goer, where Binx Bolling is the main character, he lives in New Orleans, and I found him to be a very fascinating sort of existential type thinker. I'm not sure I'd really wanna be him, but he's a character that fascinated me at a very sort of time in my life where I was still trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do, so Walker Percy is my favorite author and one of the best characters is Binx Bolling.

 

0:03:17.1 AS: I'm not as familiar. Can you tell me something that you found fascinating about him? 

 

0:03:21.3 NB: So, Walker Percy described himself as a Catholic existentialist. He was an MD, he never really practiced. His father died at an early age, so it kind of got him preoccupied with questions about where did we come from, what should we do, why we're here, and where are we going after we die? So the novel, the movie goer, is set in New Orleans around Mardi Gras, and it takes place over the course of a week. And really nothing action-wise happens except the main character is going through a whole process of trying to figure out how he can wake up in the morning, put one foot in front of the other, and live a life of meaning.

 

0:04:02.4 NB: And in the end, he ends up getting together and marrying an individual who he's known for quite some time, Kate, who is somewhat fragile herself. But at the end, there is a closing passage where Kate who suffers from anxiety has to go downtown, she has to take the bus. And Binx says, "Listen, sit in the second seat on the right, and I will be thinking of you the entire ride." And again, it sort of puts together that I-thou relationship, I don't exist outside of the perception of somebody else. And so they sort of solidify, sort of came together around kind of holding each other in one's mind and in one's heart, and that makes the relationship real.

 

0:04:55.2 AS: It sounds actually really, really wonderful. I shall look this up. Thank you. If you were in charge of picking the eighth wonder of the world, what would you choose? 

 

0:05:05.1 NB: The eighth wonder of the world. I'm gonna fudge the answer a little bit and turn it into a modern-day miracle, alleviating poverty, actually creating a quality, at minimum, in this country, if not globally.

 

0:05:19.4 AS: I don't think there can be a better answer than that. What do you wish you had placed in a time capsule 15 years ago? 

 

0:05:26.5 NB: Probably what my personal goals were at that time, and I guess I would pull them out and sort of check to see the extent to which some of those had been achieved and perhaps how they might be refined and re-dressed moving forward in this next part of my life.

 

0:05:42.9 AS: Actually, that would be really cool. I always thought, I wish I had done more journaling as a...

 

0:05:48.6 NB: I threw most of my journals out, I did not... Unfortunately, bury them.

 

0:05:53.4 AS: Do you work better with music or without music? And if so, what are you listening to now? 

 

0:06:00.0 NB: So, normally, I would say I work without music, except when I am writing more reflective pieces. So, if I'm in my science side of the brain, I don't like music. If I'm in more creative, personal journaling, writing letters to loved ones and whatnot, night I will turn on music, and I think Ronnie Laws is this someone I spend a lot of time listening to. He's a jazz person who plays pretty mellow music, and I find it quite soothing and quite... It allows me to sort of think without having to deal with a lot of words, it's largely instrumental as opposed to vocal.

 

0:06:42.2 AS: That makes sense. Yeah, I knew a woman at work who could not work without music, so she'd wear headphones all the time, but you're right, I fall on that camp of you, if I'm trying to concentrate, I like something in the background that's not necessarily interfering, but that can help me focus. Okay, one more in the fun category, name a healthy food you enjoy and an unhealthy food you find hard to resist.

 

0:07:06.4 NB: Well, so my wife Susan, we do share cooking responsibilities, but she makes the best salads I've ever had. So, I would say a salad from Susan would be the healthiest... She does all the organic vegan stuff as well. And on the unhealthy side is, one of my remaining vices are Lay's potato chips. Even when I do 40% reduced salt, I still feel guilty when I eat them.

 

0:07:37.7 AS: Those are one of my husband's favorites as well, so I don't think you can eat just one. They were right about that.

 

0:07:45.5 NB: Yeah, exactly.

