Tools
ART AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
The Art and Alternative Futures Team met and received feedback from several grassroots organizations and collectives that were focused on creating radical change through the use of arts and collective organizing. As a team, we created Essential: Black Art for the Future, a story map with the goal of uplifting the artistic initiatives launched by individual artists and community organizations all over the country, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the large-scale resistance to police brutality. In addition, we created and curated a zine of the same name, that specifically highlights the artistic contributions of several Black artists from New York City, as well as providing local support for the Black artist community in this area.
EDUCATION
The Education Team partnered with the South End Technology Center in Boston, which works to provide students in the area with training and access to technology by offering hands-on experience in various tech-related subjects. Together we wrote a survey and distributed it among the youth teachers at the center. Our goals were to gather information about students’ experiences with online learning in the spring and to use our data to inspire productive conversations about how to improve learning outcomes during continuing remote education. In addition, we will include selections from our data in a zine alongside student contributions, to be distributed as part of the SETC’s PPE for young people initiative.
We would like to acknowledge the following youth teachers for their time and participation in our survey: Haley Alphonse, Nate Dixon, Nena Pineda Guiterrez, Serenity Higgins-Laka, Charlie Luu, Makenda Marc, Qadir Muhammed, Tracy Nguyen, Josh Rodriguez, John Thach, and Kevin Williams.
HOSPITALS AND HEALTHCARE
The Hospitals and Healthcare Team partnered with the Shades of Blue Project, whose mission is to break cultural barriers in maternal mental health by raising awareness and ensuring action is taken to break the stigma surrounding seeking treatment by helping women before, during and after child-birth with maternal mental health advocacy, treatment and support. Together we created an educational playbook on Black maternal mental health, specific to COVID-19, and a postpartum depression severity assessment and care navigation tool with the goal of improving awareness of and access to mental health care for Black birthing people and new parents in order to increase Shades of Blue Project’s efficacy in the wake of COVID-19.
HOUSING AND NEIGHBORHOODS
The Housing and Neighborhoods Team partnered with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), whose mission is to document resistance upon gentrifying landscapes by producing digital maps, oral history work, film, murals, and community events. Together we created a playbook with the goal of facilitating and providing information for tenants so that they may leverage their power during the time of COVID-19. In addition, we analyzed AEMP’s collected data to generate a landlord typology document/infographic in order to show AEMP’s fellow organizations and partners how they can utilize data in this format.
MOURNING & MENTAL HEALTH
The Mourning & Mental Health Team partnered with the Brown Hope Organization, whose mission is to provide community led solutions for racial justice by creating platforms for Black, Brown, and Indigenous people to be seen, to love, and to lead. Together we developed online compatible community-building activity guides, with the goal of transitioning Brown Hope’s in-person community programming to the virtual and socially-distanced COVID-19 environment. The team worked with Brown Hope to develop an infographic that discusses their most popular reparations programming, “ Power Hour.” The culmination of the team’s work this summer is the Mourning and Mental Health Playbook. The playbook features important resources that confront the experience of Black mourning, grief and mental health in the time of COVID-19 through articles, podcasts, racial justice organizations, and artwork by Black creators. This playbook considers the material realities of further marginalization that Covid-19 and concurrent racial oppressions-- police brutality, medical health disparities, poverty, xenophobia, etc-- exacerbate in Black communities through the lens of artistic expressions and scholarship.
MUTUAL AID AND SOLIDARITY
The Mutual Aid and Solidarity Team partnered with the Black Resilience Fund, which is an emergency response fund dedicated to healing and resilience by providing immediate resources to Black Portlanders. Together, we created a playbook for mutual aid, with the goal of guiding the fund through their efforts at building a sustainable mutual aid model based in community building and reparations, following their emergency founding. In addition, we partnered with For the Gworls, an NYC-based mutual aid organization that raises money to assist w/ Black trans folks’ rent & affirmative surgeries. Together, we designed and put forward their new website. This website will help better facilitate their outreach and ability to support their community even further.
POLICING
The Policing Team partnered with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which works towards the “ dismantling of government-sanctioned spying and intelligence gathering, in all its multiple forms,” by creating digital tools, organizing in the community, and providing information to their community. Together we created a power-mapping tool with the goal of bringing awareness to the saliency of Palantir’s public and private partnerships and the vulnerability of our public health data in Palantir’s hands. In addition, we created a report to go alongside and explain the significance of our data visualization tool.
https://littlesis.org/maps/5356-palantir-s-complicity-in-information-sharing
PRISONS
The Prison Team was motivated by conversations with abolitionist and transformative justice organizations, Dignity and Power Now and Black and Pink. From these conversations, our group was inspired to create a compilation of quantitative and qualitative data visualizations with the goal of excavating the obscured relationship between prisons and pandemics. We analyzed our data through a racial justice lens in the hopes of developing the beginning of an informative instrument that functions as a tool towards abolition.
TESTING AND TREATMENT
The Testing and Treatment Team partnered with REDE4 Black Lives and the Black Public Health Collective. The mission of REDE4 Black Lives is to protect, and recognize the intrinsic importance of data to Black well-being generally and within the Canadian provinces and territories specifically. They do this through creating webinars and toolkits that educate Black people of their rights, and inform scholars and researchers of their responsibilities. The mission of the Black Public Health Collective is to "create a higher quality of life for Black peoples through resistance in public health" in Canada. They do this through writing statements and raising critical consciousness surrounding public health education and institutions. Together, we created an inclusive testing toolkit with the goal of informing people of African descent, and all Black people about Covid-19 Testing. The Toolkit provides some important information about the long and short term risks and benefits of sharing information with apps, and public and private providers/service brokers. Together we drafted a mind-map (in conversation with communities) of the path(s) your personal health information data travels along once you take a Covid-19 test, which will be finalized in the fall. And finally, we transcribed the entirety of their 9-part Covid Conversations Youtube webinar series and summarized it in an easily accessible format to highlight the expert opinions to back up the claims in the toolkit. We integrated all of the sources we used in our research into a bibliography to give back to our partner organizations.
WORK
The Work Team partnered with Barred Business (BB), whose mission is to empower and support the work of formerly incarcerated Black, Transgender, Queer, Native, and Disabled business owners by providing direct aid in the form of business grants. Together we created a Story Map tool with the goal of telling a story of resistance by Bared Business in response to the discrimination and intentional exclusion by the Small Business Agency against formerly incarcerated business owners under the Paycheck Protection Program. In addition, we began the process of attaining 501(c)3 status, creating a social media awareness campaign through coalition building and fundraising more money through grants for Barred Business.
