John Blomster: Welcome to 红桃视频. I'm John Blomster. And today we have a very special guest with us. We are thrilled to be joined by Governor Christine Gregoire. Governor Gregoire is the 22nd governor of the state of Washington, serving from 2005 to 2013. And she is now CEO of the nonprofit Challenge Seattle. Governor Gregoire has particularly deep ties to the University of Washington. Her namesake fellowship program at UW law recognizes students for their achievements, perspectives, experiences and leadership potential to diversify the legal profession in Washington. At Challenge Seattle, she leads a coalition of leaders from the region's biggest, most influential companies with a mission to address the city's most pressing challenges and help Seattle continue to thrive. It's one of the most globally innovative competitive cities in the world. We are excited to dive in to all this and more. So, Governor Gregoire, thank you very much for joining us.
Christine Gregoire: Oh, it's my pleasure.
Blomster: So, we're excited to dive into all the great work that you're doing at Challenge but first, I'd like to touch on the reason for your visit, which is meeting with the new year's cohort of Gregoire Fellows. Can you tell a little bit about why these fellowships are particularly unique and why they're so personally important to you?
Gregoire: You know, when I was serving鈥攚ell, actually both as attorney general and as governor of our state鈥擨 听was very, very concerned about the lack of diversity in the profession. And, you know, when somebody goes into a courtroom, they need to be able to see someone on the bench that looks like them. It just adds to, equal justice means exactly that. It means equal access, it means equal justice. And when you have a diversified bench, it represents that. So, I set out to do something about it as governor, only to find that there really aren't that many people of color who are lawyers in our state. And so I talked with the dean at the time here at the UW, talked with Microsoft, Brad Smith, and together began the process of really working to find a way that maybe we could diversify the profession.
So, along came the idea of the fellows program. And it's unique. It's unique in the country, and absolutely worthwhile to these students. And I'm hopeful that they're not only going to diversify the bench and the profession, but I think they're going to bring a social good to the practice of law that really needs to be present and vibrant. And they are very dedicated to that.
Blomster: Since your final term as governor, you've been extremely busy. Obviously, you filled a number of key roles. And today you're leading the way as CEO of Challenge Seattle, which is an alliance of major CEOs from the region's biggest companies with the mission to tackle Seattle's most daunting challenges in areas like education, housing, transportation, and more. What drew you to this kind of work following your political career and ultimately, what is the overall mission of the organization?
Gregoire: You know, I was approached by two of our CEOs locally who really were questioning whether the large companies, the business community at large, were doing their own social responsibility to the betterment of the community. What had happened here in our region is that we had locally grown companies that grew globally. And when they did, they became very outward facing. And in times past, we've had a lot of civic leadership provided by the private sector. That diminished because of this outward facing globalness that we saw ourselves in. And they had come to realize that it was really important. They live here, they raise their families here. Their employees raise their families, and they want to be a part of the community. And so they want to add the value of what they can to solving some of our most challenging issues that we're facing today. So, when you think of the companies like Amazon and Microsoft and others that can bring technological solutions to some of our problems that we really haven't thought about, or considered in the past, and just the kind of leadership that these 18 people can bring, they bound together and said, 鈥淲e want to give back to our community. We want to be good corporate citizens. We want to be a part of the fabric of our communities. To do so we need to provide civic leadership and perform our social responsibility. So, I commend these 18 CEOs for recognizing that and for stepping up and doing something about it.
Blomster: Housing and transportation issues were some of your signature achievements as governor, and you know, now you're approaching these same issues as a private citizen working with private companies. What's the difference there for you coming at this at a different time from a different angle, essentially?
Gregoire: As I look back at being governor, if I had had 18 CEOs of major corporations come to my office and say we want to partner with you to add value to the kinds of problem solving that is being done by government, but add the private sector and a partnership, I would have loved it. So, this is a new day, a new opportunity. I've come to believe that government alone cannot solve our problems. The private sector alone cannot solve our problems. Together, they are formidable. And so, I truly believe the future of this great state lies in public-private partnerships. And so, that's what this really represents, is the opportunity for us to tackle the most challenging, transportation being one of them. So, rather than us go out and try and find solutions, we created what we call the Mobility Innovation Center at the University of Washington, where we take on projects that are obviously more often than not funded by a partnership between the public and the private sector, but bring those who are the day to day experts in the field to the table with the innovative, creative kind of opportunities that we see at an institution like the University of Washington. And that combination is allowing us to tackle some problems.
