More than 10 percent of families in the United States today are food insecure. When Robert Lee started Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC) in New York City to distribute excess wholesome cuisine to food-insecure communities, RLC operated at a small, human scale. Over the years, RLC engaged a tech partner who understood nonprofits to reduce administrative overhead and incorporate community feedback into tech development. Now, RLC has a purpose-built platform that allows RLC to redirect staff time from tactical operations to strategic thinking and expansion planning. Requests for new features for the platform are prioritized based on staff and community feedback. RLC incorporates technical strategy into its overarching organizational strategy. The shift to using technology to extend their mission paid significant dividends: RLC now provides wholesome food redistribution services to eight cities around the United States.
In the forthcoming book The Tech That Comes Next: How Changemakers, Philanthropists, and Technologists Can Build an Equitable World, we explore the implications of our use, creation, and funding of technology for social impact. The book describes the opportunities we all have—across nonprofits, funding (including business, venture capital, philanthropic foundations, and more), policymaking, tech development, and in community—to change our relationship to technology, create more equitable processes and relationships, and to build with a more inclusive future in mind. We include a number of case studies, including the RLC story, that illustrate pieces of what this might look like. They provide frameworks for you to begin building the tech that comes next today. The work to change how we develop and use technology is not easy, and the book does not provide a checklist for change that might give that impression. The book does encourage readers to expand on the vision—creating a more inclusive, equitable world requires participation and visioning from many people.
This is a book about technology. This a book about equity. This is a book about how we can meet community needs. More than anything, this a book that asks you to asks questions.—Amy Sample Ward and Afua Bruce
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People sometimes think technology is the way to address inequality. We don’t think that, and that’s not what we suggest in this book. In fact, that’s not what our decades of experience with myriad organizations across sectors has taught us. Technology is a tool and nothing more; it’s people who have ideas and solutions. As Octavia Butler said, “There is no single answer that will solve all our future answers, there is no magic bullet, there are thousands of answers, and you could be one of them, if you choose to be.”
In asking for you and others to dream and imagine something different than what we have today, we want to acknowledge the privilege that it is to have the space for that dreaming. We have that space because we don’t need to figure out where we’ll get our next meal or a bed, or find medicine or support, or access care or safety. So, that’s what we dream of:
- That we all have space to rest.
- That we all have space to collaborate.
- That we all have space to build relationships.
We are writing this book while the COVID-19 global pandemic rages on, while protests and legislation related to racial equity continue in the streets and in city halls—and every aspect of our lives grows more dependent on technology every day. Living within these realities, what do we see?
Technology companies have pledged to diversify their staff amid various campaigns calling for them to disclose the racial makeup of their management and leadership teams. During the first few months of the pandemic in 2020, many of those same companies offered their products at free or newly discounted options to nonprofits or even individuals. Of course, most had fine print specifying these offers weren’t permanent.
The philanthropic sector is full of pledges and commitment statements about everything from addressing racial inequity to making their grantmaking more accessible and less onerous. Such assistance is indeed helpful to social impact organizations, local mutual aid efforts, and every kind of community institution, who have struggled to address skyrocketing needs for critical services and programs with greatly depleted human and financial resources. In the summer of 2020, Deloitte’s Monitor Institute reported an estimated 10-40 percent contraction in the US nonprofit sector with 1 out of every 3 organizations already closed or at risk of doing so. The pledges and commitments by technology providers and philanthropy are important in many ways, but they are not enough to help many organizations and communities even to stay afloat—let alone to build a better world.
As we discussed in chapter 1, the systems and challenges around us—the same systems that created the need for an entire social impact sector to provide life-saving and enriching programs—have also deeply influenced the technology systems, tools, and culture in our work and lives. We cannot build a better world through only more nonprofits or more inclusive services. If the technology-enabled systems, data collection, and even service models we employ toward a positive mission are themselves causing harm, because they are extractive, don’t acknowledge our identities, or are inaccessible, we must acknowledge that harm and make change—in both the technology tools themselves and in the way we create technology for our needs.
An equitable world will require change from every one of us, as individuals and organizations and sectors and communities. Critical in this is changing our relationship with technology generally and changing the technologies we have available so that more appropriate, relevant, and equitable technology is available to meet our needs. Even more critical is practicing the big work of imaging that we can do things differently.
Let’s think about social impact work as building a house for a moment. We don’t start by pulling up plans for each tool; we have a blueprint of the house and financial estimates for all the permits, materials, and labor that will be needed through to completion. We don’t focus on how many saws and nail guns we have, nor do we expect the full house can be built using only a hammer.
Similarly, we need to ensure that our relationship to technology, as individuals and as organizations, is one that acknowledges digital tools are just that: tools. Despite the efforts of Silicon Valley to frame every application and service as comprehensive “solutions,” these digital tools need to be approached with appropriate expectations for what they can actually do and what they can’t. Staying focused, instead, on the goal we have ahead will enable us to select the best tools as and when needed. Keeping our community central in our processes, through engaging many people in the goal-setting, decision-making, design, and implementation of our work, allows us also to be accountable for technology use that causes harm and to make appropriate adjustments. To return to the house-building analogy, if we selected tools that caused avoidable accidents, we need to find alternative ways to meet our goal without endangering our laborers.
