Bobbie's impact: On parental leave & working parent advocacy

The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world without a paid parental leave mandate.

And even though polls show 84% of voters support paid leave programs, it’s been slow-moving to get a national policy to pass.

If you listened to our episode with Congresswoman Katherine Clark, we talked about how important it is for companies to get involved to advocate for paid parental leave – that hearing from business leaders on how it’ll help the workforce and economy will help make a difference.

One company that has committed to this work is Bobbie.

You may know them for their high-quality baby formula, but they’re also extremely committed to advocating for paid parental leave through initiatives like their “Take Our Leave” and “Parents Push Harder” campaigns.

In today’s episode, we welcomed Sarah Hardy, co-founder and chief people & experience officer at Bobbie, to join us on the podcast.

She shared her experience with authoring the paid parental leave policy at Airbnb and what it was like to be the first employee to take it.

We also talk about why she believes normalizing parenthood in the workplace is great for businesses and what she’s most proud of about the culture and policy at Bobbie.

Allison: Sarah, thank you so much for joining me today. I cannot believe that this is the first time that we've actually spoken, given how much overlap we have as it relates to our passion and interest in the parental leave space. But thank you so much for being here with me today.

Sarah: I can't believe it either. I feel like we know each other. We've been in and around each other's orbits for years at this point, and it's great to be here.

Allison: Yeah, we actually had to stop our prep conversation because we were worried we would ruin that for this podcast. So I'm gonna start with probably one of the easiest questions for you to answer, but I think it's helpful context to start this conversation, which is, Bobbie's a formula company, yet you're very well known for your work in the paid leave space.

Why did you choose paid leave? Out of all of the things that you could be doing, why is that the thing that you are so well known for, that you are investing so much time and money to talk about and build campaigns around?

Sarah: Because it matters. It matters to me personally, it matters to our team, matters to our leadership team. For us, it was really, really clear that this was an area that we were gonna get invested in from the beginning. For me in particular, you know, just prior to Bobbie, I was at Airbnb and it was born out of a personal experience. You know, I was Airbnb's first mom to return from maternity leave.

Allison: Amazing.

Sarah: I know, it's wild. But when I was expecting my first child, I remember digging through Google Drive, being like, okay, where's the parental leave program? There wasn't one. And in that moment, I was three, four months at the time, I was like, okay, here we go. And I ended up reaching out to a bunch of friends, friends of friends, networking, and I pulled together a benchmarking study to figure out what other companies were doing at the time.

And I packaged it all up and I handed it off to our executive team and much to their credit. You know, they turned it around really quickly. So I was the number one benefactor of all of that hard work to put a program in place. I enjoyed every single minute of my 16 weeks of paid leave. But what I was not prepared for was the return to work. So fast forward to Bobbie, I just knew from the beginning, for me, for my co-founder, for our early employees, and for all the employees who were about to hire after that, that this was going to be central to how we thought about designing support structures for the Bobbie team.

Allison: When I was preparing and doing my research before this interview, I saw the video that you had with the Take Our Leave campaign. And it was fascinating, and I'm probably going to mess up the stat here, but I think you had said 60% of your employees had a child or welcomed a child within your employee set, which is extraordinarily high. Am I messing up those numbers? It was a really powerful statement. Can you share more about like the take our leave and given, you know, what was that like to have so many people going on leave while at Bobbie?

Sarah: Yeah, Bobbie's known, of course, for who we are, but we are also very well known for our advocacy work, just to put it out there. So even long before we had launched our first product, we were already out there doing advocacy work, taking a stand, supporting parents. When it came to, you know, we launched Bobbie in the middle of a pandemic, right? And we had a team of predominantly moms. Many of those people had babies during the pandemic.

It was abundantly clear that if we could do one thing to better support this team, it was going to be to reinvent what support structures would look like, starting with our leave program. And that's what we did. We overhauled the entire program. It was grueling. I mean, really to understand when we are building and launching a new brand and growing a team.

And if anybody's worked in the startup, you know that every minute of every day matters. And we also knew given the dynamics of our team and what we stood for as a brand and with our mission, that we were gonna do this right and we were gonna do it totally differently. As an early young company that was very small. And so we did just that. I'm happy to talk more about the mechanics of what that first program was, but very true to Bobbie Form and true to our DNA. We were like, this is not enough.

