Our Fight For Change Is Not Over
👋 Welcome
Hello friends! Can you believe it’s already February? We can’t either, but because it’s still the beginning of the year, there’s no better time to get involved and be engaged.
Hate Crimes Against Asian Americans
Last weekend was Lunar New Year. It is one of the most popular holidays in Asian culture. Lunar New Year celebrates family, health, and new beginnings.
We are deeply saddened by the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans in the United States — especially around this time of celebration. Anti-Asian sentiments resurfaced with the spread of COVID-19. Throughout the pandemic, Asian Americans have experienced racially motivated attacks. Code for San Jose does not condone racism or violence of any kind.
We want to reaffirm our support to everyone of Asian descent in our community.
The work to promote racial equity is unfinished. Asian Americans are a culturally diverse group representing a multiplicity of experiences. Please include Asians in your anti-racism work. Support local Asian-American owned businesses. Below we have provided educational material to aid your cause. Please speak out when you see injustice.
Resources:
Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center
Southeast Asian American Community Hub
Hollaback Bystander Intervention
GoFundMe page for Vicha Ratanapakdee
Anti-Racism Daily’s newsletters Address Anti-Asian Hate Crimes, Support Asian Americans Through COVID-19, Support Chinatown during COVID-19 and Reject the Model Minority Myth
COVID-19 Vaccine
COVID-19 vaccine is available to individuals over 65 in Santa Clara County. Please check their website for more information about eligibility and how to schedule an appointment. Remember to stay home, wear a mask, wash your hands and be 6 feet apart.
Black History Month
February is Black History Month which promotes the contributions of Black Americans. After a year of racial protests, Black Lives Matter and the work to promote racial equality is unfinished. It is critical that we keep up the momentum by continuing to educate ourselves and fight for racial justice. Click here for resources Code for San Jose provided in our June statement.
Resources:
Rachel Cargle’s #DotheWork
An Antiracist Reading List
Anti-Racist Resources from Greater Good
Support Black Owned Businesses
Support San Jose Black Owned Restaurants
28 Days of Black History
✏️ Code for San Jose Updates
Stephen Jefferson, from Bloom Labs, presented the Bay Area News Collective project at the CfSJ Civic Hack Night on January 21. Bloom Labs will collaborate with 6 newsrooms to assess the diversity of news within the San Jose region to curate and provide diverse and equitable stories. Code for San Jose volunteers are helping conduct research with community members around this news-diversity topic.
Hattie Chau delivered some new Icons for our partner Catalyze Silicon Valley (SV) to use in their property scorecards. She also gave a presentation of healthcare.gov’s design audit with Evan Suarez from CfSJ and other members of the audit team from other CFA brigades to the stakeholders involved in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
Darren Pham wrote some infrastructure as code automation so that project teams can get their website deployed and made public all while using the same shared AWS infrastructure. This helps Code for San Jose quickly iterate on projects in a cost efficient manner.
🍁 Leadership Changes
Thank you to our outgoing leadership teammates, Dane, Yan-Yin, Cesar, Umang and Ashwin, for all of their hard work.
We welcome our new teammates: Teresa: Director of Marketing, Jatel: Director of Member Engagement, Carolina: Assistant Director of Member Engagement, Bri: Newsletter Producer, Anthony, Darlene, Shannon, Connie and Paris: Project Leads.
Open positions: Director of Event Management. Interested? Reach out to Annie on our Slack workspace.
🎉 Code for San José Project Highlights
- 211 Chat Bot team started including chatbot feedback and improving chatbot flow with better matching intents to entries.
- Bay Area News Collective is a new project that will evaluate the diversity and equity of news stories in the San Jose region. The team is working on recruiting participants and creating user and stakeholder questions.
- Open Street Map has more than half of the high priority tasks for the project completed and 6% of the business imports are finished.
- Design Audits for Healthcare.gov team presented the audit to the government agency stakeholders and the project is complete. Great job everyone!
- Catalyze SV Icons team delivered the Catalyze Silicon Valley (SV) team the final assets and the project is complete. Awesome work!
All active projects are looking for volunteers. For more information and project updates, view our civic hack night slide deck.
🌏 Events
The Code for America Summit is May 12–13, 2021. Click here for more information.
Code for San Jose Civic Hack Nights are on Thursdays from 6:30–9 pm. The next Code for San Jose Civic Hack Nights are:
🐰 That’s all, folks!
Join us for our virtual meetups on February 18 and March 4!
To get in touch with us, email us at codeforsanjose@gmail.com, or find us on Slack. If you haven’t joined our Slack yet, go here.)
If there’s someone from your organization who’s not getting these updates, but should be, send them this link to subscribe to our newsletter.
Until next month, take care, and let’s keep up the good work!
Bri,
Code for San José Newsletter Producer
This was originally published on Mailchimp.
