Episode 174 - Connor Boyack - Leaders On Leadership
Leadership isn't about titles; it's about making a meaningful impact in the lives of others. Joining us for this episode is Connor Boyack, the founder of Libertas Institute and author of the Tuttle Twins children's books. Today, he shares his journey from a web developer to a leading advocate for freedom and entrepreneurship. Connor shares how he took the leap of faith and founded Libertas Institute, a non-profit organization that fights for individual liberties, one policy at a time. He also discusses the genius behind the Tuttle Twins series, which has sold over five million copies. Connor shares how the series is more than just “children’s books”—they are introducing kids to the principles of entrepreneurship, economics, and freedom in a fun and engaging way. Connor testifies that you don’t have to lead a huge team or be a CEO to be a leader; anyone can be a leader. It’s all about rising up and wearing out your life trying to do good things for other people. Tune in now.
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Connor Boyack - Leaders On Leadership
Welcome to the show, where we pull back the curtain on leadership and we talk with leaders of all ages and stages about what it takes to pay the price of leadership. For this episode, I am tremendously excited because my guest is the one, the only, and the tremendous Connor Boyack. Connor, thank you for being here.
Thanks for having me.
Let me tell you a little bit about Connor. Connor Boyack is the President of Libertas Institute. This is a free market think tank in Utah. In this capacity, Connor has spearheaded a number of successful policy reforms in areas such as education reform, civil liberties, government transparency, business deregulation, personal freedom, and more.
A public speaker and author of over 40 books, Connor is best known for the Tuttle Twins books, a children's series introducing young readers to economics, politics, and civic principles. He is addicted to changing the world for the better, one life at a time. He primarily does this through the non-profit he founded, Libertas Institute, one of the country's most impactful think tanks that helps reform policies in Connor's home state of Utah and across the nation. Connor, I cannot wait for our discussion on leadership.
There's a lot to talk about. Where do we even begin?
First of all, I always like to give people context because people are like, “Tracey, how on earth do you connect with these amazing people?” I got the introduction to Connor through Mike Capuzzi. Mike had me on his podcast. He's the Bite Sized Books creator. I had him on my show. He introduced me to Connor, and Connor immediately got back to me. That's what tremendous people do. I tell people, “As a speaker, the more you speak, the more you speak. For meeting people, the more people you meet, the more tremendous people you meet.”
Let's get started with what it takes to pay the price of leadership. Father wrote a speech many years ago called The Price of Leadership. In it, he talks about the four things that you are going to have to be prepared to give in order to pay the price of leadership. The first one is loneliness. We've all heard that it's lonely at the top, heavy is the head who wears the crown. Jesus was alone a lot. What do you think about loneliness? Could you tell us what that means for you as a leader maybe when you went through a season of that?
A lot of people want to participate in the upside of a business without being there for the downside. It's very easy to see when a company is profiting and doing well. Everyone wants their share. If an entrepreneur or a CEO is massively in debt and they're using their personal credit cards to do payroll, no one else is saying, “Let me bear that burden with you. Let me shoulder the load.” That doesn't happen.
A lot of people want to participate in the upside of a business without being there for the downside.
When I think of loneliness, I think of responsibility. For my nonprofit, we employ 70 or 80 people overall with everything that we're doing. I feel immense pressure to get things done and to get results. People on my team have their own spheres of influence and impact that they're focused on, but I'm the one at the top responsible for seeing all the chess pieces I need to move around. I like to use that spinning plate analogy where there are lots of spinning plates. One over there is getting wobbly, so you got to go give that some attention, and then you got to go to this other one that's wobbly.
It is lonely in the sense that I don't know that anyone in my organization can relate at all to what I experience and how burdensome that is. I'll be on a trip with my family and an idea will pop into my head. It’s something that's urgent and needs to happen that maybe I let slip or something. I'm like, “There's no one in the organization that I've delegated that to yet, but it still has to get done so it falls to me.” I’m like, “Honey, pull over. Let me take care of this quickly on the laptop or something for ten minutes.”
The interruptions and preoccupation in my mind where things are always going, always thinking, and always trying to forecast, look ahead, and seek opportunities is such a unique experience. For that purpose, I have gone to great lengths to associate myself with other people, primarily through EO or the Entrepreneurs Organization that I joined, just to be around people who are similarly situated. They are in different businesses, different industries, and different circumstances but they get it. They are lonely like me, so let’s be lonely together. Let’s at least have a camaraderie. That has helped me quite a bit.
