Name: A Seat at the Table: Building Inclusive Ecosystems - Erica Stanley | JSConf Hawaii 2020
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T17:09:37.000Z
Duration: 17 min 44 s
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To-infinitive

Oh, so I'm here to talk about creating space, creating a seat at the table and kind of taking some things a way that we can use to build Maur inclusive tech ecosystems.

Has anyone in here ever felt isolated in a room full of people?

Past simple

Have you ever felt the distinct feeling that you didn't belong in a space?

Even though you have similar experiences and credentials, as many of the people in the room toe hold those thoughts?

Because I want to tell you a story that kind of shapes how I think about inclusion One day long before diversity, equity and inclusion were ever even conversations that we had in tech, I learned what I feel is the foundation of inclusion from one of my best friends from college.

We were at an event that she was hosting, and at one point I sat back and watched terrifying ways to engage with everyone in the room as a raging introvert myself, I was in all at the end of the night, I asked her, Why does she put so much effort into engaging with everyone there?

To my introvert eyes, it just seemed exhausting, and she said I know what it's like to feel alone in a crowd full of people.

Loneliness is the worst feeling, and I don't want anyone to feel that way when I'm around, that really stuck with me.

But it will be years before I would really relate to that and could also do something about it.

I've worked in tech for over 20 years, and while I've had some amazing experiences I could only have had in Tech as a black woman, it has been at times isolating and also honestly spirit draining.

And as long as I'm here, I don't want anyone else to ever have to feel like that.

So almost seven years ago, I started this journey of making room for people who are underrepresented or, as I like to think, underestimated in tech by creating organizations and events meant to empower and showcase marginalized people.

So Arlen Hamilton, BC extraordinaire, created these T shirts for people underrepresented people in tech with the underrepresented part, striked out and replace what underestimated.

So I don't come up with that, Um, but But that's a term that I like to use so kind of at the beginning of this journey I started the Atlanta network of Women who code in the summer of 2013 and I'd love to tell you this was an intentional part of my journey.

But it wasn't a friend of mine was going to start it and then found that she would be moving to the Bay area.

So she was trying to convince me to started in her place, but I was doing my best to run from it.

I had worked with nonprofits and user groups and meet ups, and I knew how much work it would be.

But I also didn't want Atlanta to be excluded from the very important progress we were making with women and tech simply because I wouldn't step up and organized women who coat there.

Elena, who is originally from Atlanta, um came down from the Bay Area and together they convinced me that I wouldn't be completely terrible at it.

And then even after I started it, I plan to just started and not mess it up long enough for someone else to take it and run with it.

I'm still a director there and something I started noticing soon after.

Women who Code Atlanta started really growing is that our presence in the Atlanta Tech community started changing the conversations and experiences people were having.

And now the Atlanta Network of Women Who code is one of the most diverse and active networks globally.

Our local leaders have worked really closely with the larger Atlanta Tech community for 6.5 years to make sure our members over 4000 strong have a seat at the table.

We are making our mark on one of the fastest growing tech startup ecosystems in the country from women who cold.

We created this conference call We rise, which was a women in tech conference in Atlanta and the gold there was.

This actually came about strictly from listening to our members.

We had had, ah, hackathon all women hackathon that had a day of workshops that I was telling everyone like This is not a conference.

But everyone was like that, but a lot like a conference Erica.

Um and so after it, people started asking for, like Okay, so when are we really gonna do a conference if that's not if that wasn't it.

And so that's where we rise came from and we had a great time doing.

We really wanted to make it an intersectional event on, and I think we did that.

But there were still some issues and some conversations we weren't having.

And so we created a completely different event that started last year with Factor Tech, and we really wanted to make this make sure that we went beyond the conversations around women in Tech.

Um, something that we find a lot is that when we have conversations around women in tech, people don't dig into the intersections and the different groups within women in tech.

And when you stop at one say identity, the largest group in that identity is going to have most of the benefits.

So a lot of times when you hear women in tech, what really happens is that you make games with white women intake, but you don't make a lot of gains with different ethnicities, people with disabilities, people who are members of the LGBT community.

So we really created re factor to really dig deeper and go beyond kind of just surface level diversity and inclusion.

