Assembly Select Committee on Select Committee on Happiness and Public Policy Outcomes

Good morning, and welcome to the final hearing of the Select Committee on Happiness and Public Policy Outcomes for this legislative session. Thank you all for being here, especially to our panelists.

The goal for this committee's hearing is to listen to experts in a wide variety of fields as they share their recommendations on what California is, can, and should be doing to help make people happier.

Our impressive group of panelists work in a wide variety of fields, including pre k through 12, and higher education, philosophy and happiness, science, civic well being, public policy, education and nature and outdoor access. Before turning, I'm not going to turn over to my colleagues. They're not here yet, but when they are, it's going to be awesome.

Later, I'm going to ask my colleagues to say hello. We're going to have two panels with each panelist allotted about five minutes each. Please try to stay within your timeframe as we do have session today at 01:00 p.m. and we never start late.

We'll save our questions for each panelist until after the entire panel has presented, except in the case of Superintendent Thurman, who I know needs to leave by 11:00 a.m. after our two panels conclude, we will provide opportunity for public comment. For those interested in public comment, please note that each person will have two minutes for their remarks.

All public comment will be in person. Let's get started with our first panel, which will be talking about happiness policies impacting youth and young adults in particular. I'm sorry. While we're waiting for Superintendent Thurman to arrive, let's have Doug Everett, Director of student wellness and health promotion at the University of California, Irvine.

Mister Eberhardt, thank you for joining us today. Okay. Let's also have Cindy Bagley come up as well, and I'll introduce you in a second. Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for coming. Good morning. Good morning.

Grab my glasses. Chairman Rendon and members of the panel, I appreciate the opportunity to be here to talk about happiness and what we're doing specifically at UC Irvine for happiness.

I am the Director of the Center for Student Wellness and Health Promotion at UC Irvine, and I sent some things through Katie that you should have in your packet that I'll be referencing today to give you some foundations on how we look at happiness.

And I'm going to be talking more about well being because happiness doesn't happen without the foundation of well being occurring first. And the first one I'd like to bring your attention to is the frogs in the pond slide, which basically explains how we do our work oftentimes. We live in this western medical society.

We wait for frogs to behave strangely. In this case, maybe they're unhappy. And rather than rush to find out what's wrong with the frogs, maybe we need to look at what's happening in the pond. What is the pond doing to create the behavior that we maybe want to change?

So we tend to look at the setting or the infrastructure, the environment, and the culture of our setting being UCI, to do that work. The next piece is the snail model that my colleague Paula Swinford created out of the USC, and it basically talks about the difference between health promotion, prevention and health education.

Health promotion is really a salutogenic approach, which comes from the positive side of health. We want to assume that everybody starts with the intent to be healthy and well and happy, rather than the pathogenic approach, which is we wait for people to be ill and have challenges and then rush to fix them.

So the salutogenic approach is really what health promotion is about. And that means looking at, again, looking at the pond or the setting and creating a culture and the opportunity and capacity for people to be well. So that's the foundation of the work we do at UC Irvine.

We're part of the United States Health Promoting Campuses Network, which is part of a network of campuses across the country that are working to adopt the Okanagan charter, which was written in 2015.

That charter is a global, international document that helps colleges and universities around the world use their place in society to research and create strategy, to create settings and communities of wellbeing. So that's what we're doing.

At UCI, we use health promotion strategy, meaning upstream approaches like policy development, teaching people skills to be healthy and well, and creating cultures of well being. So specifically what UCI is doing. So the approach is, again, we support happiness versus really focusing on preventing illness or sadness.

So not that that other work is not important, I want to make sure that that's clear as well. So we do things as a health promoting University to create a culture of well being, using the Okanagan charter as a guiding document.

Since we adopted the charter in 2021, we were one of the first eight campuses to do so. There are now 30 campuses across the country that have officially adopted the charter, and almost 300 campuses looking to adopt the charter.

We have made well being an institutional value that we're using the Geneva charter, which defines globally what well being is, meaning you invest in well being, it's a political choice to promote well being. So those are the foundations that guide our work at UCI as an institution, because you can't have happiness without well being to start with.

So we're doing things. And, yes, we do programs and services which will highlight a few of the things we do.

We had a happiness day in the spring where one of our positive psychology professors organized a day of happiness, where student organizations came out and just talked about the different things they do as an organization to promote happiness and well being. We do Wednesday wellness walks.

We know there's a lot of research that says being out in nature, and I know one of our panelists today is here to talk about nature. Being out in nature is definitely good for your mental health. So we do Wednesday wellness walks.

We have some great nature preserves on our campus and in our local community, so we introduce our students, faculty and staff to being out in those nature spaces. We have a distress fest every finals week.

We're on the quarter system, so three quarters of the year during finals week, we bring in therapy dogs, have healthy snacks, healthy food. We remind students that, yes, this is a stressful week, but taking care of your well being and managing your stress is part of being well and happy.

So we bring out therapy dogs and all of those things to remind them that there are resources here to support you. We have a behind happy faces training. Many people hide behind a happy face when they're really struggling inside. So we talk to students about, it's okay to struggle. Everybody struggles to a certain extent.

But what's important is we know how to manage that stress, how to respond to those challenges and use the resources available to us. And lastly, we have an Institute for pedagogical wellness.

We're working with our faculty to teach them how to create well being in the classroom so that students know that the faculty and the institution cares about their wellbeing, not only philosophically, but as part of their classroom experience. So basically, from a public policy perspective, my question would be, is how do we fix the pond?

So in this context, today we're talking about the State of California, and how do we make people happy? Well, how are we making California a place that supports and can create capacity for people to be happy?

Thank you. Thank you very, very much. And I know one of our colleagues, Miss Waldron, who's probably on a plane right now, will be here soon, is very interested in the outdoors as well. So I'm glad you mentioned that. And Miss Bagley is here. Yeah. Let's do this. If you're okay, Miss Bagley, let's go to the Superintendent.

But he just sat down, so I want to make sure he doesn't get to rest at all.

Do you want to stay here? Sure.

Welcome back. Thank you, sir. Good morning. Our young friend, longtime friend, state Superintendent Tony Thurman, is here to talk about the importance of happiness and joy in California's classrooms.

The Superintendent has a tight schedule, so we're dealing with airlines Monday mornings, as you know, so we don't have a lot of panelists here, but I'm going to make sure I ask my questions of you up front so you can take off when you're done with your presentation. Thank you, Superintendent Thurman. Thank you.

Thank you, Mister chair. You know, it's funny that you called me old, because I was thinking back to being in school, which was a long time ago, and what was it that brought me joyous in trying to think about today's conversation?

And a lot of times it was the stuff that happened in the after school programs, you know, the extracurriculars and the sports and activities and, you know, and as we talk to students to ask them about what gives them joy, a lot of the things are the same.

You know, we're at a place now where California schools provide $1.0 billion for arts and music education every year now. And I can't tell you how many times it was drama or music or something, being in a band, whatever it was, that really, even now, continue to give me joy.

And I think our students are also experiencing that, and they will experience that as part of the new arts and education program that comes from Prop 28 funding. We have a lot of formal programs to help address needs for our students, their mental health.

And then we have some, I think, structural things that can be helpful for after school programs. Our schools have $4 billion still for arts, for afterschool programs that can be tutoring, that can be enrichment, that can be anything that's going to support our students. We have $4 billion in community schools wrap around supports to help students.

And so we're recruiting mental health Clinicians who want to work in our schools, and we give them a $20,000 scholarship if they want to get credentialed, the same for teachers. So they have a $20,000 scholarship. And so there's so many things that we think can give our students joy.