You talked about the downside. Every entrepreneur out there can relate to this. It is what you said about everybody wanting to be a piece of it when it's happy, but in the beginning when it's coming out of your bank account, how much do you love it? When did you start the foundation? Tell me about the lean years. Seventy or eighty is a healthy-sized business. Can you give me how long you were in that time before you got to the tipping point? A lot of our entrepreneurs out there are five or fewer people and trying to grow.
I started Libertas about twelve years ago. At the beginning, it was just me. I had no manual. I had no clue what I was doing. I used to build websites for a living. I felt called by God to go onto this new path. I quit my job, took a big pay cut, and took a huge risk. My mom thought I was condemning my wife to a life of poverty because she saw, “You want to do a nonprofit?” I was making good money being a web developer. I was moving up the ladder and doing all the things. My mom equated nonprofit with being poor. In reality, a nonprofit is a tax classification. That's all it is. You can pay yourself well in market rates and everything if you've got the money.
In the early years, it was very difficult. It was just me. I had no clue what I was doing. I hired the wrong people. I made a lot of mistakes. The first 5 to 6 years were very slow growth. Oddly, a large inflection point for us was COVID. When COVID hit, our organization started firing on all cylinders. We tripled our fundraising. These Tuttle Twins books that you mentioned, we started that in 2014. For six years, 2014 through 2019, we sold a total of about 750,000 books. For a self-published outfit, Mike Capuzzi will tell you, those are good numbers, 750,000 books is impressive for over six years. In 2020 alone, we sold 1.3 million books, almost double the entire past six years.
Our organization, all of a sudden, was getting all this interest and all these families needing help. They are like, “What happened to my country? The freedom that I long took for granted, what's going on? How do I talk to my kids about this? They're hearing weird stuff at school.” We were in the position of “Preparation meets opportunity.” It is the quote that I think about. We had been slogging along for a while, humming along, and doing okay, but then opportunity struck. Sadly, it was a silver lining in a very dark cloud of our shared experience with all that mess. There were some silver linings. For us, it was a big growth period. Our organization has quadrupled in size over the past couple of years, which creates its own complexity in having to figure out how to be a leader.
I'll be very frank with you. I struggle to be a leader because I started this whole organization. People will look at me and say I'm a leader. They'll look at my output. They'll look at all the books I've written and millions of copies sold. They'll look at these external things and tie that to, “He's a leader because he is at the tip of the spear and all these different things,” or whatever.
To me, leadership implies that you're leading a team and that you're intimate with them. You have close relationships with them. My struggle, to be frank with you, is that I started this whole organization to get the work done. I’m passionate about the work, so I feel very tempted to get in there and do the actual work. It’s not just, “I'm a leader and I spend all my time leading people.”
For me, it's that careful balance of how I still meaningfully contribute to the work and satisfy my own personal desire of why I started this, to begin with, while balancing it with the fact that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. I do want to go far, which means I do need a team. That means I need to tamp down that inclination I have to just jump in, close my office door, head down, and do the work all day long.
I need to realize that I have to come up for air. I have to talk to my team. I have to support them. I have to make sure that they get what they need. It's lonely for me, but it's lonely for a lot of them as well if they're trapped in this role that they don't know how to do it or they don't know what to do. It is about coming up for air and realizing that we've all got our insecurities, we've all got our challenges, and trying to be there more for the team.
You did a beautiful definition of being a leader and transitioning the role of leadership and hitting on the think tank or mastermind group with the EO. It’s brilliant. Let's talk about weariness. We had a pre-meeting before this. You're fighting the good fight. You're fighting a fight that if people were sane, it would not have to be fought. Some of the stuff, you're like, “Am I in the twilight zone? What's going on?” My dad would always say, “There are some people that are doing more than they need to, but the majority of society is going to be doing less. Somebody has to pick up and shoulder the load.” How do you stay at top fighting form?
Our think tank exists to increase freedom. We're changing hearts, minds, and laws. Given that, we're in the political arena for a lot of our work. We're meeting with elected officials. We're battling against other people who have different views and ideas and are trying to get their ideas implemented. It's a constant cage match that requires thick skin for certain.
