A Systems Transformation Approach - Xavier Morales
According to the CDC, half of Black and Brown children born in 2000 can expect to develop diabetes in their lifetime. Xavier Morales, Executive Director of the Praxis Project, reflects on the structures that drive such inequities in communities of color and makes the case for a transformative systems approach to health inequities caused by sugar sweetened beverages. Challenging us to think of health equity as a verb, rather than a noun, he uplifts community-imagined and -led health and education initiatives as critical tools in the fight against the beverage industry. Drawing on SSB tax work done in Oakland, Berkeley, and Philadelphia, he argues that reinvestment of SSB tax revenue into communities most impacted by the beverage industry's predatory marketing to do this work is necessary to build the power needed to oppose the industry's exploitation and obfuscation of the truth.
This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes. Learn more about Praxis’ work around SSB taxes on our Centering Community & Equity Through Sugary Drink Tax Investments page.
You can also tune into this episode on Anchor, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. You can also watch this episode on YouTube with subtitles for accessibility.
A Systems Transformation Approach – Xavier Morales
Podcast Transcript
We've tried this for many, many years without going and working closely with community partners, and it's been a really hard struggle. I feel that this way to expand the advocacy to authentically enlist and authentically engage community organizations that are also trying to protect and advance community health and health equity—I think this is the next place. This is what's different hopefully moving forward, and that we will actually be more successful we're all working together and enlist the community to be part of the solution.
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[In Praxis Intro] You are listening to In Praxis, a podcast by The Praxis Project created to support, hear from, and uplift the stories coming out of the ecosystem of basebuilding organizing. An ecosystem that includes frontline basebuilding groups and the folks who help support their important work. In this season of In Praxis, our hosts, Julian Johnson and Kourtney Nham, focus on sugar sweetened beverage taxes. We have compiled interviews from advocates working on issues surrounding the reduction of sweet and sugary beverages as well as the taxation of these products. Participants of this podcast are community members, public health practitioners, health department representatives, and concerned parents that span across the country. In each episode, you will hear about their phenomenal work as well as their perspective on the health effects of sugary consumption, and in what ways policy can be used to combat this and lead to reinvestment in our communities.
Julian Johnson: Welcome Xavier! It's awesome to have you. We'd like to hear you give a brief background about who you are and what you do.
Xavier Morales: Great to be here. I am Xavier Morales. I’m the Executive Director for The Praxis Project, and The Praxis Project is a national organization that works very closely with basebuilding organizers across the country to improve health equity in communities. We do that through bringing together all of the wisdom of our community partners and sharing it with one another. I’ve been the E.D for Praxis now since 2016, and I took over after the founding director, Makani Themba, stepped down, and she's an incredible organizer and really laid a really good foundation for us moving forward. I’m just happy to have been able to continue the work that she started.
Julian Johnson: Now, one thing I’m curious about that I’d love to hear from you is, when did you first realize that sugary drinks were linked to preventable chronic diseases?
Xavier Morales: It's interesting that you asked that. When I first realized that it started with my grandmother. This is back when I was a kid. This is the thing that's interesting is that we've had to have so much research done in order to prove that sugary drinks lead to preventable chronic diseases. In fact, even today some of these assertions are still contested by either the industry—beverage industry—or industry funded researchers. I first heard about this back when I was like seven years old, six years old from my grandmother who just said, ‘stop drinking that soda that gives you diabetes.’ She was someone that didn't finish the third grade, and she barely spoke English, and yet she had the wherewithal to, in this common folk wisdom, to know that this product wasn't good for us and it could lead to diabetes. I’ve since come to know that it's not just diabetes, it's diabetes fatty liver disease, which leads to heart disease, stroke, and even the dental decay. That was another area where they told us early on that drinking too much soda is going to give you cavities. So again, when you ask was the first time I heard about this or learned about it, it was as a kid growing up. Now, if you would have asked me when I was twelve years old or seven years old, would I be working this hard to try to curb the consumption of sugary drinks by educating community to be able to resist the inaccurate messaging and advertising done by the beverage industries, I never would have thought that this would be in the portfolio work that I do today as an adult.
Julian Johnson: And I’d love you to just kind of speak more on that in terms of that trajectory—from realizing at an early age from stories to your grandmother to now in like your professional career. You're devoting a significant amount of your energy to reducing consumption of sugary drinks and so what made you and your professional career put time and energy to that cause?
