Episode 6: Evolving Ambitions

Travel back to the late 1980s and early ’90s, to Galveston Street in Washington, D.C. Once a child with dreams of becoming a scientist, James is forced to confront the consequences of harmful policies and a broken criminal justice system that reshape his life. This episode explores parental loss and the lasting ripple effects of harm,  and how it extended to the family and friends who supported James throughout his journey. Mother and survivor ayoola mitchell joins us, along with experts Dr. Robert Kinscherff, Eduardo Bocanegra, Marsha Levick, and Josh Rovner, to provide critical context on the complex issues at play.

Themes may include physical, mental, and sexual abuse, along with adult language.

A partnered production of The Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions (AIFCS), The Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth (CFSY), Green Buzz Agency and our expert panelists. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

One of the worst parts about being in a federal prison is being in what they call transit. When you get shipped to a different prison, you gotta get on a plane, and on the tarmac, it's like 40 or 50 prisoners, mostly brown and black, handcuffed belly chain. Then you have the marshals, which are mostly white with shotguns standing around you, and it just reminds you like a slave ship.

SPEAKER_04 0:36

Welcome to another episode of Before They Could Dream. For those listening for the first time, our series examines the history, lived realities, and broader impact of youth incarceration across the United States. I am your host, Abdullah Latif. The story you will hear today is personal and unique. But it also represents the stories of thousands of children in the United States today, many of whom suffer in silence. Today we will be hearing James's story. We are also joined by mother and survivor Ayola Mitchell. We will explore parental loss and perspectives on family and friends of individuals who have experienced harm. We'll also hear from Dr. Robert Kinshurf, Josh Rovner, Ramarcia Levick, and Eduardo Bocanegra. Out of care for our listeners, we want to advise that each episode of our podcast series is unvarnished and truthful. Therefore, topics may be difficult for some listeners. Themes may include physical, mental, and sexual abuse along with adult language.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

My name is James Carpenter. I'm from Washington, D.C. At the age of 17, I was incarcerated and ultimately sentenced to 57 years to life. I served 24 years in prison, born in 78. So DC was chocolate city at that time. We just had our own culture. You know, our own music, our own dance, our own dress code. Back then, every neighborhood kind of had their own band. The trash can would be the drum, some buckets would be the congos. Someone would probably buy a keyboard, you know, and then make a band. We would go downtown and play live instruments, call and response from an MC. He just would engage the crowd by acknowledging your neighborhood, acknowledging you as an individual, have your name called in a go-go. It's like you on the map or your neighborhood is on the map. Dances, girls. Back in the days, they used to play for hours, six in the morning, you know, ten at night. I don't know why they called it go-go. Somebody said they said it just go, go, go all night long. Everybody in the neighborhood kind of knew each other, and my friend Jamal and uh baby James, we all hung out and played football together. They used to come knock on my door, ask my mother, can he come out play football? Back then, the different streets would play against each other. I lived on Galveston Street, so we played against Wingate, Foster, Danbury, stuff like that. You really didn't know that we were really living in poverty for real, you know, because everybody around you was the same. Martin Luther King got killed in 68. I was born in 78, so civil rights really had just really gotten past. It was a radical movement, and to stifle that movement to enter the drugs. Upstanding people in the community started getting on drugs. It was starting to be a danger. You could see it on the news. They were saying it was the murder capital in DC, the apocalypse and stuff. Like, it just was a lot of violence. We knew it was bad. Because we could see like the older people getting on it. But we also seen that it was making people a lot of money, too. Prior to our generation, older people didn't really recruit young people to sell drugs like that. But when the crack era came, they started looking for younger people. People started coming to school with a lot of money, the 14-year-old having up ends, getting cars and clothes and stuff like that. People started getting killed too. It was like a really violent time. So just to survive, you kind of felt you had to participate in it just to be respected.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

