Case Study: Calhoun County South Carolina
The Client
In Calhoun County South Carolina, the county library is a positive agent of change for the community. The library enhances the quality of life of residents by engaging, educating, equipping, and empowering its diverse community. The library further seeks to meet the needs of the community with services that fall outside its traditional scope in support of community development.
The Challenge
A needs assessment revealed that both residents and local business owners agreed there was a need for more people to be aware and connected to local happenings
The small rural county is diverse but could often be divided along the lines of age and ethnicity
The Calhoun Connects idea needed to move beyond a great idea to experienced reality
Brand Development -
Reflect the desired simplicity of the initiative with a logo that is to the point, and create a messaging framework
Strategic Plan -
Created a plan of action and process for creating initial awareness of the initiative; obtaining the information needed for the business directory and calendar; keeping people connected, giving them a reason to return
Website Development Consultation -
Determined information needs and link architecture based on needs analysis; created digital content
strategy
A clear and concise Brand messaging framework that ensured consistency in messaging
A simple logo that reflected the simplicity of the community initiative
Keep It In Calhoun County - a buy local campaign that promoted shopping locally
Created social media toolkits to enhance accessibility for residents
An easy to navigate website that could be accessed by all ages groups and disseminates key information and promotes community involvement - second only to the official government website
In The News: Complaints Against Racial Discrimination
There are many people who would like to believe, that in the year 2021, we are living in a post-racial society, but the evidence continues to prove that racial discrimination remains deeply entrenched in different power systems globally.
That doesn’t mean that people are not taking action and fighting back!
Australia
Image by Simon Maisch
The state of Western Australia is re-drafting heritage laws meant to protect sacred Aboriginal sites so that developers may have the right to appeal, while denying appellant rights to Aboriginal Groups.
While the updated draft of the laws emphasize agreement between the indigenous Aboriginal groups and developers, it also maintains that the government retains the final decision in land disputes; and gives developers the opportunity to appeal that decision while withholding that same right from Aboriginal peoples.
A group of five Aboriginal Australians have filed a complaint with the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, stating that this is "a continuation of systemic and racial discrimination.” The Thomson Reuters Foundation reports that “while the UN has no authority over Australian state legislation, the group hopes getting the committee involved could help put pressure on the state government to make changes.”
Already, there has been the destruction of culturally significant, Aboriginal rock shelters by developer Rio Tinto.
The United States
Image from Twitter/@NoahWicks
In the state of Mississippi, six Black farmworkers have filed a lawsuit against Pitts Farms (one of the largest farms in Mississippi) for discriminating against them in favor of White foreign laborers from South Africa. Pitts Farms hired the White South African workers through an allegedly illegal use of the federal government’s H-2A visa program, “which allows U.S. farmers to hire foreign workers only when no U.S. workers are available to do the job.”
“With the unemployment rate in the Delta hovering at around 10 percent, it is unacceptable and unlawful that local farmers are looking to hire foreign labor before people in their own communities,” said Ty Pinkins of the Mississippi Center for Justice, which filed the lawsuit along with Southern Migrant Legal Services.
“Pitts Farms once employed a majority Black workforce drawn from Sunflower County, which is over 70% Black,” however, beginning in 2014, Pitts Farms “began recruiting and hiring only White farmworkers from South Africa, a country that is over 80% Black. In 2020, the lawsuit says, Pitts Farms laid off most of the plaintiffs while it recruited more White H-2A workers than ever, (Mississippi Center for Justice).”
In addition to discriminatory hiring practices, Pitts Farms also violated federal law by paying Black workers less than the White H-2A workers. Black workers received the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour with one dollar an hour more for weekend work, while the White workers from South Africa received $9.87 an hour in 2014, “and that rate increased most years until it reached $11.83 an hour in 2020” (CBS News).
To Conclude
It’s not just unfortunate that situations like the two mentioned here continue to happen, it’s unacceptable! This is what is meant when people say institutionalized or systemic racism, and yes, it is still happening in 2021.