We are focused on making sure that they all learn to read. We've provided a grant to nearly 300 school districts to hire reading coaches and specialists to make sure that kids learn to read by third grade.

But we want them to develop a love of reading and that they will read to learn, and they will read things that they love. And so we know that there are so many things that support well being.

And one of the things that I'm really pleased to report that we have heard over and over from the young people that we talk to, they want to be involved. They want to be engaged. They want to be involved in civics education. We now offer a seal of civics engagement.

This year, we will provide 16,000 of those certificates. That's up from the 12,000 last year. We have grants that go to school districts to help them develop service learning projects for students, and we've already been through two rounds of those grants. And so.

And we partnered with the California's Chief Justice on civic awards, civic learning awards, so that we can honor exemplary civic learning programs in our schools. And we thank the Chief Justice for continuing that tradition. You know, being involved in your community makes a difference for your community and for us.

You know, you think about it when you go to a, you know, a volunteer day or a community service day or just what we do in public service, we get a chance to help people. It has a feel good quality to it.

We have heard from students in our advisory councils and in other places that they want to be deeply involved in civic involvement.

And so even in this time, when there's so much hate and we've had the pushback, those who would attack LGBTQ kids, and I was pleased to support the legislation that you've helped to pass, the safety act so that our kids aren't subjected to forced outings, even though we have, you know, have to fight the battle of those who fight against ethnic studies and kids having a chance to learn about the contributions of their ancestors.

In spite of all these things and the hate that we see and spikes in anti semitism and attacks, there's still a lot of goodwill as it relates to what our students experience and their own desires to make a difference in their community.

And so I would submit to you that there is a lot of happiness and joy, and we stand ready to work with this Select Committee and you and others and of your colleagues on things that we can do to help bring happiness and joy to more students and to support them as they grow and develop.

They're going to have access. Again, thanks to you and the Legislature for voting early to approve our legislation to teach our students about personal finance. That means that they'll grow up without debt. That means that they'll understand how money works. We're working on a computer science graduation requirement.

That means students can work in jobs in biotech and healthcare and steam jobs where they'll make enough money to be able to care for themselves and their families.

We think that there are ways to offset the challenges that we see to the high number of homeless youth in our state and those who are struggling in poverty, and that we give young people a chance to earn. They will have great futures.

I know your story and how you worked in factories and others to get your education. I remember starting out working in fast food and restaurants just to pay the rent. And there's nothing wrong with hard work.

But if we can give our students a chance to be able to earn a living, to be able to afford to stay in the state where the cost of living has become so high, I believe that we contribute to their long term success, their happiness and their joy, and we stand ready to help in any way that we can to support your work and the work of this Select Committee.

Thank you, Superintendent. Thank you. You've been doing that in your official capacities and otherwise. One of the things we've been hearing a lot about is obviously Covid, which you were in your role during that struggle.

And when I'm hearing you talk, I hear these sort of dual potential problems of students having missed some time, that social aspect which is so important, and also an increasingly electronic world where there's sort of a distancing. You talk about things that are very tangible, the arts. You talk about involvement in community.

Do you see the extent to which Covid and social media, et cetera, have been able to complement, or maybe perhaps social media could complement some of the efforts you're doing and the extent to which maybe Covid has hampered.

Thanks for the question. I think you are correct that the experiences of young people and adults coming out of COVID was just devastating. We are not meant to be isolated, but yet we needed to be for safety.

I mean, when you think about a million people dying from COVID it was clear that what needed to happen took place. But even the million students who didn't have a computer when we went into Covid, they were separated from the ability to talk to a mental health provider.

If everything was by telehealth and you didn't have a computer, you know, there were some devastating effects. And so I believe that we're beginning to see our students climb out of COVID but I think it's going to take some years.

A lot of pediatricians have called it, you know, multi year effort to see students bounce back academically and socially.

I think we saw a very dramatic spike in depression and anxiety for many of our students, they were robbed of not just being around friends, but even a graduation or a prom or the things that many students do in school. It is very, very difficult on so many young people and so many adults.

But I do believe that our young people are more than a set of circumstances that they have faced. And young people are very resilient and with the right supports, they can overcome. And one of the things that we're doing is saying, let's work on our long term plan to make sure our students bounce back academically.

And this state has provided the right resources. More than any other state, this state provides $8 billion to schools for what's called learning recovery activities through a block grant. Every school district has received a portion of it, $4 billion for the expanded learning program. So that means extensive tutoring and longer school days.

And so this state has been creative. We're seeing a growth in the rate of students who are signing up for transitional kindergarten. I know you made your career in early education.

While schools are struggling still with some declining enrollment, it is encouraging to see that growth of four year olds who are entering transitional kindergarten, because one of the impacts of the pandemic is that for young children who are starting school, it's difficult for them to do some basic things like hold a pencil or, you know, we see a lot of increases in behavior.

And so in spite of these challenges, California is positioned with the resources to help our students to make the greatest comeback and to grow. And we're working to make sure that 300,000 teachers get training as it relates to math and teaching kids to read so they can develop that love of reading and reading by third grade.

And so in spite of the challenges that exist in the world, I'm still hopeful. I'm full of hope that this great state will be able to overcome some of the challenges that we face and lead a path for others. And so I'm grateful for the work of this Committee.

And to your question, I believe that we're going to see our students make successful recovery from the challenges of the pandemic. But we're in the midst of that work, and we're working to style long term plans for mental health and academic achievement that we believe will help them to make that progress. Thank you, Superintendent.

I know you got one last question when we talk about, and thanks for your work on transitional kindergarten, too.

As a father of a four and a half year old, it's interesting how transitional kindergarten has gone from a niche term that nobody ever talks about to something that all the other parents talk about, and it's something everybody understands. We talk about the mental health of students. Totally important. It's what we're here for.

But we know that schools have been asked to do more and more, and teachers and faculty, that can be a challenge for them.

Can you talk a little bit about what you've done or what the Department has done in terms of making sure that our teachers have all the resources they need, particularly relating to things, relating to well being and happiness.

Yeah. And I hope that your family is enjoying TK. It's really special when we see the young ones getting that, just that introduction and having fun and enjoying things and knowing that they'll be put on a path for success going forward.

And so thank you for your work in this area in terms of, you know, just working through challenges. Our schools, you know, we can't ask the teachers and classified staff to be the counselors of kids. Right. They've got a lot to do. We are trying to counter chronic absenteeism. Kids have missed a lot of school, even now.

And part of it is that people have moved away from their communities, they've moved away from the state. We're not always sure where they went. But just like before the pandemic, kids miss a lot of school because of illness, taking care of a younger sibling, dealing with lack of transportation, homelessness.

We have 240,000 homeless students in the state. 10,000 of those students are unaccompanied. They're on their own. And if we don't help those 10,000 students right away, they will become homeless adults. And, you know, there are transitional housing programs that can help them to get a subsidized apartment and staff that provide the wraparound supports.

You know, sometimes people say it's mission creep to ask schools to do more, but the school always has been, is still the hub of so much great activity for students and for their families, like adult education, to give parents opportunities to learn about resources for themselves and how to support their students.

But we do have great resources in our schools, like the community schools grant the $4 billion. So there's someone at the school who is trained to connect people, the resources for whatever it is that they need. Health, mental health, social services.

The state has a $4 billion mental health plan to get all the systems aligned, from healthcare systems to county health to school based health programs. It's called the Children's Behavioral Health Initiative, and it is significant.

It really, you know, these systems sometimes don't talk to each other, and getting them all working together means that like I like to call it, there's no wrong door to go through. We have to remove stigma around mental health.

We have to have clinicians who have various training and cultural competency and speak multiple languages, and they're ready to work in communities and do home business if that's what it takes to get to where the needs are. And California is poised for that.

