Hayes told the audience firsthand accounts of her experiences with “broken and fractured systems” — organizations like municipalities, nonprofits and developers that failed to address racial and socioeconomic problems within their respective communities. A main focus of the talk was race, and racial issues were very closely intertwined with much of Hayes’ work.

District 6 was a pre-apartheid area in Cape Town. It was an area where people were forcibly removed from their homes and resettled into townships based on race. District 6 is different from many of the other districts, because it was a place where whites, blacks, indians, malaysians, and khoesan lived together peacefully, therefore going…