Tag

San Francisco

Hashtag: #EndingHomelessness

By | Homelessness, The Race to End Homelessness | 2 Comments

You won’t find out what I’ve done today by checking my facebook statuses. I’m comfortable with social media, but I try not to get too comfortable. No “woke up, ate eggs, went to work, looks like it might rain” information from me. I’m on the quieter side – both in real life and when it comes to posting what I’m thinking about, which is perhaps why I struggle when I see my friends and colleagues use their twitter feeds as a platform for social advocacy.

As #Bringbackourgirls, the hashtag protesting the kidnapping of more than two hundred girls in Nigeria, exploded this past week, I wondered if I should be tweeting the same thing. I read up on this travesty, and felt outraged at this human rights violation, but I struggled to connect how my tweeting – even with a hashtag used by hundreds of thousands of other users – might lead to justice half a world away.

This week, Twitter made an announcement that really connected the dots for me, and showed how a platform made up of 140 characters can make a difference online and off. The microblogging giant announced plans to open and operate a tech center for individuals experiencing homelessness in the San Francisco area. Computers are increasingly relevant to the job market, both in finding available job opportunities and in possessing basic computer skills, but poverty creates a “digital divide,” and people from lower income backgrounds have less access to computers as they grow up, making the internet a scary place.  The space, called the Twitter Neighborhood Nest, will be open to individuals as well as families, with tech skills offered to any age group. For adults, this will include computer literacy as well as job searching skills.

Twitter is the place for the newest information, where the news is splayed across your screen in tiny snippets. So it is perhaps somewhat surprising that the platform for all things instant is partnering with a service organization that is more than a century old. Compass Family Services will work with Twitter to create the new technology center, as the nonprofit currently coordinates services for more than 3,500 individuals experiencing or on the brink of homelessness.

This partnership is an excellent move, one that gives The Twitter Neighborhood Nest a strong foundation. This seems to be much more than a one-time donation or a publicity move, because Twitter has sought input from people who know the demographic they hope to serve. Partnerships – especially the unlikely ones – are the key to having enough knowledge and resources to overcome the digital divide and overcome homelessness.

 

Trouble in Techtopia

By | #SaveBmore, Social Enterprise, The Thagomizer | 4 Comments

Every city wants to create the “next Google.” Go to any start up weekend, tech happy hour, or hackathon in any city you will hear the same gospel: the tech industry can save our city. Yet examples from already established tech communities paint a less than delightful picture of the darker impact of tech fueled economic growth.

Right after I had read Lindsey’s post on the the amazing way San Francisco had come together as a community to support a child’s wish, I came across a different view of the city. An article published this week in the New York times discussed the tension boiling between old time San Francisco residents and the new techie influx. Amid higher rent prices, a 98-year-old-woman being forced from her home to make room for new money, and entire districts turned into frat neighborhoods for “tech bros,” the effect of the tech industry that worried me most was what was described in the Mission District.

In a classic example of gentrification, working-class Hispanic residents who once defined the neighborhood were being forced out by the tech elite. The celebration of Day of the Dead, instead of being a cultural celebration, had been transformed by newcomers into a boozy extension of Halloween. Residents and shopkeepers who had been there for decades were being evicted or forced out, no longer able to afford rents in the neighborhood. The culture of the district is rapidly being lost. As one performance artist described it, “One day they will wake up to an extremely unbearable ocean of sameness.”

This wasn’t the first article I read about citizens being pushed out by the new demands from a tech boom. Earlier this month NPR reported on one of the last trailer parks in Silicon Valley. With real estate being at such a premium in the area, the owners of the land want to sell this park, one of the few affordable housing options in the area, to developers. Residents will be forced to move, not only losing their homes in the process, but missing out on the public schools and being forced to have a longer commute. While perhaps this isn’t something these new city dwellers realize, by losing diversity they are losing something too in this equation. One mother of a Palo Alto student explained, “My son has gone on play dates to homes where he found out his friend didn’t have a bedroom. His friend sleeps on a couch. He didn’t even know that that was how some kids grow up. You learn what they don’t have; you learn the richness of what they do have too — the strength of their community and culture and heritage.”

When they push the natives out, they also push the history out, the culture, the weirdness, the part that makes the city unique. In this way technology doesn’t save the city, it simply takes it over. City natives become refugees, forced to find a new home, and not receiving a whole lot of benefit from “the next Google.” This embrace of techies as the saviors of cities is another shining example of what I call Hipster Trickle Down theory. Basically it is the idea that importing bright new creative types whether they be artists, developers, or designers, will lift up the city for everyone. Yet what these Californian examples prove, it does a better job of pushing out people than it does uplifting them.

