We are delighted that an idea and initiative we suggested has begun to get traction, as evidenced by an effort launched in July called
“Venture DC 2015”. Sponsored by Comcast and supported by DC’s Department of
Small and Local Business Development (DSLBD), the well funded Venture DC initiative claims to seek to “empower emerging
entrepreneurs who are addressing and solving some of DC's most pressing challenges
related to health care, education, housing, economic security and access to
financial services, specifically in Wards 7 and 8.”
Perhaps a little background is in order. On
January 19, 2015, Martin Luther King's Birthday, we convened several DC-based
Black Tech firms, policy analysts and others at a meeting in Washington, DC to
discuss social innovation and technology. For more, see: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/martin-marion-tech-william-michael-cunningham-am-mba
“We focused on the role technology might play
in addressing Black Male safety and security issues. The meeting resulted in a
discussion about developing an app/apps to address Black Male Health Issues, specifically including the problem of
elevated homicide.”As we
noted at the time, this is extraordinarily difficult. But we also asked “what
is the point of having tech skills if you cannot use them to improve lives, ALL
lives, including the Black ones?”
(Besides, there's already an app that is being used to complain to police about Black and homeless people and to report non-crimes. We doubt this came up at the Comcast event.)
(Besides, there's already an app that is being used to complain to police about Black and homeless people and to report non-crimes. We doubt this came up at the Comcast event.)
Venture DC 2015 probably did not address these issues.
This is one reason having a truly diverse (race, gender, income) group
discussing these issues, as we did on 1/19/15, matters. The picture below shows
attendees at our meeting in contrast to one photo from the Venture DC 2015
meeting.
Left, Jan 2015. Right, Aug 2015
The Comcast event also follows my March 12,
2015 testimony
to the DC City Council Government Oversight
Committee on the lack of performance with respect to health
care for DC residents, Black contracting. The
video can be viewed at https://youtu.be/rlr_DomOais and the
details of the testimony can be found at "DC's revealed Black Economic
Development "Plan"" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dcs-real-development-plan-william-michael-cunningham-am-mba
Unfortunately, if you are an African American male actually from Wards 7 or 8, the City’s revealed
economic “development plan” for you is to offer limited low wage employment (I
know..I know...better than nothing) while devoting millions of dollars in funding to
non-minority companies.
For example, the D.C. Council gave nearly $33 million in tax breaks to Living Social and "gave" several valuable public properties to a firm called Fundrise. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/dc-wire/post/dc-council-approves-livingsocial-tax-breaks/2012/06/26/gJQAQAvv4V_blog.html and http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/fundrises_plans_for_the_r.l._christian_library_on_h_street/9772
As we have noted before, our economic research
reveals the following: there is not a
single city in the United States of America where the majority of Black people
resident before gentrification have been better off post-gentrification. Not
one. See: http://twisri.blogspot.com/2015/04/gentrification-and-black-people-in-dc.html
Clearly, the issues we raised in January and
March remain unresolved, even after we outlined (for the Chair of the DC City Council and the head of DC's Economic Development Department) two entirely new socially responsible financial instruments to help with these problems,
Unfortunately, issues of honest inclusion limit the ability of the Comcast-funded effort to legitimately serve the needs of the African American portions of the Ward 7 and 8 community. This is, of course, not surprising. Your freedom will not be brought to you by Comcast, Sprite, or Google.