 

0:07:46.2 AS: Well, thank you for playing along and I appreciate we started getting a little fun glimpse into some of the stuff you enjoy. Tell me a little bit about the Global Center for the development of the whole child, explain a little bit about what that is and what the main crux of the work that you're doing is right now.

 

0:08:00.5 NB: Sure. So, the Global Center for the development of the whole child is a university-wide center that sits in the Institute for Educational Initiatives, and it was founded in November 2019. We work in nine different countries. On the one hand, we work in two countries around crisis, so refugees and internally displaced people. We work in India, for example, with the tribal societies which have set up residential schools to work with children from the delete, the outcasts and others that grew up in abject poverty and societally and historically have been told that they're not worth anything. And so the schools really work on self-esteem, and you can do it and imbuing 21st century skills, and have been quite successful in terms of progressing children out of that ditch that they've been in.

 

0:09:00.7 NB: And in Haiti, for example, where we're working at 340 school communities, and activating a Catholic parish system that includes the school, the church, and the family, and really working at how do we activate, create and activate a child development and learning system. 'Cause in a country like Haiti, for example, the government doesn't function terribly well, and about 85% of education is provided by non-governmental actors. So, you really kinda have to create the system. So we'll work in abject poverty, kids facing multiple kinds of adversity, and we look at it perhaps in terms of approaching it systemically, how can we activate the entities around children that are most important in their daily lives and support those entities as best as we can? 

 

0:09:50.1 AS: I feel like the scope of your work could seem overwhelming. First, how would you describe the work you do and how did you get involved in it? 

 

0:09:58.3 NB: Well, thanks for that question. I've sort of zigzagged in and out of academia on the one hand, and then operational organizations on the other. So, I've taught at Harvard, taught at Duke, taught at Columbia and came to Notre Dame, most recently. But in between, I ran Save the Children's programs, Children In Crisis programs. I was the head of UNHCR children's unit. I worked in Rwanda after the genocide with the UN and whatnot. And I think to me, the culmination of those experiences where you're sort of putting your hands in the Moon, so to speak, but then you're coming out and being able to think about it and write a bit about it has been useful, but I think it's also sort of forged a perspective, which I think is... The Global Center represents that perspective, which is that if you're talking about kids in adversity, one intervention such as Health or Education is not necessarily gonna change the life trajectories of kids.

 

0:11:00.1 NB: Because the structural issues are multi-dimensional. So, the center, in a sense, attempts to understand what are the key interventions at what you need to do that to not only get kids to learn how to read and write, but actually then support them in terms of evolving out of poverty. And perhaps our program in Haiti is the best example of that, in that Notre Dame has been there for 14 years, but we came to Notre Dame in 2019. I moved my operation from Columbia University to Notre Dame, largely out of my experience in Haiti with the Notre Dame team, which was an incredible commitment to making a difference in the lives of children and learning through doing. I was inspired by Notre Dame's conspiracy of goodness in Haiti, and I think we've moved from kind of a literacy program for first and second graders, so a school-based program that was in 340 schools, so it had quite a bit of scope and scale.

 

0:12:00.0 NB: But it was a singular intervention, teaching young kids how to read, and we moved from there much more towards a parish systems activation model. Whereby in a country like Haiti, the government does not invest that much in education, 85% of the schools are managed by non-governmental actors, so religious actors, civil society actors, etcetera. And so there isn't a robust national system, so the question then is, what is a system? What does a child development and learning system in Haiti... And actually, the Catholic parish provides the best opportunity to invest in systems because you have a church, so very religious people, they go to church, every parish has a school or most parishes have school, so you have a church and a school, and then you have families that send their kids to school and go to church. So, those are the three most important things in the daily lives of children.