But we have to ramp up in hiring staff and training staff to be ready to do that work. And so it's why I still have hope, you know, that the voters of California passed $1.0 billion bond to address homelessness and mental health for veterans and others.

I think that it will take time, but as we layer these programs together, we will see deeper impact for young people and adults going forward. And when you layer that with things like civics and service learning and community service, young people learn to become stewards of the environment.

But it's really doing something good for them, too, letting them know that there's a commitment to your neighbors, to helping others. We have students in high schools who tutor students in elementary school.

You know, they're not only our next wave of teachers, but what they're doing from an intergenerational standpoint, prevents bullying, supports our young people, and so there are so many examples.

We just need some time to layer it all together and move forward with this plan with diligence to really make sure that we help every single one of our almost 6 million students.

Thank you. I know you have a busy schedule. Busy day. Thanks for always being such a good friend. Appreciate it. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. Thank you, Miss Superintendent. Take care. Can I give this to you before you leave?

Yes. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me here. It's great to speak with these two expert panelists. I, in my professional life, I'm the community services Director for the City of Rennert park. So recreation, all things happiness and fun in that agency.

And today I'm here before you as a volunteer, as the President of the California Park and Recreation Society, which is a professional association that really is designed to support professionals who bring happiness to communities across California every single day. There's so much to pack into what parks and recreation can do for happiness in youth.

As you see, I have my two kids back here in the back of the room, one of which we just finished TK and had a fantastic experience. When I think about my own kids and I think about days when they'll say things like, that was the best day ever, mommy.

It was a day that included a park, and that didn't cost me any money. All it cost me was a little bit of extra time out of my day to let my kids enjoy open space and free play.

Not only free play, to me, didn't cost me anything, but also free play where they get to design their own day, they get to design their own fun and their own experience. And it's really important that kids have access to parks and open space.

And there's so many kids in our state who don't have access to parks and open space, which is the basis of happiness right from the beginning of youth.

The first place parents take their kids to enjoy recreation is to their park next to their house in their neighborhood, where they can walk down the street and watch their kids just enjoy life. I think, you know, talking about the Covid-19 pandemic, parks really got a really good reputation, again.

That was the place where everybody could go outside and enjoy and still feel normal for however many moments it was. But again, how many Californians across our state didn't have that access, couldn't go outside and see nature or play in a playground?

They were stuck inside of a home or into a multifamily apartment complex and didn't have any place to go to get outside and get fresh air and play with their neighbors in a social distancing environment because they didn't have access to that.

And so I think it's really important, and something that we really want to see across the state is that every child in the State of California has access to park and open space within walking distance, biking distance of their homes.

I think that we would love to see more unused private space, be able to be rewarded, to be converted into park and open space, urban landscapes. I've seen some of my colleagues across the state get grants from the statewide park program to convert an unused alleyway into an urban parkscape.

And that's something that is so wonderful for the community. We see lots of housing initiatives. We want more housing, we need more housing, but we also need more parks. We need more open space to go with that housing. It's great to get the homeless places to stay and have roofs over their head.

We also want our communities to be able to play and recreate together and listening to the Superintendent speak, there's lots of opportunity for the schools to reach across the table to their local agencies. In parks and recreation. Our teachers are overwhelmed and they are overburdened.

I will tell you that for a long time in our industry, we were able to get teachers to work for us in the summer. They would come to our summer camp programs.

We had experts, they were still ready to go. Since the Covid-19 pandemic and students coming back to school and teachers really spending a lot of their day dealing with mental health throughout the course of the day, they want their summers actually off.

And so now you're looking to parks and recreation agencies to really continue the enrichment activities over the summer, to continue to give kids access to social environment and play when the teachers are taking a break so they can recharge and be ready to go for the school year.

And so I see lots of opportunities for recreation and park professionals to talk to the school district, reach out to the school district and ask how we can partner what happens at 05:00 when the teachers are done? The kids still need space, they still need play, they still need social engagement.

And that's where, you know, parks and recreation professionals and our park systems can really play into keeping kids happy, not only during the school day, after the school day and throughout the entire summer.

Another aspect to this is if you look at our park systems in places where we do have playgrounds, you see a lot of two to five year old playgrounds and five to 12 year old playgrounds.

So until just recently, this summer where my kids turned 5 and 10, they could not play or should not play in the same play structure at the same time because it was dangerous for my younger child to play in the 10 year old play structure.

So we really would like to see this movement of all inclusive play spaces, which are designed for all ages and all abilities. Not only does it give kids across physical disabilities, emotional, sensory type, needs all a place to play together, which will help prevent bullying in the future, but it also talks about intergenerational. Right.

Grandma can take their grandkids to the play structure and actually be able to get onto it with them. And so right now, lots of our play structures, by law, need to be accessible, which means that someone with a disability can access it. But then what do they do once they get to it? They can't participate on it.

They can't play on it, and it just highlights the disability. So we really would like to see this movement of anytime someone replaces a playground, that they replace that playground with an all inclusive playground which is different than accessible playground.

Inclusivity is really important to building social cohesiveness, which makes happiness in all of our kids and our youth, which transcends into them going to a University where they choose universities that are going to help them continue in that happiness, but they have to find that happiness at the core when they're children first. So that's where I'll stop.

There's so many more things to say, but we'll stop there.

Thank you, and I appreciate it. I'm going to ask you some questions Miss Benkley suggested. You just finished and you made me think of a lot in a lot of communities. I'm thinking of two different types of communities. My very urban community. When we think of parks, we often think of sweeping green spaces.

Just don't have those in my communities. In my communities. Wondering what you've seen in terms of communities like that, very dense urban communities, what they can do with limited space.

And then the other thing I was thinking of, in certain suburban communities, the largest green spaces are often schools, which unfortunately, often have a giant fence around them or inaccessible for, you know, different reasons. After 03:00 04:00 can you speak to those?

And what we as lawmakers at the state level, but also perhaps at the city and school district level, might be able to do in terms of, you know, creating more opportunities for school districts to work together, but also to find smaller pieces of property that we could use for park space?

Yeah, I think the property piece is a little tricky, again, because lots of the property that you could see be converted into open space, parkland is private.

And so it's really trying to figure out how to cross pollinate the public and private sector so that you can incentivize private parking lot owners, for example, to be able to convert a portion of that parking lot into some sort of open space, tree landscaped area. It doesn't have to be a playground.

It really can just be converting a space in your parking lot with Greenery and benches and places for people to congregate, a table that has a checkerboard on it so that people can just engage in social activities together.

So, you know, playgrounds and park spaces like that are very expensive, but converting an unused piece of hardscape on a private property is really not that expensive. But really the challenge is getting the private property owners to be able to work with the public agencies to be able to convert that.

So that's where I would see the biggest opportunity is how do you incentivize that relationship to create more opportunity in these unused spaces? Because there's a lot of unused concrete slabs that just sit there, and they're too expensive to develop, so the private developers don't do anything with it, and it sits there unused.

So that's where I would see lots of opportunity in those urban landscapes. As far as the school districts right now, I think the public agencies that have the best opportunity to give kids access is those that have a really great Superintendent in their school system, and they have the joint use agreements.

So if we can get more of those types of opportunities working together, especially for that post 3:30 time slot, is that, hey, I'm going to work with XYZ Public Agency after 03:00 they can use all of our spaces just as if they were their own.

So all of our youth sports organizations can use those spaces, we can use their classrooms. I can speak for my own private public agency that we are working with our school district to access those extended learning opportunity funds so that we can come in onto their space afterwards. We have the staff and provide enrichment opportunities.

