Dr. Paulette Brown-Hinds - GeoMedia, the Black Press and Charting a Future Rooted in History

In this electrifying episode we sit down with the multifaceted Dr. Paulette Brown Hines, the founder of Voice Media Ventures and second-generation publisher of the Black Voice News. Dive into Paulette's journey from an English literature professor to a GIS enthusiast mapping Black California. Learn how her work extends to impactful historical tours following the Underground Railroad and promoting Afrofuturism. Discover the pivotal moments that reshaped her media venture, the role of GIS in data journalism, and the groundbreaking successes of her initiatives, like the California census project and efforts to combat racism through data. This episode is a compelling tapestry of media evolution, technology integration, and the unwavering drive to foster thriving Black communities.

Dr. Brown-Hinds GIS Day Presentation

Footsteps to Freedom

Mapping Black California

Combating Racism

Voice Media Ventures

Ignite Leadership Academy

Transcript

0:15

Be black. Be black. Be bold. Bold. Be innovative. Show the world equitable gl. We're coming together as a collective to celebrate people of African descent, the diaspora, and talking about geospatial equity and justice. You're listening to the North Star Gaze, a podcast with intimate stories from GL luminaries. Okay, welcome back to season two of the North Star Gaze. I am really excited about this session today because we get to speak with Dr. Paulette Brown Hines. And Paulette, you've done so many things already in your career that I'm trying to think of how do we describe you? Because you are the founder of Voice Media Ventures. You are also responsible for mapping Black California. But can you tell us a little bit, can you introduce yourself to our audience so that we get the full idea of who you are and then we can launch into some of the questions we have today? Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Erica. It is hard to define my career, trajectory. I started as a, professor actually, of English. Literature was my chosen profession, but I grew up in the newspaper business, so my family has. Owned the Black Voice News here in Southern California, for over 40 years. So I grew up with the newspaper, the community newspaper, and, all of my first jobs were related to that, including editing. I was the subscription manager. I delivered the paper. Everything you can imagine you do with a c paper. I did. And so there just was a point in my career where I decided that I wanted to come back home and I wanted to help build up my community and I wanted to do that through the newspaper. So I currently publish the Black Voice News, second generation publisher of that. And in that work I. Kind of was introduced to GIS after I met Jack and Laura Dangermen, and just was so fascinated with the technology. I had no background in geography. My mother, however was a geographer actually. A bachelor's degree in geography, but I just became fascinated with GIS and so I started mapping black California 10 years ago. Wow. And we've been growing that entity. And then also related to the newspaper is our, underground Railroad study tours. 30 years ago, my mother as publisher then of the Black Voice News started this tour and we take, educators and folks that are connected to the school district on an eight day study tour learning underground railroad history. It's called Footsteps to Freedom. And so that's something I do, it's all related to and comes out of the work of the newspaper. And that's like the best way for me to describe, my kind of career. So a publisher, fascinated with GIS and then, history and the work we do with Cultural Tours is just a part of that. And we believe important work of preserving our history. What an outstanding mantle you're wearing to take on the responsibility for something that your mother started. You've already answered one of my questions, which was gonna be, how did you get involved in GIS, but I wanna talk a little bit about the way you were received at our 2024 Homecoming event because you were one of our keynote speakers and we really appreciate you taking time to be part of that event. But tell me why was it important for you to be a part of North Star of GI S'S homecoming event? I, so I was there at the beginning of North Star when Clinton was thinking about it. And actually when the first time I met him, he said, that he was inspired by the work we were doing with mapping Black California. And so anytime I can support North Stars activities and events, I do, and I was just honored to be asked to speak about the work that we do. It was totally surprised to be asked, but also excited to share really the work we're doing with the footsteps to freedom in particular. I don't get a chance to talk about it a lot. My work with my brother, my younger brother, Hardy Brown II on the tours, and he spends every single day either thinking about it. Speaking about it working on it, but a lot of people don't know. That's also something that I do and I've been passionate about and been working on it for actually the, almost the entire 30 years that we've been doing it. Wow. This is awesome. Thank you so much for that. And thank you for being part of Homecoming. It's important to our community to hear voices like yours. The other thing I was excited about was the theme and the concept about Afrofuturism. Literature had always had me thinking about, I actually used to teach Octavia Butler's Kindred in my literature class. So I actually have the new book that's out A few rules for predicting the Future. Her, she did like a short piece, but it's a beautiful book that's out by her. But I always thought about the importance of looking back to move forward and that concept Afrofuturism, that's tied to Sankofa the idea of learning from the past. So that theme resonated with me.'cause I was excited to be able to share some thoughts when I was asked, oh wow, it's radio. They can't see that I am grinning ear to ear 'cause I'm a total Octavia Butler junkie and fan. You totally are speaking to me right now. I love her work. And it's so funny, my husband's a playwright professor of Theater Hines, and he would just read Octavia Butler for me. I was like, I'm teaching this, and I was always reading it to think about how I'd incorporate into to classes. But this I find myself looking at innovators, like her, just to help ground me in the current time we're in. And like that book I'm predicting the future. And one of the, like the first thing is look towards the past, and so the work we do with the Underground Railroad footsteps to freedom even with the newspaper and preserving history I think is like important grounding for right now. The kind of volatility that we're seeing in the United States. I guess it's rippling across the globe. But yeah. Thank you so much, Paulette. And I think one of the key things that really sparks me about your work is how it really feels like you have an entire ecosystem. It's an entire value chain in how you look at media and how you present this information. And so I'm curious from your first engagement with, Jack and Laura at Esri and how you're looking at mapping currently, when it comes to data journalism, how has that changed over time and are there pivotal moments that changed how you look at maps or how you look at GIS when it comes to data journalism and the work you do at, mapping Black California? Yeah, let me, so that's a good question. I will be very honest. I did not understand that you needed data for maps. I just, I