I’m hopeful that the past year has shown us how important it is to care for one another. I’m hopeful that the past year has shown us how we all struggle. I’m hopeful that all the issues that were raised during the pandemic, all the greater understanding that we’ve gotten during the pandemic, I’m hopeful that that doesn’t go away. As we look at things like the Black Lives Matter movement and food insecurity and rent insecurity and all of these other things have been exacerbated by COVID, they always existed. But it would be so easy once we come out of this to go back to just not thinking about food banks and not thinking about rental assistance or not thinking about how we care for our children and care for the most vulnerable in our community because we’re out of this and everybody is back to life as normal.

I don’t think the normal that we once knew will exist again.

It’s time to fix the systems that are broken
So I would just remind us that in the midst of all of the many challenges we deal with every single day is to hold this past year in front of us as much as we can and continue and not to let go until we fix the systems that we discovered were broken.

 It’s kind of like you get a broken pipe at your house and you don’t get any water. Well, eventually when they put a Band-Aid around the pipe, you get water. You tend to forget that the pipe was broken until it breaks again. When it breaks again the second time, you can’t just put a Band-Aid on it. You’ve got to replace the whole pipe.

We have got to remember that even though we’ll come out of it and it may not be in front of us as much as it was, that the problems still exists.

We’ve got to continue to fight.
We’ve got to continue to have a commitment towards fixing them, making sure everyone in our communities can afford to live in our communities, making sure that there is no one who is homeless, there is no one who is hungry, that our families are cared for, making sure that our BIPOC communities have the opportunities that they need — that we remove all barriers so that everyone can be successful. Those are the kinds of things that we’ve got to continue to focus on.