The gate thing is a challenge, and I understand, you know, you want your. You don't want a bunch of problem people in your playground in the middle of the night, and the kids come in to play in the morning and there's shredded glass on a slide. So there is.

It would require some additional funding for staffing to make sure that those spaces can have a recreation professional, for example, in the space doing organized activity in a playground area.

But I think the open space is really just a joint use agreement saying that after 03:00 the public agency is going to come in and rent these fields just like we would our own. And by rent, I mean sign an agreement. Doesn't have to have fees associated with it.

That's the most successful way that I think we can get access. We are all serving the same population of kids. We all have the same goals is to give our kids places to play and have fun. And so I don't see any reason why we couldn't continue to do that across the state.

I've only seen it successful in a handful of them. It's definitely a challenge.

Thank you. I have one more question for you, but I also thought you made a good point and sort of analogous between you said the parks and rec folks don't have to, they can just rent the space. And that reminds me of your previous comment when you talked about how parks can be open play.

I think about my daughter who loves parks, loves playgrounds, and then when she comes home, she replicates them in her home, sometimes at great cost and breaks a lot of stuff. But it's that cool idea of sort of, that's creativity. It really is because of open play.

And I think that's something we need not only from our kids, but also from our school districts and cities and legislatures as well. One last question. I'm really interested in, always interested in comparative models, and you sort of ended where I want my next question to start.

What communities, what school districts are doing a really good job of? Have you seen examples that are, that we can replicate?

I mean, well, I have one myself, but I feel like that's, I'm being biased. Go for that. I'm in the City of Roner park. So with the Katarina Park Unified School District and our Superintendent, she's so open to community engagement and trying to work across the table.

Our City Council and our school board have meetings together talking about how we are creating these spaces for our youth.

And so I think that when you have both sets of your electeds working together rather than separately, that's when you get opportunities for the, the practitioners to be able to come in and do really great work for our communities.

Our joint use agreement actually, technically right now is expired, but we are still both allowing each other to continue using it as if it wasn't while we work on, you know, the paperwork part, which is challenging.

I can't, I don't want to speak for other agencies because I'm not sure when I got my joint use agreement started seven years ago, I did reach out to many agencies to find out who was doing a good job. The City of Roseville would be a good example up here in the northeast.

But again, it's been seven years, so I don't know who's doing what today but we could definitely get you access to that information relatively easily through our association.

Great. Thank you very much. Appreciate, appreciate it. Miss Bagley, a couple questions for Mister Eberhardt. I'm curious about Happiness Week at UCI and how that went. And if there were particular, I'm sure you're always trying to improve your models. What worked, what didn't, what did you see was the most effective, what were the most effective activities?

Well, I'm going to be careful in comments because it wasn't my event. It was one of our faculty members, but one of our peer educators out of our office helped organize it, and I think the students are just really looking to reengage.

I think this coming out of the pandemic that everybody's been talking about is a big issue. So I think the students are begging for ways to engage. But what we're finding in our office is we're having to reteach just the basics of starting a conversation and building relationships, right.

So we can have social programs and expect students to come and say, here's an opportunity. But if their anxiety, because they were isolated for three years and they missed out on a lot of those opportunities to learn how to start a conversation and build a relationship.

So you mean that literally?

I mean that literally. So one of the things we're doing this year is our office is because we tried the social program and have students come, but we had more and more students just say, I'm having trouble making friends. I'm having trouble meeting people.

So we're actually going to work with the School of Social Sciences and we're going to start changing our programmatic model to do a social event and have it be educational, but not call it an educational program and invite faculty, staff and students from a school and give them prompts.

Tell me about your family, tell me about your hobbies, tell me about your pets. Those conversation starters that really teach people conversation 101. Because the faculty say there's this generational gap and, you know, the youth of today and students today just aren't the same. And I can't connect with them. And the students will say, I don't.

The faculty are intimidating. I can't talk to the faculty. There's this power dynamic. Well, it's all the same thing. They're both anxious of each other. So let's bring it back to basics and really teach people how to reengage in in person conversations. So I think that's literally a piece of the puzzle that is critical.

So that's why we go back to those foundations of really starting with well being before you can expect things like happiness and flourishing and thriving. We need to teach people some of the basics of just how do you be in a space with others and build community?

Yeah, I think that's well said. I think a lot of what we found in this committee has been, be careful how I say this. There's a lot of obvious things, and then we think, well, if they're so obvious, why don't you do them? And I think that sort of mindfulness is a big part of that.

And things like start being able to start conversations are things that are so, like, I was surprised when you said that. I wasn't sure what you were even talking about.

And I think that's very helpful from that perspective and would probably be helpful for a lot of legislators who like to talk about themselves so that maybe you can do those classes here. I had another question for you, and there's a great article in the journal for Higher Education.

It came out about a year ago, using Colby College and a few other, in Maine and a couple of other places as examples of universities have turned themselves inside out, where the campus sort of spreads into this neighboring city, which I think Colby's in Waterton, Maine. And so they have classes in the city. They have.

All the volunteer activities are in the city, so that the University, the college is no longer a isolated space, and it becomes, you know, one with the city. So when you talk about students wanting to engage and reengage, I think that's. I think that complements that to a large extent. Have you.

Have you seen that as well at UCI? I know it's a big campus. Yeah. And I always. I find the design really interesting, and that's sort of the circle. Circle. Yeah. Are almost.

It's a blessing and a curse.

Yeah, I could imagine. Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful park on the inside. But you wonder if people are more inclined to go inward rather than outward. Can you speak to that?

Yeah, a couple of things with that model, because I was, before I was at UC Irvine, I was at UC Riverside, where everything crisscrossed through the bell tower. Go, Highlanders. Go, Highlanders.

So everything happened at the bell tower, because that's where you could see everybody crisscross at some point during the day when the campus is built in a circle, and at the center of the circle is a park. Unless you have a specific reason to go to the park, you live on the circle.

Yeah.

So if you're in the school of Engineering and the School of Social Sciences is here and the student center is here. Unless you're, you know, have a reason to be somewhere else on the circle, you're not necessarily interacting with others. So that's another structural piece that we have to grapple with.

So we're really trying to work on activating our park to get more people there. So there's that piece then expanding out. The Okanagan charter, actually part of the charter says scaling out.

So universities are known for their research strategies for creating solutions, but then it's about scaling out to your local and global community to show the rest of the world what's working in your researched environment and then sharing that out. So we're actually partnering with the community on a lot of different things.

Sustainability is an example that comes to mind. We're partnering our school of Engineering and Physical Sciences, looking at different green energy sources. So compressed hydrogen is a new thing that we're researching in engineering and physical sciences.

So we're partnering with SoCal gas to really look at how can we really scale this out on a much broader scale where I live 60 miles inland in San Bernardino area, and we just launched our first hydrogen powered monorail, or not monorail rail system. So the metrolink now has a hydrogen-fueled, clean emitting train line.

So we're working on things like that. And then the parks, and we work with the schools, we work with all kinds of things to really build those connections so that it's not. That's UCI over there, and then this is the rest of the Irvine community. So we're really looking at those partnerships.

Cause that's, again, what the Okanagan charter's talking about.

Cool. I appreciate that. I think what you made me think about, interesting intersection between what you both do. I was thinking of the urban. Jane Jacobs, who's an urban theorist, talked a lot about large. She didn't like large parks. She thought that large parks were tended to be dormant at night in particular.

And she was a big proponent of pocket parks, and she thought all big parks should be broken up and, you know, sort of interspersed with housing and built into smaller parks. And that's interesting. It was specifically because of that activation issue that she felt that there were great to have big, large swaths of land, but often there.

So Irvine specifically is built into these different villages, we call them. Right. So each village in the community in this big circle that is Irvine, has its own park, its own shopping center, its own school.

