Aneesh Raman

So I dislodged this idea that I am my title.

And I started to understand that I have skills I can take to different arenas.

Explanatory storytelling is this core skill I've had from my first days as a reporter to now.

When I left journalism to join the Obama campaign, and he hadn't won yet at that moment,

I knew I wanted to be part of a movement.

Like telling a story was one thing, but being part of actioning that story felt like a necessary next step for me.

And so a lot of the time in the administration and then at the startups I went to after was kind of coalition building.

How do you tell this story but mobilize people around a vision?

And then about a decade ago, my because sort of locked in.

Economic opportunity became this sort of cause for me.

I found it really interesting.

I found there were so many broken pieces to how people access or don't economic opportunity.

I sort of committed to it as this 50 year problem I wanted to help solve.

And a lot of it was just out of I can be endlessly curious and committed to this because it's a big, gnarly problem.

And then the moment of Black Lives Matter really shook me in a way that I understood it wasn't just economic opportunity, it was economic freedom.

And Dr. King has this great line about free to famine, free to the rains and the storms.

Like legal freedom gets you a lot and it gets you to this place of being situated and seen as a human in the society you're in, the democracy you're in.

But economic freedom requires like investments into you.

It requires like structures around you that help you

Now with that legal freedom, go build the life that you want.