by Lisa Gilham
At Amplify, our mission is to amplify the voices of developing leaders from historically excluded communities in tech. This focus on developing leaders for the future is rooted in our histories of community care; many of our board members and volunteers are also members of these intersecting communities and we’ve always helped one another when existing power structures seek to silence, exclude, and destroy us.
A long history of care
In 1969, the Black Panthers started the Free Breakfast for School Children program in Oakland, California, recognizing that children did better in school when they were fed. This initiative blossomed into a nation-wide program, even as the FBI worked to shut down the party, threatened in part by the public goodwill generated by these practical programs of care.
During the height of the AIDS crisis, when fear and misinformation was rampant, lesbians stepped in to fill gaps left by the healthcare system. They organized blood drives, advocated for governmental action, sat by hospital beds, and raised money to fight the epidemic and the stigma attached to it.
Indigenous groups have long cared for another directly. During the covid-19 pandemic, a native mutual aid organization, K’é Infoshop, distributed food and medical supplies directly to their community members in New Mexico and Arizona, bypassing bureaucratic red tape to support their neighbors.
Community care today
What does care look like right now in a world that seems intent on shoring up outdated systems of power that support only a handful of people? It means continuing to operate and connect with each other outside of those systems. Care can be offering a glass of water or a cup of tea to a friend who came over to your home. Care is writing up some talking points for a former coworker preparing to ask for a raise. Care might look like teaching a friend how to change the oil in their car.
When we meet someone’s basic needs, help them acquire more resources or build skills, we are strengthening the web of our community. There’s a reason many of us have been emphasizing the importance of belonging. Feeling like you’re part of a community that actively cares about and for you fosters personal strength and resilience that you can then leverage in support of others.
We’re not abandoning our work building new systems that better serve us, but we’re not waiting for them, either.
What does this look like for Amplify?
Since 2013, Amplify has created programming and spaces for community members to gather and grow our skills within the tech world. This has been our way of caring for one another, offering material support, outside of the powerful structures that exclude us.
This work is more important than ever as diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and teams are defunded and deprioritized across industries.
Because of that, more of us will need to look outside our own workplaces for models of leadership that better represent and support us. To that end, Amplify is committed to developing leaders from our own communities. We need leaders who challenge the status quo and redefine what it means to have power and use it to support their teams. We need leaders who understand how to support team members through grief and times of crisis. In short, we need leaders who care.
We invite you to be a part of that work! Our Leadership Academy program and study groups offer opportunities for emerging leaders in our communities to gain skills and experience and connect to a support network.
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