The chance: coming full circle
As Software program for Good welcomes the brand new yr with our new imaginative and prescient and values, I really feel the humbling sense that I’ve come full circle.
After I went to school, I realized tips on how to think about what Black liberation would imply for the world, to dream of what we humanity might obtain in a world free from racism and misogyny. Pursuing that imaginative and prescient was the work I longed to do, as a scholar and instructor like my mentor. However as a younger mom, I needed to put my goals of liberation on maintain to assist my child — so I realized to construct software program. Again then I by no means imagined, as I coded web sites by hand, that know-how itself may very well be a power for liberation.
As I grew as a technologist — nearly at all times in areas the place I used to be the one individual like me (the one Black individual, or the one lady, or the one Black lady) — I usually felt as if I have been getting farther and farther away from the work of liberation that my soul nonetheless longed to do. However at any time when I despaired, my mentor would remind me that know-how can make it potential for human beings to dwell extra absolutely and freely — and typically does. So I began pursuing alternatives to make use of tech to energy liberation in academia, within the public sector, and in neighborhood with like-minded technologists wherever I went.
Nonetheless, in each job I’ve had, there have at all times been obstacles to constructing the form of know-how I dream of. Through the years I step by step resigned myself to separating my life’s objective, the pursuit of liberation for everybody, from the day-to-day work of managing groups and delivery code.
Then I joined Software program for Good.
The problem: deep questions
This summer time and fall, once I gathered with Casey, Cassi and Kevin to plan our firm’s future, I found a bunch of people who find themselves as excited as I’m in regards to the energy of know-how to liberate human beings. Thinkers like Robin D.G. Kelley and bell hooks fashioned my political consciousness in school, and I discovered myself drawing deeply on that lineage because the 4 of us deliberate a technique round liberation and love, centering individuals who have been traditionally excluded from full humanity. On Google Meet or round whiteboards at The Coven, I discovered this staff welcomed my largest hopes and most sacred goals — not just for our firm, however for humanity.
The imaginative and prescient we articulated for our shared work took my breath away:
At Software program for Good, we envision a world the place all communities can use the facility of knowledge and know-how to domesticate shared abundance and liberation. To deliver this world into being, we construct software program with love.
It is a mission assertion for a corporation that may and can construct know-how that liberates.
When the management staff introduced this imaginative and prescient to the entire SfG staff, they responded with an outpouring of joyful enthusiasm, mental engagement, and a complete lot of very deep questions. How can we inform if the apps we construct are literally making the individuals use them extra free? How can we shift from a shortage mindset to an abundance mindset? How can a software program company love our individuals as human beings in a labor market that’s constructed on exploitation? How ought to we stability the wants of our personal staff with the calls for of our purchasers and our duties to our communities and the world? How can we enable time and house for our personal staff to be taught and develop in an company that payments by the hour? How will we all know if we’re constructing software program with love, anyway?
Making an attempt to reply deep questions like these collectively is the work earlier than Software program for Good within the years forward. As CEO, it’s my job to deliver our expansive shared imaginative and prescient again down into the day-to-day actuality of software program engineering. Creating the situations for love, abundance and liberation to flourish in a software program company is an immense and persevering with problem — particularly as a result of my staff is united in believing the problem is price taking up.
Fortuitously, I do know I can depend on the power of my staff’s shared imaginative and prescient for know-how that liberates — and on our curious willingness to attempt new issues, experiment, and assist one another as we be taught. My father, a farmer, at all times informed me that “scared cash don’t make none,” and I do know he was proper. Cultivating shared abundance, like rising crops in rural Georgia, is an act of hope over concern. Right here at Software program for Good, shoulder to shoulder with my entire staff, we’re already constructing software program that liberates human beings to dwell extra freely. We’re solely simply getting began.