You know, we've just done all of this work. We have a program that we're so proud of for our own team. Why not take it external? And so we created a dedicated landing page and a campaign called take our leave. And it was intentionally a call to action to other business leaders, to other HR administrators, CEOs, employees, and really just published what our blueprint was not to copy Bobbie's leave, but conversation starters to get businesses and employees talking around what can they make, what can they put into place that makes sense for them. And we felt like being the small company that we were, you know, we really set out to bust the myth that you can actually put something into place that's affordable, that supports employees and it's a win-win.

Allison: Let's talk about what's in your leave and what that program looked like. You kind of alluded to the fact that it has changed over time and you've iterated on it. What was it in the beginning? What are some of the key components to your leave? And I would say even your broader support structure for parental leave.

Sarah: Yeah, you know, when it comes to talking about leave, naturally it's centered on, well, how many weeks of paid leave do you have? I don't wanna say that's not important. It's incredibly important. One of the most important things is understanding how many weeks are birthing and non-birthing parents allowed to take off and get paid. Having a baby is not cheap. We all know that, right?

So of course that's, you know, of course that was going to be central to the conversation. The thing that we did that was unique though was we took a step back and said, you know what? Starting a family, expanding a family is really a two year journey. Why aren't we talking about the two year journey unto itself? Everything from family planning to expecting to planning to actually transition out. What does that look and feel like? How many weeks of paid leave is your company able to offer you?

Do you get any extended unpaid leave if that's right for you, and if you're able to make that work, you can do it? And what is your transition back to the workplace? The second we took that lens, it became a totally different creative exercise for us. And so, you know, when you look at take our leave and our original policy that we put together, it really was that. It was focused on the end-to-end experience and not just the employee that was going out on leave.

But what is the support system around that employee to make sure that they're successful and also making sure the business can still deliver on its priorities? So the original leave is that, you know, you were assigned somebody on the people team, your manager was front and center and really, really brought along on how to support the employee going out and leave, making sure we have really clear transition docs into place. We understand how the work's gonna happen. We have a lot of high performing team members, they also want to make sure that someone's going to carry forward their work right when they're gone, and give them that peace of mind.

We offer 16 weeks of paid leave but the thing that we did was so unique was we realized we're very uncomfortable forcing people to come back to work right after that four months of paid leave. Every single mom was different. I have two kids. One leave I couldn't wait to go back. The other one I was dragging my feet. I just wasn't ready.

Allison: Same.

Sarah: For us, we were just like, okay, so what else can we do? So we offered employees the opportunity to extend up to an additional eight months of unpaid off and to give them one full year protected leave. Their seat is protected at Bobbie, but they're able to come back on their own terms when they're ready. And I'm happy to talk more about what that means for the business.

Allison: I would love to talk more about that because I struggle with that as a business owner, as the CEO of a small company myself, and of course, my entire business is about parental leave. And so I want to be the most supportive in that experience as I possibly can. And that is the part that I have found to be the most difficult and that I hear from other small businesses and large businesses is that, fortunately for us, it's less of a financial…we offer 16 weeks of paid leave, which most small companies say they can't afford and struggle with, which we can talk about separately. Can you not afford it?

But actually, oftentimes the challenge is not necessarily just the pay, it is the time away. And it's, ooh, how do we support someone going out for an entire year? What happens to their work? Who do we bring in to cover for that? So what I found the most fascinating about your policy is actually that unpaid portion, because it is very compelling and it makes a lot of sense from the employee's personal perspective and their ability to choose that. But I'm so curious how you manage that from the business perspective.

Sarah: Yeah, it is a great, great question. Culturally, what I'll say is it's normalized and clear that our employees should feel safe as parents and as parents of young children, you know, building a family, all of that. One of the biggest unlocks for us is outside of the leave program itself is the culture. We often hear oftentimes much earlier than other businesses when people are planning to go out.

That allows us to really think about how to plan for what that leave looks like. Open, honest conversations. How long do you wanna take? How can we support your journey? And really thinking about, okay, now what does the business need to be able to thrive in that situation? That's a really, really big deal as a business leader.

Because then suddenly I'm like, okay, I'm planning for seven, seven months. Let's call it four months. Let's pretend the employee is in California. I know California state's going to offset part of that wage. I think that's something that's been taboo in the past. Not every state is like this for 28 different states as a team. So I can see the variability from state to state, but you know, it really is important for us to understand financially, how do we keep the business running? Right?

