National Black Justice Coalition — a project recap
Bringing together organizational efforts to empower Black LGBTQ+/SGL communities with the NBJC platform
National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC) is a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C. dedicated to empowering Black LGBTQ+ and Same Gender Loving (SGL) people and people living with HIV/AIDS through federal public policy advocacy working to end racism, homophobia, and LGBTQ+/SGL bias and stigma. The nonprofit leads several different initiatives advocating for important social causes, ranging from employment non-discrimination to criminal justice.
COVID-19 has once again highlighted how Black communities are disproportionately affected by social, economic, and political injustice in this country. While only 13% of the national population, Black Americans comprised 22% of COVID-related deaths in the United States. Police brutality continues to disproportionately endanger Black lives, and without activism, the justice system continuously fails to protect the lives and rights of Black Americans. LGBTQ+/SGL individuals also face a variety of hardships stemming from social stigma and discrimination from peers, family, and the system as a whole. This leaves them especially vulnerable to homelessness, inaccessibility to healthcare, and legal injustice.
The injustices that Black and LGBTQ+/SGL communities face on a daily basis makes it even more important that Blueprint works with advocacy organizations like NBJC aiming to dismantle racism and homophobia.
To empower Black LGBTQ+/SGL communities, NBJC focuses its efforts on three main initiatives:
- NBJC Engage: Series of events highlighting community engagement and power building with NBJC’s members to discuss change and fostering consolidarity with Black LGBTQ+/SGL community leaders.
- Power and Policy: Initiatives like the Policy Agenda and Protest to Policy are used to highlight the importance of intersectional advocacy that ensures everyone is able to thrive in our nation, as well as learning about the opportunities to sharpen skills and develop tools to make change.
- NBJC Thrive: NBJC Thrive houses NBJC’s Education, Research, and Health and Well-Being divisions, focused on building visionary and liberatory solutions and communities beyond what we already know, something that needs to be, and is already being, shaped by Black LGBTQ+/SGL people themselves.
The Problem
NBJC does much of its work through connecting its wide network of civil rights, advocacy, and social justice organizations to people seeking different forms of support, resources, and communities. Current tech tools do not fully support NBJC in its unique community operations, posing barriers and limitations in implementing and growing their programs.
In the words of NBJC:
“We want to connect, nationally, through technology to sound the alarm and work more collectively with entities that focus on constituency.”
The Solution
Blueprint designed and built a web platform that connects NBJC’s partner organizations with individuals so that they can easily share resources, events, and calls to action supporting the Black LGBTQ+/SGL community and individuals living with HIV/AIDS. We used React, Next.js, and TypeScript for the frontend, while we used Prisma.js and PostgreSQL for the backend.
User Research and Design
Our project aimed to support 3 main types of users:
Organizations
- Advertise and promote their events to interested audiences
- Access a network of similarly focused organizations to connect with and share resources
- Become an NBJC “partner” organization
NBJC Staff
- Moderate and select what partner organizations should join the platform
- Approve events that will be posted onto the platform
- Access settings for users such as organizations and moderator accounts
Public Audience
- Search for organizations and events either by location or categories such as age, sexual orientation, or race
- View further organization details such as the organization’s type, work, audience, and other key words
Initial interviews began by communicating with the National LGBTQ Task Force, one of NBJC’s many partner organizations. From our conversations with Victoria, one of the directors, we learned more about:
- the shortcomings in the current means of advertising events
- how organizations were managing their network connections and partnerships
- current efforts to reach out to their audience and community
- what details and information on organizations and events are most essential to communicate
We wanted to combine the best traits of existing solutions to build a flexible, adaptable, and accessible platform that supports NBJC’s individual needs.
Joining NBJC as an Organization
Organizations who wish to join the NBJC platform may sign up and complete an online application form. Through this form, organizations can describe information about their work, the audience demographics they focus on serving, upcoming initiatives, and motivations for joining the NBJC network. Upon submission, they can wait for a moderator or admin to approve their participation in the platform. Moderators and admin must approve all organizations on the platform so they align with the mission of NBJC and serve the communities the platform is meant to help.
