NP Action - Advocacy through the Media: FOCUS St. Louis (NPT Pilot Project)

Advocacy through the Media: FOCUS St. Louis (NPT Pilot Project)

Introduction

FOCUS St. Louis is a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating a cooperative, thriving region by engaging citizens in active leadership roles to influence positive community change. The organization also functions as the region's citizen's league. With the support of 1200+ members in all twelve counties of the bi-state region, FOCUS develops leaders by providing cutting-edge program opportunities for youth, teachers, civic and business leaders, young professionals, and executives; engages citizens to examine and address critical issues which shape the region and its future; influences community policy by promoting region-wide dialogue and problem-solving, facilitating collaborative initiatives, and informing policy- makers. Our highest priorities in the region are good government, racial equality and social justice, quality educational opportunities; and sustainable Infrastructure.

Background

In 1993, Leadership St. Louis graduates Greg Freeman and Dan Schesch launched the Bridges Across Racial Polarization project, a unique program that improves communication and understanding between people of different racial backgrounds. Small groups meet regularly on an informal, social basis, often in each other's homes. Participants have the opportunity to interact and build relationships with people whom they might not otherwise meet, hear different ideas and perspectives, and increase mutual awareness. To launch a Bridges group, one person of color and one white person are recruited as co-hosts.

FOCUS St. Louis, the organizational home for Bridges, provides co-hosts with training in facilitation skills and background information about racism. Our efforts were focused on developing a "FOCUS on Racial Equality and Social Justice" component of our website to appeal to several audiences, including: a low-income, neighborhood-based community, the 200+ members of the FOCUS Bridges Across Racial Polarization program, a group of high school juniors who were also participating in the Bridges program, and the broader online public.

Level of Innovation

The primary technology vehicle developed for this Pilot Project was a website. FOCUS St. Louis worked with several collaborative partners on this project to develop and design a website that would be accessible and relevant to multiple populations for use to learn about, discuss, and find solutions to issues of racial equality.

Our strategy was to expand the FOCUS website to include a section entitled "FOCUS on Racial Equality and Social Justice." This section would contain information about the pilot project, and would provide content for various forms of interactive discussion. The website was designed to provide quarterly topics of discussion on topics related to racial equality and relevant to the target audiences. Through the website, significant information regarding the current topic is available through numerous links. In addition, site visitors have the opportunity to engage in dialogue via list serve (for the Bridges participants) or via an online public forum. Individuals involved with the Bridges program and those in the community-based program, would all engage face-to-face in addition to online.

Specific website elements included:

Purpose/Objective of pilot project
Listing of Collaborative Partners
Toolbox (helpful hints on interracial dialogue and conflict resolution)
Resources and Links related to interracial dialogue and community development
Explanation of how visitors to site can join in discussion
Feedback form for visitors to the site to comment on the site or offer suggestions
Quarterly topic of discussion (first topic is school desegregation) which includes a brief explanation of the topic and related information and subtopics
Public forum with registration form
Topic-related resources and links
Local profiles related to the topic of discussion
Shared solutions bulletin board

Measures of Success

Our expectation was that we would develop a cutting-edge form of interracial dialogue in an online format that would enhance face-to-face interaction. Through the website, we hoped that individuals would be led from concern to action via the process of issue education and dialogue. We expected the "Racial Equality and Social Justice" website component of the FOCUS site to be an entree into an interactive website experience for our organization, its members, and the public at large.

We have been effective as an organization with our past technology and very effective with our public policy activities. As a public policy organization, we are highly effective at engaging citizens to address difficult policy issues and craft solutions for change through a consensus-building model. We have also been effective at impacting change through advocacy. However, we believe we can be significantly stronger in terms of advocacy, and are purposefully working to achieve this through our newly adopted organizational strategic plan.

We have been less effective with respect to our technology activities. While our computer system is a good one, we are continually facing bugs, problems, obstacles, and limited financial resources for upgrades and enhancements. We have not been able to develop our site into a fully, interactive, regional citizens' website. We continue to work to make this happen, and with our new internet provider, we believe we will have greater capacity and likelihood to effectively implement our internet goals.

Due to a number of internet provider problems, we were not able to fully implement this project within our year-long timeframe, despite managing to design the website components and line up our collaborative partners. The design and development of this project with our collaborative partners, however, was a very positive experience.

We were able to bring together a disparate group of organizations and individuals, build trust with one another, and develop clear expectations of one another as partners. We also learned a great deal from one another and from our experience working together. We also wrote, designed and developed a website for this project that we all contributed to and with which we have been pleased.

A Youth Bridges Across Racial Polarization group consisting of high school students who participated in the FOCUS Youth Leadership program this past year was developed. In-between regular face-to-face meetings, these high school students registered to participate in a Youth Bridges electronic list which allowed them to opportunity to dialogue and discuss different issues regarding race. The group also had the opportunity to utilize videoteleconferencing equipment to interact with others both near and far on the issue of race.

Working in conjunction with the Community Information Network, St. Louis Association of Community Organizations, Shiloh Education Center, and Saint Louis University, a collaborative community-based component was designed to encourage folks living in the Vandeventer Neighborhood of St. Louis City and one or two other local neighborhoods to engage in meaningful dialogue about important and relevant issues for them. This created an opportunity for these individuals to dialogue through an online public forum on a key issue that they are interested in better understanding or addressing through action.

This project has enhanced our public policy work more from an increased awareness and lessons learned perspective than from a capacity perspective. We believe that upon full implementation, this system will enhance our public policy capacity by drawing significantly more people into discussion, education, and action on issues of individual and systemic racism in our society. Furthermore, we are increasing our public policy capacity by drawing in a segment of the community that technology so often passes over those in low-income neighborhoods and communities.

