Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Many families don’t expect that dementia will be a factor in financial decisions, but it is more common than we think. The challenge is that people can start having trouble managing their finances years before being diagnosed with dementia. Our expert panel delves into this subject so you will recognize when a loved one's capacity is declining and what to do about it.

They will explain a dementia diagnosis, the implications of this condition on our planning abilities, and suggestions on how to create an advance directive with this outcome in mind.

They will also discuss how families can navigate their financial matters, with their advisors, if faced with the unexpected issues of dementia. They will share some examples of the best practices of individuals and families who successfully prepare for the possibility of dementia, and share some pitfalls of not planning ahead for this increasingly common experience. The concept of having or losing the capacity for financial decision-making is vague to most people. Yet it is understandable when you know the legal components of financial capacity.

The concept of preparing for a loss of capacity can be a scary thing to face. Yet it can be comforting to learn the definite ways to manage your financial affairs, so they can be handled in your best interests and in line with your values and expectations.

SPEAKERS

Catherine A. Madison

M.D., Founding Director, Ray Dolby Brain Health Center, California Pacific Medical Center

Gretchen Hollstein

CFP, Senior Wealth Advisor and Managing Director, Litman Gregory Wealth Management

Natalie Oh

CLU, Insurance Professional, Taran Insurance Advisory

Denise Michaud

Chair, Grownups Member-Led Forum, The Commonwealth Club of California—Moderator

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on October 27th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Dubbed the social justice manifesto, Until I Am Free, by author Keisha N. Blain, is a unique opportunity to hear about life from the perspective of a working, impoverished and disabled Black woman. Blain, an award-winning historian, details the life and accomplishments of Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist too often forgotten in the narrative of racial justice. Defying the layers of marginalization that threatened to hush her powerful words, Hamer is held by Blain in the same esteem as her contemporaries Rosa Parks and MLK. Through Blain, Hamer’s message is given new life in an age where the same issues remain pertinent.

At INFORUM Blain will peel back the layers of Fannie Lou Hamer—layers that ostensibly would have taken power away from her but instead became the very source from which she drew it. This conversation will be moderated by Aimee Allison, founder and president of She the People.

SPEAKERS

Keisha N. Blain

Ph.D., Historian; Associate Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh; President, African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS); Author, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America

Aimee Allison

Founder and President, She the People—Moderator

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on October 26th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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With dazzling illustrations, sumptuous recipes, and its own curated playlist, Bryant Terry’s sixth book, Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora, is a feast for the senses. Terry, a renowned vegan culinary innovator, returns to dive into the depth and breadth of Black foodways spanning nations and time.

Black Food celebrates both the creations and creators, pairing heartwarming stories of generational traditions with the soul-filling foods at the center of them. From tropical Afro-Caribbean dishes like jerk chicken to beloved Nigerian jollof rice and further on to southern sweet potato pie, this book is an ode to the African diaspora’s influence on food and culture.

At INFORUM, Bryant Terry will share the stories, people, places and ingredients that make Black food the diverse and divine cuisine it is today.

SPEAKERS

Bryant Terry

Chef; Author, Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora

Anjali Menon

Vice President, IfOnly; Member, INFORUM Advisory Board

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on October 20th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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As president of One Fair Wage and director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, Saru Jayaraman has fought for a reimagining of tipped industries. She argues that at just $2.13 an hour, what tipped-wage workers are paid is unlivable on its own and that, unsurprisingly, the people in these jobs are often society's most vulnerable: undocumented, BIPOC, and women workers who already make cents on the dollar of their white male counterparts. In place of the 30-year-old subminimum wage, Jayaraman has worked tirelessly to realize a fair living wage for these essential workers. In the wake of COVID-19, she says it is more obvious than ever that changes need to be made if we want to keep everyone’s head above water.

Jayaraman’s message is unwavering—our drivers, delivery workers, servers and nail technicians deserve to have a livelihood. At INFORUM and alongside service industry experts Chef Dominique Crenn and Angela Glover Blackwell, Jayaraman will lay out what changes need to be made and how we can achieve a fair, livable wage for everyone in our communities.

SPEAKERS

Angela Glover Blackwell

Founder in Residence, PolicyLink; Host, "Radical Imagination" Podcast

Dominique Crenn

Chef and Owner, Atelier Crenn

Saru Jayaraman

President, One Fair Wage; Co-Founder, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United; Director, Food Labor Research Ctr., UC Berkeley; Author, Behind the Kitchen Door, Forked: A New Standard for American Dining, & One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on October 18th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Some might say that Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods were destined to meet. Poor, a professor of photography at CSU Sacramento, was volunteering with the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison when she met Woods, who was serving a 31-year-to-life sentence. The two bonded over a love of storytelling and with no formal experience, began a podcast together where they showcase the realities of life in prison while detailing the path of their fateful friendship. Their upcoming book, This Is Ear Hustle, shares its name with their well-received podcast, which has gone on to become a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize and is in its seventh season. The book avoids the overtly political and instead delves into the richness of humanity found even behind the bars of the prison system. With candor, the authors showcase the unlikely inspiration found in stories of the incarcerated.

