Hello and I'm welcome to all out in the open. My name's Charlie Bird and I'm Ben Schlattie and this is our very first altogether episode.

These episodes will be hosted by Liz McDonald and Michael Soto and they'll be talking about community building interviewing people who are doing cool things in their community so that we can do similar things in our communities.

This episode I feel like is super special because they sat down with the mayor of Mesa.

Mayor John, is John his first name?

John Giles.

John Giles.

And they talked about getting a non-discrimination ordinance

passed in Mesa, Arizona, how the three of them

worked together over the span of many, many years to do something that was so impactful in their community.

Yeah, and the thing that I loved in this episode was just how they worked to build consensus.

They built coalitions and just like sat down with people who were on different sides and had had fears and like

listen to those fears work through those fears so they could eventually get the non-discrimination ordinance passed.

Yeah, I thought it was really cool how they had like moments where they didn't think would happen or timing wasn't lining up but they didn't stop and they like kept that momentum and I feel like it's just so it's such a beautiful pattern of what it is to make community

change where no matter what happens you're always building something and

those initial efforts are almost never wasted because they came back later.

It was so cool.

Yeah, definitely.

And the main thought I had when I was like,

when I finished listening to the episode and was just thinking after

was they did something cool, like this big political thing and this this this breakthrough in the nation that was so awesome and and that's really great and we can do big things too but also all you need to make change is just a lot of love in a living room.

Yeah, that's really beautiful. I also

really loved how they worked with church leaders and just formed something that

...