Lessons Learned

We faced numerous obstacles and issues during our experience, and we have learned many lessons. In trying to determine how to most effectively engage low-income communities in this project, we were confronted with several issues that we had to work through in the planning phase, but have not yet had to address in the project's implementation. These included:

Finding a comfortable, convenient, accessible location equipped with computers that are internet-connected and readily available to individuals when convenient.
Recognizing that many individuals who live in low-income communities have little spare time to engage in activities outside of working, supporting, and caring for their families.
Recognizing that those who do make the time to participate in the project need to be engaging in work that is meaningful to their individual lives and that will allow them to directly impact change.

We addressed each of these issues by drawing in collaborative partners to participate in the development of this project from the beginning. Several of the collaborative partners that we brought in either worked in or worked directly with our target neighborhood. Through our work together, we were able to resolve the above challenges.

One of our partners was a neighborhood pastor of a local Baptist church that housed a computer education center. This site became our focus for bringing this project into the Vandeventer neighborhood in the City of St. Louis. The non-neighborhood-based collaborative partners were asked to attend neighborhood and public meetings so that they were able to get a better understanding of the residents' concerns, interests, and perspectives; and many of our collaborative meetings were held at the Baptist church so that we could all became more familiar with the neighborhood and its surroundings.

At our collaborative meetings, we engaged in significant discussion about what title and topics would draw low-income residents and what would be a detractor to them. It was also reiterated repeatedly by our neighborhood-based collaborative partners that our project had to lead to action or it would be of no interest to low-income participants. The notion of engaging low-income individuals in interracial dialogue for the sake of better interracial understanding was not of primary importance. Rather, providing opportunities for participants to learn about, engage in, and act upon issues that were directly relevant to their lives was where we needed to direct our attention.

Another obstacle that we encountered was with regard to the Bridges Across Racial Polarization( program participants. A number of individuals were not fully comfortable with the idea of participating in the pilot project. This was the case for two primary reasons:

The notion that interracial dialogue should really be an in-person, face-to-face experience. Race can be hidden in an online interchange.
A number of the Bridges participants were not fully comfortable with or did not have easy access to the internet.

We addressed the first obstacle by building a registration form into the design of the site for individuals engaging in the interactive components of the site, so that they were not participating anonymously.

With respect to the second obstacle, when we actually get the site online, we will let all Bridges participants know of its availability and let them experiment with the technology themselves. We have also compiled a list of free, public computer labs in our region that we are able to distribute to project participants without access to a computer or to the internet. We believe that as individuals explore the site, their comfort level with the technology and with this particular form of interracial dialogue will increase. We have also built a feedback form into the design of the site so that participants can relay their concerns, experiences, and ideas for improvement in order for us to continue to refine and strengthen the site.

The third major obstacle that we encountered concerns our now former website provider's unwillingness to cooperate with us to finalize the project. We have had the site designed for some time, but have not been able to get our provider to develop any interactive components for our site. We are addressing this by switching to another internet provider, but it has taken us some time to find an appropriate match for someone and us who could work with us. Our staff is not strong in terms of technological understanding, so we have been highly reliant upon our provider and designer up until now. With the assistance of our new internet vendors, FOCUS staff will now be able to handle the monitoring and updates to the site.

For organizations without a significant base of technological knowledge, particularly with respect to the fast-paced world of the internet, it would be helpful to have some kind of technical support or assistance with the implementation process. We have been extraordinarily reliant upon other entities to implement our project because we do not have the technological expertise or knowledge to have implemented it on our own. This has also been an interesting learning process for us because of the nature of the work our pilot project is addressing interracial dialogue online. There is an implicit tension in the very premise of this project the challenge of overcoming difference through dialogue by way of a vehicle in which individuals communicate without physically seeing or being with one another.

Next Steps

Because of our problems with our internet provider, we had the good fortune to find and secure a vendor that we feel will be able to appropriately handle our nonprofit organization's website needs. We anticipate having our system for this project up and running in March/April 2000. FOCUS has applied for additional funding in conjunction with our collaborative partners, to sustain the interracial dialogue technology partnership that we have begun through this pilot project. We have recently upgraded our computer software, and are finalizing our switch to a new internet provider and website design firm. With respect to technology, we have significant plans for further developing our capacity. We are also launching a new initiative to engage citizens across our region in public deliberation and discussion in conjunction with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and we will be further enhancing our technological capacity through that partnership.

FOCUS works in three primary areas: leadership development, citizen engagement, and community policy. Our new strategic plan outlines a course of activity and growth in each of these three areas. Thus, our planned public policy activities include: developing a means for low-income individuals to have greater access to technology, critical information regarding issues relevant to their own lives, the opportunity to engage in discussion and solution-sharing with others online regarding these issues; creating an online vehicle through which individuals can address critical, systemic issues of racial inequality such as school desegregation and quality education, economic parity, neighborhood development, and so forth.

The website will connect individuals to websites of local community/ neighborhood-based groups working for change and an additional forum where solutions and change strategies can be shared. An information-sharing or coalition-building gathering may be held as a way of bringing those who have interacted online into a face-to-face, action-oriented forum. This will provide a way for individuals to learn about and develop meaningful solutions to the issues that directly affect their lives, and will serve as a tool that leads individuals from information gathering to dialogue to action that can affect local community change.

[This is one of six nonprofit project evaluations supported in part through OMB Watch's Nonprofits' Policy and Technology (NPT) 1998 Nonprofit Technology Pilot Projects for effective use of technology in public policy activities.]