Secrets of Guinness House || The Dynasty That Built Ireland

0:00Good evening everybody and thank you so much for spending your Monday night here with me. So I hope you all have a Guinness. Okay, firstly let's do a big cheers. Cheers. We have obviously a very special individual here this evening. So it's lovely, lovely feedback at the NED. This is my fifth talk here this evening and I love being sat up here. I love telling the stories of some amazing founders that I've had. For anyone who's new, my name is Zoe Fox and I am the founder and host of the Getting to Grow podcast. So please do put me a follow, listen to all my other episodes as well. All founders within food and beverage.

0:44I am so excited to speak to Arthur this evening because I don't think I've ever, well I certainly haven't ever spoken to anyone who has a family history that dates back to 1759. When your five times great grandfather started Guinness. and signed that famous 9 ,000-year lease, which I just asked him before I went kind of live. I was saying, so what happens after 9 ,000 years? Did you give it back? And you said, well, it wouldn't be quite the same plot of land that he was gifted, so I think he's probably taken over. I think that's right. There's been some improvements, if we can say, a greenfield to a brewery.

1:21But your name quite literally carries Irish history, so it's an honour to welcome you. So please join me in welcoming Arthur Edward Guinness, the fourth Earl of Ivy, known to his friends at Med, and the author of his beautiful new book, Guinness, A Family Succession. Thank you, Zoe. Which you can all buy this evening over here. It's on a special price tonight of£15, and Arthur will very kindly sign it for you if you'd like. So yeah, do pop over there after if you enjoyed the talk, which you definitely will. so you continue a remarkable family legacy overseeing the Elverdon estate in Suffolk one of the largest working farms in the UK with a strong focus on sustainability conservation and community projects you're also deeply involved in philanthropy and heritage preservation continuing the work started earlier by early generations of the Guinness family from the Ivy Trust social housing to the restorations of the Ivy markets in Dublin Beyond your work in land management, Ned has become a thoughtful storyteller of his family story, and his new book really does bring this to life.

2:29So, Ned, welcome to the Ned. You must feel really at home. Thank you so much. So at home. Thank you so much, Zoe. Now, I must say, it's also so funny, because I feel like I know so much about you and your family from the research and everything I've done. I feel like a bit of a stalker. There's so much that I've learned and absorbed about Guinness over the last two and a half weeks, And I'm absolutely fascinated from the early days when Arthur left the rural suburbs of Dublin, went into the city and decided to take this big leap as an entrepreneur. So for anybody here who doesn't know the exact family, can you tell me how you're related to the original Arthur Guinness?

3:07Well, the original Arthur was the son of Richard, but he was my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. He was born in Kildare outside Dublin, and he ultimately headed up to Dublin to take on a really decrepit, dilapidated brewery that hadn't been working for 10 years. And he sort of polished it up, and the rest came along from there. And what do you think about the man now that kind of signed that lease on St James's Gate? What does that connection feel like on a personal level for you? Well, it's an enormous thing because it did inform all of us, including my father, my late father, who was Benjamin, he was called.

3:53But he was Arthur Francis Benjamin. And he worked for Guinness all his life. And he continued a tradition that has worked for Guinness for 233 years directly. I'm indirectly kind of in there somewhere. But Arthur started it all off. He was an extraordinary man. He didn't go into becoming a lawyer or becoming a doctor or becoming a kind of respectable professional person. He was one of many children. So he probably had to look after his younger children. Sorry, his brothers and sisters who came after him. And he went into this. He helped his father, who was a land agent. And then he decided to focus in on brewing a trade.

4:41and he stuck at it. He persevered. He focused. But he maintained, one of the things is he maintained his roots very strongly with Kildare. He had come up to Dublin, founded the brewery, all that, but he worked very hard to sustain or be involved very strongly with a charity with good causes in County Kildare. 11 of his 21 children died as children 21 children total but 11 died as children they were buried quite close to where he was brought up but he maintained these roots to his backdrop in County Kildare so he never lost track of where he came from It's so fascinating from the early days of Guinness when he put that£45 a year rent on St James' Gate, which in today's value is about£28 ,000 in terms of the value of what it was then.

