The YX Foundation

We are aiming to produce a coalition platform for organizers, technologists, students, and industry leaders to exchange ideas and technologies at the intersection of liberation and technology. We are solving the problem of the gap between this technology and the communities it affects and if scaled globally, this could provide a language and understanding as well as tools and resources for communities themselves. 

At The YX Foundation, we believe that technology can only serve a truly liberatory purpose if informed and created by the communities most marginalized by its violence today. In the era of digital technology, many grassroots organizations have been left with an immense challenge: utilizing fascist social media platforms to virtually organize disparate communities often lacking in digital literacy to begin with. Existing community-channels inadequately serve the needs of grassroots coalitions aiming to centralize individuals and build solidarities effectively and thoughtfully, while also nurturing space for discussion. Rather than building the next “AI for…” product, The YX Foundation is working directly in collaboration with marginalized communities’ hubs of resistance to build an elegant, yet simple anti-racist technology: the digital infrastructure for coalition-building in the 21st century.

The YX Foundation is creating a transgenerational and interdisciplinary digital coalition meant to drive engagement and collaboration between those who are often not in conversation or co-creation. Potential members have Slack fatigue and don’t want to join another Google Group. More importantly, feedback from community organizers has revealed shortcomings in traditional workspace software designed for corporations (i.e. Slack / Google Groups) which don’t serve the unique nature of stakeholder collaboration and non-hierarchical workflows that characterize many grassroots organizations and coalitions. This is an opportunity to design a web-based platform that facilitates coalition building for interdisciplinary teams and long lasting collaboration. 

We aim to develop a web-based (react.js) collaboration platform which can facilitate team building (channels), communication within and among the entire group (general chat channels), forums to address suggestions, problems and facilitate topic specific discussions. The YX Coalition will serve as a proof of concept, but our platform will be highly generalizable and applicable to any organization aiming to mobilize and base-build.

Our solution serves grassroots organizations, student-led campaigns, on-the-ground collectives of resistance, and other coalitions fighting against the violence of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. A core priority in our design is working in collaboration with, rather than as consultants for, such organizations; as such, our rollout plan consists of a detailed set of user experience questions with organizers and activists located across the country. We want to know their pain points, and how our product best fits with their needs by first building a personal connection with them. Using the critical insight gained from these interview answers, our talented team of product designers and full-stack engineers will create a prototype digital coalition -  The YX Coalition. Many of the users have full-time jobs outside of their organizing work and will rely on this platform not only as a mode of communication with their fellow organizers but also as the home base of the async and synchronous digital collaboration including design sprints, brainstorming sessions, happy hours, and after-event reflections. 

Thus, our digital coalition platform will impact the lives of organizers by giving them an easy, accessible, and secure way to communicate, discourse, mobilize, and build movements. No doubt, “community” is the structure at the heart of all organizing work, and in our digital era, grassroots collectives deserve platforms that will help them migrate “community” to the web.

Often, technologies that aim to advance social good are in startup silos, divorced from the lived realities of communities and coalitions working towards collective liberation. We bridge that gap by building a product that directly meets organizers' needs. If we envision a world where technology ensures racial justice, promotes grassroots advocacy, and enhances our ability to tackle complex socio-political challenges, we must be radical, imaginative, and humble in designing products that manifest this future. It requires input and centering of BIPOC organizers and teams of engineers ready to build technology for liberation’s sake rather than distorting liberation for technology’s sake. 

We chose prototype as we have begun to test this model following our collaborative roundtable series with the Radical AI Podcast with a Slack community but we are still fleshing out the final details and revisions in order to serve the most people possible as well as the technology we will eventually use.

Our solution is innovative because it builds upon and applies existing frameworks hashed out by critical race theorists and community organizers in a mechanism to provide a community to those interested in the place of this work in technology. We believe that bringing together the theory and practices of organizers with the technology available to us could change the way that liberation practices are understood, shared, and acted upon.

Currently, our solution serves upwards of 500 people - those who have attended our previous events and opted into our Slack channel, our YX leadership, our community partners, and our advisors. In one year, we'd aim to be serving upwards of 1000 and in five years, upwards of 10,000 - reaching the mass of people interested in technology, critical race theory, organizing - and all the various intersections. 

We are measuring progress through people involved in, actively signing up for, and interacting with our coalition. Additionally, we are looking to YX's place in already existing community organizations - as sponsors, as partners, and as assistance points.

We currently have 20 people working on our solution team.

We are all students currently and the opportunity to connect with professors doing this work, industry mentors, community organizers from our homes, as well as access to institutional resources at a place like Harvard position us well to solve this problem. Our team is made up of Ivy League, HBCU, community college, and high school students - all BIPOC and all with experiences and connections to marginalized communities and a stake in improving our own quality of life.

We aim to scale our team from an even wider pool than our previous recruiting and with a flat structure of leadership, we provide every team member the opportunity to thrive on our team and to share ideas and discussion. We have intentionally mandated practices such as pronouns, an open door to every team meeting, and community discussion norms to ensure that in this crucial work we are doing, every person involved feels supported and welcomed and able to grow and learn in this space.