Shaun Glaze and Chris Webb Discuss the Black Brilliance Research Project - Building for Digital Equity Podcast Episode 18

Sean Gonsalves (00:06):
Hey, this is the Building for Digital Equity Podcast where we talk to people working to expand Internet access, address affordability, teach digital skills, or distribute affordable devices. We talk with those working on the front lines of giving everyone everywhere the opportunity to participate fully in the digital world, whether in rural areas or cities. Our guests here are doing [00:00:30] the often unglamorous jobs in places that have been left behind. This show comes to you from the Community Broadband Networks team at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, where we have long produced the Community Broadband Bits podcast and the Connect This Show Building for Digital Equity features. Short interviews from Emma Gautier, Christopher Mitchell, and me, Sean Gonsalves, talking to people at the events we are attending, to highlight the interesting work and inspirational stories to get [00:01:00] Internet access to everyone. Now let's see who we have today.

Christopher Mitchell (01:06):
This is Chris Mitchell back at Net Inclusion 2024 in Philadelphia, and today I'm speaking with Chris Webb and Dr. Shaun Glaze. Dr. Shaun Glaze is the Research Director for the Black Brilliance Research Project, and Chris Webb is the Digital Equity lead, and both of you are people I tried to interview before and I'm so excited that we're having a chance now to sit down. So welcome to the show, Dr. Shaun.

Shaun Glaze (01:28):
Thank you so much. Really excited. [00:01:30] So great to be here. I mean, hey, Chris, say hi.

Chris Webb (01:32):
Hey, Chris. Thanks. Thank you for having us, and it's been a year in the making.

Christopher Mitchell (01:37):
Yes, yes. Look forward to this. So I am curious if you can start off, I think you're located in Seattle, but I think you're not limited to Seattle. Tell us a little bit about the Black Brilliant Research Project.

Shaun Glaze (01:48):
Sure. Black Brilliance Research really launched after decades of organizing and the black community, but really launched in 2020. Of course, George Floyd was a big [00:02:00] contributing factor to the mass uprisings that happened around the world. And yeah, we launched out of Seattle, Washington. Initially, there were over a hundred community members who came together to form Black Brilliance Research in 2020, and we came together to design a way forward how our city would reinvest millions of dollars in service of people thriving. We asked three key questions, what creates true community safety? What creates true community health and what do we need to thrive? And we spun out [00:02:30] dozens of research projects in a very short amount of time, and the digital equity work has been one of the enduring components to our, not just strategy, but to our work in Seattle and Tacoma and in other places around the region. We're just really excited to be here. Chris, do you have anything you'd like to add?

Chris Webb (02:47):
Yeah, no, the project began, as Shaun said, it spun off of the, it began in response to the George Floyd killing, and [00:03:00] Shaun brought me on to support the work as the digital equity and Internet access research team lead in September. And very quickly, things began to grow exponentially in terms of what Shaun saw as the possibilities that were resulting from our research. And within two months, we entered into discussions with the Detroit Community Technology Project leadership and the University of Washington. And [00:03:30] within two months after that, we launched our first digital stewards cohort and we were actively building community-based networks.

Christopher Mitchell (03:39):
Well, when you say research, I want to clarify for a second. I think a lot of people, first of all, you've got a doctor in your name talking about research. Oftentimes my first thought is, is this research that's published in a manner that I probably a journal I'm, I can't access, and even if I can, I'm going to be super confused just reading the abstract. Yeah. Is that the kind of research you're doing?

Shaun Glaze (03:58):
You know what, that's a good point. Let [00:04:00] me break that down. So the kind of research that I specialize in is called participatory action Research is what happens when you bring traditional research and activism together when they have a baby. That's participatory action research, and I've been doing it for years changing local, state, federal policies and practices around workforce diversity in the construction trades, women in the political sphere. And so I've been pretty lucky to have to have that experience before the whole thing happened in 2020. And so [00:04:30] when our city got together and said, Hey, we'd be happy to divest millions of dollars and reinvest them into community, we just need a plan, and if we don't have a plan, we can't do it. And so I was like, oh, it sounds like what you really want is to bring together the communities that have been harmed by these policies and practices and have them as the experts come together and create that plan for you.

(04:53):
That's what it was. The city of Seattle would end up reinvesting $30 million through the process that we designed, [00:05:00] or at least a process informed by our design. They always change stuff. Then the King County Washington would end up having two cycles of participatory budgeting after that, again, informed by our work, the state of Washington would end up having $200 million for the community reinvestment fund that's informed by our work. What it looks like though is regular people coming together and being curious together, thinking about things together, finding out information together, and then saying, here's exactly what we want this to look like, and [00:05:30] then testing things out, seeing what works and saying, here's the way forward. So to your point, it's not like the traditional research thing where you have someone kind of swoop in out of nowhere, collect a bunch of information, swoop out, interpret it, and then put it on a shelf somewhere where no one's going to read it.