I am Eddie Bocanegran. I currently serve as the interim executive director at the Noah's Arc Foundation. And for three and a half years, I was serving as a senior advisor at the office of the Attorney General for the Department of Justice in the United States, spearheading our community violence intervention initiative. The aftermath of the civil rights, we saw a huge increase of more prisons being built and then being filled by predominantly people of color, and mostly African Americans. And that happened, you know, slowly but surely through the late 60s and 70s, and then the 80s, early 80s, it was like a big boom. You saw these numbers kind of doubling and tripling in some places, including DC. You saw these communities um decimated in terms of the social services, in terms of uh employment, and that had to do with war policies and its ripple effects, uh, the collateral consequence around that, the war on drugs. So all of these had had a huge impact for young people who don't have money, who don't come from much, their capital is reputation. So once you test that reputation, you start questioning their level of safety. And they they themselves internalize that by saying, like, okay, either I'm gonna play the role of a victim or I'm gonna be a perpetrator now. Because if I allow this person to get away what he just said, or what the fact that he bumped into me in school, right? Or we were playing basketball, and and him and his friends are mocking me. If I don't respond to that, I will now be a further victim in my community, in my neighborhood. And so these kids, right, these young people are not taught how to de-escalate that, how do you mitigate that?

SPEAKER_02 6:24

My parents, they went to high school together. My father was a Vietnam veteran, and I think he dealt with that. I just remember him vomiting one time, then they called an ambulance, and then it was like he was in and out of the hospital after that. Yeah, I didn't know what cancer was. I think it's resort of the Asian Orange over there. I think he probably was sick for a while, but we just ain't know it. My mother, she probably was dealing with the doctor, the head of the household, the protector in the rough city at that time. Back then, they used to turn like apartment buildings to like what they call crack houses. And I can remember the guy downstairs in our building. I don't know if he did it or he was trying to, but I just remember my father, he was real sick, but he went down there with a baseball bat, and he was like, man, you're not gonna have that stuff in these buildings. But he wasn't really in no shape to do that deal with it. My father passed away when I was 10. Then my mother started kind of drinking. So that kind of opened up the door for that problem. I did really well in school, like always was in all those types of programs that recognized promising students until my father passed away. Both of them was big on education, just non-traditional ways of learning. Crystal, my sister, she's three years younger than me, my brother's five years older. We just always had that competitiveness in terms of education. I started doing bad in school, and started, my grades started slipping, she started teasing me like she was gonna be in the class with me, so that was like horrifying to me. Like her catch it up with me if I kept, you know, failing my grades. I always wanted to be a scientist. But I ain't see any scientists around me, you know what I'm saying? But I wanted to be a scientist. Once my father passed away, I don't think my mother really had the focus to nurture that nature in me to try to, you know, learn in that regard. She was dealing with trying to put food on the table, just the hardship that she had to go through to trying to raise three kids in the city. And I think I kind of veered more into the streets. I think I met my friend, his name was Boo-Boo. He kind of like was the big brother. He had all these types of ways to make money. I want to help people pump gas, help people with their groceries, cut grass. But that hustle and energy also transfers over to we can sell drugs. The laws have started getting more harsh, you know, for the adults, so they didn't really want to get caught with it. And then they knew the most they could do to us was send us to the juvenile facilities and we'll be back out. So us running around being independent, people recruited us. We smoked marijuana and drank alcohol, probably like 13. It was like the cool thing to do. Like you would look at it, I'm just smoking weed, I ain't smoking no crack or using no heroin. So we were still kids, but we were doing adult stuff. I stopped really like hiding stuff from my mother, stopped going to school and just was entrenched into the criminality of the streets. I understood I could get locked up, but I also had the idea that if I did get locked up, I'd get back out. Cause I'm a juvenile. My brother, he was in the streets, he was selling drugs, but he was probably like 16 or 17. I just remember like had the whole neighborhood chasing me, trying to catch me, hold me for him, so he can get me, like, beat on me for me trying to sell drugs. He didn't really have a full vision. He just knew he didn't really want me into the streets, but he was in the streets and he hardly ever was home. Then it just got to the point where he couldn't stop it. The first time I got arrested, it was an unauthorized use of a vehicle, passenger. My friends, they had a stolen car. And I think I wanted to ride to summer school, and I got in with them, and we got pulled over, and then we got locked up. I got out probably the same day. I remember my mother coming. I just remember her smacking me, like, what are you doing.

