So how did they help New Orleans?

There was a whole set of kind of after action learning that said like, how do we think about especially that kind of mega disaster differently and prepare for it? I think what was more interesting for me and probably work that I was closer to was the kind of on the fly learning and adaptation that was happening.

Because again, we were operating in an environment where our role as the federal coordinating office was to say, how do you interface with a bunch of other government agencies, Housing and Urban Development, FEMA, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Health and Human Services.

They're responsible for doing a given thing in the wake of a disaster.

And there's like a set of protocols that they're supposed to follow.

And there were plenty of instances where we all looked at and said like, That protocol just doesn't make any sense.

It's not going to work.

When asked his thoughts on how the government should deal with failure, this was his response.

In the course of these first couple of years of Flourish Fund, have you made a consequential decision that might be insightful to, uh, bring other leaders into?

Sure.

I think one of the first thing-- Because we are a collaborative philanthropy fund, part of what we're doing is gathering both individual families and institutional partners together, and I think we've had to make several consequential decisions on when to say yes or no to some, uh, some partners who wanted to, wanted to give us money, and we had to evaluate, are these the right kinds of partners for what we ultimately wanna do for the community that we're, we're building.

So one specific example that comes to mind, it was a large institutional funder that would've given us a ton of credibility, had an amazing network.

There were a number of good reasons to say yes to the partnership, and yet we felt in the course of our discussions with them that they had a pretty strong point of view in terms of what partnership looked like.

They were wanting to exert a higher degree of control than we've been-- that maybe pushed our comfort zone a little bit.

And ultimately, it just felt like it may not be worth...

Uh, is there another decision you can tell us about, uh, during your leadership at the Center for Public Impact that might be of consequence, weighty, and insightful to other leaders?