Has anyone in here ever felt isolated in a room full of people?

Have you ever felt the distinct feeling that you didn't belong in a space?

Even though you have similar experiences and credentials, as many of the people in the room toe hold those thoughts?

Because I want to tell you a story that kind of shapes how I think about inclusion One day long before diversity, equity and inclusion were ever even conversations that we had in tech, I learned what I feel is the foundation of inclusion from one of my best friends from college.

We were at an event that she was hosting, and at one point I sat back and watched terrifying ways to engage with everyone in the room as a raging introvert myself, I was in all at the end of the night, I asked her, Why does she put so much effort into engaging with everyone there?

To my introvert eyes, it just seemed exhausting, and she said I know what it's like to feel alone in a crowd full of people.

Loneliness is the worst feeling, and I don't want anyone to feel that way when I'm around, that really stuck with me.

But it will be years before I would really relate to that and could also do something about it.

I've worked in tech for over 20 years, and while I've had some amazing experiences I could only have had in Tech as a black woman, it has been at times isolating and also honestly spirit draining.

And as long as I'm here, I don't want anyone else to ever have to feel like that.

So almost seven years ago, I started this journey of making room for people who are underrepresented or, as I like to think, underestimated in tech by creating organizations and events meant to empower and showcase marginalized people.

So Arlen Hamilton, BC extraordinaire, created these T shirts for people underrepresented people in tech with the underrepresented part, striked out and replace what underestimated.

So I don't come up with that, Um, but But that's a term that I like to use so kind of at the beginning of this journey I started the Atlanta network of Women who code in the summer of 2013 and I'd love to tell you this was an intentional part of my journey.

But it wasn't a friend of mine was going to start it and then found that she would be moving to the Bay area.

Um, shortly after.

So she was trying to convince me to started in her place, but I was doing my best to run from it.

I had worked with nonprofits and user groups and meet ups, and I knew how much work it would be.

But I also didn't want Atlanta to be excluded from the very important progress we were making with women and tech simply because I wouldn't step up and organized women who coat there.

So she brought down the big gun.

Elena, who is originally from Atlanta, um came down from the Bay Area and together they convinced me that I wouldn't be completely terrible at it.

And then even after I started it, I plan to just started and not mess it up long enough for someone else to take it and run with it.

But 6.5 years later.

I'm still a director there and something I started noticing soon after.

Women who Code Atlanta started really growing is that our presence in the Atlanta Tech community started changing the conversations and experiences people were having.

And now the Atlanta Network of Women Who code is one of the most diverse and active networks globally.

Our local leaders have worked really closely with the larger Atlanta Tech community for 6.5 years to make sure our members over 4000 strong have a seat at the table.

We are making our mark on one of the fastest growing tech startup ecosystems in the country from women who cold.

We created this conference call We rise, which was a women in tech conference in Atlanta and the gold there was.

This actually came about strictly from listening to our members.

We had had, ah, hackathon all women hackathon that had a day of workshops that I was telling everyone like This is not a conference.

This is not a conference.

But everyone was like that, but a lot like a conference Erica.

Um and so after it, people started asking for, like Okay, so when are we really gonna do a conference if that's not if that wasn't it.

And so that's where we rise came from and we had a great time doing.

We rise.

We really wanted to make it an intersectional event on, and I think we did that.

But there were still some issues and some conversations we weren't having.

And so we created a completely different event that started last year with Factor Tech, and we really wanted to make this make sure that we went beyond the conversations around women in Tech.

Um, something that we find a lot is that when we have conversations around women in tech, people don't dig into the intersections and the different groups within women in tech.

And when you stop at one say identity, the largest group in that identity is going to have most of the benefits.

So a lot of times when you hear women in tech, what really happens is that you make games with white women intake, but you don't make a lot of gains with different ethnicities, people with disabilities, people who are members of the LGBT community.

So we really created re factor to really dig deeper and go beyond kind of just surface level diversity and inclusion.

And then from there, I also started getting involved with a lot of the incubators and accelerators in the community and really trying to find ways to make, um, founders and funding more diverse and inclusive as well.

So what this is is the story of my experiences and how I have used them to create more inclusive spaces in Atlanta and in a lot of the organizations I'm a part of.

So the first thing is you have to find and listen to your audience.

This is deceptive, deceptively crucial point.

So I'm gonna spend probably the most time here, and you're probably wondering like, um, Erica, did you submit this talk?

Come all the way to Hawaii, walk on this stage and just tell all these beautiful people to listen like we don't know how to do that.

The thing is that this is Loki High key.

The most important part about getting involved with diversity, equity and inclusion.

Finding your audience means that you individually may not represent the audience that you're trying to be more inclusive of.

If her is this, you are a white sister heterosexual men or women in Tech, you may not be representative of the audience you need to listen to to make a space more inclusive for marginalized people.

In Tech, I do a lot of work with career changers, boot camp grabs and people who are new to tech.

But I've been in Tech for 20 years, and I came through what many would consider a traditional path and tech.

So in the case of working with career changers and folks who are coming through tech and nontraditional ways, I'm not representative off the audience.

I'm seeking to include, so I have to listen really well there.

And then you have to actively listen to that audience, not just here, not just make them feel heard, but take in and process what they're saying.

I don't know how many times has happened to me personally, or I've heard it happen to someone else from a marginalized background where they will share a uniquely hurtful or maybe discriminatory experience that they've had and the people they're talking to will immediately respond with.

I've never seen that.

Let's dig into that a little bit just because this person trusted you enough to share their lived experience.

A piece of their trauma with you doesn't instantly make you the expert on their lived experience.