5:41And we were just talking about luck earlier and how entrepreneurs, 93 % of businesses fell in their first year, but Arthur's didn't. And look at it today. It's the complete global brand that Guinness is. Do you think it was a combination of luck, skill, timing? What do you think made it and the fact that he did stick it out? Well, absolutely, there was skill. And one of the things I found when I was researching the book, that in the later 18th century, there were tariffs. And again, you know, you could say nothing changes. Anyway, there were tariffs, and English beer was taking the absolute market share off the Irish brewers, and Irish brewers had to buy the hops and so on, you know, and keep tied from that perspective of ingredients being tied to certain sources.

6:31and Arthur actually went before a committee with two other brewers and he said I am seriously contemplating setting up my brewery in Anglesey in North Wales because should the tariffs remain as they are for seven years if I could have a guarantee that they remain like that I will move to Anglesey and thank God he didn't it took them four years before they shifted at all but he stuck with Dublin and nothing wrong with Anglesey, I'm not doing it down but the connectivity that Dublin had and his brewery had with the growing infrastructure of transport, the canals, the railways the seaport, the Liffey and so on obviously St James's Gate Brewery was incredible from the angle of serving not only the city but nationally and internationally that was one thing he stood over the source of water with an axe and he fought over the source of the water from the brewery.

7:32The Corporation of Dublin was taking 25 % of its revenue from pipe money, they called it, water money, water tax. And he stood over with a string of expletives and he told the officials to go away. He fought them in the courts for nine years and he won. So thank God, of course, history could have been different. What is a brewery with no water? So these tiny little events or huge events that history could have been so different. So yes it was luck but also there was ability. And staying power and sticking with it, persevering, having a clear vision. I think all of those things. Because when I was reading up about it there was also 32 other breweries at the time when Arthur started.

8:19So there was stiff competition as well that he was against in that time? Enormous number of breweries and lots of front of house publicans would brew back of house and so what he did this is one of his differentiators was to offer all of the public houses one after the other they chose to stock his beer he only did when he came to Dublin brewing he didn't do like he did in Kildare the front of house the offering you know and then then you get into accommodation and then you get into all sorts of distractions. They were passionate about the quality of the beer and obviously we're talking way way before pasteurization, sterilization, all of the clever science that we have that guarantees that we know what we open a can and we you know have what we think we have in front of us that tastes just like we want it.

9:16And you grew up in Farmley in Dublin. What are the single clearest memories from that childhood that shaped how you think about the Guinness story today? Well, I was brought up in my great-great-grandfather, who floated the company, floated Guinnesses in 1886, Ned's and his wife Adelaide's house, Farmley. And so it was his character, their characters, all around me. I was born on the first floor of the house. I remember many happy memories we lived on the top floor us children, I'm a family there's four of us and really lovely people my parents were quite busy they were always travelling and doing lots of lovely things including with us as well but we were off to the national school in Castlenock I went to school just south of Dublin called Brookhouse, it's closed down and I'm always the kiss of life to kind of an educational establishment, it seems.

10:17So, you know, I mean, happy. It was a small farm just outside the city centre. So it felt like a farm. My dad had these beautiful white charolet, these beautiful big animals. So we used to preen them for the Royal Dublin Society, the spring show every year. And, you know, go and feed them with cattle nuts and all sorts, you know, and hope they don't trample on us. we were little then and you know bicycling puddles jumping around you know bicycle freedom the freedom the freedom yes oh amazing and the Guinness story is such an iconic part of Irish history how did you growing up know that you were part of this family what kind of stories were told and the tales that went down the family and did yeah did you go did you grow up knowing what your what the dynasty was?

11:10My dad was incredibly good. He was a quiet man. He built the most amazing library, which is in Farmery now, and it's intact. It's the first day covers and first editions and Irish book bindings and so on. But he started collecting. But he was really obsessed by history. He loved history. He loved Ireland. And he'd moved over to Ireland full-time with my mum when we were little before I was born. And, you know, so he was always talking about history and about the brewery. We were going into the brewery. The last thing I ever wanted to do was go into the brewery because I wasn't sort of sipping delicious pints.

11:55I was waiting for my father to come off the wretched telephone or, you know, stop reading those ghastly papers or he smoked these dreadful cigars. They weren't nice, delicious cigars from Cuba. They were drainpipes, we used to call them. So he was sitting there waiting for him to get off a very boring meeting or something. And the people, the team around him were very charming to all of us. And the last thing he wanted us to have was to go into what was for him the Guinness business. His Victorian grandfather brought him up and he had become the chairman of Guinness aged 25 with 20 ,000 employees around the world, international business and that put on him lots of pressure and he said to all of us, listen, if you want to go into an international thing, you know, do it but don't go into Guinness.