So if you have an employee in California, understanding that some of the state is replacing some of that wage is a big deal. Because it also offsets if you have contractor costs, you need to onboard a vendor, you need to bring a consultant to hold down the fort. Do you have somebody part-time who stretches to full-time to cover what some of that leave looks like? The unpaid portion as well is just that. So technically it's freeing up funds to think about how can you keep your machine humming while protecting and preserving the space for that employee to return on their own terms.

It requires intentionality and thought and wanting to do the right thing for your employee and also making sure that you're not dropping the ball on giving your managers what they need to be successful. So I want to acknowledge that it's not a simple waving of the wand, you know, and here's the perfect formula that really does require planning. So I would go back to again, what I started with, which is.

The culture itself unlocks a lot of this, unlocks the conversation, the openness, and trying to plan collectively to make sure that your business can thrive and succeed during that period of time.

Allison: Does anyone ever change their mind? They say, I'm gonna go for a year. Then they go and leave and they realize, oh, I made a mistake, I actually wanna return. Or does that not happen?

Sarah: Oh gosh, is this the time to share that happened to me? Ha ha ha.

Allison: I'm just curious because I totally get what you're saying about planning. I'm just now going to, well, what happens when that plan doesn't work? And if people realize in either direction, maybe they say, oh, I only want the four months. And then they go out and realize they want longer or the opposite.

Sarah: Of course it does. You never really know what your birthing experience is going to be, what it looks like to welcome a baby into this world and how fast or slowly you get settled on the home front. As part of our parental leave program and how we support parents is we do check-ins with them along the way, right? If someone says, hey, I'm going on a leave, I'm just gonna take the four months paid, we're not waiting until the day before to check in.

We're checking in a variety of ways and hopefully the support and love from the team, but also checking in to see how things are going. Again, with an eye towards the future and understanding, just making sure we're minimizing the number of surprises for the business. Most people stick in and around with what they think, but there may be some nuance. You know, again, did you have a C-section? Is it going to be two weeks longer than what you thought because you have an extra recovery from a medical perspective? There's a lot of considerations that we go through.

Allison: Yeah, that makes sense. I imagine most people follow through with the original plan, but it's such an interesting structure. I'm also curious to talk about your NICU policy, which I believe is newer. It was a newer edition. The NICU policy in general is a bit of a new thing, and I get asked a lot from companies, how do we actually write this policy? Because while we can maybe agree in theory, it's actually a little bit complicated to put that into a policy to track it, especially for larger organizations. So I'm curious if you can share specifically what your policy says as it relates to NICU stays and what your experience has been with that to date.

Sarah: Yeah, so we launched Take Our Leave very publicly, patted ourselves in the back, and then very quickly exposed a huge gap in our policy, which was we had nothing in there that actually spoke to the experience of having a baby in the NICU. It was humbling.

You know, here we are thought we had designed this perfect end to end policy that serves the vast majority of parents. And, you know, we're really proud of our work. And then overnight realized that we had a huge, huge gap in here. So one of our team members, she ended up delivering at 27 weeks. And the news was a shock, of course, to her, but also to us and to her team.

And I will never forget jumping on the phone first with my head of HR and then we ended up bringing our finance partner in as well. And just knowing, we had to acknowledge that we had a gap. This employee was about to exhaust all of her paid leave while her baby was in a NICU. That was not the intention of how to use the leave, she was driving back and forth to a hospital every single day to be with her baby. The intention was to adjust to her new life, as a new mom, at home with that baby. And

I mean, I'll be honest, this is a lot of, yes, we're going to make this work. How are we going to make it work? But also how we're going to make it work was about the numbers as well. Very few parents end up with the baby that's in the NICU. Of the parents that have a baby in the NICU, I had a baby in a NICU. It was not a long time. It was one week. It was one of the most stressful weeks ever as a mother for me, much less an extended period of time.

It is, we knew that by implementing a policy here, it would have a huge outsize impact on this one employee. And it was such a rare circumstance that we were like, we can do this, there's no reason not to do this. So the way that our NICU leave policy works is, for every one week, your baby is in the NICU, we credit you one additional week of paid leave up to 16 weeks.

