Making Values Visible: Building Accountability that Scales Withfriends
It’s never too early to build an accountable, transparent technology company.
We can no longer pretend that building great technology is a moral thing to do. Technology is a disruptor — it changes real people’s lives.
Most of you reading this are deeply involved in the arts: as organizers, supporters, or artists yourselves. We’re all familiar with how gentrification in our cities tears apart the lives of people close to us, and all the people around us we’ve never met.
Sometimes, gentrification happens as a consequence of our work — we band up together and build beautiful community spaces — infrastructure that allows passionate human beings to come together, express their truest selves on our stages, and build robust communities around our work. We are excellent at building powerful community building infrastructure.
But when we build infrastructure without deliberating who it is for there’s a terrible consequence. It reflects and amplifies inequalities in the society around us. That’s how we in the arts community have often made the mistake of making gentrification too easy.
These days, the arts community is evolving from these mistakes. Almost every organizer we know builds accountability into their spaces, by being mindful in their programming, and by being selective in the communities they invite into their doors. This is an effort to not only build infrastructure but make sure it meets the communities that should have access the most.
Let’s bring the same evolution into technology. Building a technology company is like building an art space. Social technology products are powerful community building infrastructure. Our company Withfriends has built infrastructure that brings 10x more funding into independent culture than before, all of it directly community driven for the first time.
This infrastructure has the potential to create drastic change in our cities, and we need to make conscious, strategic decisions about the direction of this impact. We can design the future we know is just, and bring it to life together, starting today. Look around your cities.
Which groups, if they had 10x more funding right now, would build the most hopeful, diverse, and just future for America?
Here’s some ideas:
- Black & brown owned spaces
- Women owned spaces
- Queer owned spaces
- Spaces in underfunded neighborhoods
- All-ages spaces
- Education businesses
- Environmental businesses
- Urban agriculture businesses
- Worker cooperatives
- Grassroots political spaces
These are just some examples — but the Withfriends team is working carefully with advisors to identify the most important and underfunded values to society today that are being left out of capitalism as we know it.
Once we identify those values, we’re going to bring them to the forefront of this whole project.
And then we’re going to get real about execution.
As an organizer, you’ll have great tools to report your success in advancing these important and underfunded values to our cities. And even cooler — by the end of the year, you’ll be able to collaborate in fundraising with other spaces. You can grow membership support not only for your own space, but for neighboring spaces that you believe in, together.
As a member or event-goer, you’ll have tools to discover events & spaces that advance important and underfunded values in your city, and become a part of their support network. You’ll have a beautiful profile that illustrates the impact that you personally create in the city you live in, that you can keep private, or share in public.
As a company, we’ll be focusing on our Jewellers, local community leaders that Withfriends hires to help community spaces succeed at membership programs on Withfriends. Jewellers are very important people in our plan, so we’ll be diligent about bringing the right network of community leaders into the company. We’ll tell their stories, so you know the change each Jeweller personally bring into their cities, on and off their work at Withfriends.
This infrastructure has the potential to create drastic change in our cities, and we need to make conscious, strategic decisions about the direction of this impact.
As a community, we’ll set quarterly targets for cultural fundraising dollars that advance important and underfunded values in our country. We’ll evaluate progress quarterly, and publish recommendations for how to improve next quarter. These recommendations aren’t just internal — they will be for all of us involved in this change, as organizers, members, event-goers, and investors. As of August 1st, we’re already a community of 30k people. As we grow, we’re going to make a massive impact together, by paying honest attention to our own behavior, and learning to improve constantly.
It’s never too early to build an accountable, transparent technology company. We’re excited to have been pushed in this direction by our potential investors themselves! That alone is a sign of a new era to come. As we learn to succeed at creating accountable technology, I hope we’re not only doing that, but helping create an example for the other technology companies to do the same.
Excited about the future of diverse and independent city culture withfriends? We need you to help bring this future to life. Invest in our company at any level from $100 to $25,000, today:
