Unbreakable City
Safe spaces cultivate & amplify Chicago’s diverse voices
This feature article appeared in the June 2017 premiere issue of Hyperlink. Purchase a copy.
Hyperlink is produced by Winning Edits.
By Alicia Swiz
Avisual chapter book celebrating minority artists. Pop-up libraries offering insight into the city’s untold history. A weekly public brainstorming session. Chicago is teeming with creatively diverse entrepreneurs creating access points that bridge the gaps in film, design, and civic engagement in order to empower and educate their communities through digital spaces. While each offers a unique take on the city they call home, the nexus connecting their work is undoubtedly clear:
Chicago over everything.
Creating Communal History
In Chicago, everything has a story. Every neighborhood is an anthology of each block’s unique history. And there is always someone who has a tale to add to the existing story. Nell Taylor has spent the past ten years ensuring these stories are told by the people who live them.
“Chicago is a very complicated place,” says Taylor, creator of the Read/Write Library, “but one that still manages to generate incredible amounts of civic love among the people who live here, especially those of us who’ve grown up here and are steeped in it.” Through public programs and nontraditional collection strategies, Read/Write offers a new model for local libraries in which community ownership of content enables individuals to control their own narratives of local histories and collections are more representative of the communities they serve.
In their physical hub, Read/Write Library houses over 5,000 Chicago-area publications, from local political publications to neighborhood pamphlets and city publications, community newspapers and indigenous communities zines. In an effort to create accessibility to the physical collection, Read/ Write hosts pop-up libraries throughout the city to facilitate dialog around what’s missing from the record. Witnessing the way community members talked to each other and to the staff, sharing personal knowledge and stories, Taylor was inspired to develop what she describes as “a formalized system that captures the desire to tell and pairs it with tools for becoming a creator.” The three-part process includes: generating questions, researching and sharing the story, and either rewriting the story to include new or forgotten information or documenting the story it if there is no record. by training community members to discover the stories in their own backyard and add them to the record, Read/Write is building a thriving community history that lives in the past, present, and future.
“We’re interested in tracing these layers and connections down to the neighborhood level,” says Taylor, “because Chicago’s neighborhoods have always been changing — through displacement, migration, white flight, disinvestment, gentrification, changes in industry, redevelopment — and recently as quickly as a generation at a time. Creating a library that allows these changes to be documented in a transparent and accessible way that explicitly opposes the erasure of communities is something that could only have grown out of a city that experiences decline and rebirth as frequently and in as complicated a way as Chicago does.”
Take, for example, the Chicago Young Authors, a nonprofit program that mentors teens through writing, publication, and performance, and whose published work is housed in the Read/Write Library. The work of these students is cataloged in Read/Write’s unique online system which includes the name of the author, the editor, and also the educator. As Taylor explains, “We catalog by everyone who contributed so people will be able to see the ways that individuals influenced one another over time and how ideas spread, as well as geo-tagging everything to the best of our ability so eventually someone could look at everything produced within a few block radius of their house, for instance. by documenting the work of the people who are teaching the next generation of creators we create a concrete network of how influence develops.”
This project is specific to engaging disenfranchised communities and community members, especially teens. Taylor is the first to admit that for people with an interconnected global perspective, the Chicago Young Authors program might seem unnecessary. “but if you’ve never felt safe or had the means to leave your block like many people in marginalized neighborhoods in Chicago,” she says, “being able to see the positive impact and creative expression produced by people with access to your same set of resources and from similar backgrounds is incredibly important to start envisioning these outlets for yourself.”
Supporting Safe Spaces
“Chicago wants you to succeed,” Sarah Minnie Chandler says over coffee in Logan Square, the Chicago neighborhood she calls home. Chandler, 29, is changing the culture of film both onscreen and on set by putting Chicago creatives at center of the city’s ongoing story. Her mission? To cast and hire people of color, specifically women or femmes, in roles and positions that are empowering and fulfilling. Through Minnie Productions, Chandler focuses on collaboratively growing a film culture that creates safe spaces for artists of all mediums. Minnie Productions is not only a woman-owned business but a minority-driven company, something Chandler prides herself on. “We think it’s important to feed our community of local artists,” she says, “so they can continue to create.”
The daughter of a former Chicago police officer and niece of a former alderman, Chandler features Chicago prominently. The city is not only a setting, but a character in her work, the architecture, the neighborhoods, and, in particular, the people that make Chicago great. “Chicago isn’t New York,” she says. “but it doesn’t wanna be New York. We’re Chicago because we’re one of the greatest cities of the world and we fought to be like that. Chicago is a city of hustlers.”
The need for a space to share important and underrepresented stories led to the creation of Hear Us Roar, a visual chapter book that gives artists from different mediums a platform to share in a collaborative safe space built to celebrate what is unique about their contribution to the Chicago creative community. Each story is an original piece pitched by the artist based on their willingness to share the message that they want or need to be heard. It debuted online in May 2017 with the first chapter, “Steps for bravery,” a prose poem about the process of overcoming loss and trauma in the face of personal doubt, written by Chicago native Brittany Julious.
