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EK: So that's actually a nice lead-in to, I wanted to discuss the outreach efforts. What was your role with the outreach efforts, and where did you go, and can you kind of just describe what these efforts were like?

AG: They were everything from major conference-style events, workshops, to, hey, let's call this one person and work them through. So I tended to be more in the individual touch. I would get cases from Aileen or from Tink to say, "Hey, can you call and work with this person?" And, you know, there's a line, because they have to tell you the information. You can't feed it to them, you can't really steer them. And so that would have been my biggest thing, I did have the opportunity to go to do a workshop in, I want to say we did one in San Francisco and then we did one in Hawaii, which was a great time because we would work with members of the community to get them set up to make sure that our coming was published in all appropriate languages, that we had all the resources there and that we had the time to spend. Because folks were not spring chickens, I mean, the recipients, not the team. We were middle chickens. But in terms of you don't want to rush somebody that wants to tell a very painful story. And so I think that there were times when we would have lines that I saw for myself or that I heard from the team that were just super, super deep, to where you had to get chairs for people to sit and wait because you've got this eighty... the eighties and nineties is different from the eighty today. So you had people that really waited, and there was a lot of emotion, and people would have all of their papers in a bag, and you would have to sort of help them work through it. And you see in people's faces, they're looking at the envelope, and they're like, oh my god, that was my best friend who wrote that, and then they have to process through that to actually answer your question, okay, what street was it on?

But we had workshops, we worked with the community, we would do... I can remember doing telephone campaigns trying to locate people, and this was pre-Google, pre-Siri, pre-everything, pre-flip phone. And so it's going through the phone book and saying, "Okay, can we research online a phone book for the Chicago area for 1975?" to try and find people. And then I did have one phone call where I called and the person had just passed, and so it was like, okay, you figure I'm twenty-two or twenty-three, and how could I get out of this gracefully and respectfully? And that family did eventually come back. I gave them my direct dial, and they eventually did come back later and apply and received what was due to them. But it was just my timing which was off, it was just a big bust on that. But I don't ever recall hearing any stories of bad workshops. I think that all of our workshops were successful because we did a lot of pre-planning. Even to, I can remember having a conversation once on the font of the form to make sure that it was big enough, making sure that we had at least somebody that could communicate, making sure that whatever organization we were partnering with was prepared, and that we had gone through the logistics and we just didn't show up. Because even then I think you said, "Oh, I'm from the Department of Justice," "Oh, I'm from the government," and people are like, "What are you doing?" So working... when Sox Kitashima passed and her family asked the administrator, Bob Bratt, who was no longer at the time of her passing, the administrator. But when they asked him to come at her services, what bigger compliment is that? And they had become friends, of course, but I met you at work, in a not necessarily easy job to do, because there were definitely times when Bob had to say no, and here's why it's a no. But to be asked to speak in her final audience is huge

And that's the kind of thing as a young professional, when you think and you look back on your life of what kind of boss do I want to be, what kind of worker do I want to be, hands down, my experience with the Office of Redress Administration colors everything I do today. I think that my current staff -- so I've had two staffs in my current job, one in human resources and one in business resources -- totally different types of personalities, they all know DeDe, they all know Joanne, they've all heard of redress. When I have shared with them, I guess it's over there, what the program was about, and some of them are millennials and some of them are older, but they have no idea. And so then I'll just sit and like, "Okay, I've got to go now," because I just keep going and going, "And then we did this and then we did that," but it was a fabulous opportunity to learn about the history of our country, learn how we could make it better, and also to just... it's not a paper thing. The IRS probably, we know they talk to way more people than we ever talked to. But I think the impact that we had on individual lives, and the feeling that you took away from when you helped. Taking away from... there was a gentleman, Mr. Kitashima, who always called me Amy, but by the end of our conversations he started to call me -- like he worked on Angela. And I remember the first time he called me Angela, I'm like, oh yeah, it's okay, because he knew that, I said, "Oh my work name is this," and I'm playing it off because I'm twenty-something. But the first time he called me Angela was just huge. Or the gentleman that sent us like a hundred and fifty pounds of onions, which was a love offering. We were at 1331, across the street from The Shops, which was a place in D.C. And was just so... he was a farmer, and was just so touched by what people had done, and that's something... you can't accept a personal gift for doing your work, you just can't, that's just procurement regulations. But that was something perishable, so we put them out in the breakrooms, so everyone was like, "Oh, I don't even like onions, but I'll take pictures." So that was really cool.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.