Also, I joke with people. I say, "I'm in the one industry that has the greatest job security. There will not be political problems and government largesse that we're having to fight against." It's weary for me in the sense that it feels like whack-a-mole a lot of times. It's like, "We solved that problem," but then this one pops up. We whack that one down, and then this one.
Another example that I often share when I think about our country is I feel like we're on the Titanic. We're heading towards the iceberg and there's not enough time to make a detour. These are thoughts that I feel about our country. You look at the financial situation, the debt, the inflation, the economy, the corruption, the bribery, all this censorship, and everything. I feel like we are headed toward an iceberg. There is going to be a collision, which is going to create a lot of calamity. Do I want to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic and feel like I am doing something productive to then deal with that collision?
I feel like my role is to get as many families on the lifeboats as possible. We can't save the ship. I personally feel like we can't save the ship. The ship is going to have a crash. There is going to be a lot of chaos, but we can save a ton of families in the meantime. We can get them out on those little lifeboats where they can more nimbly get around the iceberg and other obstacles and get to safety. That has value. Even if I go down with a ship, I can save a ton of people. That is the best work that I can imagine.
My faith is I'm a Mormon. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We have a particular scripture where one of our church leaders talked about the importance of wasting and wearing your life out, bringing to light the hidden things of darkness. You can be wary of working in fast food every day, a meaningless job. All work is meaningful to some degree, but you can feel like it lacks purpose, meaning, and everything like that. There are lots of things that you can do for work.
I find significant meaning in being weary for a good cause. Changing people's lives, helping them talk to their kids about these things, having meaningful conversations, getting more financially prepared, being more aware of their environment, being skeptical of authority and all the lies that we're being told, being civically engaged, and able to be the change they wish to see in the world. That to me is a worthy cause. I've got deep bags that are forming under my eyes and all the things. To me, it is a hallmark of meaningful effort that has made a difference for others. I love being weary when my energy is applied toward productive meaningful causes.
There is good weariness and there is bad weariness. The apostle Paul is my hero. Finish the race and stay through the faith. There is no greater way to be poured out. When you orient it back to your why, that's where you get the intrinsic, divine, and supernatural. We see it throughout the history of people doing that. The Titanic example was brilliant.
We have talked about loneliness and weariness. The next thing my dad talked about was abandonment. Typically, abandonment has a negative connotation, like fear of abandonment. I'm in pet rescue, so that's a big no-no. What he's called abandonment was to stop thinking about what you like and want to think about, maybe arranging deck chairs, and start focusing on what you ought and need to do. It is making meaningful change.
Especially as stuff starts exploding and you get all these people coming out and saying, “I need you to do this. I need you to represent this. I want to partner with this. Can you write a book on this?” I can't even imagine all the different ways and plates that get thrown your way. How do you stay singularly focused on the highest and best use of your calling and time?
That's a powerful question. For a long time, I struggled with that. I have gotten better at it. Before I started all this, I was a web developer. I wasn't an awesome web developer. I was decent. I was good, but I wasn't great. However, what set me apart was my communication ability. I would communicate super well, and I was extremely responsive. When clients would email me or people have questions, I would be on the phone immediately. I would drop what I was doing and I would go communicate. I would get them what they needed. That had a huge benefit in my early years. I built a successful career for myself from being only a good web developer by being an amazing communicator, trying to create value for others, and trying to think about what they needed.
When I transitioned into this role and started my own organization, it was okay in the early years because I was building something from scratch. It was lean and mean or whatever. In recent years, it's been a big problem because I habituated myself into being a yes-man and dropping what my priorities were to get that dopamine hit of responding to somebody else and helping them with what they need.
A lot of times, it was like, “You wrote this thing six years ago.” It’s all the most random things and I would be like, “Let me reply. Let me help you.” I would get that dopamine hit. I've had to retrain myself. I'm not, by any means, perfect at it yet, but I am making sure that it's okay to ignore people. It's okay to say no, which I struggle with.
One of the things that has helped me substantially improve is I'm a member of Strategic Coach by Dan Sullivan. It's a coaching program for entrepreneurs all over the country and all over the world. I've been in it for about two years. They have a process in there called Unique Ability. It’s his model for the things where you get the highest energy, where you get the highest reward, and where you have the highest impact.