And I know what people are thinking, my business can never afford that. Rarely, rarely would a parent find themselves with a baby in the NICU for that long. And ask yourself, if this employee is worth retaining and saving as a valued member of your team, do you want to force them back into the workforce? Do you want them coming to work every day when their baby's in the NICU alone? I mean,

Really, it starts to break down very quickly. So I am really, really proud of what we put into place in less than 24 hours. It made a huge impact on this employee who is such an incredible teammate to all of us today. I can't imagine us without her. And we were there for her at that time, and it has paid itself back. I mean, the way that she shows up every day for our business speaks for itself.

Allison: First of all, congratulations on doing that. I think that the way that you've implemented that is also very smart and fair and makes sense from a human level. And I love what you said about people saying or companies saying they can't afford some of these things. I hear that all the time.

We actually have a proposal that we open-sourced to allow folks to fill it out and ask company leadership for additional paid leave. And oftentimes the pushback is we're not Google. That's kind of like the common refrain, right? Like, we're not Google. And so we can't do these things because Google is known as having a lot of money and being able to do all of these like very generous benefit policies and whatnot.

And what I spent a lot of time trying to educate people on is that it’s not just Google. There are so many small companies that are also able to do this. And I agree with you. It's not just like they're able to. It is the smart decision. And I would even argue as a small, much smaller business than Bobbie, it becomes even more important to show up in these moments. We work so closely with each other and each person carries so much weight for the company that we want to be able to retain them. And how do you retain someone if you're not giving them paid leave?

And they go out and have a child end up in the NICU. I mean, it's just, it's fascinating to see that pushback of we can't afford it. And yet, of course I understand that it's expensive and whatnot. Have you seen any creative ways that, like if you were to talk to a small business owner and say, and by small business, I'm saying, you know, they have under a thousand employees. So not even super small.

What would your argument be to, or how do you prove to them that this is a good investment? What's your case?

Sarah: Yeah. There's three things that I'm constantly thinking about. Will we make any investment to support employees, even outside of, of course, like parental leave? How it, what's the health of my recruiting pipeline? How are we talking about what we do for employees internally, externally, right? So recruitment is a big thing. Are we able to recruit top talent for the positions that we have open?

The second thing is retention. Once we get these amazing people in the door, how are we doing in terms of retention of our top talent? And lastly, what is engagement looking like? These are core metrics that any HR leader is looking at all the time. Too often when we're talking about things like paid leave, we are so myopically focused on, well, how much is going to cost me? How many dollars does X number of weeks of paid leave cost me? And...

We do need to take a step back and ask ourselves, yes, that is a very important thing to answer. But when you offer these programs, don't make it a tree falling in the forest and there's no one there to hear it. Talk about it. Talk about it in terms of your recruitment. How does it show up in your employer brand? How are you out there on LinkedIn? Talk about how you support employees. What we have seen, and this is one very specific stat that we had tracked was.

When we posted the Take Our Leave campaign, our recruiting pipeline jumped 50% inbound applications overnight, and it didn't fizzle out. It put Bobbie on the map. And not only did we see a huge increase in inbounds, we saw a huge increase in the quality of candidates who were applying to work at Bobbie. And get this, they weren't all parents.

Allison: I believe it.

Sarah: What candidates were seeing was…Oh my gosh, Bobbie cares about its employees. It cares about thinking about how to design programs that supports them. So I just want to bust that as well, which is when you do things that support parents, it's not just about supporting individual parents in your organization, it's about the halo effect that it also has over the rest of your team and your external employer brand as well.

Allison: That's a perfect transition to what was going to be my next question, which is parental leave, great, awesome. You're known for that. But in reading up on your why and what really motivates you, I get the clear sense that it's not just parental leave, it's how do we create a really positive work environment for all employees, but especially parents.

What are the things outside of parental leave that you focused on to make working at Bobbie a really good experience for everyone, but especially for parents?

Sarah: The number one thing you can do is normalize being a parent in the workplace. And for us, and it started, of course, I mean, look, I was the mom of two young kids. So it also had to work for me very selfishly at the beginning, truly, building this team. And so it's, you know, and...

Allison: I totally hear you.

Sarah: It was such a fun exercise to work on because I had experience for 15 years prior to Bobbie, all of the breakdowns that I'd seen in the workplace and then becoming a mom, you know, a few years before Bobbie. So I'd seen a lot of the gaps and a lot of the holes. The number one thing you could do is normalize what this means in the workplace. Perks, benefits, all of that is really, really important. Well, what does your culture look and feel like? Transparent calendars.