The Social Impact Organizations That Come Next
We have already discussed how important it is to consider not just what work social impact organizations do but also how they do the work they perform. By involving all staff in strategic conversations about technology, social impact organizations can adopt and increase an organizational culture that keeps the focus on the mission and community instead of the technical tools, allowing for investments in technology to be more successful. The implemented technology should help with repetitive, straightforward tasks that people shouldn’t have to spend their time on, thereby freeing them to work on the many activities that require a human’s attention, empathy, and judgment. While changing individual mindsets about technology is important, the impact can be magnified if organizations move away from a scarcity mindset and act on the value of collaboration within the sector; leveraging shared infrastructure can allow organizations to more quickly launch and sunset programs, as well as test and learn from the work they do.
The Technologists That Come Next
Technologists in the social impact sector serve a broad variety of functions. Whether a technical designer, developer, or implementer of a tool or program, technologists must have deep subject matter expertise. They must understand when to implement complex algorithms and structures and when to mitigate harms—as well as when to acknowledge that the solution needed is not a technical one. Furthermore, social impact technologists must invest the time to connect with organizations and communities in the space to understand true needs. To strengthen the ties to the community, technologists must be able to include non-technologists in decision-making and plainly explain how the data and tech are used. For technologists to develop technology differently, they must build upon a foundation of security, privacy, and ethical use as they bring non-technologists along in the development process.
The Funders That Come Next
The injection of, management of, and use of money in the social impact sector matters. Funders—whether philanthropists, venture capitalists, or business owners—can fund thoughtful, inclusive development and implementation of technology. Structures can be put in place to give the organizations themselves the space to innovate, the freedom to learn from activities that didn’t work the first time, and the flexibility to create based on what the organizations, as the on-the-ground actors, know to be true based on their experiences. Formal communication loops can be built to allow community members to have some agency over decisions directly affecting their lives. Funders must seek to find ways to ensure proximity to impact. By funding social impact organizations to hire or work closely with developers, the technology solutions are situated in direct relationship to the issues and regions being addressed. This also creates a foundation for iteration and evolution of the technologies in context, where development staff can make changes and improvements as real-world use cases present new opportunities.
The Policymakers That Come Next
Policymakers, we have learned, have the ability to restructure policymaking to involve more people in the process and to incorporate technical expertise into the process. Although there will likely never be policymakers who have expertise in policy, technology, and all issues facing all social impact organizations, we can expand pathways for technologists and social impact organizations to articulate their policy needs and influence the policymaking process. It will continue to be important for social impact organizations to build coalitions to engage in policymaking. And because it would be untenable to leave key policy decisions to individual technologists who don’t have a holistic view across applications and implications, a subset of technologists must be willing to work alongside policymakers to bring needed oversight to the technical development process.
The Community That Comes Next
Solutions that benefit the community can only do so if the community is an active participant in the development, testing, and deployment of these solutions. We must create structures and systems to allow communities use their own power. This means ensuring communities are resourced holistically—consider what funding and technical support communities need to support their dreams. Shifting the perception of technology only being accessible by a handful of experts can also be beneficial to communities. Remember that expertise can be learned through traditional educational institutions, but it can also come from apprenticeships or other hands-on experiences. The organizations that support communities can take many different forms, and as we build for what comes next we should focus first on what we accomplish than create the structure—a 501(c)3, a Public Benefit Corporation, or some yet to be defined construct – will work best to deliver for the community.
Ultimately, only so much time can be spent studying the challenges in and of the social impact space. “Social problems have interest too,” says Lyel Resner, technologist, entrepreneur, educator, and advisor. “They grow. They compound.” Whether you are a funder who can make capital available more quickly, a technologist who can expand the capabilities of mission-driven organizations, a social impact leader who knows which levers to pull to make change, a policymaker who can create systems and laws that protect and encourage, or a community member who can actively participate in solution development, you have the knowledge and power to make an impact. The tech that comes next can help ensure the impact is positive, one that strengthens communities without inflicting harm.
The case studies and examples throughout the book varied widely in their technology tools and their communities, but all of them included people saying, “We can do this differently.” All of them included people committing to prioritize the community and the benefit that could be created from doing so. From there, they found success, they found valuable outcomes, they found strength to do more.
Ours have not been exhaustive examples. Organizations and technology projects and community efforts that have produced similar results exist everywhere around the world. We hope you have your own examples—projects you’ve been part of, or even just know of. We hope that experience or reference powers you forward to be part of the examples we all learn from next.
The world is hard. There are real hardships and injustices everywhere we look. It’s because of this that we know that, together, we must commit to something else. Today, this moment, right now is the right time for us to take the next step toward a more equitable world, a world that works for all of us.
So, what will you build next?