(05:47):
Instead, it is people who are most impacted really designing the futures that they want to see. And that has been the most incredible thing in terms of this digital equity space because we just finished our fifth cohort last year, and [00:06:00] we're about to launch our next cohort as part of the Connecting Minority Communities pilot program. And we'll be training people how to do this research. We'll be training people how to build these networks. We'll be training people how to write grants. We'll be training people how to do mutual aid and community organizing and start businesses. And so when we think about research, to me it's about trying new things, seeing what works and really creating that future you want to see.

Christopher Mitchell (06:25):
And when you got ramped up, how quickly did you zero in on Internet access and digital equity [00:06:30] as a main focus?

Shaun Glaze (06:31):
Immediately? Immediately. I mean, you have to realize for us, we had about a hundred people, A third of them were currently or formerly incarcerated. So they intimately understood how the control of information and the control of power, and then you had folks who were, I mean, all walks of life. We had elders, we had youth who were differently impacted, like the young people. Their schools were closing at that time. We were in Seattle, [00:07:00] which is the first city in the whole country. United States know we had COVID. And so a lot of decisions were being made very quickly, and our elders, they were being isolated in part for their protection. And so we knew it was important for that. We had health workers and community health workers who were talking to us about the spread of mis and disinformation around how do we keep each other safe.

(07:23):
We also had teachers and software engineer. We just had a lot of people who immediately understood it. And we had a city, thankfully, [00:07:30] that had already been making investments for years in digital equity and digital equity research, but was really consumed with the other pressing needs of the pandemic. And so at the city level, when you look at where the investments were going, we were really concerned that the investments weren't going, weren't going to go to where our communities needed. We were so concerned about that. Chris, you wrote multiple briefs. You were having meetings with the city, with the county. It was incredible. It was just like we knew immediately [00:08:00] and I found you immediately.

Chris Webb (08:03):
Yeah, I was, the project launched, I believe it was in June of that year, Shaun had been searching for someone to step in to lead the team, realizing that Internet access and digital equity were a key component of a healthy community, a healthy digital ecosystem, and a healthy social ecosystem. Also, realizing that our community, if our community was, if we were going to have this opportunity, [00:08:30] this once in a lifetime opportunity to actually make a significant impact and a significant investment in our community, that it was key that we create a pathway opportunity, leverage these resources to create a workforce development pipeline for our community as well as an opportunity for our community members to participate in the 21st century information technology economy. [00:09:00] And I might add one additional thing that we were reminded of as we began this research and we began to interact with the leadership of Detroit Community Technology Project, was that the term digital equity was insufficient to describe our movement and the movement we were participating in, that this was actually a reframing of digital equity as a movement of [00:09:30] digital for digital justice. Because this work that we are doing, this ecosystem that we're building, actually we believe is a human right.

Christopher Mitchell (09:41):
Yes. Well, I'm with you on that. Now, connecting people is difficult, and one of the reasons that we often focus on city efforts is because they have a lot of resources they can throw at it. And so I'm curious, when you're looking at more of a community focused project, what is your strategy for getting people connected?

Chris Webb (09:57):
Yeah. Yeah. So that's a very good [00:10:00] question. The answer is a little complex, but generally speaking, the key component is going to be having preexisting relationships or relationships that have been nurtured over time in the community so that you have stakeholders in the community that can participate in not only the outreach to the community members, but also in the prioritization and the design and the development of that network, as well [00:10:30] as help to connect us with community members who can then also be trained to maintain and build that network so that we are creating an ecosystem that can self replicate, so to speak, and that those community-based organizations that participate and that bring their community members to work with us can then again go and teach others and go and build other networks. And then it's like a hope. [00:11:00] It's like a hub and spoke situation that then begins to build out,

Christopher Mitchell (11:03):
Which we've seen in Detroit.

Chris Webb (11:05):
Yes. Which we learned from Detroit.

Shaun Glaze (11:08):
And then building on that idea, I think a lot about the more structural and funding side because definitely one of the things a lot of people struggle with, and it's interesting to me because, so for me, my part of this is understanding the federal investments, the state investments, local investments, how they all fit together, what's going on, what's the history of this, what's the timelines [00:11:30] of this? And we have three National Science Foundation grants that we've won. We have the NTIA grant that we won, but we didn't do it by ourselves. And so if I were to tell people listening about some of the things that have worked really well for us that they should really consider, it's a couple of things. One, the National Science Foundation is fantastic in that they have several different kinds of investments, and we have a smart and connected communities grant that we have in collaboration with UW Washington [00:12:00] out of Seattle.