Can this change? Is there a way of using the technology industry to help everyone in the city? Can tech benefits reach those historically marginalized communities who sometimes sit on the other end of the digital divide? Certainly here in Baltimore we have some programs trying to train Baltimore youth for new opportunities in tech and design. Yet I think we need more than that. We need a city that prioritizes growing from within over looking for new economic saviors. We need policies that focus first on communities struggling the most with poverty and unemployment, and do not wait for the money of tech billionaires to trickle down.

Yes, Baltimore, and cities around the country need more profitable industries but we need these economic behemoths to combine forces with the city residents, not cast them aside. This doesn’t mean some donations to schools or a few hackathons, but a real intention to infuse the people and place of the city into their company, and to work together with the community to make the community better. It’s time for tech companies to ask not what cities can do for them, but what they can do for cities.

The Caped City

By | The Good Plan | 3 Comments

If you were anywhere on the media sphere last week, you most likely heard about Batkid, a 5 year old San Francisco boy named Miles in remission from Leukemia. Miles was granted a wish through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. His wish, as you may have gathered, was to be a superhero for the day.

But this wasn’t a ‘meet a celebrity in the isolation of a hospital room at the children’s ward’ wish; this was a full-fledged, 20,000-attendee spectacle of humanity throughout the City of San Francisco. In addition to the publicity of Wish execution, the support for his wish was what went viral. The Foundation reported that the total reach from all social media users who used the hashtag #Batkid or #SFBatkid was 1.7 billion people. That’s more than the population of the United States, India, and Mexico combined.  Essentially, nearly one quarter of the entire population in the world learned about Batkid and saw the City of San Francisco in an unbelievably positive light. The city made Miles a pint-sized hero in a pleather cape, but Miles made a hero of his city.

The humanity as demonstrated by San Francisco was a reminder that our cities can be hubs of good, if and when we choose to work together or are united by something bigger. I don’t know the details of those who flooded public plazas and sidewalks that day. I don’t know if they skipped work. I don’t know if they answered the Make-A-Wish call for volunteers My hunch is that they weren’t there for fame or recognition, or that many of them had ever given money to the Make-A-Wish foundation before. Instead, they showed their support through presence – exercising their social capital to belong and participate, rather than sit back and write a check, maintaining anonymity and removal from the cause.

Miles’ day was assisted by entities around the city: social media, newspapers, actors, mascots, costumers, government officials, the U.S. Attorney’s office, event planners, the police department, and lest we forget, the President, who made a Vine for the little guy. All of this was undeniably moving and admirable, and it made me wonder if this same outpouring of support would have been shown in Baltimore. Or Miami. Or Detroit. Or Nashville.

What is it about San Francisco that facilitated the outpouring of support exhibited by Batkid’s 20,000 onlookers. According to a variety of rankings, San Francisco was ranked the #1 city by businessweek.com in 2012. Together with Bloomberg Rankings, the center evaluated 100 of the USA’s largest cities on attributes around leisure, education, economics, crime, and the environment. San Francisco is walkable, the citizens are highly educated, and its apparently one of the happiest cities in the world, so perhaps the fact that the majority of its citizens are far removed from the worries of crime, isolation and poor health allowed them to unite in the outpouring of Batkid-based support.

Communal resources may make a difference, but personal wealth or poverty seems not to. Comparing the volunteer capacity in San Francisco with the capacity in Baltimore, and on a greater scale, the capacity of those in rich states to those in poor states, I wasn’t able to find a correlation.The three richest states based on average household income: Maryland, New Jersey, and Alaska, have 27.6%, 22.6%, and 22.6% residents volunteering respectively. The three poorest states, Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Virginia, have 25.8%, 23.2%, and 22.7% of resident volunteers respectively. Looking specifically at cities, San Francisco has 31.8%.

Based on this quick glance at the numbers, it doesn’t seem that household income plays a defining role in volunteerism. Whatever the variable might be, Miles and Make-A-Wish were able to draw themselves together through something bigger. People came out to support not because they had more money than anyone else, but perhaps because they live in a city that facilitates joy, activity, culture, and education. We have Miles to thank for saving Gotham, but it was also the City itself that saved the day.

IMAGE CREDIT. [Instagram user @phippsadelphia].