So, one of the major issues we're facing right now is how can we create a virtual command center? And by that, I mean, is how do we get all, everybody, who works on transportation issues working together. So, we had made early recommendation that they should have a brick and mortar, well, that's not practical. That's not going to happen. So, that's why we've now gravitated to the idea of a virtual command center, where you have law enforcement and first responders and all of your transportation experts getting real time data at the same time to distribute out to the public so that they know what they can expect and so on. Perfect example, when we have a major incident that happens, traffic incident that happens, in Seattle, first responders historically have immediately gone to that incident. There are multiple incidents that grow up of a major incident and little or no attention was being paid to that. We're now focusing on that as well. But again, with the use of real time data that we know is accurate, and we can rely on and get that out to the public. So, they know alternative routes they might take. And they know it because it's reliable, real time information. That's kind of what we're trying to do, is bring the innovative creative ideas from the private sector, their technological, real expertise, marry that with the experts in the public sector, and the genius of the people who do research at the University of Washington.
Blomster: So, middle income housing affordability is a humongous issue in Seattle. Now more than ever, with housing prices are pushing out so much of the middle-income workforce鈥攖eachers, 听nurses, police officers鈥攆urther out of the city. In a job market that has a reputation for being so strong. Why is this such a huge
problem. And what is Challenge Seattle doing to address the growing housing affordability crisis in the city?
Gregoire: You know, it was about 18 months ago, the CEOs brought up the issue of homelessness and low income housing. And one of them had had an experience where they had talked to the Chief of Police of Bellevue, who had indicated that he had moved his family to Monroe because they could no longer afford to live in Bellevue. Then they found out the same was true of the chief of police of Redmond, who had moved to Granite Falls even further away. And so, they asked if I would take a look at what was going on. So, we did an international survey. And we found that there are others鈥擲ydney, Australia, London, England鈥攖hat have been working on this issue of middle income housing for years. And none of them have succeeded. And so, we again, work with Boston Consulting Group and tried to take a look at what does the data show us, in King County in particular, and what it shows us is we are progressively moving our middle income out further and further away.
We are now one of the top three mega commuting communities in the United States, meaning those who have to travel 90 minutes or more each way to get to and from work. And what we saw is that everybody has been talking about homelessness, to some degree about low income affordability. But nobody was talking about middle income affordability and the lack of it. And we saw it impacting those who are building our communities, those who are teaching our children, those who are providing us protection from public safety issues to firefighting. Literally, the fabric of our community is slowly but surely being moved out of our community. You don't want to live in a city where you don't have diversity of income, all levels, all levels, low, medium, high, and yet there's a lot of economic incentives to build low income. There are literally none to build middle income.
So, there's no future, frankly, to solve the problems. So, we began looking at what did the mayors of King County think about the issue? And I talked with the nine largest city mayors in King County with the exception of Seattle, and each of them said the middle income was a huge problem to them. And when I offered a public-private partnership to them, they most appreciatively said they wanted to be a partner.
As I distinguish why everybody else in the world has failed, they tell me they have failed not because they couldn't raise capital, but because they couldn't get over or through or under or around the public policies, whether it was rules, regulations, what have you, that drove up the cost, so that it wasn't profitable for them to build middle income housing. So, we're trying something different here. We are partnering with literally all of the mayor's now in King County, we are partnering with labor, who have now made a commitment to be a partner of ours. Those who build, we are now partnering with the development community to ask them to understand that they may not make as much profit. But we absolutely have to have them be a partner with us on this. We're working with the financial institutions to come up with new ways to provide the kind of affordable financing, if you will, so, we can actually do this kind of development. And we're looking at new approaches, like dense population being close proximity to transit, so that it we don't have to have a bunch of car spaces, new ways of thinking of how we can make this possible. So, we issued a year ago, a document entitled: 鈥淭he Invisible Crisis: Middle Income Affordability,鈥 and really brought to the fore a discussion that we now had for months and are being recognized around the country, as bringing this issue to the forefront.
Microsoft got out in front, in a unique in generous way, provided $500 million for housing affordability, $225 million dedicated to middle income. So far as we know the first to ever do that. We're now seeing some attempted replication of the work that they have done down in California. We've got a long way to go. But we've got a whole new approach. And it really is around a public-private partnership. And by that I mean partnership with mayors and developers and labor and it literally everybody, so that we can have the kind of vibrant communities that I think really is a must for us. Where we can have our teachers be able to be close to the children that they teach. That our law enforcement are a part of the community that they serve, that our nurses can be able to provide health care and not commute over 90 minutes each way to work. That's what vibrancy of a city is all about.