Discriminatory practices are ingrained in much of the fabric that make up different societies, and are embedded in policy making and business operations.
These are not two outlier examples, they are proof of the continued and calculated acts meant to grant certain rights and privileges to one group while intentionally withholding those same rights and privileges from others.
There is power in collective efforts. It’s time for our communities to come together and hold institutions and systems accountable. Community-ownership, especially by impacted and marginalized people, of Development processes is a vital part of that accountability. When people are re-powered and understand that together they can affect positive change, we will begin to see equitable and inclusive social transformations that benefit those who have been traditionally underrepresented.
On C.L.Ai.R.A. and Tech Bias in the United States
Move over Siri and Alexa…C.L.Ai.R.A . has arrived!
Meet C.L.Ai.R.A. - the first Afro-Latina artificial intelligence (AI).
“…C.L.Ai.R.A. is considered to have the sharpest brain in the artificial intelligence world…[and]is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text,” (Black Enterprise). C.L.Ai.R.A was created by Create Lab Ventures, a tech company that provides underserved communities with the skills, resources, and networks needed to thrive in tech and media.
The hope is that with C.L.Ai.R.A.’s debut in classrooms across the United States, young people of color will be inspired and uplifted.
It is important to note that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a core theme in any STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) curriculum.
According to Pew Research Center, “Black and Hispanic adults [which C.L.Ai.R.A. is supposedly modeled after] are less likely to earn degrees in STEM than other degree fields, and they continue to make up a lower share of STEM graduates relative to their share of the adult population,” and women only account for a small share of degree earners in fields like engineering and computer science “areas where they are significantly underrepresented in the work force.”
So is C.L.Ai.R.A. enough to counter the “histories and ongoing forms of deeply embedded discrimination, bias, racism,” and white insecurity, that infect U.S. institutions and systems, including technology?
In her interview with Counterspin, Ruha Benjamin, the author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, makes it clear that technology “is not, in fact, objective in the way we are being socialized to believe.”
Counterspin Interviewer, Janine Jackson, offered this example to better illustrate the lack of objectivity, or rather how the implicit biases of the larger society can affect technological outputs, including AI:
“If police are deployed disproportionately to poor communities of color [because of discrimination and racism], then that’s where they make the most arrests. So if you fill a database with that, and then you say, you know, ‘Alexa, where is the most crime, based on the number of arrests?’ Well, it’s going to circle you right back to the data that you fed it, and it’s only predictive because you make it so.”
The Pew Research Center maintains that “the long-term outlook for diversity in the STEM workforce is closely tied to representation in the STEM educational system,” of which C.L.Ai.R.A. of course would be seen as an asset for representation.
However, according to Massive Science’s report on data from the National Science Foundation:
“The share of STEM-field bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black students peaked in the early 2000s and has been falling ever since — despite increasing federal spending on STEM diversity initiatives….
Precisely what is driving the decline is a matter of some debate. Some experts pointed to persistent income inequality and the disproportionate lack of access to quality schools among Black and other minority communities. Others argued that outreach efforts, peer mentoring, and other programs aimed at fostering interest in the sciences among Black students have dwindled, causing enrollments to plummet. But several education and legal professionals also pointed to a more straightforward and sobering correlation: The steady downturn in STEM degrees among Black students, they say, comes in the wake of a large-scale retreat from specific programs and policies that consider race in admissions, recruitment, and retention in higher education — policies commonly known as affirmative action.”
From a Development standpoint, it is suffice to say that likely all of those factors contribute to the current state of bias that can be found in the U.S. tech world.
It remains to be seen if C.L.Ai.R.A.’s introduction to the STEM educational system will have the positive impact her creators are hoping for, and can help to reverse the downward trend of Black and Hispanic/Latinx people in STEM.
While we can hope it is a step in the right direction, there are still several other factors (e.g. lack of quality schools, etc.) that need to be addressed in order for there to be significant and long-lasting change.