Xavier Morales: It was… it was seeing the numbers—the numbers don't lie—and seeing that over half of the adults in California are pre-diabetic or have diabetes. That was astounding to me. The statistic that half of the kids, Black and brown kids, born since the year 2000 can expect to get diabetes some point in their lives was just astounding to me again. Then when you look at every step of the way, when you go from the racial and ethnic distribution of who has pre-diabetes to who actually gets full-blown diabetes, you see that it gets browner and Blacker with even more less economic resources. Then for those that get full-blown diabetes, for those that actually have amputations, again it gets even more concentrated in brown and Black communities and also communities without a lot of resources. Then when you look at the blindness that happens, again, it's the same thing. It's our communities and then the last piece is, when you look at the deaths from these preventable chronic diseases that are related to the over consumption of sugary drinks, again you see that it's really concentrated in our communities.
I felt like the approaches that were being done before, there's a lot of really good-hearted folks that were out trying to help decrease consumption of sugary drinks, through an approach that followed the tobacco model. Something that did work for tobacco, where you raised the price through using a tax instrument that that would help to decrease consumption, But what we saw was that the beverages industry, they put up such a strong fight they're actually able to go in and convince our communities that this is regressive and it's against their own interests. It's just so ironic to me that it's the same product that is causing this community misery and that a lot of this community misery is being paid for through both the emotional labor that comes from the families that have to support folks that are going through these horrendous chronic diseases but then also our public health system or our tax-funded medical system that is paying for the consequences of the profits from the beverage industry.
So, to me we needed to figure out a different way than just the strategy of raising the price, so that poor people can't afford it, towards let's do something that's more meaningful. Let's go in and let's work with communities, community partners, and let's work to educate our residents so that, one, they know that sugary drinks are not the solution, but then more than that so that the healthier solutions are actually available. Because that's another drawback, that was another shortcoming of this approach where you just raise the price so poor people can't afford a sugary drink, because if you go to places like Flint, Michigan or even Delano, California where the water is not drinkable, and then you're going and telling folks don't drink sugary drinks, it just makes people feel bad about what they're doing. So, in my mind there's a whole different way to do this work, and the way that we can do this is, again, through community education and making sure that communities are part of the solution. But all that takes resources. The other part that we know is that if you look at the research that describes who are the people that are purchasing sugary drinks and consuming sugary drinks it's usually people with lower socioeconomic status—lower incomes, it's usually newly arrived immigrants, and it's usually people of color. So, for me, it's like if we're going to go and these are the folks that are going to be paying the tax, then we got to make sure that that money is coming back into these communities for this community-oriented solution.
Julian Johnson: Exactly.
Xavier Morales: Again, to counter the predatory practices of the beverage industry who's out to maximize their profits.
Julian Johnson: And so turning the gears a little bit but also staying on the topic in terms of the work that the SSB work group has been doing. I know to work with focus on various projects and I’m just going to touch on a few here in our conversation. So one of the first ones I’d love to hear more about is just a project that included the development of recommendations for designing soda taxes in a manner that promoted health equity. Why do you think that it's important to center health equity and soda tax policy? I mean you kind of already address it, but I’d just love to hear more again
Xavier Morales: Again, at Praxis, we have a very strong health equity and health justice bend to what we do. We understand that we when we talk about health equity, that you can look at health equity as a noun and you can also look at health equity as a verb. When we talk about the noun, we're talking about the outcomes the indicators, the effects—what you see in community, the higher rates of diabetes amongst our residents, the higher rates of heart disease and stroke, the higher rates of amputations, all of that is to me the noun of health equity. But when we talk to talk about the verb, we're really talking about the systems, the actions, the systems and structures that lead to the nouns, to the outcomes. So, if we're ever really going to get in front of this, we can't just deal with the symptoms and the end results, we actually have to go way upstream to address the systems that are causing this. For something like diabetes stroke heart disease it's pretty profound the causes, and it’s the over consumption of sugary drinks. The systems that lead to the over consumption of sugary drinks is what we need to approach.
So, we need to make sure that the healthy beverages are available, not just available, accessible, and affordable—free would be great—and we also need to make sure that we have fresh fruits and vegetables, again available, accessible, affordable. When you start to look at the systems that define and determine beverage availability and food availability, you start to see that in our communities there's a huge deficit in the systems that are in place are not ones that support that. So, that's the other reason. I think that we really need to work with community, within community, to address their needs address their priorities, how they define it.