They have this whole process that they walk you through where you inventory all your activities. What do you do? Where do you spend your time? What do you have going on? You classify them in different buckets and figure out, "This is my unique ability. I'm competent at this, but it's not my unique ability. I'm incompetent at this stuff, but I still have to do it." They systematize it and then create this process where you can start to identify specifically everything that isn't your unique ability. It is like, "Let's start chipping away at delegating, eliminating, and so forth for all these things."
The result of that process was I have a document that says, “Connor's Unique Ability.” It lists out, “Here are the different things. I'm a strategic freedom fighter and I help try to save the world one life at a time, and all these things. I am a public speaker and author.” It goes into detail. The point is the clarity about my unique ability has allowed me to prioritize where I'm at my best. A lot of what I do with my assistant, even my wife, or my COO is to constantly re-orient things. I’m like, “Am I out of alignment? Are we out of sync? Let's go back and look at this.” Everything creeps in. All the DMs, emails, requests, and everything are always creeping in.
Leader: "The clarity about my unique ability has allowed me to prioritize where I'm at my best."
It is that constant re-orientation. It's like a compass. I fly a lot. If you're flying into a destination, the pilot never goes in a straight line. They have a ton of little tiny course corrections to make sure they are generally on a straight line. It is not a perfect exact line. It's a very slight back and forth, making sure that you're always pointing towards your destination. That's what a lot of this boils down to as well. It is having people in my life who can help support me in re-orienting as a leader to make sure that I'm pointed toward the goals that I want.
You said the word clarity, and earlier you said, “What sets me apart?” I love that tight focus like a laser beam. We could be pretty colors of the rainbow or we could get that tight focus. I love that. I want to check out that Dan Sullivan program. I have heard of Dan. You've been in it for about two years?
Yes. It's awesome. I’d recommend it.
Is it something you stay in forever? Tell me about it.
Dan has this quip where he says his best clients are the ones who have deep pockets and long-term memory loss or something like that. His point is some of these people have been in it for a very long time. The way I think of coaching is as a church for entrepreneurs. That may sound silly, but what I mean is when I go to church, I've heard all those messages before. I've read those scriptures before. I know what they're talking about, but I'm at a particular point in my life where what the speaker is saying or whatever I'm reading lands a little bit differently. Simply being in the pew and hearing that message tied to my life and my current circumstances is this continual impression upon me that's always precise with what I need to hear.
I think of coaching the same way. They've got some awesome tools, but a lot of them are simple prompt questions to get you thinking. They are putting you in little breakout sessions with different groups. None of it is super revolutionary. It's a church for entrepreneurs where you are hearing the right things that you need on a particular cadence.
There are these quarterly meetings so that as you're going through different seasons of life, business, or whatever, you are like, “Thinking about this is prompting a lot of thoughts of what I need to fix here or what I need to do there.” That's how I think about it. It has merit. It has substance. It's important. No one is going to sit there and be like, “This is the most revolutionary thing,” even though it's impactful. The cadence, the frequency, the people that you're with, and all of that has made it very impactful for me.
It's so good you're sharing it with people. I tell other people, “I can't do it for myself. You can't do it for yourself.” There's something about the fact that we have to be with other people. We're meant to be in fellowship and community with one another where somebody is an expository teacher. I love the church for entrepreneurs. We can't read our own labels. I love that you're bringing out that even somebody like you, we all are unfolded by getting in collaboration with other people. There is nothing new under the sun, but the discovery process is until our last breath when we get perfect on the other side. Thank you for that.
We have talked about loneliness, weariness, and abandonment. The last topic my father talked about is vision. We hear about this visionary and you think it is someone with this Mensa IQ or they're born with this dove alighting on their heads or something like that. He said, “Vision is seeing what needs to be done and doing it.” He had this attraction kind of thing, but very strategic and tactical. How do you craft your vision? What's next for your organization?
A couple of recommendations, and then the answer to what's next. I struggled for a while to communicate vision. You have your mission statement and vision statement. When you read most vision statements, they do not help anyone else envision anything. They suffer from a massive curse of knowledge where the people who created them understand what they're saying but they're not meaningful to your vendors, customers, and random people viewing your website.