At INFORUM Earlonne Woods—whose sentence was commuted in 2018—and Nigel Poor will take our stage in downtown San Francisco to help our audiences become “ear hustlers'' themselves, eavesdropping on the tales of resilience, forgiveness and the lives that exist behind some of America’s most well-guarded doors.

This program will be moderated by Piper Kerman, author of The New York Times bestseller Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison.

Note: This program contains EXPLICIT language

SPEAKERS

Nigel Poor

Visual Artist; Co-Creator and Co-Host, "Ear Hustle" Podcast; Co-Author, This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life

Earlonne Woods

Co-Creator and Co-Host, "Ear Hustle" Podcast; Co-Author, This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life

Piper Kerman

Author, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison—Moderator

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on October 25th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Many nations have a national poet, whose poetry helps carve out their own unique cultural niche in human civilization. Italy has enjoyed many literary geniuses for over two millennia, but still looks to one man the most: Dante. Like major poets in other cultures, Dante’s influence on the Italian language can hardly be overstated. The Divine Comedy was the first major work of literature to leave Latin behind in favor of Italian, and it remains the world standard of poetic excellence. Dante’s fertile imagination also inspired artists, writers and theologians, making him almost as influential about the afterlife as he is linguistically.

Join Humanities West in person at The Commonwealth Club, or via livestream, to celebrate the 700th Anniversary of Dante’s death—which ironically occurred not that many months after he completed his speculations about post-death possibilities—with a two-hour, three-lecture Dante feast:

• Timothy Hampton on "Dante After Dante: the Forms of Memory." Though there were many "in the know" about the achievement of Dante's great poem during his lifetime, his vast influence on Italian poetry and world literature was uneven in the centuries following his death. In some areas of artistic creation—for example, in the painting of Botticelli—Dante was powerfully present. In other areas (poetry, philosophy, literary criticism) his influence was definite, but diffuse and oblique. This lecture will speak about the ways in which Dante's work did and didn't shape Italian and European culture in the early modern period.

• Kip Cranna on "Dante at the Opera: From the Divine Comedy to a Comic Puccini Delight." In "The Inferno," part one of The Divine Comedy, Dante introduces the condemned sinner Gianni Schicchi, consigned to the Eighth Circle of Hell along with others guilty of fraud. His crime: impersonating the deceased Buoso Donati to falsify Buoso's will for his own benefit. Dante personally knew the Donatis (he was married to one), and therein lies an intriguing tale of medieval Florentine society. The story of this fraudulent will and the legend surrounding it became the inspiration for the famed composer Giacomo Puccini's only comic opera. After outlining the Dante-Puccini connection, San Francisco Opera's Dramaturg Emeritus Kip Cranna will present brief video highlights from the opera Gianni Schicchi, including the ever-popular aria "O mio babbino caro."

• Marisa Galvez on "Dante Before Dante Become Dante." In retrospect it almost seems like Dante invented Italian literary culture, but he arrived on the Italian literary scene as a love poet—an admirer of courtly love and the troubadour traditions which had begun a century earlier in Occitania, and had spread to Italy, Spain and then most of Europe. Dante defined the troubadour lyrics as rhetorical, musical and poetical fiction — which is also a good description of The Divine Comedy.

NOTES

MLF: Humanities

Note: This program contains EXPLICIT language.

SPEAKERS

Kip Cranna

Dramaturg Emeritus, San Francisco Opera

Marisa Galvez

Professor of French and Italian, and by Courtesy, of German Studies and Comparative Literature; Faculty Director, Structured Liberal Education, Stanford University

Timothy Hampton

Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature; Director, Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, Berkeley

George Hammond

—Moderator

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on October 22nd, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Join this important discussion to learn how the White House is forming critical partnerships across sectors to fight anti-Asian hate crimes, moving forward the administration's Build Back Better Agenda to rebuild the economy, and ensuring the advancement of the Asian American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AA and NHPI) communities. Attendees will have the opportunity to identify issues the AA/NHPI communities may want to prioritize and ask questions.

Erika Moritsugu was appointed in April by President Biden to serve as deputy assistant to the president and AA/NHPI senior liaison. She engages with AA and NHPI communities and leaders on issues such as advancing safety, justice, inclusion, and opportunity through a whole-of-government approach to racial justice.