So, here are the four principles that Praxis has evolved over time, and this is through active participation in sugary drink reduction legislation and other advocacy that we do, so we've come up with four principles that we feel helps to center equity in these campaigns in a way that gets at the structures and systems. So the first one is that, for example, if we do, when we do receive revenues from a soda tax, that these revenues need to be invested back into the communities that are experiencing the worst outcomes related to the over consumption of sugary drinks—which is again as what we talked about: heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, dental decay. We need to be specific about the geographies where we invest these revenues.
The second thing is that in these geographies where we're going to invest these revenues we have to work with the community to find out what their priorities are, because if we come in and say, '“uh yeah our priority is to make sure that everyone has clean water so that's what we want to invest in,” but you go into a community and a community has clean water already available and what their priority is more around food availability—healthy vegetables and fruits, that's their priority—then when we come in and we're determining the priorities from the outside, then that becomes a problem. It becomes a mismatch. So, the second criteria here is that we work on investing to address what the community prioritizes as the most pressing health issue. Again, at Praxis we approach health from the determinants of, so there's a long list of things that contribute and take away from health in this social determinants a health frame. So, we need to make sure that we are addressing the community's priorities.
The third criteria that helps lead to health equity is that we involve the community as a partner in the delivery of the programming and services in the community. So we've got some really great examples in Berkeley, California which passed the tax back in 2014, of groups like Healthy Black Families, Multicultural Institute, Berkeley Unified School Districts and their gardening and cooking programs, the East Bay YMCA and the Early Child Care Programming, and then also the Ecology Center in a lot of their youth development. We're seeing the power of investing these funds into community-oriented solutions, and where we're not only creating jobs, but we're also funding the groups that are the closest to the residents who are experiencing the brunt of the negative consequences of the over consumption of sugary drinks. So for us that's an important criteria too, to involve the community… that's the third criteria.
And then the fourth criteria is that when we do provide this funding that we should help the organizations that are receiving funding to not only deliver services in the moment and programming in the moment, but that it also builds infrastructure. It also so that when the grant runs out, when the grant term ends, that there is capacity in the community that's left behind so that they can continue to address other issues—that there's infrastructure and capacities to address other issues. I kind of see this work of health equity where we're addressing the verb of health equity—the systems and structures that lead to the disparate outcomes—I see this work as a muscle. The work that the community builds a muscle. There's a community power muscle. They're building power, their muscle to address issues, and so they start with issue A, and then they built they build a muscle to actually be able to advocate and get those policies changed, and then that same muscle that they build on addressing issue A, they can then apply to issue B, which might be another health priority. They're getting stronger and stronger, and hopefully over time in this model, a community can actually lead a lot of the changes that need to happen to help keep the residents healthy and safe and connected.
Julian Johnson: No yeah that's all amazing work. I know that you're also aware the fact that there also is a lot of industry pushback to trying to create non-regressive soda taxes. Some of the work that your group has done has been developing counter messaging, against the regressivity arguments that have become industry staples. So, I guess I’m wondering as you're doing this important work in terms of trying to reduce sugary consumption, what are the counter messages that you feel are most useful in combating industry messaging, and why do you feel like those kind of messages are essentially useful?
Xavier Morales: The most interesting thing here is that when we talk about community messaging we're talking about truth. When we look at the marketing practices that the beverage industry uses, they're really trying to obfuscate the truth. They've transcended now. They're not even selling a product anymore, they're trying to sell a feeling. One of their recent campaigns was something about open happiness. It's not even about the product if you watch the advertising that they do on sports shows, and other shows on popular media, that a lot of children watch—even though they say that they're not targeting children, but the children are watching these shows, especially the sports shows—it takes a while to figure out what it is that they're actually selling, because the images that they have is people floating down a river, using a rope swing to come in, and everybody's happy, they're all dancing… it's a lot of this imagery that's not even related to the product. Then, they pull the product up. Also the beverage industry executives continue to say that sugary drinks can be part of a healthy diet, and I think that that's sending mixed messages to folks, especially kids. So what I find is that when we talk about counter messaging, it really is trying to counter the obfuscation that the beverage industry does in their advertising and in their words to try to maintain their sales and to get people to continue to purchase their products. So we need to go into community and say, ‘no you're not opening happiness, what you're opening is the gateway to preventable chronic diseases whose rates are out of control in our communities.’