So everything, even though it's a big city, it's made up of six or seven different villages, and each one is intentionally developed to include park space and open space and play space, but also the other things that. That you need.

Fantastic. Thank you so much. I appreciate both of you. Miss Bagley and Mister Everhart, thank you so much. Great panel. Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna call the second panel up, but before I do, I'm gonna say hello to my friend Miss Waldron. How's Southwest Airlines treating you this morning? You all right?

Good. Actually, for some reason, everyone decided to have a Select Committee this morning. I'm sorry. One started before this one, so I popped in that one.

Got it. Any opening comments you want to. I know you just got here. I don't want to blindside you, but.

Well, no. I mean, I'll just say when we talk about happiness, I've mentioned this before, like, getting outside is such an important part of that well being. Even if you feel bad, if you go outside on a beautiful sunny day, you can't help but at least feel your mood elevated.

I grew up in the South Bronx in New York, where we didn't really get to see too much sky. So every time you come up from the subway, if you're in Manhattan, you would look up and see sky, and that would be about all you could see.

And we had a lot of gloomy weather through the winter, all the way up to April when the crocuses would break through in the ice. And then I would feel my moods start to change when we have longer days. So just getting outside is so important. And I look around Sacramento and they have great parks.

I just heard the discussion about parks, and some of the parks got run down. And I've seen them rejuvenate because they've added disc golf courses, believe it or not. And people are wandering around in the wooded areas and other areas. And it's pretty safe now because of that.

Getting more use out of parks can really change the whole atmosphere of them. And it's really important to have that multi use flexibility in parks. So you have little kids and adults and seniors and everyone being able to recreate at all times, too, not just, you know, the middle of the day. So anyway, thank you.

Thanks, Miss Waldron. Miss Waldron and I get together socially fairly often, and she always brings up not only this Committee, but especially within the context of parks, which I know is so important to her. Our next panelist is Julie Rusk, co founder of civic Wellbeing Partners and former chief wellbeing officer for the City of Santa Monica.

Miss Rusk, thank you for joining us today.

Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here, and I'm really impressed that you're doing this committee, which I think is doing really forward leaning work, and is there'll be a time when people will look back and say, no, duh, you know, this is really about, I think, the first principle of governance, which is really about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and well being.

And I know there's some language that we can talk about. So what I'm going to go through really quickly today, and I know that discussion is probably the sort of richest part of this kind of engagement, I'm going to tell you about a couple of things.

I'll start with using a chapter that just was published about Santa Monica's work, because I think that provides a nice place based example of working on. Welcome. Of working on this topic that you're tackling.

So I'll talk a little bit about Santa Monica's work, then I'm going to lift up a particular programmatic example, which is our wellbeing microgrants, which really gets into civic engagement. And then finally I'm going to wrap with a little bit about what's happening more broadly. So the next slide, please. I'm not sure where this slide. Thank you.

So I left a couple of copies of this chapter from a recently published book on urban inequalities. And Graciela Tonin from Argentina had asked us to write a chapter about Santa Monica's work.

We're one of the few cities in the US that has really tried to tackle what does it mean to take a framing of well being and really use that within a local government context. So the next slide, I'm going to start to tell you a little bit about that. And the way we.

I'd like to sort of start by again, really briefly telling you about our work, is looking at this framework that we created in partnership with the Rand Corporation, the New Economics foundation. We started the work after a government innovation prize that Santa Monica received from Bloomberg philanthropies about 10 years ago.

And part of what we set out to do was convene people who've been working across the country and really the world on this concept of well being and what it means and how it can really inform government and really be a unifier and help us think beyond what I'll call the operations and transactions of government.

But more to the purpose of government. And what you'll see in this framework is we basically set out to organize our thinking about this in six dimensions, which the research and science showed were all really important.

The sort of top yellow band is looking at outlook, which is really where you might measure the sort of subjective well being and behaviors of individuals. And then in the verticals, the orange talks about community, then place and planet learning, which is really lifelong learning, starting really at the very beginning and following us all through our life.

We know that learning is really important for our well being, health, which is physical and mental health, and then the economy. And part of what we look at with the economy is both the perceptions that people have about the economy, but the economic sort of ecosystem that people are living in.

And there's much to learn in all of these areas, six dimensions were what we used as a way of organizing data, and the kinds of data that we really pulled together was both traditional sources of data, sort of administrative data, objective data, everything from tree canopy within place and planet, to crime rates, to traditional health data.

And then we kind of merged that and overlaid that with the more subjective data, which was newer to us in government to really use as a part of understanding how government can be effective. Another thing that became very important in the Santa Monica experience was really looking at governance.

So this was really became tied to our performance management, our communication, and some of the functions of government. So I could be happy to answer more questions about the framework and the data that we collected. So, next slide, please.

And these slides are just a couple of stand ins for some of the kinds of learnings we had about how people felt about their ability to influence government, their health, their economic opportunity.

I mean, one of the things we learned, for instance, was that close to 70% of people in Santa Monica really didn't feel that their kids would be able to live in the community. And that was a real. That makes a lot of sense. A lot of this kind of reinforces some of our common sense notion.

But to start to have data about this was really helpful. We knew that well over a third of people were concerned about paying rent or mortgage. And again, this really speaks to the kinds of things that we know are happening in communities around the country.

So I think the question then becomes sort of, what do you do with this? And so, again, these slides really just pull a few of the things that we learned.

And before I get into the microgrants, I'm going to share a little bit about what we did in city government with the 2015, 2017 and 2019, which were the three indices that we fielded in Santa Monica with the Rand Corporation.

So you'll note that was before COVID. So post-COVID information and data is part of what we've begun to collect through our micro-grant program. But we did everything from looking at how our land use and zoning policies really needed to be informed by what we knew about our residents.

So at downtown community plan in 2017, really used our wellbeing data. We did a neighborhood based project that was really in one of the PICO neighborhood in Santa Monica, which is really facing gentrification like many of our communities are. And we really used the data and the framing in those projects.

There's a project that you may be familiar with, the government alliance on Race and Equity, which really became a sort of hand in glove partnering program with our well being work, because we know that disaggregating data and understanding what's happening by race, by gender, ethnicity, zip code really matters.

It's not just about a top line, feel good story, but it's about really understanding how people are doing. So we did a number of things like that. We tied to our performance management. So going on again, I realized time is short. I want to tell you a little bit about these wellbeing microgrants. So this was really something.

As we got into Covid, part of what we did was we took some of the work that was happening inside of city hall when we were all in lockdown.

And one of the local organizations in Santa Monica, the Santa Monica Bay Human Relations Council, really understood that really doubling down during COVID was part of what we needed to do.

So they kept this wellbeing program going, which has essentially resulted in 100 community leaders doing well over 80 different projects over the last number of years to really address social cohesion, belonging, partnership, engagement, small Scale Micro Businesses. We've actually started up a number of businesses. The next slide, please.

And part of what we've learned is that if we pair a call for creative ideas from the community. So these are coming from a cross section of our community with collecting a little bit of data. So pre and post, we really looked at people's sense of hope, their feeling about that they could make a difference.

And we've worked with someone at the Brookings Institute, Carol Graham, who's an economist, who is measuring hope in particular. And we've got some really interesting pre and post data. And we have Carol Graham, one of her books here by my colleague, who's going to be speaking with you next. So we've learned a lot.

These hundred people are, some of them are under the age of 24, about a third of them are young people, about a third of them are middle aged folks, and about a third are people over the age of 50, we are really proud that we've really reached out to people that are in all racial and ethnic groups.

We really feel that this is a pipeline for leadership, and I think this is something we could talk a little bit more about how pipelines to leadership and civic action really do tie to well being. Moving on to the next slide, where we'll talk a little bit about the context.