(12:01):
Then we have a couple of National Science Foundation grants for addressing MIS and disinformation. That's a big one. That's about black communities, rural communities. We're working with rural librarians, rural educators, and developing our own tools to solve the problem right now, and probably for the next 18 to 24 months, there's a big priority in our federal government, although we'll see what happens in November. There's a big priority in our federal government to have community-led solutions be seen [00:12:30] not just as valid research. And I say that in quotes because that's where the conversation was even three, four years ago, but now it's more like it's a given that that is a, not just acceptable, but in many ways a higher quality way to collect information but also design something that'll last. Especially you want to create relationships that'll last longer than any funding cycle. And so having a community-led approach is one way of ensuring that.

(12:55):
So if you were to look at the National Science Foundation investments, you'll see that [00:13:00] the Convergence Accelerator, which is one of the ones that we have, is moving to a regional strategy, and that's all about use based research or practice inspired or what have you making stuff happen. And so look into that if that's something that y'all are interested in, and we would be happy to talk to y'all about the complexities of that and how to navigate relationships and negotiate things with the universities if you want to collaborate. But the other thing is with the CMC, with the Connecting Minority Communities pilot program, [00:13:30] that's a federal investment. Ours is unique. There was several awards, but ours is one where the community group us gets the lion's share of the award, which is really atypical when partnering with universities. I think it's, it's nearly a $3 million award and we get 2.7 or something of that three mil. So understanding how to navigate the systems, understanding regional planning organizations and their priorities and all that other stuff is so much a part of this because community is [00:14:00] brilliant. It has such great ideas about what it needs, but the resources are often farthest away from the communities that are most impacted. So you need someone or a group of someones to be there connecting the dots and really funneling laser focused into community to have massive scale projects where you're going to be training over 140 community members and how to change the world.

Christopher Mitchell (14:24):
As we're wrapping up, I want to ask you a question that comes almost unconnected to the others, and that's [00:14:30] that I feel a little bit dismayed at times when I feel like people who are doing social change work feel like there's not a lot of hope that things aren't getting better. You're someone, Shaun in particular that strikes me that roots a lot of your thoughts in evidence history. How do you feel like we've been making change and that we're moving in the right direction? There's a reason to be hopeful in doing this work?

Shaun Glaze (14:52):
Oh, absolutely. I sometimes get surprised when people are really pessimistic because even if you just look at it strictly from this [00:15:00] perspective of someone presented here at Net Inclusion, they're talking about the pace of change. And it's funny, I didn't hear their talk, but I heard four people paraphrase their talk back. To me. It's something like, how long do you think it took us to get electricity everywhere? How long did it take to get the Internet everywhere? How long did it take Chat GPT to get everywhere? And I think that the scale of change is dizzying and disorienting, and I think that as someone has a psychology background, anytime there's something that's dizzy [00:15:30] and disorienting, sometimes their anxiety follows. Depression follows sense of hopelessness, sense of lack of control. But what's really cool is for me, I don't feel like we have to control things so much as we need to get as many people to know and get excited, and not even just excited, but just really get resources in their hands.

(15:51):
Once people get resources in their hands, and when you hear resources, you might think laptops, you might think Internet, but I think about the social infrastructure piece [00:16:00] is what we are building and doing that makes a difference is what makes me wake up all excited to be alive. The social infrastructure piece is enduring. People are one of the most amazing organisms on this world, but also we can do cool stuff that can make it to where the future and the present can be a better reality. We learned that in COVID, things that were impossible before. You can't do this, this, this, this, and then suddenly we figured it all out in the span of a few months. If you're pessimistic, [00:16:30] my recommendation would be like, you don't have to let go of your pessimism, but surround yourself with people who are kicking ass. Can you say, ass, you kicking butt kicking butt.

(16:41):
We'll allow it because it really is what 2020 taught me was the power of mindset and I had never believed before. That mindset was one of the biggest things holding our communities back. But I tell you, when we launched BBR, when we launched Black Brilliance, and we suddenly had an opportunity where the city said, [00:17:00] we're going to listen to you, and the city was going to put money in people's hands, and we knew we were going to be able to hire people, and before we had hired all 105, I would spend 13, 15, 16 hour days talking to community about this project, doing daily podcasts, doing press conferences and teach-ins and all this stuff. Go into community groups talking about this research, come join, join. And I would spend hours talking to people who were so uniquely qualified to do this work, people [00:17:30] who'd been incarcerated, people who'd been harmed by systems, and they would be talking me out of hiring them. I'd be like, okay, great. I have this opportunity. And they'd be like, I don't have a resume. I don't have this. I don't have that. The reason why I bring this up is I think it's the same thing for all of us that are on the front lines. It's like we think that we need to have Y and Z put together, and you don't. What you really need is people around you who really believe in what you're doing in order to keep going.