SPEAKER_05 10:38

The frontal lobe continues to develop into at least the mid-20s. It is the part of the brain that allows you to imagine alternative futures, to look at options and choose amongst them by thinking about the risks, the benefits, the consequences that can allow you to inhibit impulses long enough for you to make a judgment as to whether or not this is a good idea or a bad idea. My name is Dr. Robert Kinshurf. I'm the executive director of the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital. I'm also a professor in the doctoral clinical psychology program at William James College. In all kinds of risk behavior domains, you see a spike right around 16, 17, 18 in all kinds of risks. That includes elevated risks of developing a substance abuse problem, elevated risks of an unintended pregnancy, elevated risks of being in a car accident or drowning. This spike goes up, including the risk that they will engage in a range of delinquent or criminal activity. And then at around 21, 22, 23, as that frontal lobe turns on, becomes more efficient and effective at regulating emotions, pausing decision making long enough to really think about it, all of those risk behaviors uh begin to sharply drop.

SPEAKER_02 12:03

I was arrested probably like five times between the age of 13 and 17. Just was hustling, just sold drugs, participating in some robberies and stuff like that. I'm 16 now. Got my own apartment, got a few cars. The older girls started pursuing me. People respected our neighborhood. I was making money just doing my role. My mother, she had a stroke, so I used to go to the hospital and see her. And I even that was a part of like my routine. I would go to the hospital. I would have my drugs on me, my gun on me. I would go in there and see her. She couldn't talk without just sitting there with her. I cry. Then I leave, I go around the neighborhood and start selling drugs. My mother passed away when I was 17 in January 1996. I can remember being with a girl one time, and then I just started crying, I guess, reflecting on my mother passing. All done went to my mother's funeral. One of my homies named Stretch. He was like, Damn, man, if my mother died, I probably couldn't just be back out this joint hustle. I probably cried and whatever. But I was just on my own. Just kept pushing. There was just a lot of chaos in the neighborhood. We had a lot of different conflicts with different uh neighborhoods. We had conflicts within the neighborhood. Boo-Boo had gotten arrested at that time. So I was with some other friends. He was locked up. He was over DC jail on the juvenile floor. And one of the older guys, he was like, What you gonna do now? Boo Boo ain't out here with you. You know, so it was like a challenge. Like, how am I gonna maneuver without him? When I was 17 and I'm hustling, selling weed at that time to have like a reputation of willingness to do violence was like also kind of good to have in terms of you selling drugs so nobody won't try to rob you or take advantage of you. I was incarcerated April 29th, 1996. I was charged with uh second-degree murder and first-degree murder. We were accused of breaking into someone's home and my co-defense brought the guy to the home, switching to guns or something, and the trigger went off, and I shot the guy during the robbery process. Shot him one time by accident. Always felt like that was one of the worst decisions I made in my life to be a part of that situation. Let my actions leave someone losing their life.

SPEAKER_03 14:49

My name is Ayula Mitchell, and I come to this space as a survivor, having experienced tremendous trauma and tragedy in a very short period of time. On January 30th, 2009, my oldest son, who was 23 at the time, he survived 17 gunshot wounds, and that night his friend was killed. 15 months later, on Mother's Day, my middle son Deshaun was killed. And less than four years later, my godson Josh was killed by a drunk driver. Those three tragedies really changed how I look at both people who have suffered devastating loss as well as those responsible for that devastating loss. I spent so many years on defense teams doing investigations, a mitigation specialist, litigation support, just a myriad of jobs within the criminal punishment system, on defense teams, doing death penalty work, post-conviction, doing trial work. And I've seen firsthand where families were so focused on quote-unquote justice that when the case is adjudicated, now their grief hits them like a ton of bricks because the focus had been on something external. And now we have to deal with the internal. Because what happened to the education system at 10, what showed up at school after his dad died? And what about social services? And was there any resources in community? And what was the environment like? Even I know what the environment was like in DC in the 80s and and the 90s, because it was the environment in San Francisco where I grew up. And so what happened to our young people that came of age, teenagers in this era? And so the question is how do they heal? James's dad passed away when he was 10. But then at 17, his mom dies. So now at 17, he don't have any parents? How is that anger, fear, and pain manifesting?