I brought a couple of books that I think are really important from the Robert Wood Johnson foundation, one on advancing health and well being, and a second one that came out in 2020 that really looks at expanding the definition of progress.

Robert Wood Johnson foundation, which sort of has leaned into the social determinants of health, which is essentially another way of framing well being, understands that health is about more than the absence of disease, and we must really look holistically. And that's essentially what well being does.

There's folks in the new economy movement, and I sort of show you a little slide there of some folks that came together, a group in California, here in Sacramento in April, and then a team of six state representative coalitions came together just after that to really share some of what's happening. And there's quite a bit going on.

And then onto the next slide, I'll tell you a little bit about a project that I was involved with, with some folks from Madison, Wisconsin, which, again, we did this work for the Robert Wood Johnson foundation, and we called it mapping collective well being. And essentially what we did was we interviewed over 80 folks.

And I would really encourage you to take a look at the website. It's a treasure trove of information which really created a point in time understanding of what people who are working in the new economy movement, in public health, in education, in government, were really talking about.

When they think about this concept of wellbeing and how it can really be about change and transformation.

And I do want to make that point really clear that I think this is more than just sort of an overlay of something that sounds good and obvious, but it's really about how do we really hold ourselves accountable to what the purpose of our systems really are.

So onto the next slide, please, and I will wrap here with some lessons learned. And again, we could spend the afternoon on all the lessons that we all learn on this, this kind of transformative work.

But I will say that, you know, in my experience working on well being inside city government and then also working on this in the nonprofit sector and the work we did interviewing people, this is really about breaking down silos.

This is really about understanding that if we just sort of stay within our own lane and don't think about the real experiences in our community and how our lives are. I mean, you were talking about this earlier with joint use agreements.

Joint use agreements are just a fancy bureaucratic way of saying we got to have our schools and our parks coming together in our communities, because it's crazy to have things chained up on the weekends and evenings when kids need a place to play. And this can be done and we can do it.

And I think there's good models for that. So really breaking down silos and realizing that at its core, to me, this is really transformative work. And I really want to sort of emphasize that data is extremely important. We're swimming in data. We have lots of data.

I think it's important to say this work is about more than a data project. It's really about what we do with data, how we understand each other.

And going back to something that the Superintendent of education talked about, that I think where many of us are really thinking anew about is joy and is living the lives that we all want to live. And how is, how do we make that possible in our community?

How do we lift up the strengths and the assets in our community, not simply focus on the problems and the disparities and the inequalities. And this is not about papering those over, but it is about understanding that there are solutions to be found in our strengths and our assets. So I think with that I'll end again.

Many more things I could leave with you, and I'd be happy to answer questions. And I'm really honored to be here with you and thank you for your work. Thank you.

We're honored to have you here. I'm going to get to our next panelist. Mister Garcia from Coachella is here. I told Miss Waldron earlier I didn't want to put her on the spot to give opening remarks, but I rather like putting you on the spot.

So if you have any opening remarks, no long winded opening remarks, just thank you for bringing us together. Happy to hear the rest of the presenters and the information that will come from that. Thank you.

Thank you. And it should be noted that Mister Garcia is a champion for parks in our state, author of, I believe, two parks bonds and resources bonds in our state. So thanks for your work in that space. Typically happy guy. Typically happy nine times out of 10. Yeah, look out for that one out of 10, though.

Our next panelist is Stephanie Harrison, founder and creator of The New Happy, a science-based approach to thinking about happiness. Miss Harrison is joining us remotely this morning. Miss Harrison, thank you for being here or there.

Thank you so much. Can you all hear me?

I am. Okay. Yeah, I can.

Okay, great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate being able to dial in remotely, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to speak at the hearing today. So I've spent the last 10 years developing a new philosophy of happiness, and now I teach that to millions of people through my company, which is called the new happy.

And as part of that, I also run one of the largest communities of happiness seekers in the world and have had the opportunity to speak with, at this point, hundreds of thousands of people about their pursuit of happiness and what's standing in their way.

And I think one of the most interesting findings and personal experiences that I've had is that what we believe to be these unique personal experiences are actually quite universal. And it's these insights that have fed into this philosophy of happiness. Julie mentioned the Declaration of Independence and the right to the pursuit happiness.

And what I want to start with is the idea that Jefferson had when he wrote that, and he had a very specific understanding of happiness in mind.

He thought that happiness was the result of developing your individual self and then using it to contribute to the common good, based on the recognition that we are all connected to, and therefore dependent upon one another.

And these words have obviously become a major part of the American DNA and have encouraged so many people to go out and pursue happiness. But my work argues that the happiness that we're pursuing today is a very far cry from the way that they were written in that document.

Modern culture has conditioned us to believe that happiness is something that we achieve through pursuits like personal success or wealth and individual gratification. This is a belief system that I call old happy, which has been driven by our cultural institutions of individualism, materialism, and domination that have been a part of our world for many, many years.

And we can see the consequences of old happy in the data, many of which my fellow panelists have shared. In March, America fell out of the top 20 happiest countries in the world. One in four Americans are struggling with their mental health.

And perhaps most stunningly to me, and really aligned with so much of what we've heard already, 50% of Americans say that they are lonely.

And I believe that this is because old happy has led us to believe that we are separate from one another, and that happiness is this personal achievement that we can secure for ourselves, by ourselves, by elevating ourselves above others.

And when we see happiness as an individual pursuit, then it also means that if you're not happy, then there's something that's wrong with you. But years of research have taught us otherwise. The UK has a think tank called the what works for wellbeing think tank that lists 28 factors that affect happiness.

And not a single one of those is uninfluenced by systemic conditions. And the vast majority of those factors are principally driven by them. I believe that happiness for Californians begins with recognizing that true happiness is collective. It's about being connected to other people, about participating in relationships, of mutuality, of recognizing our dependence upon one another.

I usually like to sum it up by saying that if you want to be happy, the best way to do that is to help other people to be happy. And not only does this perspective transform our individual pursuit of happiness, but it also influences our society and our culture.

We all know from the research that societies that facilitate social equity, belonging, strong relationships, a sense of collective responsibility, create happier citizens. And those citizens then are driven and influenced and motivated to contribute to those conditions, thus creating a positive upward spiral of well being.

So I bring three questions today that I personally believe need to be addressed in order for us to create the conditions for happiness for everyone in California. The first is, what is happiness? I believe that we really need to teach this information to everyone. And I have witnessed firsthand that people are. They're hungry to understand what leads to well being because they want to be happy. Very much so.

The New Happy, my company, our work has been featured in prisons, in elementary, middle, high schools, universities, community centers, therapist office, institutions all over the world, and been used to help people to understand well-being and give them the tools and resources that they need. I think that this really speaks to this deep desire.

And as many have noted, we have the insights and the research, and now it's more about putting it into practice and turning it into real, actionable interventions that meaningfully improve people's lives. The second question is, where is happiness being thwarted?

We do need to look to those systemic conditions of happiness, because we need to make it clear to people that no one can be happy alone. And if you are struggling with your happiness, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's your fault.

There are so many other factors that need to be addressed, from economic instability, discrimination and injustice, access to healthcare, green spaces, the creation of safe spaces for people to create positive relationships. So much of what my fellow panelists have covered is practice interventions. And then the third is asking, where can happiness be built?

We must help people to identify where they can use their unique gifts to contribute to the common good. From an early age, I believe that people should be invited to discover their authentic selves and their strengths, and then find a way to develop them by working towards the very real problems that our society faces.