12:51Oh, quite interesting really. And Guinness actually started in a very different world. When we look back at the 1750s, it was almost considered a health drink because of the kind of contamination, the contaminated water at the time and how drinking Guinness actually would kill the bacteria in the stomach. So can you tell us about those early days, what Arthur Guinness was trying to achieve and kind of some of the challenges he came across in the brewery? Well, you're absolutely right. And, you know, it was that real strong dedication to detail. And that meant buying the best ingredients, seeing to the right process and adjusting because you know i mean what brewing was a 52 week a year pastime and so that old barley or that in the second part of the the the cycle of the year you know i mean it's a it's a challenge i know it from the crops we grow in suffolk right now you know we we we have all the benefits of refrigerated stores and and you know this technology and that technology but they didn't have that.

13:52He decided strongly, following a man called Patrick Sweetman, who actually lived on St Stephen's Green in Dublin, that Dublin became known, Sweetman was the first brewer to brew a good pint of stout porter in Dublin. And porter came from London. It was an English drink. It came over. The Irish began to have a taste for it and developed to taste. Sweetman proved that a good pint of porter could be brewed in Dublin and it was only you know it was a considerable period of time after the Guinness Brewery was founded but it was the later part of Arthur the first Arthur's brewing career that he actually switched exclusively to porter and the benefit one of them was that porter can travel Guinness can travel which it did and so therefore it grew.

14:47Because it started out as a light ale, is that right? That's right. And then it kind of progressed into the Guinness that we have today. That's right. He was an ale brewer in the first decades. So how did that transformation happen to the Guinness that we see today? Was it over that time that he had then, kind of the porter came in? That's right. He had seen the introduction, he'd seen this English beer. He also came across a remarkable brewing family called the Pursers And much of the wonderful success of Guinness was obviously there were sort of, there were the Guinness family, but there were the people that they had around them or we had around us.

15:29And actually, you know, you spotted talent, you hoped to nurture it, you spotted it, you nurtured it, you gave progression and you supported your team. and one of the remarkable things, the kind of cultural things that happened around, it wasn't just brewing beer, but it was about nurturing people and the health of people and the whole sort of the community, you know, that they're around, the locality. You looked after the employees, well, they were healthy enough to look after you in their day jobs. So it was before its time. There was the most awful sectarianism. you know Ireland was split and we were always very strongly in favour and publicly in favour of Catholic emancipation we were always very strongly in favour of things that were you might say you know people were divided and and we were able to nurture the talent and we were able to choose from the full pool of talent that we had but people didn't have education like there was equal education opportunity now so um you know it it was an unfair sort of society if you like but we were we were uh busy attempting to do our little thing in um equalizing uh you might say in shorthand and obviously coming with with what the brewery had and all the kind of all the employment employment it made do you think at the time the family realized the social impact it was having on dublin well um great great grandfather the ned who floated the guinness and bought out his um his older brother he was son number three um he was educated in number 79 to 81 stevens is green and um on the top floor which is the the Department of Foreign Affairs now, and that some of the worst slums in Western Europe were between that property and the brewery.

17:35So it was very evident, very firsthand that people were... And I have photographs in my family albums of the children with no shoes, with dirty smocks and dirty clothes running around in the streets and so on, the vendors in the streets with no shelter, you know, 365. It was very evident. It was very in-your-face. I mean, it was normal because that was the age they lived in. So I think that very proximity to some of the worst social deprivation in Western Europe was all too evident. So Ned was an extraordinary man. He decided to do lots about it. The Guinness Trust in England and Wales now, it houses a population of 125 ,000 souls.

18:29Obviously, you know, the original benefaction is something, and that relatively small to the 125 ,000 capacity that that extraordinary institution has now. But nonetheless, you know, I mean, what an amazing... And I'm a trustee of the Ivy Trust, which is its equivalent in Dublin, which has a hostel for the homeless. You know, it's... It's amazing what he kind of then went on to do and how he gave back so much. So we've traced the family tree. We've heard very beginnings of Guinness from a humble health drink to a now incredible household name and a glimpse of what it was like to grow up in the family, what you had like as childhood, but then also kind of what it was like in those days.