Blomster: These companies who are part of Challenge Seattle are the major employers in the region. So, with the work that you're doing, how are they leveraging their positions as these major employers to start shaping that next generation of the workforce in Seattle and the state of Washington?
Gregoire: Yeah, good question. One of the rules of Challenge Seattle is we work on issues, or we approach issues in a way that others don't, can't or won't. So, we looked at education, and every one of these employers would tell you, they're struggling to get the qualified workforce that they need. And we said, well, you're importing it from out of state. And we want to find a way to stop that. We want to get those good jobs to our own people right here in our own backyard. One-hundred percent that's what they want.
So, we started looking at ways they could add value. And so, we have three programs unique in the country鈥攐ne we do in the spring and in the fall. We invite students in. And we started with some of our most challenging schools, where we bring the students in on tours of the companies. And the tours of the companies are one to expose them to the different occupations that are there. Example. Go to Alaska Airlines. And these students would tell you, there are really two professions. It's the flight attendant and the pilot. We show them there are a thousand different jobs, that anything they love, we've got a job for them. But the condition is they have to get the credentials to qualify for the job because the job sitting there waiting for them.
Two, we are trying to connect the students to understand that particularly in science, technology, engineering and math, those are not skills that you'll learn in high school by rote memory and then forget them because they don't, they're not relevant to life. So, we have a project on every one of the tours, where they have to solve a problem working with their colleagues, and they have to use those skills that they're learning in the classroom, that really may not mean anything in the classroom, but we apply them to a real world problem.
And thirdly, we're trying to get them to understand that these employers mean it when they say 鈥淲e want to hire you,鈥 but that means you got to get a high school diploma, and then something more. A high school diploma today is not going to give you the kind of job you want. Now, you may not need a four year degree, but you sure need something more than high school鈥攁 certification, an AA, a BA, but you need something more than a high school diploma, but for now, get your high school diploma, start thinking big. Start thinking bold. There's a job out there that you're going to love, if you'll just get the credentials.
Second. We're asking our teachers today to teach career connected learning. Let's be realistic. Most of them went from their own high school to college to the classroom. And so, they didn't have any experience in the private sector. How then are they supposed to connect that? So, we now provide externships in the summertime with our companies where they go in, they get the experience, then they write their curriculum for the year. And they can bring in some of the people they met during the course of their stay in the companies, bring them in, Skype them in or have them actually come to the classroom. So, we're connecting the students again with, 鈥淵ou want that kind of job?鈥 Well, let's say you want to build a boat. Well, guess what, you need math. So, we're trying to get the students to understand the connection between those.
Thirdly, principles today are unbelievably challenged. It's a different kind of job than what it's ever been. And what we're trying to do now is provide a partnership with the private sector. Leadership is leadership, whether you're the CEO of Microsoft, or the principal of Roosevelt High School. So, we're connecting these executives with these principles to talk about what does it take to succeed?
Whether it's your budget, or working with your teachers, or working with the public, how do you succeed in leadership role as a principal today? And so we've connected them, we have training with them. And so and so. We're trying to connect in a way that nobody else can, but these private sector employers by giving these students exposure to things they wouldn't otherwise see or be able to understand, give these teachers a real opportunity to see career connected learning and give these principles the opportunity to see leadership and maybe some new and innovative ways so they can succeed. So, these CEOs are in those schools, from a human standpoint in every direction, from students, to teachers, to principals, and I'm hopeful that they're going to convince them those jobs are there for them. Just get their credentials and you can do it.
Blomster: We've talked about this on the podcast before about how the expectations of companies like this have changed over the time. And unlike almost any other time the public is looking towards corporations to 听lead the moral and ethical and social changes in ways they didn't before. Do you think that this is accurate? And why do you think this evolution has taken place, you know, so dramatically over the last, you know, 10, 15 years?