There is a book called Vivid Vision by Cameron Herold. He is very well-known in the entrepreneurial community. He runs a group called COO Alliance for number twos in organizations. His book, Vivid Vision, is not a long book. It talks about how you create a vision statement that is explicit and detailed. The very simplified version is to imagine yourself traveling three years into the future and then you look around your organization. What do you see? You describe in detail what you see in the aspirational sense. It’s like, “My fundraising team has all these relationships. They've attracted all this interest in our work. My communications team is making daily videos for social media. They are getting a lot of engagement. People are sharing them. Look at my policy team. We're changing all these laws.”
Vivid Vision: A Remarkable Tool For Aligning Your Business Around a Shared Vision of the Future by Cameron Herold
It should be more detailed than that, but the point is to be very detailed by department or by topic in your organization, and then you reverse engineer how to get there. You say, "What's the yearly goal for this to be true in three years? What has to be true this quarter? What foundation do we need to lay this year?" That process has helped me as a leader not only to clarify my own vision but to communicate it.
When I hire people now, before I even hire them, I make them read Vivid Vision and we talk about it. It’s a 3 or 4-page long document. They read it and I say, “Now is your time to ask any questions because this is the direction that we're going. What is unclear to you?” They love it. They are like, “This helps me understand what you guys are trying to do. I want to be a part of this.” Vivid Vision, I highly recommend it. It is by Cameron Harold.
In terms of what we're building, we have a few different facets to what we're doing. We have the policy work where we talked about changing laws. We have these Tuttle Twins children's books that have sold five million copies. It teaches kids entrepreneurship, freedom, and all the rest. We have another program called the Children's Entrepreneur Market. These are like farmer's markets, but they're run entirely by the kids. Mom and Dad can help set it up and take it down, but the kids run the show. We incubated this program in Utah for five years to refine the model. We got a well-oiled machine and we said, "Now we're ready to scale."
This 2023, we added six states. In 2024, we're adding ten more. Within 3 or 4 years, we're going to be fully national with this program, serving hundreds of thousands of kids across the country with entrepreneurial experiences so that they can learn not just money and customer service but marketing, economics, business, and all kinds of stuff.
How do all these things fit together? Policy reform. We have the children's books, the Tuttle Twins. We got the kids’ market. What I have envisioned is what I call the pyramid of impact. The bottom layer of this pyramid is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is apolitical. It's not left or right. It's very American. Everyone loves the lemonade stands and everything.
We are going to go across the country as we scale this program up. We are going to serve hundreds, thousands, and millions of families with entrepreneurship experiences. I don't care if they're left, right, blue, red, purple, or whatever. We're going to draw people into entrepreneurship. We are establishing some rapport with them. We're building trust. We're building a relationship. They know who we are.
The next layer of the pyramid is education. The kids who come to our entrepreneur markets get Tuttle Twins books. We send them our cartoons and our curriculum. We have them join our community. We educate them over time on these ideas of free markets and freedom. Moving up the ladder, we get into things like activation or application. Tracey, where do you live? I don't know that I remember.
Harrisburg, South Central PA.
We have markets in the broader Pittsburgh area in Pennsylvania. There are some organizations in Pennsylvania that work with legislators, their city councils, or their school boards. What if five years from now, there's a big legal battle? I'll be silly for a moment. Let's say they're trying to ban youth entrepreneurship. No one may engage in any economic activity until they're eighteen. That'd be a silly law, but let's pretend for a moment.
What if the groups working in your backyard in Pennsylvania could come to us and put out the word and say, “We need help. We need people to come to this legislative hearing. We need people to come to testify. We need people to sign this petition,” or whatever it is. Imagine if I've got this network of let’s say 25,000 families in your state who have been coming to our markets, reading our books, and learning about these ideas. We then present them with an opportunity to activate those ideas like, “You've been learning about it. Here is your opportunity to stand up and do something about it.”
The vision here is we're building out this national community engagement program through entrepreneurship and education so that as we move them up the pyramid of impact, we can then get them up to application and activation. They're applying the ideas that they're learning. They're activated. They're civically engaged. No one is doing this.
Leader: The vision here is we're building out this national community engagement program through entrepreneurship and education so that as we move them up the pyramid of impact.