The counter messaging is really more about speaking truth and helping folks connect the dots between the health inequities that we're experiencing and the product being marketed as happiness. That's our biggest challenge right there. It gets even more challenging because they present themselves as our friends our community's friends. they do some good works in communities, and they make these donations to different groups and they're seen like good guys. I mean you go to universities they have pouring rights that this whole system that's evolved where universities are so strapped for cash that they have to accept pouring rights, get into pouring rights contracts. So now I take my kids to the university to watch a baseball game, and you can't avoid all of the advertising. The same thing—you go to little league stadiums, and it's the same thing. My son plays travel ball you see the same thing happening, there's just so much advertising. Again, they claim not to be targeting children, but they do just by the nature of where they're positioning. So it's a really hard fight because again they present themselves as friends. Again they fund a lot of things, but those funds are coming out of the profits that they're making off of making people sick.
I’ll tell you one more thing it's like the most ironic thing to me, is that recently they made a donation—one of the beverage industry foundations—made a donation to some national civil rights organizations of color, and these national civil rights organizations do incredible work across the country, but the next thing is that this foundation is like doing press releases on how much money they're giving for COVID response to these organizations, it's for rapid response. So they gave seven million dollars to these two organizations. To me it was ironic because the outcome of the over consumption of this these products are the underlying conditions that are causing people to be more vulnerable to COVID and Coronavirus. So they're making this donation of seven million dollars, and when I looked at their advertising budget for the year in the united states it was it was 1.49 billion dollars is their advertising budget. When you look at how much they gave to these two national civil rights organizations and divided by their advertising budget for the country, you'll see that it's less than one half of one percent that they're giving, and but yet they're putting out these huge press releases to make it again seem like they're our best friends. So the power that this industry has, and the work that we need to do to educate our communities about the dangers of these products, it's immense.
And so we started this the question with the talking about the messaging, but the reality is that not only do we have to address their messaging, we got to do this in a way that really reaches the community members we need to reach, because if we work against them on the platform of public media, we have no money. They got at one point—this one company, this is only one company that has 1.49 billion dollar advertising budget for the year in the United States. That’s only one of the companies. We’re coming at this with no money. We can’t meet them on their terrain. Where we need to meet them is in our communities. That becomes a challenge also because it's intense work and it takes a lot of support to do this community work. Our groups work on shoe strings. When we talk about the counter messaging one of the best ways to counter message is to adequately fund some of these basebuilding community organizations that are trying to improve the health of communities. That's a major way that we're going to be able to counter those enormous advertising budgets that this industry has.
Julian Johnson: Yeah no, it's about really getting into community and creating relationships with those members, show like what's going on. Because like you said, they are very good, and I think it reminds me as well of tobacco industry tactics of placing themselves as a friend, and as this company or entity that brings these positive and happy memories, and so you can't combat them on a media level, but you can in terms of trying to change the hearts and minds of people on the grassroots level.
Xavier Morales: Yeah, I wasn't part of the larger broader tobacco work, I was just young. I mean there's some incredible folks that did that work and have achieved some really good outcomes, but even there we're still seeing that while the overall numbers of smoking are going down, we do still see that there's pockets and usually the pockets are mostly in communities of color, and folks without a lot of resources. There are other pockets where the smoking rates have plateaued, and then, you start to see that the industry starts to transform their delivery so we have all this vaping that started. One of the companies based out of San Francisco just got fined… If I remember the story correctly, the advocacy groups came after them because they were directly advertising to children, and the way they were naming their products was directly designed to increase addiction by teenage youth. So there's parallels, because even the beverage industry changed up their products. It's not lost on me that a few years ago as they saw more people of color the market growing, that you started to see these same companies start to invest in more flavored sodas, sugary drink flavors, that resonate more with communities of color. They're even moving into the spaces of the sports drinks now too. That's another innovation of theirs. These little kids that are out there on these little they're doing weekend travel ball, or weekend soccer games, the fact that these kids are now starting to drink sports performance drinks as much as they do, and we're also hearing that they're starting to drink caffeinated sports drinks, especially as they get a little bit older. That's kind of like the parallel that happened within the tobacco, world it's like industry innovation to reach new markets. We see the same thing happening in the beverage industry, and the outcomes are not good. Especially when you cook these kids early on the sugary drinks and the caffeine combination, that's something that's going to stay with these kids for life, those aren't good outcomes.