SPEAKER_02 17:19

So I was 17, I'm Charles as an adult. So I gotta go to what they call the juvenile block. It's probably like 20 cells, but everyone is Charles as an adult for some type of violent crime. You got all these teenagers down here with nothing to do. We didn't go to school enough, we just sat on the tier all day. The way the laws are written, it was called Title 16, basically a law that allows the prosecutor to seek an adult charge. If they feel like that juvenile is not gonna be redeemed by going through the juvenile system, they need to be held accountable as an adult. I went to trial almost a year later. Juvenile court is more so about saving your life, getting you treatment. Adult is a punitive. If I wasn't charged as an adult, I would have just gotten two years in a juvenile facility. I was sentenced to 57 years to life for second-degree murder and an attempt at armed robbery. I did deserve to be found guilty and be punished for some of the stuff I did. But not what they was trying to do, give me 57 years to life. In the juvenile system, it gives you snacks. You get on a free phone call. It's just a kid place. I mean, an adult system, you have to have money to buy your commissary, you had to pay for your phone calls. It's people in here using drugs, people participating in stuff that I'm not trying to participate in, so you had to come into your own to survive. When I got to the prison system, a staff member would walk up to me, grabbed my arm, like, how old are you? What are you doing in here? Because that's how young I looked at the time. There's two COs for the unit, maybe 300 inmates in the unit. But back then it was no cameras, and so they can't really see what's going on. It was chaos at that time. A lot of violence, people getting stabbed and stuff like that. DC had a local prison system, which would be like a state prison system, even though D.C.'s not a state. But they sold the contract to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. That's how I got up, different federal prisons across the United States. My family visited me every federal prison that I was in. Florida, Atlanta, Kentucky, and West Virginia. My oldest brother always been there for my aunt, always sent me books. Books that could stimulate my mind, um, nonfiction, a lot of history. I think the book that probably stood out to me would be Soul Dad Brother by George Jackson. Cause he was someone of prison, going in uneducated, becoming politicized to the point where he would challenge the system. You look at all the people that makes money off of this stuff, like the lab tech, the FBI agent, the coroner, the lawyers. Like, do you really want to stop it? Because it keeps the economy going. All this stuff is just that I seen it just was eye-opening for me.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

My name is Marcia Lovick, and I'm the chief legal officer and also a co-founder of Juvenile Law Center. Taxpayers spend a lot of money to punish people in America. And we do know when we have an opportunity to compare the costs for keeping people in their community, keeping them at home if possible, providing community-based services to them. All of these things cost much less than incarceration, where you are pending the costs of the people who are the corrections officials, you are pending the cost of housing them, you are pending the costs of feeding them. All of that adds up, which is quite different than if you keep them in the community. And these are costs that taxpayers incur. And it's not really clear what we get for it, because these are not questions anymore. We know enough today in America that we can keep communities safe even when we bring people home, even when we provide sanctions for their conduct in their own communities. We know that we can still keep communities safe. And the difference in the cost of incarceration versus keeping someone in their community is enormous. When we continue to feed a system that is a carceral system, we lock people up in correctional settings, in prisons and jails, it costs an enormous amount of money. And we're talking about billions of dollars. Specific amounts are probably in the tens of billions of dollars. Incarceration in America is a big business. There is such a large presence of private enterprise in the business of incarceration that really is making an enormous amount of money off of having people incarcerated. We need to ask that question who's going to make money off of this? And also be mindful of the cruelty that happens there.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

One of the worst parts about being in a federal prison is being in what they call transit. When you get shipped to a different prison, you got to get on a plane and on the tarment, it's like 40 or 50 prisoners, mostly brown, black, handcuffed, belly chain. Then you have the marshals, which are mostly white with shotguns, standing around you, and it just reminds you like a slave ship. At every stage of my life, I mean, no matter what environment I was in, it's just so much stuff that don't really make sense. Seeing people getting butchered about a cell that we don't own. Whether I was in a hole in prison, you know what I'm saying? It ain't matter. Our systems just get off on punishing the other guy, my people.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

There's quite a bit of history that really can trace, I think, the kind of contemporary, the modern American criminal justice system, uh, you know, to the runaway slave acts of the 19th century. This so much of our system, it doesn't just uh reflect current racism, it really reflects historic racism and pulling in of black and brown people into that system, moving black and brown people from one part of that system to another part of the system. You know, individuals who are handcuffed and shackled at various times during their period of incarceration, they understandably feel uh dehumanized by that process. The fact that it is done perhaps even more so for the economic benefit of individuals and of corporations is something that that we should not tolerate and we should really educate ourselves about what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 24:10