Chris Webb (17:58):
Shaun said it. Shaun said it [00:18:00] sold my thunder. What I would say, just to add to that, is that

Christopher Mitchell (18:06):
There is no hope and we should all give up. Yeah, right.

Chris Webb (18:12):
Let me vague to differ. No, but what I'll just say is that we work with technology, we work with ecosystems, we work with social ecosystems, and we work with ideas, and [00:18:30] it's very difficult to be pessimistic when we're inspired by such brilliant and such innovative and such powerful ideas that we have seen and our colleagues who inspired us, have seen for decades, change people's lives and empower people, and then those people then inspire other people. And that logarithmic [00:19:00] growth that's associated with that is something that is very difficult to be pessimistic in the presence of. That's number one. Number two, when we talk about technology, I often try to, when we're teaching, I often remind people of what happened in 2007, 2008, almost like a where were you? And that's difficult for the younger students of course, but the bottom line is that in 2007, 2008, [00:19:30] the first iPhone was launched.

(19:33):
That was 16 years ago, 15 years ago. And people, our entire world, when computing was made handheld in that way, we had cellular phones for decades. We had cameras, digital cameras for decades. We had, et cetera, et cetera. But when the iPhone launched, if you look at the world, you look at the amount of wealth that's been created, the amount of opportunity [00:20:00] that's been created, the amount of new technologies has been built based on that innovation. That's less than a lifetime for most people, and that is inspirational. That's the kind of thing, and that's kind of where we work in. That's kind of world we live in. Using examples like that, we want to inspire our community and others.

Christopher Mitchell (20:23):
I would also say that it's a wonderful experiment. The technology angle is one. The thing that I come back to is that [00:20:30] for ever since the Birth of humanity, there's been people who didn't identify as a man, as a woman that weren't attracted to the opposite sex, and those people had to hide their identities, and we're finally getting to a point where people can be themselves, and that's true of no matter the color of your skin, we have a lot of barriers to overcome. This is an exciting time where most people agree, we got to get rid of those barriers, let people be themselves and not suffer because they don't fit into someone else's judgment about what they should be. I'm really excited to be living during this time when we're trying to get over that.

Shaun Glaze (21:00):
[00:21:00] I'll say this, when BBR launch, we had two co-leads, myself and Dr. Lania severe, both black, both queer, both non-binary, and so stuff that people just did not know what to do with. In some cases, they definitely didn't expect to see people who are professionally trained in research had done research for local, state, federal government or evaluation. Both of us, me and La Laan is a firefighter too, and some people didn't know what [00:21:30] to do with us former basketball championship in college. I didn't have anything like that. I was like, I've been a researcher since forever. You know what I mean? But one of those things that I think a lot about is both latanya and I are not from Seattle and I'm from Texas, and there are still places in Texas where people think that you have to torture children in order to get them to be different people.

(21:55):
It is just one of those things. There are places in Washington that are like that, but [00:22:00] what's really cool when you do things like what we did when we launched BBR of bringing people together across difference, we had over a hundred mostly black folks together, and we would intentionally set up our weeks a certain way, right? Mondays are press conference day or teach-in day. Tuesdays and Thursdays are teach-in days, so that means that people, anybody can come talk to us. Wednesdays, we connected the research to what's happening, organizing and policy, and so we had those conversations. But Friday and Saturday, [00:22:30] those are the days where we would get together and build community where we would build those relationships that live longer than funding cycles. And that's when black folks who had never messed with each other before because they don't know. I don't know what your experience is as a Muslim, or your experiences as a Christian or someone that's an atheist, or someone that's a sex worker and someone that's a teacher, someone's a software developer. All these people getting together and talking and building community and being able to knit together a new idea of what could be possible. That's [00:23:00] what I think is really cool, and that's what unlocks people's ability to kind of let go a little bit, feel a little safer, take a little risk, but not feel like you're in danger. And that's one of the things I love about technology, being able to find and create that kind of context.

Christopher Mitchell (23:13):
That's great, and we're going to have to end it there. So thank you both for your time this morning. It's been great talking to you.

Shaun Glaze (23:18):
Thank you. Thank you, Chris.

Sean Gonsalves (23:21):
We thank you for listening. You can find a bunch of our other podcasts at ilsr.org/podcast. Since this is a new [00:23:30] show, I'd like to ask a favor. Please give us a rating wherever you found it, especially at Apple Podcasts. Share it with friends. You can even embed episodes on your own site. Please let us know what you think by us at podcast@communitynets.org. Finally, we'd like to thank joseph mccade.com for the song on the Verge.