Addressing Economic Inequality in NYC through Social Impact Tech Research at Blue Ridge Labs
by Briana Vecchione
As technology is applied to high-stakes social impact domains, such as healthcare, criminal justice, and education, so too come opportunities to apply domain knowledge and technical skills to address systemic inequality. New York City is a notorious hub for both technology and socioeconomic inequality, making it well-positioned for creative social impact solutions which embrace the abundant resources that the city has to offer. The Robin Hood Foundation is one such organization, which seeks to fight poverty by building nonprofits to support low-income families in New York City. Over the summer, I was embedded in one of Robin Hood’s offshoot programs, Blue Ridge Labs, which is comprised of a team of bright and dedicated folks who are passionate about providing support to early-stage social ventures through their accelerator program, ‘Catalyst’. The lab not only provides funding and health insurance, but also connects ventures to executive coaching through their broad network to advisors, potential partners, and other social impact organizations. The selection process for the program is competitive: Each venture completes a five-step process which includes interview rounds and a pitch to RobinHood’s investment committee for consideration. At the end of the process, four ventures were selected:
Touchdown NYC: A platform that equips mentors who have successfully navigated reentry with digital tools to help returning citizens achieve their goals in their first year post-incarceration.
Communifi: A community-run internet co-op that connects primarily Black and Brown New Yorkers to mesh internet in their homes which relieves them from expensive and inconsistent internet.
UnlockEd: A platform dedicated to improving access to high-quality education for incarcerated individuals.
Karen’s Club: A platform to empower people of color from low-income and underserved neighborhoods by informing them about pursuing cancer clinical trials.
The spirit of many of these ventures are strengthened by founders’ personal relationships to the social impact issues they seek to address. For example, ‘Karen’s Club’ is founded by Karen Peterson, an African American stage IV cancer survivor living in New York. After fighting recurring triple-negative breast cancer over the course of two years and a life expectancy of 18-24 months, Karen found that she was eligible for enrollment in a clinical trial at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center. The treatment was successful and, within months, the lesions had disappeared. This inspired Karen to help others educate themselves around the possibility of cancer clinical trials saving or extending their lives, and Karen’s Club was born.
Despite personal connections to their startup ventures, the founders were aware that their efforts would be strengthened by research to investigate the effectiveness of their proposed tech solution(s). My responsibility was to provide just that. Over the course of the summer, I worked
with founders to outline research questions that they wanted insights into and then pursued that research towards two ends: First, to provide the internal team with academic findings to help them make design decisions around their tech solution, and, second, to provide the venture itself with research that could be externally published or displayed on their websites or other client-facing materials in order to build trust.
The overarching theme of my contributions over the summer was to prompt founders to think about ethical uses and considerations for their technology solutions. These often included discussions around responsible data collection, usage, and privacy. One such activity was a workshop inspired by the Institute for the Future and the Omidyar Network’s EthicalOS Risk Mitigation Checklist, which encouraged founders to think critically about the risks that may arise through the uses of their technology*. Venture teams were particularly concerned with mitigating the potential surveillance of vulnerable communities due to some requests from partner organizations to share sensitive data. Of course, these concerns are complex and multifaceted, but teams reported that it was helpful to have preemptive discussions around technology development and usage.
Two startups ultimately requested research writeups, which culminated in the following end-of-summer reports:
Venture Domain Research: How Ethical Uses of Technology can Mitigate Systemic Inequality for Early-Stage Startups
Karen’s Club: Racial and Ethnic Group Participation in Cancer Clinical Trials
Touchdown NYC: The Influence of Social Support on Reentry Success
Technology has the potential to significantly mitigate pervasive poverty-related issues, such as lack of education, employment, housing, and healthcare. The efforts of Blue Ridge Labs empowers ambitious New York City residents to combat these critical topics through the development of technology models which provide resources and community building. It is my hope that my involvement this summer strengthens ventures’ understanding of the social landscape as well as inspires strategies to design their solutions. From high-quality healthcare and internet access for underserved folks to education and mentorship for incarcerated individuals, it has been an honor and a privilege to contribute to the efforts of this year’s Catalyst teams. I’d like to thank my team at Blue Ridge Labs as well as the organizers of Cornell Tech’s public interest tech fellowship for a wonderful summer experience.
*For more information around ethical technology resources, feel free to reference this list I created for team workshops.