19:12Which brings me on to your amazing book, which I was very kindly sent a few days before. so I've highlighted my way through it and I think genuinely what got me is that your great-grandmother had 21 children. Sorry, your five times great-grandmother. Poor girl didn't stop at that point. He wanted more. I cannot believe he wanted more. Honestly, I just don't know how you do that, but anyway, that's a whole different conversation. And you've spent years obviously exploring the history and the brewery and the lives, the decisions, and all the philanthropic work as well. Was it mostly a personal project or did you feel kind of responsible for documenting the family story?

19:53I was incredibly blessed in the book because great-grandfather Rupert in 1957, so 67 years ago, he published privately a wonderful book by George Martelli, which was called A Man of His Time and a few copies of the book circulated around the family. That's sort of two generations back, and the copies are getting moth-eaten and torn at the edges and so on. And I was always fascinated by that book, so I had the benefit of that amazing research that was done at the time. And he wrote in the foreword, which I put in my foreword, if you like, the fact that what he was doing was writing the book, getting the book commissioned to remember the extraordinary, sorry, but the forebears and remember the foundations of our family so I was able to use his brilliant work his records, the records he kept my late father kept the private papers, their letters and diaries Guinness still has an archive in Dublin Diageo still maintain a wonderful archivist they're still there and they're working away they're beavering away on all sorts of wonderful things So they still value where the company has come from.

21:16So I had the benefit of all these things. With Irish historian Antonia Hart, she is amazing. And I completely landed on my feet with her. She put the context of my family and the Dublin and the Ireland of the day and the international elements that were happening to Ireland of its day. But also, my dear cousin Henry. I'm cousin Henry so almost a twin and we used to go and play go to Frinton-on-Sea and play buckets and spades and so on we were age 7 and 6 and so on and so Henry had a publishing company it's called Scala it closed down with Covid it supplied museums everywhere and wonderful galleries and so on social cultural institutions in America Britain, Ireland, you name it, amazing.

22:12And closed it down for COVID because COVID didn't work for those sort of places. And Henry lost the battle with his health in COVID. And his brilliant widow, Katie, came along and we talked. She lives in Essex. I'm based in Suffolk. And this book was born. so I'm so lucky that I had so many blessings with this book and when you were looking back and kind of looking at the archives is there anything you found out that you didn't know before from doing your research? so many things and always the little things I never knew about the story about going to Wales I never knew also the women of the family not so much is written the head of the family the head brewer this male figure But I found out the wives and the amazing women, Anne, who's the daughter of Benjamin Lee, the great-great-great-grandfather Benjamin Lee, the three sons, including Ned and Anne as the daughter, they were doing great things.

23:23and you know women who'd come out of prison women who were um who you know you know you know i mean venereal disease went both ways and and you know but trying to get people back into health back into trek back into working for themselves finding some pride in themselves and giving themselves a living giving them shelter giving them reskilling them you know the wives the women of the Guinnesses were extraordinary. So, you know, and it's true, you know, behind every good man is a woman, behind every good woman is a man, for heaven's sake, and it doesn't have to be exclusively like that. So we live in a completely society which is, you know, it doesn't matter who you are, but have good people around you, that's the thing, you know, your partner, whoever they are.

24:10Amazing. I was also astounded at the amount of Arthur's and Edward's. I was very confused. I've actually lost track of which Arthur and which Edward this now is, because there are so many. But when I was looking at it, I was reading about the Guinness Golden Girls. So the three daughters, and I can't... Very Irish name, so I'm definitely going to pronounce it. Una Maureen and Eileen. Okay, not Eileen, that's not very hard to pronounce. And I thought I could swap lives with them for a day. They were like Dublin socialites, kind of going out, hosted amazing parties. They were known as the Golden Girls of the time.