Managing the Platform as Admin
Accepting/Rejecting Organizations
After an organization applies to join the NBJC network, moderator and admin users can view all applications from pending organizations, which they may either decline or accept based on their screening criteria (or delegate the decision to a moderator to whom they can assign the application). Admins can also view all organizations currently on the NBJC platform and manually add organizations to their network.
Customizing Application Questions
To maximize flexibility of the organization application process, admins can also add, edit, and delete additional questions on the NBJC organization application. Each added prompt can also include a hint, placeholder text, and a minimum word count, to provide further context to applying organizations.
Managing NBJC Platform Users
The admin dashboard finally provides a view of all organizations, moderators, and admin participating in the NBJC platform. Admins can also invite new users to become moderators, who are then invited by email to assist with NBJC’s operations.
Moderating Organizations
After they are invited by an admin to create an account, moderators can view all organization and event applications. From the organizations shared to them, moderators can either approve or decline applications to join the NBJC platform or create a new event. Declined organizations are given an explanation justifying a moderator’s choice to not add them to the platform.
Finding NBJC Organizations and Events
Upon joining the network, NBJC organizations can now be easily searched by anyone who visits the NBJC website. Site visitors can search organizations by name or browse organizations with certain target demographics, backgrounds, and audiences.
Each organization has a unique profile page sharing their mission, background, team, and contact information. The organization can also publish and edit events that they’re leading so site visitors may learn more about how to become involved with the organization’s programs.
Similar to searching for organizations, users may also search for nearby or popular events. Site visitors can also view a map visualizing the locations of events in any area. Events can also be filtered by the identities, backgrounds, and age ranges that they emphasize supporting, allowing users to easily discover resources in which they can find support and community.
Technical Overview and Challenges
For this project, we used Next.js and TypeScript for the frontend, while we used Prisma.js and PostgreSQL for the backend. Historically, Blueprint teams have used Ruby on Rails for their web-based projects. However, realizing the challenges the nonprofit partners had with continuing to develop with Ruby on Rails, we decided to try a tech stack that relied primarily on JavaScript, a common language used in web development.
One challenge in using a new tech stack was in the fact that we’d have to regularly check for updates in the tools we used. For example, Prisma is a very active development project with continuous ongoing changes. Many times, helpful features were added to Prisma during our development period. However, this required the team to be aware of the changes that were being made and if they justified upgrading to newer versions of our tech stack.
Final Reflections
We’re excited to transfer our project to NBJC, who will be linking it as an external site on nbjc.org and promoted to the nonprofit’s affiliates! Overall, we’re grateful to have built a project for an organization doing so much work towards racial, LGBTQ+, and socioeconomic justice, and we hope our project will allow NBJC to further advance its mission. Despite the challenges of remote development, our team was able to foster a deep sense of community, collaboration, and support, and we appreciate how much we’ve been able to learn from NBJC, our team, and other Blueprint members throughout the past 2 semesters.
Meet the Team
- Frederick Kim (he/him): Project Leader (fa 20)
- Calvin Chen (he/him): Project Leader (sp 21)
- Elizabeth Wu (she/her): Designer
- Bryanna Gavino (she/they): Developer
- Sonja Johanson (she/her): Developer
- Cindy Zhang (she/her): Developer (fa 20)
- Gabe Espinosa (he/him): Developer (sp 21)
- Sami Oh (she/her): Developer (sp 21)
To learn more about Blueprint and our projects, visit our website and follow us on our Facebook page!
All of Blueprint’s work is open-source because we believe in building technology that makes us more open and connected. You can view the NBJC app and the rest of our projects on our Github.
Special thanks to Frederick Kim, Calvin Chen, and Elizabeth Wu.
