Bridging the Gentrification Gap: #SiliconValleyStories

Claire
6 min readFeb 18, 2020

A much-discussed issue in Silicon Valley is gentrification. The effects of the growing tech bubble on the Bay Area’s culture and more permanent populations have been the subject of academic analysis, popular news coverage, and casual conversation alike. I, like many others, have seen it play out in front of my own eyes.

I’ve written about the observations I’ve made about the divide between profitable downtown tech companies and the populations I work with (Title 1 middle schools in South San Francisco). A recent experience I had at work only affirmed those observations.

As I’ve mentioned before, the organization I work for partners with companies and Title 1 middle schools to expose students to careers in their city. In December, we’re approached by one of those corporate partners, a prominent tech company in downtown San Francisco which shall remain nameless out of (ironic) professionalism — let’s just call it Company A — to facilitate a 2-hour volunteer event at the end of January for their employees during a company retreat. They call it a Hackathon, popular in tech culture as a sprint-like innovation competition to develop and finish a software project in a truncated period of time (usually 24 hours or less) that targets a specific problem. They want to do a Hackathon of sorts with some of the students we work with, helping them to work on a project that solves a problem they are interested in.

We agree. Our corporate partners are paramount to the success of our program, and we are always looking to improve our partnerships. So we develop a 2-hour Hackathon workshop suitable for 12-year-olds: the students would be split into groups to work alongside Company A employees to determine a solution to a problem that they are passionate about and then present their findings to the rest of the cohort. We emphasize Problem Solving and Research Skills and encourage the volunteers to guide but not overtake the project.

We send over the workshop plan we had written to the employees at Company A who are coordinating the event on their end. They keep asking for more: they want a minute-by-minute breakdown of the flow of the workshop, examples of projects the students could do, and more detailed instructions to guide the volunteers through the two hours. We give as much as we can, but the more we try to make them feel prepared, the more we feel inclined to remind them that we are dealing with 12-year-olds, and it’s difficult to predict how two hours with a group of 30 7th graders is going to flow. Flexibility is one of the most necessary skills of my seven-person team — the team being the whole organization.

On the day of the event, the whole team is there to support. From my observations, the event is a success. The students choose interesting problems they seem genuinely passionate about, from homelessness to bullying to school lunches to distracted driving, and engage with their volunteers as best they can. On the bus ride back to school, many comment that they enjoyed the workshop and that it was one of their favorite field trips they had gone on with the program. The team had been nervous and we had all hustled to make sure all logistics were in place, but at the end of the day we all walk away sure that it had paid off.

The following week, we receive an email from the event coordinators at Company A. They want to schedule a debrief call with us to discuss how the event went. They send a formal agenda, divided into positives and growth areas of the event, along with a link to feedback they had independently collected from the employees who had volunteered at the event and are hoping to discuss. I click on the link and am navigated to a spreadsheet with google form responses. It’s completely unadulterated, with names attached to each response.

The feedback is soul crushing.

“It was a hectic volunteering experience that didn’t seem very well thought out for the volunteers or student experience. The staff seemed ill-prepared and not knowledgeable in how to facilitate the session. And the ratio of students to volunteers was not great.”

“The introduction to the event didn’t really set the stage well for the activity, or to shed light on who [redacted] is as an organization. I also felt the project could have been more structured.”

“The concept of the activity seemed like a lot to fit into an hour, and I wished that the primary facilitator joined with more positivity (I perceived her to be really stressed out). Also, we had a student in our group who was difficult to work with, and since we are not necessarily teachers or skilled youth facilitators, had a hard time moving the project forward. Additionally, the [redacted] staff member in our group did not help to keep things on track.”

My instinct is to re-evaluate our performance. What more could we have done to prepare? How could we have made it more smooth and organized? What would have engaged the students more and made them more enthusiastic? My heart is in my stomach — we failed. We completely failed.

Then I start to think about it. What exactly could we have done more? We are an entrepreneurial team of seven managing an incredibly complex and expensive program that requires high level partnership management, trauma-informed youth expertise, juggling logistics and expectations in multiple places, and most of all, intense flexibility and on-the-spot problem solving. We put Title 1 middle school students, all of whom are minorities, in the same room as people who work for the companies that have directly contributed to the gentrification that affects the communities these students come from. We are not a giant influential tech company oriented around tangible results with thousands of employees operating like a well-oiled machine. For us, success is a student feeling proud of work that they’ve done, or coming out of their shell as they continue to meet new people, or feeling inspired to explore more of their interests. What Company A seemed to have interpreted as disorganization, lack of structure, and ill-preparedness was actually us doing everything we could to ensure the students had a good experience. What they seemed to interpret as lack of engagement and confusion on the part of the students was actually them thinking deeply about issues that affect their community and communicating them in a way they are most comfortable with. I know. I work with them every day.

I start to understand the divide I was seeing. Company A’s expectations and experience were so far removed from the communities they were doing a volunteer event with: a small non-profit with a finite budget and resources, and most importantly, 7th graders from South San Francisco. They wanted smooth transitions, seamlessly in sync staff, smiling faces without a glimpse of the hectic logistics going through our heads, and angelic middle schoolers who would do as they were told on first command. What they got was a team of seven managing a Hackathon simplified for 30 12-year-olds, trying to manage the expectations of high-achieving Silicon Valley professionals and 7th graders from the other side of town. Those students enjoyed the event and verbalized that they got a lot out of it. As the event was meant to be an act of public service on the part of the Company A volunteers, this can only mean the event was a success.

I feel comfortable speaking for my team: we are open to feedback and criticism. Perhaps once the drama of the whole event has blown over, we will be able to realistically evaluate our performance and come away with real areas of improvement. But at the end of the day, we are a team of seven who are focused on creating a great experience for our students, and it was impossible for us to maintain the order and total predictability that Company A seemed to have been looking for.

This experience only further illustrates the staunch divide between Silicon Valley and those who have lived in it longer than it’s been Silicon Valley. Corporate Social Responsibility is popular among profitable tech companies, but as I continue to interface with these departments, I am finding more and more that they have little to no experience with the communities they are trying to uplift. A deep conversation needs to be had between both populations, and better understanding of each other can hopefully lead to a more united Silicon Valley and real, genuine progress.

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Claire

Philosophy grad, lawyer in training. I write about society, politics, and the human experience, mostly based on reflections of my own humble life.