Those of us who are on the conservative-libertarian side wait to communicate our ideas until people are adults. We let the schools indoctrinate the kids. They often do a very poor job. They turn them into little socialists or social justice warriors. We wonder, “Why don't these people support freedom?” It's because we're not talking to our kids. We are the only game in town trying to build this ecosystem. We are reaching into the rising generation, educating them and their parents, and then shepherding them into the future to help be partners with us on the Titanic to get people on those speedboats and to safety.
I cannot wait to hear more. I'm going to check out what's going on in Pittsburgh. I know we'll stay in touch and hear how this grows. We sure will be thinking about you in our prayers and thoughts and whatever we can do to move that along.
Thank you.
You're welcome. We talked about loneliness, weariness, abandonment, and vision. Is there anything else in the leadership sphere? While we have our audience who I'm sure is adoring this, is there anything else that you want to share in your years, especially the last twelve, that you want to impart to our audience?
This is what comes to mind. Anyone can be a leader. I used to build websites for a living. Who am I? I have no formal training. I'm up at the Capitol debating with the Attorney General and the Governor's general counsel, sitting in this room, hashing out this policy thing. I built websites for a living. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an economist. I have no formal background in any of the stuff that I'm doing. I teach kids economics. I have no degree in Economics. My degree is in computers. I believe that everybody can be a leader. If I can do it, so can you.
Maybe my sphere of influence is bigger or smaller than yours. That's not the point. The point is everyone is and can be a leader to a few other people in your circle of influence. The things that you talk and write about, these ideas are relevant to everybody. It's not like, “I'm not a CEO of a large organization. I don't need to think like that.” Everyone can and should rise up. You should waste and wear out your life trying to do good things for other people. In my mind, that's what leadership is.
Everyone can and should rise up. Waste and wear out your life trying to do good things for other people. That's what leadership is.
I love that sense of humility. I've met world-class trailblazers. Not just leaders, but the first or the first. They're sitting there next to me. Had I not kept asking them questions, you never would know. They're like, “I’m a small-town girl from Iowa,” or “I grew up in Las Vegas.” I love that you said that because authentic leaders have that sense of humility. They are willing to step up because they realize you have this compulsion. You're addicted to it. You've caught that fire. Thank you for encouraging everybody else out there because they look at people like you and say, “If I was Connor, I could do this.” You can do it. Your words are a great encouragement to our audience.
That’s awesome. I am glad to hear it.
What's the best way for people to get in touch with you, support Libertas, and get the Tuttle Twins books?
For the Tuttle Twins books, the best place is at our website, TuttleTwins.com, where you can get deals, bundles, and everything together. The children's markets are at ChildrensEntrepreneurMarket.com. Libertas Institute is Libertas.org. I have a fun fact for your audience so they can impress someone at a party. The Statue of Liberty, her name is Libertas. Libertas is the Roman Goddess of Liberty. It’s Lady Liberty. It’s Libertas. The next time, you can impress someone by saying, “Do you know what the name of the Statue of Liberty is?” That's Libertas.org. I am at ConnorBoyack.com.
I can't thank you enough. Thank you for your enthusiasm. Thank you for your clarity, and thank you for coming on and sharing your time with our audience.
I'm happy to. We'll chat soon.
To our audience out there, thank you so much for tuning in. Remember, you'll be the same person five years from now as you are today, except for two things. Those are the people you meet and the books you read, so make sure they're both tremendous. If you like this episode, please hit the like and subscribe button. Leave us the honor of a review. Get in touch with Connor. Get the kids, the grands, and the great-grands one of those Tuttle Twins books. Everybody, please keep having a tremendous life. We are so thankful for you. Have a tremendous rest of the day. Bye.
Important Links
About Connor Boyack
Connor Boyack is president of Libertas Institute, a free market think tank in Utah. In that capacity, he has spearheaded a number of successful policy reforms in areas such as education reform, civil liberties, government transparency, business deregulation, personal freedom, and more.
A public speaker and author of over 40 books, Connor is best known for The Tuttle Twin books, a children's series introducing young readers to economics, political, and civic principles.
He's addicted to changing the world for the better, one life at a time. He primarily does this through the non-profit he founded, Libertas Institute—one of the country’s most impactful think tanks that helps reform policies in Connor’s home state and across the nation.