For example, I know that some of the problems that we are experiencing here include climate change, the conditions that lead to people becoming unhoused, access to education, reforming the criminal justice system. How might we invite and involve people at every stage of their lives to contribute to those problems in their own unique ways?

And then the beauty of this approach is that happiness can be built by addressing where happiness is being thwarted. This is what will allow us to create a true environment of well being for everyone.

And I personally like to imagine that every resident of this state felt a sense of responsibility for the happiness of their fellow Californians and then was given the chance to contribute to that and ultimately believe that this would be a profound way to honor the spirit of those words and the Declaration of Independence, a vision of happiness that does not separate us from one another, but that connects us together.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Great. Thank you Ms. Harrison. Our final panelist is Doctor Ted Lascher, Professor of public policy and Administration at Cal State Sacramento. Professor, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you Mr. Chair, and thank the panel. I really appreciate this topic, which is very, very important. I have some background in the handouts I gave.

If you want to know a little bit more about me, I've been doing some research on happiness and life satisfaction really grew at a Halloween conversations with colleagues about those sorts of things. And my work has tended to be with large data sets comparing people in terms of various factors that influence whether people are happy or not.

Given the short time here, I want to focus on one part of the research that I've done that really relates to the connections between a sense of security, life satisfaction and health insurance. That's where I'm going to particularly focus. I've done other sorts of research, but that's what I want to concentrate on today and give appropriate credit.

This really grows out of a really excellent master's thesis that was done at Sac State by Non Tran. And then we collaborated on this together. At the risk of being a little bit of a downer, given some of the other discussions here, there are things that other panelists have talked about that can increase happiness for everybody.

However, the research is very clear that overall poverty is a major source of dissatisfaction. And that's one of the key points I need to stress today.

And it's not just in the ways that we might first think that access to good food and being able to get some health care and things of that sort, but a lot of it is even psychological. My colleague mentioned Carol Graham's work, and she's done a lot of work on this.

One of the key, another key related points is that a sense of insecurity and not knowing what's going to happen in the future is very, very debilitating to people. And one of the things that happiness research says we can accommodate a lot of bad things.

We actually can, but we have a lot of trouble accommodating great uncertainty about personal circumstances. We have a, and that's things like if you're going to be evicted or things of that, that sort.

To be really specific, the research that I, that my colleagues and I did that grew out of non's thesis based on statistical analysis of very large data, of a large data set, shows that just having health insurance is strongly associated with, with whether people are happy or not.

And the handout I gave you, and maybe, Katie, if you showed that, you can see a graph that shows the bivariate, just two variables comparing looking at health satisfaction and whether or not people have health insurance. And you see big differences just on that basis.

But the important thing to note is that we went further and looked so even if you control statistically, meaning essentially you're looking at people who are similar in terms of whether they're married or not and their income and their education and all those things that we know that affect, and they simply do or do not have health insurance, having health insurance makes a significant difference in the likelihood of expressing light life satisfaction.

And one of the implications, and this is a tangible policy in complication that I think the committee is interested in, is the California Legislature's recent efforts to expand health insurance very likely has increased overall health, overall life satisfaction in the state. Again, the legislature has expanded Medi-Cal access and done various other things.

And the evidence from big, large national data sets suggests that simply doing that should raise, and keeping doing those sorts of things should raise aggregate health insurance life satisfaction in the state.

I'd also note that in addition to that, in an article that was published in the journal that I edit, California Journal of Politics and Policy showed that when you compare California to a number of other states that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, those that California, the change in mental health and personal health and things has been stronger for Low income people in California than in states that did not expand Medicaid under the ACA.

So those are some key. Again, I know you've got lots of things I can talk about, other research I've done on politics and economics and life satisfaction, and I can talk more about the data and how we got it and what it represents and that kind of thing. But I think I will leave it right there.

Thank you. Appreciate it. And I believe you're our second panelist during this year from Sacramento State. So it says a lot about the institution's commitment to this, to this topic. I'm going to defer first to my colleagues to see if they have any questions for our three panelists. Ms. Waldron's nodding her head.

Sure. Just the testimonies bring up a lot of ideas. And actually, I hadn't even thought about this until I saw this framework for community well being sparked a memory of something that was completely not planned for in a way. I served on the City Council for 14 years in Escondido, which is an older city.

It was incorporated in 1888, and it actually has some of the lowest census income census tracts in the nation and high immigrant population and lots of older segments of the community where I. Infrastructure is debilitating or non existent. No sidewalks, things like that.

So the city decided it was going to use CDBG funds, the community development block grant funds, to go into some of these areas and put in sidewalks so kids could walk to school and feel safer, maybe put a stop sign or something like that. That was lighting curbs, sidewalks.

And what we found was the way the city did it, in a coordinated effort, sparked the neighborhoods to start to kind of come to life. So these areas that were dark were areas of, you know, drug dealing and all of those issues.

When the city started to go in and meet with the residents and talk about what their needs were, were. And then actually the project started to evolve. Something happened naturally that the city never expected to happen. The community itself.

Even if it was just this little pocket area with a street or two that they were working on, a leader would emerge from that area. Other people who lived there got together, and they started to meet with the city and said what their vision would be. And the city met with them.

And I used to go to those meetings because it was such a positive thing, I thought. And over time, as the project developed and then finally got done, we would do one project after the other. We call these the neighborhood groups, because they naturally evolved on its own. It's not anything.

The city created these groups by putting in a sidewalk and lights. We didn't realize that all of a sudden, all those houses, the people would paint their house, they'd plant flowers, they would make it a really positive place to live again. And we started going as council members to their little meetings.

And here you'd have women who had these big pots were coming in, these food simmering on the stove for, I used to say, days, just excellent ethnic foods or variety of foods. And the neighborhood would get together and long after, for years, and it's probably still going on.

When those sidewalks and lights went in, the community still kept meeting, and it just took on a life of its own. So it was such a positive and happy thing done without us even thinking that it would happen. It's just a naturally evolved thing in these little areas.

I think we ended up with about 18 neighborhood groups in Escondido. So that really sparked, because I think it hit almost all of those topics, and they're just something the city did and could do. The other thing I wanted to talk about was about the health insurance and people, not insecurity about their future.

I've been, as the Chairman also. We're terming out this year, 12 years, I've worked on people in incarceral spaces. And a lot of times we look at women who are incarcerated.

And when you see, like, say, women in the LA County jail system, when I've watched documentaries or interviewed people and gone to visit, we've done that as the women's caucus several times going into women's prisons and jails, when you interview the people there, they don't have a hope for the future.

And you ask them, how many times have you been here? And it's been 10 times, 11 times, 15,18 times incarcerated. And you talk to the wardens in the prison, in the women's prison, and they say, well, you know, they're not as violent as the men. We give them a little more leeway.

But at the end of the day, what do we do in our jail? We immediately separate the women from their children. We immediately separate incarcerated people from their families. The buildings that are dilapidated, the air conditioning doesn't work. Everything is hopeless.

And, you know, we look at some of the things we've tried to do is how do we get people out of this cycle? But if we're separating moms from their children, automatically we're continuing a cycle of incarceration.

So I think when you look at the amount of people that have gone through an incarcerated system in our state, it's a big part of our community.

And if there's something we could do to work on, and I know we've tried, but everything costs money, is really make an impact on creating hope for people who have been incarcerated. We go a long way to helping with a feeling of well being and a hope for the future. That's what I see.

Thank you. Miss Waldron. Curious if any of our three panelists have any comments on those astute observations.

I just want to say I think infrastructure can be a real catalyst. I think that was just such a great example. And I also really appreciate that in the seeing that framework, you really just saw the work of good local government, really, because I think that is what we try to convey in that.

It's really about working together. So I just love that example. Thank you.