24:46And I was like, yeah, I could definitely be her for a day. She would have quite a fun time. Maureen was extraordinary. She had a 90th tiara party. Yeah, that is my type of gal. There she was, greeting her guests, wearing her tiara, and a shade long in her hallway. But everyone else, if they were female, were expected to wear a tiara. I tell you, extraordinary. I would never forget it. Yeah, that's fabulous. and what was the first story you knew you had to include and the moment you realised this book needs to be written well I wanted to go back to the very beginning that was my mission because you know I mean you can go and look at things but you've got to know where things originate from and you know so I mean Ned was an extraordinary man and you know but he was an extraordinary man but he was a fourth generation brewer and you know so it was these sort of the layers and they all did things and they all made mistakes and they all, you know, but there was more in success than there was failure and they stuck with it and they held on and they nurtured.

25:56There was all sorts of crises. So it was really important to just that, you know, and I think Ned, you know, the great-great-grandfather, I mean, he's got the most humble gravestone in the village graveyard where I live in Suffolk and there he was, he did he was one of the wealthiest people in his time in his country but they gave group parties, they gave to all these wonderful causes but they stuck with it, I've got pocketbooks of Ned recording the price of his weekly and daily newspapers the attention to detail absolutely, he went to church every day and Actually, there's a thing in my book I discovered that religion was used to discredit competitors.

26:51The island of Ireland is prevailingly Catholic. Of course, being Protestant brewers, and it mattered in those days, everyone went to church in those days, it was an easy swipe to make at. Oh, well, you can't do that. You can't drink the Protestant beer. Anyway, it was jealous competitors. And, you know, so it was an easy swipe to make. But luckily, we were decent people and we never sort of went wrong. We never went wrong. Yes, because it only takes one generation to, you know, it doesn't work anymore. And you mentioned Antonia Hart, the kind of historian that you worked with. What was that collaboration like?

27:39I know you said you landed on your feet with her. Was it a bit of like, no, I want to keep that in? Or, you know, she wanted to move things around. How did the collaboration of you guys working together? She was just brilliant. She completely got it. I mean, you know, there's not many people. It's complex. You know, you could write 100 books going off in all sorts of tram lines and off here and off there. I mean, it was a real, the most challenging thing was to try and keep it on track and make it flow, you know, make it have continuity. it make it have continuity that was the challenge so um we were what i was sort of oh my god there's this thing and that oh my oh i'd love to include that we had a good old debate um she brought so much because her knowledge of history and her ability to kind of access the history that we wanted to find out and know and we both didn't know that that was one and she and she happened to have the time.

28:36I'd heard about Netflix. I'd heard about another significant history coming out. I'd heard about it. I heard about Netflix before COVID. And, you know, it was something that, I mean, anyone can write anything, but I really wanted something with first, with primary source, with primary sources, backing it, backing it, because there's plenty of myth, and there's plenty of legend and there's plenty of fallacy and falsehood so but but but you know i was a i was a man on a mission definitely i mean i am i'm halfway through it and i've been highlighting so many things um yeah i love it so definitely grab your coffee um this evening and you mentioned obviously your house of guinness it's a very apt um kind of show that's going on at the moment i'm not not quite finished it yet i'm about two episodes through the way through the the way of the series But with the book, is there something that you were looking and you were reading that take us to a part of the book that really puts Guinness on the map and where you feel that it really hones in on that legacy?

29:41Well, I haven't watched all of Netflix, I confess. I think the starting point of it, which says that this is fiction dressed upon fact or based upon fact, is, you know, honest. and I think it's beautifully filmed. I love the music and the acting. And I just think it's a good effort. It's a good drama. I think the selectivity that they've had to go through to choose what they've selected is always a huge challenge. I did a short film to celebrate Guinness' 250th anniversary and I was always told I couldn't have anything kind of complex in my 15 minute film and I was really sad about that but you know I had great fun because it was all about Guinness but it did have benefit but you know I think hopefully there will be I haven't got to the end so I can't really say but I hope it brings people together ultimately and I know that it does take artistic license in certain places and people aren't necessarily like, exactly like they get portrayed of course, I mean it's obviously dramatised as well it's a documentary series except we're all there to watch those kind of TV programmes but in your book and people often single out Edward Cecil Guinness the first Earl of Ivor or Ivy, all the ways you were telling me you could say it, with his work with the Ivy Trust, the housing and this has been a massive part of your book and all the amazing things that your family has done can you tell us a little bit more about those projects?

