you know St Louis is, is the home that that my grandfather chose when he brought my mom and her brothers here back in the 60s, he actually remarried a woman who was going to nursing school at St Louis universities. This was sort of an easy landing point. And I remember, you know, growing up, hearing stories about how when my grandpa came to St Louis, he had been a chemist for decades in India, and he couldn't find work here because he had an accent, because he had brown skin, because he didn't have relationships, and wound up, you know, as a 50 year old man going door to door, knocking on people's doors, knocking on small business doors, until he finally made a connection. Uh, with a small business here in St Louis, and was able to find a job. And I remember thinking like, what kind of audacity and persistence must it had taken for him? He had lived a whole lifetime already, right? And he had come here, and he had to start over, because he didn't have that community, he didn't have those relationships, and if it was going to happen, he was going to have to build it himself. And so I think about my grandpa's persistence, you know, in my own life, growing up in a suburb of St Louis. St Louis is a very black or white community, and to be something else here meant you had to, had to navigate a lot of you know things that were understood more explicitly, and things that were sort of assumed, right, that informal culture that you know where you go at night and where you don't go at night, or who you hang out with and who you don't hang out with, and when you're in a community where nobody looks like you and they're not eating the foods that you eat at home. That gives you a choice, right? It feels like you have to pick. And, you know, as a Gemini, I have always had sort of a lot of multiplicity in my life, and I didn't want to pick. Like, what if there's more that we have in common than what divides us? Like, what if we have the opportunity to to learn and to be uncomfortable. And I do believe that when we're uncomfortable, we stand the best chance of growing and organizing the resources we need to be successful. And so that's kind of the approach that I had to take to like, making friends and to connecting with, you know, kids in my Girl Scout troop, and eventually, as I got older, like building volunteer relationships, and then, you know, as you shared, I had the opportunity to attend this youth leadership institute that really presented the concepts of institutional oppression, from sexism and Racism to ableism and classism, to a bunch of high school kids, right? And for better, for worse, high school kids, like, we're not ruined by the world yet, like, the world hasn't, like, crushed our little souls. We think that we're, you know, able to do anything and confer anything. So, you know, you learn about these systems, you learn about how entrenched they are. And I thought, yeah, like, I'm gonna dedicate my life to fixing this, and it's gonna be great. And you know now here I am, like 25 years later, realizing that I am building a world I may not ever get a chance to see. And it actually doesn't matter, because I need to know that I did everything that I could do, so that two or three or seven generations from now, our community is thriving, and they're not suffering from the same problems that we're tackling now and that and that's really the philosophy that I bring to my work with gladiator like we're planting seeds, we are creating fertile ground for the people and the initiatives and the work that will come after us, but we may not be around To see and experience and enjoy that goodness. So I'm I'm all about enjoying the journey. Honestly.