Gregoire: Yes, I think it's absolutely an accurate assessment of where we find ourselves today. And I think it actually started a long time ago. You know, in the early days, companies were being criticized if they were using labor from foreign countries that were not respectful of children and not respectful of women and not respectful of hours and benefits and so on. That was kind of the beginning of this movement, if you will. But today, what I think we're finding is for large companies in particular, the expectation by customers, by employees, by investors is it isn't good enough for you to think solely about your bottom line, you have a responsibility, a social responsibility, to be leading to provide civic leadership to give back to the community at large. And these companies are hearing it, they're feeling it. But I'm so proud of these 18 because they were ahead of the curve. They saw it themselves. They saw their civic responsibility stepped up and are doing something about it.
Blomster: One of the things that we talked about here at the law school is that private practice or working with corporations from the legal side, you really can make these significant social movements come to life, you can make these changes. What would you say to law students for whom maybe those pathways aren't as clear or public interest minded who want to make a difference, but maybe the pathway is not as clear to do so outright in the corporate world.
Gregoire: So, just having met this morning with the Gregoire fellows, I indicated to the them that now is their time that they are immense value added, whether they work for the public sector, nonprofit, private sector, because they come with a value of doing social good that is ingrained in them. So, it isn't new to them. That's who they are. That's what they're about. And so, what they can do is go into these companies or into these government entities or into the nonprofits, and really show them how to lead, show them how to provide the social responsibility publicly that really needs to be done.
Our days of simple solutions to problems are over. We now find ourselves in a world of immense complexity. So, the only way we're going to address these is if we see that it's working together. That's why I think people are so frustrated by what they see going on in Washington, DC. I don't know what you get done if you can't reach across the aisle and say, 鈥淲ho you represent, what do they want? What do they need? What do they care about? And how can we come together to solve the problems?鈥 That's what I see happening. Lawyers can lead the way. Lawyers can be pivotal in representing their clients and instilling them the need to think about social responsibility and how that can be done. The pro bono work that's being done by our law firms now is immensely impactful and important. And every one of the fellows here at the University of Washington asked the same question every year with a new class, 鈥淗ow do I make sure that what whoever I'm going to go to work for is going to allow me to do the kind of pro bono work where I can make a real difference.鈥 And so this morning, I said to them, I think that's important. But I think you also need to look at the law firm or the government entity you're with or the nonprofit, and show them the way, show them how to do social good and accept social responsibility, because that's the only way we're going to address the kinds of of complex problems we're all facing today.
Blomster: Finally, as a former law student yourself, for our 1Ls, you know, right now we're at the very start of their second quarter they've just gone through finals. Hair's been blown back. And you know, there's no turning back now. Just on a practical note, what's the biggest piece of advice that you would give to law students as they're looking towards the end of their first year, looking towards internships, and eventually a career in the legal profession?
Gregoire: I've been a lawyer for a long time now. And I turned to the practice of law. Back in my day, I actually graduated with a degree to teach. And I couldn't find a job, to be perfectly honest with you. Don't know where I'd be today if I had followed that career path. But I then began to ask myself after the calling of John F. Kennedy, how can I really make a difference? How can I give back to the community and at that young age, I decided it was through the practice of law. I've never regretted one day of that decision.
I believe the practice of law can make bigger, bolder, more lasting changes than almost any other single profession. And an example of that is when I lead on the tobacco negotiations for the 50 attorneys general in the country that really brought to task a corporate group of companies that were really misleading the public, technically preying on children. We brought them to task like nobody else could have, nobody else was. And we changed the face of that industry. And it was the largest single financial settlement in the history of the world then and still to this day, but more importantly, we changed the culture, the transparency, the honesty with the public. That's what I think is really fundamentally important. So, that's just one example. But every day a lawyer can make the difference in the life of a human being, to make their life better. They can make big bold changes, but they can also make a significant difference in the life of one individual that will have a lasting impact on all of us. So, I'm proud of being a lawyer. I'm proud of those who've chosen law. Some may practice, some may not. But whatever they choose to do they have the capacity to make a real difference.
Blomster: Governor Christine Gregoire is the 22nd, Governor of the state of Washington, who today is the CEO of Challenge Seattle. She's visiting the law school today to connect with this year's cohort of the Gregoire Fellows Program, which recognizes future change makers for their outstanding achievements, unique experiences and leadership potential to diversify Washington's legal field. You can learn much more about Challenge Seattle, the Gregoire Fellows Program and much more about what we spoke about today, at this episode's podcast page at law.uw.edu. Check out the show notes and the links for a deep dive into everything we鈥檝e discussed.
Governor Gregoire. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Gregoire: Absolutely. Thank you.