31:38Well so in the UK there's the Guinness Trust which is extraordinary there's also the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine when in my Suffolk village a stable boy went down with tuberculosis and there was no treatment but Pasteur in France had developed this treatment just outside Paris so the stable lad was sent over and he was treated successfully and great-great-grandfather wrote an enormous he was friends with the Fleming family very famous you know the Flemings in medicine and they got into conversation and he wrote this an enormous check for the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine.

32:24So the Lister Institute is much smaller than the Wellcome Trust, the largest charitable trust supporting medical research in the UK. But it's an enormous one, and 25 scientists get funded for five-year projects and most recently it eradicated smallpox it worked out how to use Crick and Watson's Crick and Watson's discovery of DNA but it patented the use of it for medical purposes which was incredibly helpful to the charity all sorts of incredible scientists doing things I cannot explain because I'm not, you know, I mean just they use a foreign language, you know it's so complex, but they're all British and Irish and they're all working really hard, they've all got five year fellowships amazing, the Ivy Trust in Dublin, very proud of almost 200 persons are off the street given three meals a day, hot meals, given sign posting as to how they get their lives back into, there's no drink allowed, there's no drugs allowed on site it's an incredibly good community they support each other they have a small library they have access to obviously all the things everyone needs to sustain oneself and so that's amazing to see and it's the fastest growing social housing trust in the Leinster area in Dublin so proud about that so it's growing to this day nearly 140 years later.

34:10Chaddicker Agricultural Trust, that's agricultural-focused education. Education. It was an institute. We closed it down, and it supports people training and educating people in the countryside, and skills are needed. Everyone needs tickets, of course. Farming, conservation, everyone needs tickets these days. Chaddicker supports that. There are others. So many. And you've been involved with the Ivy Markets and the local projects in Dublin. What does stewardship look like for you in 2025? Is it about brick and mortar? Is it about values? Stewardship 2025. Ivy Markets, well, please God, the roof gets put back on.

34:56The government have promised the roof will be put back on. The work is yet to start. It's right in the city centre. Great-great-grandfather gave it to the nation, to the people of Dublin. it's laying dormant for nearly 40 years and so the city needs to have it back back into social purpose but there needs to be consultation public consultation as to what that purpose is because it's not what great-great-grandfather you know the circumstances have changed since 1900 when he founded it and it worked so successfully for nine decades after that so you know what does it mean? well it means we all have to be nimble don't we we all have to adapt we all have to work away and understand the world around us sufficiently to you know to remain relevant and to be to be sensitive enough don't we we need to be sensitive enough to those around us and and the environment around us and when the public look at Guinness as named today and everything you've done what do you most want them to associate it with well good things and i think it comes back to humanization because if we're not careful you know at the pub and the and the humanizing us tonight you know this you know gatherings heaven's sake you know we're people we're all social animals we we we do our little things some of us love seclusions etc you know we're all different but by god you You know, I mean, the joy of a good pub, a good camaraderie, doesn't matter age.

36:33You know, even you can drink zero-zero if you don't like Guinness and you don't like alcohol. You know, you have to like Guinness, but, you know, alcohol. But, you know, I mean, you know, it's just gathering of people together, being together, you know. And long may that last, because I think our civilisation in terms of interpersonal civilisation is under challenge, or under change, I suppose. But you can go for days and weeks without talking to anyone. But AI can't replace the AI family, so we're all good. And looking, where do you see the Guinness dynasty going? What's next for it in the future?

37:14Well, we're a huge family, all sorts of people doing all sorts of different things. I think that the beer will hopefully follow its pathway and hopefully there will be connectivity because that's always a lovely thing should one of us or two of us wish to be involved. I'm having fun introducing Guinness micro-draft to the people of St Vincent and the Grenadines down there in the southern Caribbean. So we'll look out for the micro-draft. Oh, you know. So, you know, and so I think we've got to all adapt, haven't we? We've got to be smart on our feet. Definitely. And the Guinness brand is now part of Diageo after the 1997 merger.

38:01How does it feel knowing that the brewery, I guess, is no longer in the family, but the other parts of the legacy continue to live on? Well, great-great-grandfather floated the business in 1886, so it's been out of the family for such a long time that this remarkable span of influence, strong influence that we had, you know, 233 years. I mean, it defies sort of any kind of any, you know, I mean, it's so abnormal. But, you know, it's, I think, I hope that the brand and I hope the Guinness and I hope the Guinness family will always sort of go, have an acknowledgement to our roots because that's what grounds us.