What a silly little thing that has so much impact. It is so important to me, like if I have to go to a kid's concert, the winter concert, I missed one and I will never let it down. It is not private. It's not marked as private on my calendar. It's proudly displayed Tuesday at 1 p.m. And I want everyone to know that's important to me so I'm going to do this thing. It's not happening three times a week.

But really the power of living and breathing, what you're saying or what you're codifying in your policies, it should be palpable in the day to day. And I think that is the number one thing that people underestimate, which is how are you normalizing what it means to be a working parent in the workplace? At Bobbie, when somebody is expecting a new baby, we have a one-upper culture where we do fun things to unveil who's expecting next. And until recently, we were doing this at company-wide meetings.

That told everybody this is not a, oh gosh, how are we gonna afford it? This is a celebration of a core member of our team who's about to embark upon this amazing journey. And it sets the tone for everyone right there that this is important to us, that we recognize outside of your professional life, you have personal goals as well. So I really do think the biggest things any company can be doing is looking at their culture and how they're normalizing it. Outside of that, of course,

I mean, of course there's perks and benefits and things to focus on that are really, really important and they'll look different for every organization based on the composition of your team.

Allison: What I think is so, what I resonate so strongly with is the idea of normalizing parenthood, but also one of the things that I spend a lot of time thinking about and posting on LinkedIn about is being open about parenting doesn't mean you're not ambitious. It doesn't mean that you're not a high performer. And I think oftentimes there's this idea that I have to hide the parenting piece because it looks like then I'm not as great of an employee.

And that it's not this either or, hence the false trade off. The name of this podcast is that that's the idea there. And that oftentimes when you give that flexibility as an organization, when that's part of your culture, now all of a sudden parents, and this is actually quite unfortunate that they feel so lucky to be at an organization where that's not taboo to go have lunch with your son in school on Friday.

And they feel even more loyal, motivated, happy and do better work. And so I think like, as you're saying that, I'm like, I totally love what you're saying. And I think it's really important that people who are listening to this, who don't have those cultures at their organization, understand that it's still very high performance. We are all still very ambitious, even though we are going and taking this time to be with our family. And I would even say like, it's probably making us more ambitious and more excited about the time that we spend working on work.

Sarah: It is. I love that you have just raised this. That is the narrative oftentimes, distraction on the home front. I mean, I will tell you two-thirds of our team are parents, right? And especially becoming a new parent and welcoming a new baby. There are so many sad stats out there about the number of women that drop out of the workforce year one after having a baby within the first five years.

Every time we are able to successfully transition somebody back into the workforce, back into Bobbie after having a baby, it is a win in my mind. And it's hard not to get them back into the workforce, but to make sure that every day they feel the impact they are having on the organization, because I know anybody, regardless of your financial situation oftentimes, is doing the calculation of is it worth it to be away this many hours of the day?

There was a huge amount of pressure to make sure that person feels productive, that they have impact, that they're contributing in a way that I find sometimes doesn't exist. You know, for other people that are not in that same situation, you're absolutely right. It's the opposite. And I love the pressure that our working parents put on the rest of the org, which is, is this meeting worth my time? Where is the agenda? I wanna make sure every minute of my day is used well because I've made a big sacrifice to be here.

Allison: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: It's brilliant.

Allison: I even joke, we've had a lot of people start at parentally pregnant. And oftentimes, even though this is literally what we do, we could not be more supportive, they still are always scared to tell us that they are pregnant when they start the job, which I understand that feeling. But I joke that, to me, what I have seen is that when people start working here pregnant or when they get pregnant or their partner gets pregnant while they're working here,

it changes their mindset in a really good way for the business because it creates this sense of urgency and efficiency that you just can't fake. And so that's another narrative of like people think, oh, when you're pregnant, you're just sort of like, you know, not, you don't care. No, I've seen the opposite, which in a really good way, which is I have a limited amount of time to achieve these goals. Suddenly at a startup where everything feels very ambiguous and it forces this… I don't know, like it forces us to be more structured and thoughtful and document things and create processes that actually help us grow faster and be better as an organization.

And so I think it's very similar to parenthood in general. And I would end this sort of outburst by saying, I don't think that that's just related to parenthood. I hope that everybody is able to channel that because they are prioritizing their private life as well.

