Alumni Teach Social Justice Through Digital App

This semester, recent Skidmore alumni Jasmyn Story '15 (anthropology) and Noah Kernis '15 (anthropology) brought current students the Digital Access Incubator course, a chance to contribute to coding and content of a new app designed to improve access and communicate key information and resources to marginalized groups.

Directing members of the Coalition for the Dignity and Rights of Colored People (the People's Coalition), Story and Kernis have built on a friendship and partnership that began at Skidmore, in part as they were sharing space and growing skills in MDOCS during their senior year. Today both are based in New York City. Story is a restorative justice facilitator and a dedicated human rights activist with eight years of experience working in the voluntary sector. Formally the Director of Restorative Justice Programming at the JAGS Foundation, Story completed her M.A. in human rights at the University College London. Kernis, who previously worked in television and radio for Amazon, StoryCorps, and WNYC, works as a junior dev-ops engineer for Mentat Advisers. He recently graduated from the Flatiron School, where he studied full-stack web development. 

Returning to MDOCS in spring 2018, they drew on this expertise to offer a boot-camp style short course, "Tech for Change," that invited students to learn basic Internet literacy as well as restorative organizational management. Their approach privileges both creativity and equity, giving students a significant role in designing the in-class experience.

As part of the course, students became contributors to the Coalition's first major project, the "Meeting App," a centralized hub that provides access to and communicates key information and resources to diminish the effect of structural violence experienced by marginalized groups. An important goal is to improve access community by community to resources available in three areas: mind (schools, summer camps, youth programs, trainings), body (food, EBT accepting food markets), and soul (lodges, religious centers, YMCA).

Just what did they do? In February and March, seven students met for two weekend workshops, dedicating Friday and Saturday to sessions of planning, researching, coding and integrating. Even a snow day didn't slow down this crew. Half of the cohort gathered data about resources in the Capital Region that serve marginalized populations. The other half learned to build their own web APIs (application program interfaces) to hold and distribute the information gathered by the community data cohort. Together, they focused on understanding the meeting app's goals and its role within the ecosystem of the People's Coalition, learning how to communicate based on restorative practices while deepening their understanding of the social capital present in both the campus and the greater community.

The student contributions became an integral part of the development of a community-sustained approach to generating the app's content, accelerating the project's timeline, quickly compiling information about the plethora of resources available in the Capital Region while also identifying areas of need and populations underserved by community-based organizations. By the end of the course, students built web APIs to hold this information, providing a beta version of what will soon be a fully functional smartphone and web application. 

For alumni Kernis and Story, this experience held some important synergies.

"Returning to Skidmore College as an instructor was exhilarating. I dreamt of this nonprofit in the comfort of my Northwoods home; I recruited my first round of volunteers from the talented class of 2015. To return years later to collaborate with enrolled students has been an honor and a testament to the societal change that can be forged when you truly believe that creative thought and action matter." —Jasmyn Story '15

"The experience was challenging, exciting and in the end, rewarding. I wanted to provide a space in which students could learn, one that was different from what they normally experience in the classroom. The proof was in seeing them enjoy learning about technology that had seemed foreign to them just hours before, and then being eager to learn more." —Noah Kernis '15

Current students found the experience transformative as well. For Ari Bogom-Shanon '18 (American studies), the inclusive classroom approach invited students to not only identify learning goals, but also take an active role in shaping the class structure to achieve them. 

"Being able to bring my whole self to the classroom had a profound impact on my learning experience. Using festorative justice practices, Jas, Noah and my classmates actively created an environment which allowed me to bring my heart, mind, body and soul to class. This showed me that it's both possible and beneficial to create space for active participation not just in class discussions but in the learning process as well." —Ari Bogom-Shanon, '18

For Jamerly De la Cruz '18 (anthropology), the course and mentoring by Story and Kernis offered a timely, ethical model as she prepared her own project for the 2018 Freirich Business Plan Competition. 

"Learning from alumni was a great experience because we got to learn from people who a few years ago were in our shoes. We had a relating point that made it easier to create community in the classroom specifically tied to the professor's expectations. This atmosphere allowed for equal value and ownership of learning was utilized where we learned from each other as individuals irrelevant to hierarchies of power.

"In this course, I gained the validation that in classrooms we make decisions as a collective and are equally passionate about the work we are doing, there can be a greater understanding of knowledge where not only you gain skills but also a community. I really enjoyed this course because we created content that is beneficial to the future steps of the Meeting App and were able to witness the ways in which our work mattered." —Jamerly De La Cruz '18

With a successful launch, MDOCS plans to explore additional models for student-alumni collaborations, and hopes to host a repeat incubator experience in Fall 2018.