And then from there, I also started getting involved with a lot of the incubators and accelerators in the community and really trying to find ways to make, um, founders and funding more diverse and inclusive as well.

So what this is is the story of my experiences and how I have used them to create more inclusive spaces in Atlanta and in a lot of the organizations I'm a part of.

So the first thing is you have to find and listen to your audience.

This is deceptive, deceptively crucial point.

So I'm gonna spend probably the most time here, and you're probably wondering like, um, Erica, did you submit this talk?

Come all the way to Hawaii, walk on this stage and just tell all these beautiful people to listen like we don't know how to do that.

The most important part about getting involved with diversity, equity and inclusion.

Finding your audience means that you individually may not represent the audience that you're trying to be more inclusive of.

If her is this, you are a white sister heterosexual men or women in Tech, you may not be representative of the audience you need to listen to to make a space more inclusive for marginalized people.

In Tech, I do a lot of work with career changers, boot camp grabs and people who are new to tech.

But I've been in Tech for 20 years, and I came through what many would consider a traditional path and tech.

So in the case of working with career changers and folks who are coming through tech and nontraditional ways, I'm not representative off the audience.

I'm seeking to include, so I have to listen really well there.

And then you have to actively listen to that audience, not just here, not just make them feel heard, but take in and process what they're saying.

I don't know how many times has happened to me personally, or I've heard it happen to someone else from a marginalized background where they will share a uniquely hurtful or maybe discriminatory experience that they've had and the people they're talking to will immediately respond with.

Let's dig into that a little bit just because this person trusted you enough to share their lived experience.

A piece of their trauma with you doesn't instantly make you the expert on their lived experience.

So how does immediately asserting your lift experience helped them?

Well, you may have inadvertently helped them understand that they can't trust you to respect their story.

What you may have unintentionally done is invalidate their experience because it's not one share by you or by the larger group.

And listening includes taking it all in ideas, suggestions, feedback and criticism.

I follow Franklin Leonard on Twitter, and he recently tweeted If you aren't ready for criticism from a community you make art about, maybe you're not ready to make art about that community.

And that really made me think on my experience as a community organizer and also just some of the recent events that have been happening in the local Atlanta community.

This is also true of organizations and events.

Taking and processing feedback is a prerequisite to ally ship.

If you can't take him and process feedback from a marginalized community and work with that community to come up with solutions that address their feet back, you are not an ally to that community.

The second thing is you wanna build for your audience.

You want to center the people that you are making space for.

Don't make it about you or your sponsors or local tech companies unless that's your audience.

Focus on the people you are making space for, and I have found that you can't go wrong if you optimize for the most marginalized among those communities, you also want to make sure that you build for Intersectionality.

You may have portions of your audience whose identities are at the intersection of various marginalized communities.

There may be women who are also part of an ethnic minority, for example.

My experiences as a black woman would not would likely be very different than the experience of a white woman or a black men.

You might have someone who is non binary but also has a disability, and their experience at the intersection off both non binary and disabled, is different from identifying as either non binary or disabled.

And again, this was a big reason for kind of moving from an event like we rise to an event like re factor where we could really dig into some of those, Um, intersectionality, ese.

You don't want to allow the status quo to limit your impact.

You don't want to not do something because this hasn't been done before.

Maybe you're the person that has to do it.

Maybe you're the one that has to push those boundaries in listening and building for marginalized communities.

Intent is much more important than your ego.

You will mess it up with the best of intentions.

But if your good intentions are stronger than your ego, this will allow you to listen to your audience and apologize sincerely with the focus on the community instead of censoring yourself rather than the ill fated, self centered double down we so often see today.

And far more important than even intent is impact.

And you can on Lee understand your impact by listening and working with that community.

So this is a tweet from a good friend of mine Mecca, who's talking about how companies have been working to bring more black people to their organization without talking to black communities.

and he's talking about another organization, death color being different.

And so I'm also commenting on this by saying, You have to listen to the groups that you were trying to make an impact with.

You can't claim to do great things for community just because you do a thing you have to understand from the community's perspective, the impact you make things actually get better.

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A Seat at the Table: Building Inclusive Ecosystems - Erica Stanley | JSConf Hawaii 2020

tough

introvert

journey

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