She previously served in the Obama administration as assistant secretary for congressional and intergovernmental relations at the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Secretary Julián Castro and was the first-ever Senate deputy legislative director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. On Capitol Hill, she served as senior representative of Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. She also worked for Senator Daniel K. Akaka of Hawai‘i and at the Senate Democratic Policy Committee under Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

In the nonprofit sector, Moritsugu managed two teams at the National Partnership for Women & Families for economic justice and congressional relations, advancing workforce and health policies through a gender equity and race equity lens. She also led the Government Relations, Advocacy and Community Engagement team at the Anti-Defamation League.

Moritsugu attended Brandeis University, the College of William and Mary, and George Washington University Law School.

She will be in conversation with Dion Lim, anchor/reporter for ABC 7 Television News in San Francisco.

NOTES

In partnership with SFCAUSE (Community Alliance for Unity, Safety & Education) , San Francisco.

SPEAKERS

Erika Moritsugu

Deputy Assistant to the President and Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander White House Senior Liaison

In Conversation with Dion Lim

Anchor/Reporter, ABC 7 News in San Francisco

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on September 24th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Join us for a virtual conversation with Fritjof Capra to discuss the evolution of his thought. In the late 1950s Capra read the work of Werner Heisenberg, a founder of quantum mechanics, and quickly intuited connections between the discoveries of quantum physics and the traditions of Eastern philosophy. The result was his bestselling book, The Tao of Physics. His synthesis, which dispensed with the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton in favor of a systemic, ecological one, has provided him with a different perspective on the life sciences, ecology and environmental policy.

Six decades later, Fritjof Capra remains at the crossroads of physics, spirituality, environmentalism and systems theory. Organized thematically and chronologically, the essays in Patterns of Connection document his revolutionary and far-reaching intellectual journey.

MLF ORGANIZER

George Hammond

NOTES

MLF: Humanities

SPEAKERS

Fritjof Capra

Author, Patterns of Connection

In Conversation with George Hammond

Author, Conversations With Socrates

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on October 21st 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Fully electrifying our homes, cars and industries could cut the amount of total energy we need by half, says Saul Griffith, an entrepreneur, inventor and author of Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future. This electric revolution would mean significantly scaling up our solar, wind and battery storage and reorienting the electric grid – but could also mean “thousands of dollars in savings in every household, every year.” 

President Biden wants half the cars sold in the US to be electric by 2030. And automakers are increasingly putting money and marketing muscle behind EVs. When Ford announced its all-electric F-150, it sent a powerful jolt through the transportation industry. Pre-orders for the F-150 Lightning surpassed 100,000 within three days, signalling that EVs are no longer just for kale-eating coastal elites. 

Note: Ford Motor Co. is among Climate One’s sponsors. This program was underwritten in part by ClimateWorks Foundation.

For transcripts and other information, visit: https://www.climateone.org/watch-and-listen/podcasts 

Guests:

Saul Griffith, author, Electrify: An Optimist Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future

Cynthia Williams, Global Director, Sustainability, Homologation and Compliance, Ford Motor Co.

Sara Baldwin, Director of Electrification Policy, Energy Innovation 

Josh Nassar, Legislative Director, United Auto Workers

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Our speakers, Rev. Norman Fong and Rev. James McCray, will discuss their direct hands-on experience in working to address the issue of equity and justice in community development, especially around building affordable housing, engaging community members for advocacy and support, and the broader issues of economic development connected to jobs and small business support. They will reflect on how these issue exist in San Francisco and in cities around the country.

Join us for a timely discussion on equity and justice in the development of cities.

About the Speakers

Rev. Norman Fong has worked full-time in the nonprofit arena in San Francisco Chinatown for more than 3 decades. He has served as a pastor, the deputy director of programs at Chinatown Community Development Center, and now as executive director of Chinatown CDC. Besides being an ordained Presbyterian minister, Fong is the co-founder of the Jest Jammin Band, which has been playing classic soul/R&B/Motown music for 45 years.

Dr. James McCray, Jr., is semi-retired after 38 years of service in local churches and to their surrounding community, and now joyously living as a son, husband, father and grandfather in his beloved San Francisco. He says he is joyful first for the blessing of being a “cancer survivor.” Joyful also, because of the marriage to Gail Jackson McCray, a practicing attorney in our city. In the last 10 years, a surprising new venture has come along—the development of affordable housing through the building of a locally based community development corporation, as executive director of Tabernacle Community Development Corporation (TCDC).

MLF ORGANIZER

Gerald Harris

NOTES

MLF: Technology & Society

SPEAKERS

Rev. Norman Fong

Former Executive Director, Chinatown Community Development Center, focused on addressing the issues poverty, housing and small businesses in Chinatown

Rev. James McCray

Executive Director, Tabernacle Community Development Corp., a developer of affordable housing in San Francisco with a focus on slowing the city's out-migration of African Americans

Gerald Harris

President, Quantum Planning Group; Chair, Technology & Science Member-Led Forum, The Commonwealth Club—Moderator

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on October 21st, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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