 

0:13:00.8 NB: In fact, there's sort of a saying in Haiti that there's only three places that your kids should be, either in school, at home or in the church. And so that's sort of... Lakay, Lekol, Legliz . We call it L. So, it's our three-L system we're looking at, what can we do at the household level, especially given that the parents really are the first teachers in the house, what was it for school? And that 70% of the achievement gap is evident before kids even go to school. So, how they get off, whether they get off to a strong start or a slow start or whatever start, really determines then to a large extent, where they are when they start a formal school. And we saw with the literacy program, we did a pretty rigorous RCT, and they did learn how to read, comprehension, whatnot, word recognition, whatnot. But the bar was so low to begin with, that though they made progress, kids would come in to school, first grade, never have been read to, or they hadn't drawn or the teacher would say, "Turn to page six." Half the kids didn't know what a page number was.

 

0:14:05.2 NB: So, that's kind of the baseline in a certain sense. So, we went younger and we're working now on, what can parents do? So, we have parent teaching programs, kids get baptized, what can parents do at the household level? And then what can the church do? So the baptism, there's three to five pre-sessions before you're baptized, so the parents and the godparents and extended family come in. So, we've integrated sort of healthy brain science, it's simplified, we have videos that show parents how their love will support positive brain development, etcetera, etcetera. So, we're sort of using the church and the baptism is the mechanism that is most scalable. So, we get parents when they're young, they can get referred to the parent training programs, we have resource centers now where you could come in... We can't take the Internet to every household, but you can put it in every school community and parents and others could come in and download digital stuff, etcetera, etcetera.

 

0:15:05.1 NB: So, anyway, I'm getting into the weeds here, but the point is, is we're activating a system because in combination, those interventions stand a better chance of promoting lifelong learning and actual changes in the lives of kids. So, that's essentially what we do. And we have two types of partnerships, we have the dig and deep stuff, like Haiti and India is another example of where we're in it for the long term, but then we come alongside in other countries and provide technical assistance around program design, measurement and learning. So, it's kind of a blend of what we call our flagship program, dig deep, long-term operational versus kind of technical support.

 

0:15:47.6 AS: That sounds like extremely rewarding work. Are you comfortable sharing, why do you do it? 

 

0:15:52.6 NB: Yeah, no, I am, because it is a life-long endeavor. And I'm of an age where I don't necessarily have to continue working, but I can't find anything that's more meaningful.

 

0:16:06.8 AS: Was there something that made you look at the world versus focusing on the US? 

 

0:16:14.9 NB: No, that's a great, that's a great question. I'm not sure there was a thing that did... I was extremely fortunate to study with Robert Coles, who was a social psychiatrist at Harvard, that's basically why I went there. And Bob was someone who took his skills into the real world, and he, for example, was observing Black children who were integrating schools in the South for the first time during the Civil Rights Movement and whatnot. So, I was very captivated with that sort of approach, not lab work, but work in the real world. And on my way to Harvard, I think it was somewhere in Oklahoma, I was stuck on a freeway and I was listening to a radio program about people from Southeast Asia coming to the United States.

 

0:17:04.5 NB: And it dawned on me that that's kind of what I wanted to focus on, I wanted to focus on refugees, flight, etcetera. And so when I got to graduate school, I put those two interests together, and I'm still not quite sure why that... Especially in the middle of Oklahoma, why that captured me. But those two things came together in my mind. I was doing an internship and I was asked to assess the mental health of a young White boy who had lit a house on fire. And it turns out the house that he lit on fire was occupied by Vietnamese people who had come over on the boat people during that era. Fast forward, one of the persons in the house was a young 13-year-old girl who had lost her mother at sea. She had been that had been attacked by Thai pirates. She had been raped and thrown overboard and the girl survived, and I was...

 

0:17:58.8 NB: I guess, captivated, fascinated by this dialectic of inter-vulnerability. She's certainly... Her life had changed... Speaking of her mother would bring tears to her eyes. It was still a living pain, so to speak. And still, she functioned at such a high level within the two years he had lived in this country, she had learned to speak English, she was the best math student in her school. And in fact, the boy who lit the house on fire had been the school's math winner the year before, and this young woman had displaced him. And so there was a personal connection and also a racial connection between what happened. And so this whole thing about what is resilience... But that was inspired by a 13-year-old, but I was fascinated with her inward vulnerability, but outward resiliency. And that helped me sort of frame what my dissertation was gonna be about, and with a small research grant I worked... Went and worked on the Thai Cambodia border right after the Khmer Rouge genocide. And millions of people were fleeing Cambodia, but it was that young girl who kind of really solidified my interest in child development and crisis, so a little serendipity. But that's life.