Growing up in a penitentiary setting from 17, all your twenties, all your 30s, and beginning in your 40s, my friend, he got killed when he was like 21. And I was locked up when he got killed. He could have been anything, you know, he just grew up in a bad situation. I used to be a part of the population that was getting in trouble, star and stuff. Next thing you know, I'm part of the older population. There's young people coming in, and now I'm responsible for them. I can remember this guy, and he was like, You think what you locked up is worth what time you facing? He was like, if you could have got a job and work and got the money, then it it ain't worth it. He was like, when we was growing up, we might have like one or two bullets, but y'all got machine guns, AK-47s. He was like, they want y'all to kill each other. It was eye-opener, and it just gave me a w another perspective on what my role was in this grand scheme of things. And so my natural maturation just took me to that role and responsibility, wanting to see them young dudes do better for themselves, wanting to see them go home, not get in trouble, and survive. Because they can die in it.

SPEAKER_05 25:29

The science will tell you that the capacities of adolescents for positive change is really quite extraordinary. In fact, their brains are wired for first risk-taking, impulsivity, novelty, uh caring about what their peers think of them, all that. And then uh their brains allow them to uh begin to settle into structure, predictability, seeking a positive life that is meaningful to them. I've had a chance to know personally and continue to know a number of them personally, uh incarcerated and uh free individuals over the course of their lifetime, and I was able to watch their transformations from who and what they were when they were 14, 15, 16 years old to who they are now as middle-aged men. One of the things that I noticed from the very beginning is that at the end of the day, uh they were kids. Uh they had made some terrible decisions, made some engaged in some terribly rash actions, but when you sat with them, uh what was striking is just how ordinary they were in terms of where they were in adolescent and young adult development. And even people who started their early adulthood had their 18th birthday in an incarceration setting, for example, and had every reason to believe that they were going to die in prison because there was no hope of p of parole. The vast majority of them organized their lives to live as positively as possible in the prisons in which they believed they were fated to die.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

I didn't know I was coming home. Like I didn't sit in prison be like, when I come home, I'm gonna come home and be a mentor. I was doing my time, I was fighting in court trying to get some relief. I didn't have life without parole. I had 57 years to life. So technically I got a release date, but then I started saying language called the functional equivalent of life without parole, where a person might have a hundred years to life, ninety years of life, whatever, but it was past someone's life expectancy.

SPEAKER_06 27:40

I'm Josh Rovner, senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project. The focus oftentimes is about the juvenile life without parole population, meaning people who were under the age of 18 and sentenced to life without parole. But that wouldn't count. A 16-year-old sentenced on armed robbery charges for 10 years, 15 years, that's not life without parole, but that's a very long time. If you're talking about a 16-year-old, 15 years is a life sentence. That is as long as the young person has been alive. But when we say life without parole, that only counts people who have the literal sentence of life without parole. Virtual life without parole is people who are sentenced to a term of years that's effectively a life without parole sentence. Someone who's sentenced to 50 years or more, the idea is that that person will die in prison. So we use the term virtual life without parole for someone who's given a very long term of years that's equivalent to a literal life without parole sentence.

SPEAKER_04 28:41

James played a very active role in advocacy efforts while incarcerated. Likewise, his sister Crystal Carpenter was also a key architect of D.C.'s 2016 Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act, which created a legal pathway for reviewing and reducing long prison sentences. Ultimately, D.C.'s law allowed resentencing after 20 years of imprisonment for youth crimes, and it applied retroactively. In 2018, the DC Council expanded the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act of 2016. The third iteration of the reform, the Second Look Act, made approximately 500 individuals immediately eligible for resentencing.

SPEAKER_02 29:44

I wanted to show my contrition and my growth. And so I'm gonna give you a chance. And I was just like, just in the days. Maybe like a day later or two that I was on the street.

SPEAKER_04 30:08

After serving 24 years, on May 5th, 2020, James was finally released. His sister by his side every month, every year, every decade for 24 years, finally got to greet him at the doors of freedom.