Sarah: Exactly. Absolutely. And, you know, we personally have, of course, two-thirds are parents, one-thirds aren't. We see that and we see that harmony in the organization as well. And it's good, you know, it's a healthy tension as well to ask those questions. Now, I wholeheartedly agree and that is what we see day in and day out is, you know, having a healthy dose of working parents in your organization actually levels up the thinking around productivity and efficiency.

Allison: We are running out of time, but I have two questions I wanna make sure I get in. Parents push harder. Tell me about that.

Sarah: Oh my gosh. Okay. So we love a good campaign and we love a good advocacy campaign.

Allison: And you're great at it.

Sarah: Um, this is actually a pretty incredible story. So Naomi, her team reached out to us organically. We were thrilled and shocked. And it was one of those moments where, and she, you know, appreciated what Bobbie stood for and who we were in addition to our products.

Allison: That's amazing.

Sarah: And we ended up kicking off this relationship, and it became clear to us that Naomi's return to work back to the quote unquote court would be incredible to document. And normalizing that when a parent has a baby going back to work is the same whether you're one of the world's most famous tennis pros or if you're going back to a regular office job and you know what not.

So we thought it was a great opportunity to really share her journey back to work and to take a stand, drive more eyeballs to drive attention towards getting federal pay leave passed as part of this opportunity. So at the top of 2024, we launched a campaign called Parents Push Harder. And it did just that. It talked about her journey to becoming a mom and going back to the court and what that looked like and the trade-off decisions that you have to make.

And what we did was in launching the campaign, we also decided, hey, you know what? How are we gonna activate all the eyeballs that we have on this particular moment? And so we chose the Family Act to drive people to. The Family Act would guarantee a minimum of $580 per family welcoming that child to be able to use for whatever it might be in that first period of time. And so we said, you know what?

We're actually gonna do some grants and offer $580 and have people write in to talk about how they would use the $580. Originally, we thought we would do 50 total grants for this. You're not gonna believe this, Allison. We got 11,000 applications. 11,000.

Allison: I totally believe that. It's, yeah.

Sarah: And I just remembered that moment being like, this cause is worth it. 11,000 applications to make a case why $580 mattered to that family. I honestly, I feel emotional just thinking about it because it just talks about the power that some of this legislation really could have in American families. And so we did what we do. We looked at each other and said, oh my gosh, this is totally unexpected. We didn't think we would get this amount of inbound interest.

And so today we've actually onboarded 38 other partners that have helped us fund 200 of these grants up from the original 50. So if you're a business leader out there and you wanna get on board, pare please go. We have started a coalition and we're binding together these businesses that have come together in this moment for the long haul to continue to figure out what are the ways that we can collaborate and to make our voices heard from the private sector that it is really, really important to the health of our business and the wellness of our employees to get something like federal paid leave passed.

Allison: This is amazing. I absolutely love it. My last question for you, because we're over time and I promised you I would stay below 30 minutes. You've done a lot of things that you should feel proud of. What are you most proud of having accomplished at Bobbie?

Sarah: I would say it's the impact that we've had on the community. And when I say impact, I don't define that narrowly as just people who subscribed, you know, and received Bobbie's formula on a monthly basis. The way that I think about the impact that we've had is starting a conversation that literally never existed before we showed up.

People are not there asking parents about their feeding journeys. How are you doing those first vulnerable days? We take for granted today, the conversation that we're now seeing in social for the very first time, that didn't exist three years ago. And I look at the impact that we've had on one of the hardest times in life, especially as a parent in that first year and starting really, really hard conversations and not shying away for how charged they can be, how stigmatized some of these conversations can be, how challenging it is for parents to rise up and support each other when they feel very strongly about something.

And we have leaned way in, way in as a brand. So I'm really proud of the risks that we've taken, the hard conversations that we've started, and our commitment to continue to evolve and continue to live in and to be bold the way that we want to. It truly has made a change on hundreds of thousands of families in just our short brief period of time on the market in the last few years, and I really believe this is just the start.

Allison: Thank you so much for being here with me today. I am in awe of all of the work that you have done; that Bobbie has done, and I really appreciate you sharing in so much detail some of these things that you've done. And we are here to support you and to amplify your messages. I think everything you've said, I agree with so wholeheartedly. So this has been a pleasure for me to finally meet you, and I hope this is not our first and last conversation.

Sarah: Definitely not. Thank you so much, Allison.