Yeah. And I just add that some of the research that says that literally one of the big differences across some socio economic groups is hope for the future. Literally, that very question.

Thank you. Is Harrison anything? Sorry. Mr. Garcia, do you have any questions?

No questions. Just a couple of comments on.

Well, first, I appreciate the expertise that have come before us and really connected the dots as it relates to the circumstances that people face and kind of ultimately what it is that they project as energy mindset contribute in the economies and whenever we can make that connection to what's happening on the ground and the issues as they were outlined here in terms of poverty, the insecurity as it relates to the lack of insurance, I mean, those are policy issues, questions that we're deliberating, debating here consistently, full circle.

It really determines the state of mind of individuals and how active, engaged they will become. So fascinated by the level of research and detail that is being covered, all to encompass the State of mind of people feeling good about themselves and good about their circumstances. Case in point, the name of this select committee.

So just wanted to thank you for that information.

Thank you Mr. Garcia.

I appreciate it. Some questions for the panelists. Again, I'm trying to make this as tangible as possible for Miss Rusk. When you talk about Santa Monica and the collective well being, it's the same question I asked about UC Irvine. Are there specific activities that were more helpful, less helpful?

Well, you know, I do think in terms of the whole of government approach, really trying to help people see whatever it is that they were doing in government as part of a larger set of goals.

I mean, you know, the folks that are, you know, picking up our trash and keeping streets paved are really about sort of mobility and access and that infrastructure really does matter. And so there was something I think, that was very compelling about sort of the, sort of knitting together of the whole.

So I guess that's just sort of one overall comment I'd make. I think the other thing from sort of a whole other perspective is engaging with community and helping to sort of lift up the stories and the space and the expertise that is in every one of our communities across the state and the country.

And I think we often ignore that. So the reason I wanted to lift up this microgrant program as an example is these are short term projects that get selected after a call for ideas. And we've gotten all kinds of really wonderful ideas. People become part of a cohort, so they're learning from each other.

And I think to the point about purpose and belonging and the interconnections of community and helping to sort of lift that up and celebrate what people are wanting to do using creative approaches, and then helping people see that this is part of the purpose of government.

Because I do think that one of the things that we all really struggle with from wherever we are, government settings, is the sort of disconnection and alienation and part of our work, I think, really does need to be about making those connections to the point that Stephanie was making, that we're all making.

And I know previous panelists have made this point as well. We're not islands here. And so I think one of the challenges we have is words like happiness and well being, for that matter, wellness. These things get conflated.

People think that they're very singular and individual, when, in fact, the policies that government exists to enact and whether it's how we tie together use of our programs to give people access to food. We have farmers markets all over this state.

I mean, one of the things we found in our small community, five days a week there's farmers markets, and yet people not able to access fresh fruits and vegetables.

So we really doubled down on the market match program where people can use EBT and get double the value and did a number of cooking classes and demonstrations and brought people into the farmers markets. I mean, people are now doing this, I think, all over the state.

But these are very important access points to help people really understand that it really does matter. It matters for all of us. So I also think that one other thing I'll say is data has got to be disaggregated.

And I think this is incredibly important and was one of the big lessons out of the work we did in Santa Monica. I mean, parents said, I don't want to just hear the school district data about academic achievement overall. I want to know kids like my kids.

I want to understand third grade reading and then how it ties to high school graduation. So really being smart about how we disaggregate and tell stories from the information we have, I think it's also important. So I don't know if this is giving you a few quick answers, but thank you.

The last point about data is good for us to keep in mind as well. Professor Lasher, I had a question for you. I'm trying not to prejudice this question with my own political views. You talk about health insurance, you talk about expectations stabilities.

The last couple of decades, we've seen that the countries that tend to rate highest in terms of happiness tend to be countries with strong safety, social safety nets, places in Scandinavia, et cetera. What types of things do you think we could be doing as legislators that might increase happiness? And is that accurate?

Is it to a large extent about social safety nets?

Yeah. I mean, it's difficult to unpack when you've got so many things comparing countries. But you are correct.

Most of the countries that have tended to rate the highest are countries like Finland and Norway and Sweden that do have strong social safety nets, and it's making sure that people aren't worried about sort of, am I going to, am I going to be able to send my kid to get them to a doctor if they develop whatever is those sorts of questions, like taking, directly addressing things that we know that people tend to worry about a lot and giving them some reassurance makes a big difference.

And it is, you know, it is really interesting to see the difference. They're not huge, and there are lots of other things going on, but to see the difference between states that didn't expand Medicaid and those that did in terms of various. No, these are people's self perceptions of their health, their mental health, et cetera. You know.

Yeah. Those are the data points that specifically made me think about other countries. Thank you for that. Ms. Harrison. A big conversation we've had, a big topic of conversation we've had during this five months we've been doing this. Katie, has been around social media and technology, and I know that much of your work is in social connection.

A big part of your platform is about social media. Do you see social media as a help? Do you see it as a hindrance when it comes to fostering social connections?

I think that the way I usually like to think about it is that social media is a tool like any other. And the intention behind the tool, the way that it's used and the way that we kind of create cultures around using the tool, ends up having a much bigger impact.

And so I think it can be both something that creates well being and also something that detracts from it.

I have tried to turn it into a force for good, for education, for reaching people who might be isolated, who might not have social support, who might not feel supported by people in their lives, to be their authentic selves and to be able to disseminate at a very large scale, a lot of this scientific information and the ways in which I've tried to do that are really with the goal of making it accessible to people.

And so, just as an example, I have spent a lot of time teaching people about working with their emotions, which is something that many social emotional learning programs cover in grade school.

But for those of us who are adults and who didn't get the benefit of that curriculum, curriculum, we were not taught how to do many of those things.

And I have been amazed to see just how much people want to learn these tools and techniques to help them with their well being and how they have grabbed onto these teachings and these lessons and then use them in their own lives and pass it on to others, their children, their family members, whoever.

So I think that we have to be really mindful about how social media is used and the mindset with which we're approaching it.

So in many ways, old, happy in the culture of what I was describing about happiness, tends to incentivize using social media as a way to elevate yourself above others, to show off your successes and your achievements, and to kind of portray that everything in your life is perfect and good.

And those are practices that will not help you with your well being and that also, of course, end up rippling out and negatively affecting others as well.

And so I think that we have a large amount of work to do in terms of teaching people how to use social media effectively, as well as potentially introducing regulations that make it a safe place for everybody, especially those who are younger or who might need more support.

Thank you. Thanks so much. Any more questions from my colleagues? You're good. Both good. Great. This concludes our final panel. I want to thank all of our panelists for their insightful presentations. We all enjoyed hearing the wide range of ideas and recommendations. I know they're going to be helpful on this issue moving forward. So thanks a lot.

So I wanted to thank my colleagues. Ms. Waldron, been a great member of this committee. I know Mr. Chan, Mr. Bryan attended several meetings. Mr. Garcia, for his work, and particularly having Mister Garcia here today on the conversation about parks, given all, the champion of parks that he's been, is helpful as well.

This isn't in my talking points, which proves how what a great staffer she is. But Katie Talbott has done an amazing job throughout. I want to. I think I'm ready to go back to academia. I keep wanting to calling this. I keep wanting to call this the semester. This isn't the semester. This is the year.

But Katie has done a phenomenal job all semester in terms of staffing me. So thank you, Katie. I appreciate that. We'll now move to public comment portion of our hearing. For those in the audience, please step up to the microphone if you'd like to provide comment. Each person has two minutes.

Please be sure to share your name and your affiliation, if any. That was easy. No takers. Great. Thank you. This concludes our final hearing of the select committee on happiness and public policy outcomes for this legislative session. Thank you all for joining us.