When describing her work and the culture she aims to create on set, Chandler uses language like family, fun, support, safety. “A community should always be a safe space,” she says. “being a minority, a woman or person of color, you always have to work harder. Let’s create a space where you can create, have an opportunity, have fun and not have to worry about having to work harder.”
Accessing Educational Opportunities
Creating a safe space is of vital importance in the digital sphere, and one of the most vital elements of this process is inclusion. Access to technology, technology education, and the skills needed to stay marketable and employable in an ever-changing, media saturated culture is tantamount to the cultural evolution of a thriving community. This is why Lesley Martinez Etherly founded Contexture Media Network, and is committed to countering the hidden injustices in the tech and design markets by working to amplify the voices of the underrepresented communities in Chicago.
“Oftentimes we don’t see the injustice in design inequality,” says Etherly. “Bad brand presentation and website design often is a hidden stumbling block for many people. We come across poorly designed websites and immediately judge them and overlook them. The real issue is the lack of knowledge and skills for the person who has to create their own website because of high design costs and who never was exposed to design theory or industry format rule books.”
Through workforce training and professional development in digital media and marketing, Contexture Media Network offers community leaders and advocates access to digital and technical education that enables them to better serve their community needs. Etherly explains that creating the website builder CNTxTR.co was one of the best investments the organization has ever made — it’s both a product and a teaching tool. “I have seen when doors suddenly open for our students once they begin implementing what they’ve learned about UX/UI design principles,” she says.
In an effort to raise awareness for unsung and overlooked community organizers, Etherly has launched a campaign seeking nominations for a “Tech & Community bridge builder,” people recognized as valuable in their community. The individual selected for the title will be announced and honored in September 2017 at Contexture Media’s first annual Creative Tech Expo, an immersive tech experience integrating wearable technology, robotics, and much more.
Chicago Don’t Break
A desire to connect engaged citizens to the resources that can empower them to action is a key element to Chicago’s presence in defining digital communities. Derek Eder, Steven Vance, and Christopher Whitaker, the founders of Chi Hack Night, know that technology alone can’t solve Chicago’s problems, especially when it comes to murder and violence. “The serious problems of our city, including violence, belong to all Chicagoans,” they stated in a recent Crain’s opinion piece.
This is why, on a Tuesday night in March, nearly one hundred people from all over the city gathered at the braintree Space in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart to engage with former Fox News anchor Robin Robinson. Robinson was recently hired as a consultant to the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to help rebuild the relationship between the department and the communities it serves. Her interactive lecture, including media clips, personal anecdotes, and current data, focused on key issues facing the CPD, specifically lack of accountability and internalized racism.
A significant part of Chi Hack Night’s work invites community engagement with overwhelming issues like violence or racism, allowing people to participate and feel like they can contribute. No one in that room on this particular evening had the answers for eliminating racism in the city, but creating the space where questions like, “How can we encourage police accountability?” can be asked fosters political efficacy, a belief that your voice matters, and a sense of solidarity.
Eder and his team cultivate the same approach to large- scale community empowerment through dynamic online projects using data to engage Chicago residents on specific issues.
“No Recycling?” asks one site, MyBuildingDoesntRecycle.com. It invites residents to identify buildings that don’t provide recycling services, which are then plotted on an interactive map by neighborhood. Another dynamic website by DataMade was worked on and presented at a Chi Hack Night event, ChicagosMillionDollarblocks.com. It hosts a staggering visual representation of Chicago’s “War On Neighborhoods.” The site visually represents the city’s segregated and low-income neighborhoods, calling attention to areas where millions of tax dollars go toward higher incarceration rates for drug-related crimes.
Then there’s the Twitter service Tweechable, a project born from one of Chi Hack Night’s breakout groups. Using online harassment and ignorance as a platform for education, Tweechable is a bot that will fight online battles for you: “When an uninformed person bothers you with a common question, you simply tweet @Tweechable about the topic . . . @Tweechable delivers a curated burst of tweets to inform the individual.” With projects like these, Eder says Chi Hack Night aims to highlight important issues and push for change.
As these individuals and organizations demonstrate, Chicago boasts a loyalty that lives in consistent engagement from all community members. It’s a city dedicated to fostering safe spaces for connecting and cultivating a shared history that represents if nothing else, the idea that, as President Barack Obama once notoriously said, “I’m from Chicago. I don’t break,” and neither does the city itself.
Enjoy reading this article? Please give it a clap (or 50) and share it using the icons to the left. When you’re done, check out some of the other great articles from Hyperlink right here, or purchase a print/digital copy of the full magazine at hyperlinkmag.com. Thanks for reading!