Julian Johnson: No definitely, I mean I remember when I was playing sports as a kid, I think I was drinking Gatorade and Powerade more than water at some point, so we definitely have to start making a change in that sooner than later.
Xavier Morales: I love that Stephen Curry with The Warriors came out—and he's one of the biggest athlete stars that are out there—and he did not come out in support of about sugary drink beverage, what he came out in support of was drinking water. It was just amazing to me, and so I think that again these the beverage industry just puts these huge contracts in front of our star athletes that all kids look up to, and even our stars, our musicians, especially the musicians the way they underwrite a lot of the concert series, again, this is still advertising the kids. I wish that many of these stars would just take a step back and really understand the dangers of the drinks that they're standing behind, and that kids are starting to drink because they see who they look up to, they see these stars promoting these products. That's another way, again, the beverage industry says they don't advertise the children but that whole system, and again earlier we talked about health equity systems and for the verb of it, this is a huge part of the system that has led to inequities.
Julian Johnson: Now the work group also has been developing a research agenda that can fill gaps in understanding how taxes decrease consumption and sales of sugary drinks, and lead to overall improved health. So I’m wondering, what are the specific research topic areas or specific questions that are the most important to you for this work and why?
Xavier Morales: The research that has been done most recently, when I say most recent I’m thinking of like post 2014, because 2014 was when Berkeley passed the first municipal soda tax in the country. The research that was needed right away—because remember, we are in conflict with a profit-seeking entity that is very good at what they do when I talk about the beverage industry. So the beverage industry they also have again the deepest marketing budgets, and they have the deepest advocacy budgets: they pay for lobbyists, the amount of money that they have available for lobbying is incredible as well, they also pay for lawyers—so the research that was needed in the beginning was to be able to counter their claims that people were going to lose jobs, that the price of groceries in general was going to go up because there was a soda tax, that the price of other beverages non-sugary drink beverages was also going to go up because there was a soda tax, they also claimed that grocers are going to go out of business because of a soda tax, then the last piece is they were very insidious when they were like coming out a week after the sugary drink passed and started talking about the rates of sugary drink consumption and the rates of obesity, they were putting them onto the same map like within a week. So the research that was originally done really needed to address the claims that the beverage industry was making, the inaccurate claims that they were making. What we found is that it's not costing jobs, we're also finding that the price of other beverages in general are not going up, and then the claim that they make that the cost of groceries is going to go up, they like to say that their product is part of groceries, but to me a sugary drink is not is not a fruit, it's not a vegetable, it's not a protein, all the things that we need to live and to be healthy; To me that's food, that's groceries. What they're selling is candy, they're selling liquid candy, and the same way that we shouldn't count a candy bar as groceries, we shouldn't be counting sodas as groceries.
So that's—I’m sorry for the digression—but we know that the cost of groceries isn't going up, and we also know that small grocers are not going out of business because of the soda tax, and we know this all from the research that's been done since 2014 after the Berkeley soda tax got passed, so we're in a new space right now, and I tell you that the research that we really need now and it's starting to happen, is the research that shows the benefits of investing in community to be able to address the systems that cause health inequities. In Berkeley now, and in Oakland, and in San Francisco, in Boulder, Colorado, and in Seattle, and in Philadelphia, these are all cities that have passed a soda tax, we're starting to get multiple years of evidence where we can actually go in and start looking at the effect that these investments are having in the communities. Not just with the organizations receiving direct investment, like for example in those organizations, how many jobs have been created? Of the kids and other families that are participating in the programming, how many of them are changing their beverage habits to be healthier? And then are we reaching a critical mass? So are we changing norms? All of this needs to be studied as well, and we're starting to head in that direction that's part of what this work group is doing to identify those types of things.
And there's other nuanced, more technical things that need to be researched as well—is it better to do one cent or two cents on a tax? Is it better to tax diet drinks as well as sugary drinks? There needs to be more research on this because you don't get the sugar in the diet drinks, but you get other chemicals and the research has shown that some of those other chemicals also are not healthful, and the research also shows that many of the folks that drink diet drinks because they're drinking diet drinks, they feel like they have extra ability to intake other products. So just because they're not drinking a sugary drink, doesn't mean that their health is improving and, in fact, for some, the health is actually not improving. So this is all the research that we need to do. Again the reason that we need to do this is because, the beverage industry with all of their resources are doing everything they can to protect their profits, to protect their market share, to protect levels of retail, and we have to counter that with research that shows that their products still aren't good for us over the long term for health and in fact um are hurting us.
