Hello everyone and welcome to At Bairns. I'm Andy Surwer.

And welcome to our guest, Cecilia Rouse, president of the Brookings Institution.

Cecilia, great to see you. Thanks for joining us.

Well, thank you for having me.

So you're new to Brookings, but I want to ask you to tell us about the institution and what its mandate is.

Absolutely.

So Brookings is one of the very few think tanks that is founded on a mission of trying to have an impact on policy,

trying to have an influence on policy, really inform the political dialogue,

the debate, through scholarship, evidence, really bring expertise to inform that debate.

We do not have a values-driven mission.

It is we want to identify the most important policy issues facing the nation, local governments, globally, what are some of

the critical issues, and what are the best minds thinking about? What's the evidence they can bring

to bear? So it's this wonderful, vibrant community of scholars who share that mission. So it's the

scholars, it's the staff, it's the junior scholars we have, and everybody just

shares this mission of wanting to find ways to improve our world.

And so how is your work manifested?

Do you put out books, papers? Do you lobby politicians?

Maybe not.

So tell me what you guys do then practically.

So this is an ever-evolving big challenge, which is how do we do what we do.

So obviously it begins with the best scholarship and the creative minds trying to look around corners and identify those issues. So then they have to write that up. So they write them up in a variety of mediums. There's books, scholarly articles.

We have convenings and conferences. But we also have to adapt to the changing world. So we have a vibrant website and there are blogs and there are folks

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