SPEAKER_02 30:27

That's a video of her seeing me coming out of it, you know, coming out of the back of the jail. You know, it's just a hell of a moment.

SPEAKER_03 30:49

The fact that kids go to prison and the horrors and all the things that they are exposed to and deal with in prison and change on the inside and make it home and then do amazing work, that's what we have to talk about. Because if we can heal the anger, fear, and pain of 10-year-old James and 17-year-old James, his outcome is different. And it would be remiss of me to not mention the fact that until people see our humanity, they're gonna still be okay with throwing us away. Now I gotta quote Brian Stevenson that nobody should be known by the worst thing that they've ever done. I think that that just really sums it up. And to be honest, that is true not just for people behind the walls. Because the truth is, I've caused harm to people. We have all caused harm to people. And I don't want to be known by the worst decision that I've ever made. And if we haven't had anything in place to pour into kids, they're gonna get sucked up by it. If we don't have anything in place to represent and advocate for the kids and offer different solutions that are viable, that are working, this is what we see. Forgiving those who harm me allows me to be free. And I'm not suggesting it's easy, but we don't need easy. We just need possible. There's something to be said about people's capacity to change.

SPEAKER_02 32:33

I'm definitely not the same person I was in '96. Since I've been home, I've just been doing positive stuff, working with young people, uh, helping people, helping my family, controlling my own destiny, trying not to pass responsibility on someone else. I did a crime, it's my fault, but I didn't read the poor schools and I didn't create poverty and welfare and the projects. You were born there and you dealt with it. And when you inherit poverty, it's like you inherit all that comes along with that. If your talent don't manifest itself, you're gonna fall by the wayside. I never had a job prior to my incarceration, not no real job. So coming home, I was excited to do any type of work. I started working construction, then I started mentoring. In the mentorship that I do, we have a concept called meet them where they are. So if a kid has scholarly ambitions and want to go to college or something like that, then you can feed into that. But what if you meet a kid that got criminal ambitions, and then you trying to tell them about education in school, it's gonna be hard. They're dealing with the same neighborhoods, same poverty, drug use, like we did when I was growing up. It's other young people don't get out in the street. Even though they do, some of them do grown stuff. End of the day they are children, and if you be around them, you will see they are kids. They can change. I've changed, so they definitely had the capacity to change. My safety was just being in the streets, living by the street cold. Right now, safety to me looks like getting to a point where kids don't need to be taking someone's life to realize that that's not a lifestyle they really want, where our community is is healed enough that those types of lessons are not even relevant. Because it's not happening in all communities. It got to get to a point where we don't have to use the criminal justice system to reinforce lessons. We gotta really fix all aspects of it. Like, it ain't just on the mentor. I can mentor you, but who's gonna reinforce what I'm telling them is possible. Like, give him a one of the moments that he can say, Dang, I'm really gonna change it. Like, it could be a life-changing moment. It's just planting seeds. Like, I don't think that old man that I met in the bullpen really think I remember that. Basically saying, You think what you locked up is worth it? It'd probably been better if I'd have known him in the community instead of that situation right there. That's what I do. I just try to plant those seeds. I don't know if they gonna land or grow. But that's all I can do. I'm fortunate to be free. I knew when I got out that it was important for me to do good so other people get a chance, and I took that responsibility seriously.

SPEAKER_04 35:39

James' work in the community as a mentor and advocate reflects his commitment to improving the lives of children in DC and helping to create safe pathways to education, resources, and sometimes even just offering a listening ear. When I think about James and Ayula's story, I'm reminded that transformative justice asks more of all of us. It challenges us to move beyond punishment and the impulse to lock away potential and instead embrace accountability, growth, and healing for all as the true foundations of justice. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Before They Could Dream, brought to you by the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions in partnership with the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth and Green Buzz Agency. We are deeply grateful to all of our episode contributors for their courage and insights in helping us to tell these vital stories. If you are enjoying this podcast and the work we are doing to explore youth justice in the United States, please be sure to like and share this episode with others. It is one of the most powerful ways you can help us expand the conversation and reach a wider audience. If you'd like to actually see the folks you've heard in this series, we are excited to give you the opportunity. Our seventh episode features a round table discussion, and you can check it out on YouTube. For that link, visit BeforeTheyCohdream.org.