That's a lot of the research that we're working on, so yeah it's important to figure out how to counter message, and then again this is in response to their whole machine of inaccurate messaging, and then we have to develop a research agenda, again this is in response to the machine that they have for legislative advocacy, when we're in there talking to a legislator about how the over consumption of sugary drinks is really affecting our community, and then they come in and they say, ‘well this is going to cost jobs,’ well then we got to go do research that shows that it's not going to cost jobs. So, then the next round we come in and the next thing they say, ‘oh this is just tax that takes from the poor and it just makes it harder for them to live,’ then we need to go and like do the research to show that, no, if we invest these revenues back in the community, there's the health outcomes, the health benefits are just so great that we need to be doing this. Then also, again, I go back to right now in this moment and where we're seeing the Coronavirus really impacting communities of color that have underlying conditions, we need to be able to show that—or not just show, because we've already shown it—but we need to bring back and reaffirm that these underlying conditions are really being driven by the over consumption of sugary drinks, the sugar consumption. The research again that we've done in the past has shown that the largest contributor of sugar into a person's diet is sugary drinks. So, there's a lot of research that still needs to be done, but l’ll tell you that most of the work that we do again it's in this battle that we're in for health for our community's health. Every time we come up with an argument, they come up with something else so we have to figure out how to counter it. The worst part on this is all, they make a claim, they don't have to substantiate it as we do our advocacy. I found that they just have to come out and make a claim, they don't have to show the research behind, it they just make the claim and for some reason or other, the burdens on the health advocate side to prove that what they're saying is not true. This advocacy work that we have, it really is uphill, so the more work we can do to get together, and to come up with a common agenda, to come up on some impactful messaging, all of this is really important.
Julian Johnson: Yeah, and I’m wondering looking towards the future when looking at your work at Praxis and personally, how do you see the work of the work group influencing that work in the future? What do you hope to maybe do with Praxis from the work group?
Xavier Morales: There's a lot of people that are working on this issue, and we're coming together in a lot of different venues. I see us needing to continue to dialogue with one another. It's funny because they have industry associations where they all come together, and they talk about what's happening in the commercial space, and the product space. These associations help to identify tactics and strategies on how to protect the markets for this industry, and so they're all talking. The industry has also sponsored research and research institutions to put out research that counters the research being put out by some of—I was going to say our country, but it's really the world's most renowned health scientists. It's all just to cast doubt. So the same way that the beverage industry and their associations come together to coordinate their strategies across messaging, and research, and advocacy. They are so well resourced to do that. I think that the side of health and health equity, we really need to be having these conversations, and figuring out the best way, not just to respond to what they're doing, but to get ahead of where the industry is. For me, it comes back to: How do we recenter truth? How do we recenter equity? And how do we re-center community equity community health community justice as well? This work group is one space, there's a number of different spaces that are out there, and I think we're doing a much better job of all coming together to figure out ways to go up against this behemoth that is really one of the major reasons that we have a lot of the health inequities that we do.
Julian Johnson: I think that's the perfect way to end it: re-centering truth, health equity, and community. Thank you so much, Xavier, for taking the time to talk to me. I’m wondering before we close, if there's anything else you'd like to add and share with our audience?
Xavier Morales: I mean, the most important thing is, I think that we've tried this for many, many years without going and working closely with community partners. It's been a really hard struggle, and we're still struggling. There's a quote that's attributed to Albert Einstein that talks about the futility of achieving change if you keep doing things the same way, and I feel that this way to expand the advocacy to authentically enlist and authentically engage community organizations that are also trying to protect and advance community health and health equity, I think this is the next place, this is what's different hopefully moving forward. That we will actually be more successful if we're all working together. Not just trying to get our advocacy done in the legislative halls to try to change laws, but also in the community. To enlist the community to be part of the solution, I think that's going to be the way we're going to win.
Julian Johnson: Yeah, thank you so much Xavier, and I know myself I’m excited for the work that this work group has already done, is continuing to do, and for the continued work we have to keep doing in terms of fighting the industry and reducing consumption of sugary drinks.
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[In Praxis outro] Thank you for listening to this episode of In Praxis. We hope you all enjoyed it. Make sure to visit our website, www.thepraxisproject.org, where you can check out additional episodes of other guests as well as learn more about our work.
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