 

0:19:19.6 AS: I'm fascinated by so many of the experiences that you've had, being there amongst these tragedies, can you talk to me about the human spirit in those elements? 

 

0:19:32.3 NB: Thank you, thank you for that question. I do think that that's extremely important, and I must confess that you go into the situation, so if you look at the genocide in Rwanda, you see the best and the worst of humanity. I mean, you see cruelty beyond belief, but you see compassion and sharing and solidarity in ways that you just... I don't experience it in the same way in my everyday life. And maybe just two examples of the worst moment in my professional life and perhaps one of the better ones, the worst moment, clearly the tragedy was in what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and there was a million refugees, Rwandese ended up flooding into Zaire, Which is lava rocks, big volcano lava rocks, and it's on a big, big lake called Lake Kivu, and they were emaciated sort of really thin wobbling into the camp, thirsty, hungry, they all rushed down to lake Kivu and they started drinking water and it turned out that it was... They all got... A lot of people got cholera, and they were dying like 10,000 a month, I think at the height.

 

0:20:46.3 NB: Well, this left a lot of children that were perceived to be alone, abandoned or orphaned, the babies were picked up and taken to a Caritas refugee camp, this is where the baby orphanage was, and it was basically the orphanage was just sheets of blue plastic to cover for the rain, which didn't happen that often, dirt floors, and then army cots just put in rows, and the babies were stacked, put on the cots like loaves of bread with IV stuck in their arm, so they were getting nutritional input, but nobody picked them up and held them. And I remember getting there one day, and this one baby was in the process of dying, not because of micronutrient deficiencies, but because of the lack of love and care. And I remember picking him up and looking in his eyes and he was already in a different world. And I remember at the time thinking about my first born son, when he was about three months, and I picked him up in a similar way, and I looked in his eyes and he laughed and he giggled and he recognized me. And in Zaire it was the opposite experience, it was this haunting look of no facial recognition, 'cause it was a boy, he had cried and cried and cried, and nobody responded to his needs, and it's called failure to thrive where you don't have any human contact, you cry and cry and cry, when nobody picks you up, you give up.

 

0:22:32.0 NB: And that moment has haunted me ever since. I hope now it haunts me in a good way, but it was very, very painful. So that's the ugly side of things, but it also is a window into what you need to do. Now, why in the heck did these nuns think they didn't have to pick up babies, and why in the heck... When I asked them that question, Well, we have to train people first. Well, you mean to tell me you have to train a Rwandese woman, or a Zaire woman, how to pick up a baby and wrap the baby around their bodies with their scarfs and go on with their everyday chores. Come on, this is not rocket science. So it provided a window of maybe a positive intervention, but it was... Well, it was awful. On the flip side of that, one of the better moments professionally is in Mozambique where war had divided hundreds of thousands of kids from their parents, they were separated from their parents, and in many cases, the kids and the parents didn't know if one of the other was alive. And we started a family reunification program and ended up re-unifying, tens of thousands of kids over the course of a year or so.

 

0:23:44.5 NB: But one of those moments, again, it was a teenage girl who had not seen her parents for over two years, and we put her on an airplane, we flew her back into the area that she lived, we got off the airplane, we're walking through kind of a quasi, it's not jungle but sort of savannah whatever in these pathways and there's little huts along the way, and you can start hearing people in their native language talking and kind of getting excited, and there was kind of a rumble that went through from house to house, and we walked up and finally the daughter and the mother see each other and wrap their arms around each other and embraced each other. And that's also a moment that's worth a lot...

 

0:24:36.5 AS: Oh my goodness, thank you for all the wonderful work you're doing, and that you care, see and that's... You can throw up your hands. You could be like, That's not my problem. Why do you do the work that you do? 