So how does immediately asserting your lift experience helped them?

Well, you may have inadvertently helped them understand that they can't trust you to respect their story.

What you may have unintentionally done is invalidate their experience because it's not one share by you or by the larger group.

And listening includes taking it all in ideas, suggestions, feedback and criticism.

I follow Franklin Leonard on Twitter, and he recently tweeted If you aren't ready for criticism from a community you make art about, maybe you're not ready to make art about that community.

And that really made me think on my experience as a community organizer and also just some of the recent events that have been happening in the local Atlanta community.

And I responded with this.

This is also true of organizations and events.

Taking and processing feedback is a prerequisite to ally ship.

If you can't take him and process feedback from a marginalized community and work with that community to come up with solutions that address their feet back, you are not an ally to that community.

The second thing is you wanna build for your audience.

You want to center the people that you are making space for.

Don't make it about you or your sponsors or local tech companies unless that's your audience.

Focus on the people you are making space for, and I have found that you can't go wrong if you optimize for the most marginalized among those communities, you also want to make sure that you build for Intersectionality.

You may have portions of your audience whose identities are at the intersection of various marginalized communities.

There may be women who are also part of an ethnic minority, for example.

My experiences as a black woman would not would likely be very different than the experience of a white woman or a black men.

You might have someone who is non binary but also has a disability, and their experience at the intersection off both non binary and disabled, is different from identifying as either non binary or disabled.

And again, this was a big reason for kind of moving from an event like we rise to an event like re factor where we could really dig into some of those, Um, intersectionality, ese.

You wanna build for impact?

You don't want to allow the status quo to limit your impact.

You don't want to not do something because this hasn't been done before.

Maybe you're the person that has to do it.

Maybe you're the one that has to push those boundaries in listening and building for marginalized communities.

I have found this to be true.

Intent is much more important than your ego.

You will mess this up.

I have definitely messed it up.

You will mess it up with the best of intentions.

But if your good intentions are stronger than your ego, this will allow you to listen to your audience and apologize sincerely with the focus on the community instead of censoring yourself rather than the ill fated, self centered double down we so often see today.

And far more important than even intent is impact.

And you can on Lee understand your impact by listening and working with that community.

So this is a tweet from a good friend of mine Mecca, who's talking about how companies have been working to bring more black people to their organization without talking to black communities.

and he's talking about another organization, death color being different.

And so I'm also commenting on this by saying, You have to listen to the groups that you were trying to make an impact with.

You can't claim to do great things for community just because you do a thing you have to understand from the community's perspective, the impact you make things actually get better.

How are your results?

Reproducible?

If so, how do How do we scale to understand those answers to the questions you have to listen and work with that community that you're trying to include and another point on impact?

If you cause harm, it doesn't matter that it wasn't your intention to cause harm.

Your impact was harm.

Telling me about your good intentions does not remove that harm you can on Lee.

Repair the harm you've caused by listening and then building with positive impact, not just positive intent.

Then the next thing is you want to get aligned with your team.

You want to determine your mission and values together and make tough decisions with your mission in mind.

So for most of the events that I do in the Atlanta Tech community.

These are the members of my team, my wise and fearless team.

And by saying my team, I don't mean like they are under me.

I am.

I am one, their team.

They are amazing, Um, and for about 90% of the decisions we make, we almost always agree we can almost read each other's minds.

But it's that 10% that we're not quite a line one all the time.

That really makes like coming up with your core values and really writing it down.

It helps when you're trying to make some decisions, decisions like if you want a certain sponsor to be involved with an event, this has come up a few times with us.

We have a sponsor in Atlanta that has reached us, reached out to us since almost the beginning of women who called Atlanta, and they are a company that is, um that works in opposition to the LGBT community community and we have not had them sponsor any of our events because we want our members to feel safe no matter what their background is to feel safe in our office, and so those are the kind of things that having a core values, having your core values written out and having something you can refer to whenever it's a tough decision because nonprofits need money.

And so saying that you're gonna turn down a sponsor and you're gonna turn down the sponsor every time they come to you, that's a that's a big decision to make and saying that you have a mission and core values that support making that decision is really important.

You want to be consistent.

You want to do things like if you're a meet up or use a group, you want to meet in roughly the same place roughly the same time.

You want people to understand what you stand for, so you want to have the same kind of messaging.

Um, so you need to be consistent, but you also going back to building for impact.

You you need to be consistent but not afraid to push the envelope and the next you want it.

Empower new leaders to help you skill your collective efforts.

So this this graphic here is the current leadership of women who called Atlanta.

It started with just me in 2013 and you know, we were doing pretty well for a couple of years there.

We could have just let it be one of those meet ups that just has one organizer just has one leader.

But we would not have been able to do all of the amazing things that we've done if we had not brought one new leaders and they have gone on to do even more amazing things, and I could imagine, because they have their own goals and dreams that they wanted to to aspire to.

More than half of these people are conference organizers themselves.

Conference organizers, conference speakers.

They started their own meet up groups.

They've they've made their impact on the community as well.

And so if you're trying to do more, um, sometimes you, if you're like me, you will try to do all the things and you'll try to do all the things at the same time.

But we're human, and so it's impossible to clone yourself and try to do everything at one time.

One of the best ways to do that is to train other people to lead Um, so that is what we have done with women who Code Atlanta and then you want to scale selectively.

Whether you're working with your team, new leaders, sponsors or partners, you wanna be selective and who you exposed to your audience.

Um, so again, I told you the story of the sponsor that we have not worked with and probably will never work with unless they change their policies around the l G T B Q community community.