 

0:24:51.5 NB: Well, it's moments like that. I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. I love golf, I do play a lot of golf, but I gotta tell you, as much as I love it, it doesn't compare two moments of... Whether it's in a Haitian community or in a refugee camp in Tanzania, that's just... That's my community.

 

0:25:16.2 AS: Is there a calling there for you? 

 

0:25:19.5 NB: Yes. We spend a lot of time working. I can't imagine doing something I didn't love. As they say, if you find something that you love, you never have to work, and so there's that personal relationship of being in a place like... I've had my ups and downs, I've many, many failures, I've been in organizations which just grind you. But to make a long story short, absolutely. I do feel called to these issues, I'm not sure why. And the reason I came to Notre Dame in 2019 is because Notre Dame feels that calling too.

 

0:25:56.2 AS: We all need moments to believe in something bigger and hopeful, and it sounds like even though you've seen some of the very worst this world has to offer, you're still hopeful. Are you? 

 

0:26:08.4 NB: Absolutely, there is... Maybe it's cliche at this point in time, I think resilience may be overused, but people... Our souls and our hearts are quite resilient. If you wanna look at it scientifically, evolutionary, we've been going through bad advance forever and ever, and we do have tremendous ability to persevere and bounce back. I don't know what it would be like to live in a world where you're not hopeful. I think in this country, we're seeing that increasingly sort of this politics of grievance that's out there, which is kind of based on pain and neglect, anger and whatnot, I worry most about us as a nation spending too much time in that grievance. We have to, I think extend equality to everyone, but on a personal level and a society level, we've gotta find that hopeful place and then realistically build out from that. I just, for myself, I can't imagine... Even in the end if you lose it's better to work from a position of hope than it is from a position of grievance.

 

0:27:27.6 AS: I do have one more question I would like to ask you about that. It sort of fits into this category. You've seen some very violent things, but you also see the other side of it. People think violence begets violence, but you have observed where people in their next generation wants to make that difference, be that difference, give their families what they didn't have. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

 

0:27:52.5 NB: Whether it's sort of the Cambodian children that I first worked with back in the early '80s, many of whom we've resettled in the United States, and we continue a relationship, they're now in their 30s, 40s, or child soldiers in Mozambique that were abducted, trained and forced to kill other human beings, and now have gone back to their families and again, they have kids of their own and we stay in touch, more episodically. But using those two groups as an example, and the genocide that was Cambodia, and the brutality of RENAMO atrocities in Mozambique wide scale, the vast majority have grown up, have gotten married, have children, and it really is with their children that you see the difference. In many cases, it's not, again, sort of bringing forward harsh punishment, discipline, anger, alcoholism, whatever, the violence that we often get described as being perpetuated kids that are exposed to violence perpetuate violence. I haven't seen that. In the aggregate. What I've seen more is altruism that I didn't get this as a child, and I wanna make sure my son or daughter has it.

 

0:29:10.3 NB: So for example, in Mozambique, kids of former child soldiers actually as an aggregate, go to school longer than children who didn't experience those things. I'm not equating the two, but I'm just saying... And it's a little bit Audrey like the way that a pearl is formed, it starts off as sand and an irritant in a clam and there's a reaction around that and whatnot, but yet it eventually comes out as something of high value. And that's kind of what I've seen in some of these children that have gone through a crisis is... I don't know how to explain it very well, but it's altruism more often than it is violence.

 

0:29:53.8 AS: That's beautiful, thank you. What does resilience mean to you? And does education play a role in that, and if so, what? 

 

0:30:04.8 NB: Yeah. So I think there's a tendency in the United States to look at resilience solely as an individual characteristic, this child is resilient, she has the ability to bounce back from adversity or bounce back from trauma, she never gives up, etcetera. And I think to some extent, that is a rightful definition of resilience, but I think you also need to look at resilience from a social perspective. That girl would not have had the ability to bounce back had she not been with parents or other caretakers who gave her that love and that responsive care, that sort of solidified the social and emotional capacities within her cognitive development, which is kind of the brick and mortar for sort of academic success. So I think it's both an individual but a social construct, you do not become resilient on your own, you become resilient through interactions with others.

 

0:30:58.1 NB: And then the reciprocal relationship between education individuals and resilience, is resilient children do better in school and good schools produce resilience for that social interaction stuff. So there's a reciprocal relationship between the individual's resilience and then the school's resilience and each need is other. The challenge, I think, for education, is that we're preparing kids for jobs that don't even exist yet, so it's difficult to know exactly how to do that, but there are some sort of true and tried things, for example, we know that reading and writing and those kinds of skills are important, but the cement, or the glue around that is also social and emotional development. If you can't regulate behavior, if you can't concentrate, it may matter less how smart you are, for example. And so I think around the social and emotional issues perseverance, empathy, not giving up, being able to modulate your emotions, so you're not going into tirade on the one extreme or perhaps on the other side, becoming passive and not participating and whatnot. So those kinds of concerns are gonna be solid regardless of what the jobs are. So I think it's a combination of making sure that education is sort of holistic, that we're educating all parts of the child, perhaps even including her spirituality, for example, and not settling for just the academic stuff.

 

0:32:40.0 AS: Are there things that the average person might be able to do to try to contribute to something better in your work, in your world View? 

 

0:32:51.5 NB: I think if the focus is global, so beyond one's own community or beyond one's own nation, I think being aware of what's taking place in the world, in particular, perhaps the country's nearest to us, so there's lots of issues and problems in Latin America, and Mexico and the whole immigration issue, of course, Haiti is our neighbor, and it's the poorest community in the Western hemisphere, and probably many of us maybe don't pay as much attention to those things as possible. So I would just say stay aware and contribute in one form or another when possible. But perhaps the best learning takes place locally, so maybe global awareness, but there's a lot of things you can do in your own community, whether that's volunteering in a school, whether that's helping elderly people, reading to young children, we're learning more and more... If we go back to the early childhood development paradigm, the numbers of words that say children in middle class professional households versus who are perhaps well off households by the time they go to school, could be as many as millions of words. And again, that gap, what could a community do about the former kids that you can read to them, you can volunteer, there's lots of things you can do to really, really help children in your own community. So I would urge that sort of action, but then also maintaining an awareness of what's going on around the United States, for example.

 

0:34:21.3 AS: Wonderful. And reading a lot of the materials and things that you're working on, I'm reading this Conspiracy of Goodness. What does that mean? 

 

0:34:31.3 NB: Well, I think it... So Conspiracy of Goodness is something I've taken from a group of Huguenots in France during the Nazi occupation that ended up taking in many, many Jews when that was illegal and dangerous. And one of the children that was taken and came back as an adult and did a documentary called Weapons of the Spirit, and he's trying to explain... He goes back to these communities and ask people that are still there, why did you do that? And they said, Well, what else could we have done? This is what was required of us. And so we kind of cast around that whole phenomenon, this was a conspiracy of goodness, and that's always stuck with me because I think the Global Center and the work in Haiti and our colleagues in the Institute for Educational Initiatives and their ACE programs, these are conspiracies of goodness. We might stumble our toes, we might fail, we might not achieve everything we wanna achieve, but we're attempting, I think, to do good. And so, to me, it's a good conspiracy to be part of versus some of the other ones that we’re hearing about these days, which is kind of weird to say the least.

 

0:35:46.1 AS: I couldn't agree more and I'm happy to be in on this conspiracy of goodness with you and others. And thank you so much for your time today. Neil, it has been a pleasure.

 

0:35:54.4 NB: Nice talking with you.

 

0:35:57.8 AS: And thank you all for joining us for Think. Pair. Share. If you enjoyed this episode, head on over to Apple Podcasts to subscribe, rate and leave a review, it's very much appreciated. Check out our website at iei.nd.edu/media for this and other goodies. Thanks for listening and for now, off we go.

 

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