wasn't a science person. I wasn't a, I was, it was literature, straight literature, and so I, I just didn't think about what it took to create maps and the need for the data to build maps so that was like my first aha wait a minute, and we need to have good data. We need, especially with African Americans, disaggregated rate by, by, by race. And I care a lot about our local. Geography. Where I live in Southern California is, it's a wealthy state, but we live in one of those pockets that is under-resourced. And so geography and how resources flow was also like something top of mind for me. So race on one hand, but then, physical geography in a state and region on the other hand. And so I did not understand, at first, learned that we need better, we, so we started talking about access to data. Like we needed either better data or access to data that we did not automatically have access to. So anyway, I had to put together a team because I did not know how to use the technology. I loved Esri because. There are all these tutorials and they're great at assigning you a mentor who helps, geo mentors. And so I ended up with my team learning, like none of us had GIS experience. I'm the one who has the least amount of experience now that my team is assembled. I have ideas, we talk about the projects we wanna work on, but my team has all different backgrounds, they've come to us, been interested in what we're doing and learned. GIS from mainly Esri tutorials for the most part. But when it comes to like where we are now versus when we first started, I was intrigued by, I think it was Arc, GIS hub, like the data hub. And that was really the first thing that hooked me. I went to an ESRI partner conference in Palm Springs, and I asked, can I just sit in on, these different workshops and there was one on the hub, and I think it was the city of Los Angeles that helped develop it. And I looked at how residents could register and they could help contribute to the data, they could identify needs in the community and work, within this framework of GIS to help make the community better. And for me, it was like a light bulb moment of that's what a community news organization does. And so I saw that hub is if you were to take a community news organization that was doing the work, centering community and helping solve problems, find solutions, engage them in that this is what it would look like if you did it in a digital space. And so that was my first can we build a hub? So we started thinking of things like, what data do we need? What does a hub do in a community? And we found just challenges for us in finding data and also understanding what data we needed. So we started building relationships with black led organizations. Those doing like systems change work. Because when we think of solutions for communities, for us, we think of folks who are working on changing the system because this system was not designed for us to thrive. We know that. And and so we were like, who are the folks doing that work? What data do they need? And so we started there, we called it the Hub, and then Covid hit and changed everything for us. We were in the process of working on census. We actually were hired to work on the 2020 Census California. And we were focused on building a hard to count map. That was like some of our first work. That was actually our first big project because we knew that, African Americans, black Californians were one of the hardest groups to count. So we wanted to identify where they are and then help create a kind of tool that community organizations who were doing census work could use to reach. So that was like our original work. And then as I mentioned, COVID hit and we were looking for the data on how the impacts of covid were impacting our community and. We kept seeing information from, other cities, in other states, kinda in Chicago, New York, big cities that had larger black populations. And we could see that it was, impacting, black Americans, at a higher rate, like their frontline workers. They had existing conditions that, had comorbidities when it came to Covid, but we couldn't find any data in California. And so one of the first things we did, and this was in partnership with news side of our business the Black Voice News, our editor, we wrote an article about it, and ended up actually getting the governor to start, asking for the counties to access the data on covid by race. First of all, there's so much in that answer. I know. Sorry. There's so much in that answer and, but I wanna take a step back because you jumped in at the point where you wanted to create a map and you didn't know that there was data needed to create the map, but something happened before you wanted to create a map. What was going on in your organization that led you to begin using maps as part of your deliverables? Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. When you think of community journalism, community news, you don't think of data journalism, right? Data journalism is something that kind of larger, more established news organizations, have a team to do and have been doing historically. And so at the beginning I still didn't understand the connection between data journalism mapping and the work we were doing as a community news organization. I think what attracted me to it was, one, being able to tell stories that had the, it one thing to tell kind of anecdotal stories, but it's another, it's to really focus on like the facts and the data. And I was thinking, okay, here's like technology that allows us as a small newsroom to do this. And I actually saw an article around that time that was talking about small newsrooms being. More nimble. And this was globally, so this was a, it was about an article about a newsroom in Europe somewhere that had a small team of five. And they were doing some of the best data journalism. And they were saying part of it is because they were small, they could be more nimble and they, could use technology differently than if you were in the kinda a larger organization. So that, just started me thinking as a news publisher. The other thing for me was trying to find a sustainable business model. So community news and local news in general has been in the last, probably the last 10 to 15 years, struggling with, its business model, right? Newspapers are going out of business. We have fewer journalists in communities, all those things. And part of it is the business model of advertising. And local subscribers, but mainly advertising totally changed with social media, right? With the way people, access in the digital space, digital media. And so as a legacy news organization that was printing and still does, I still print a few every week, but printing a paper and distributing it, relying on advertising, local advertising was, I, I saw that as all publishers, that shrinking and going away. And I was like, we need a better business model. So part of what I was thinking was that data and mapping could be a part of that solution for us. So we've built a community news model where one pillar is our data and mapping and the work that that, that team does, supports the newsroom, but it also. Creates its own kind of flagship projects that we're able to get underwriting and philanthropic support for, and can do consulting and can consult at a premium because of the expertise. And so that's where I was as a publisher thinking what can that future look like? And thinking this might be a part of the solution. And it has been, it really has been something that's, we're building a news organization that is thriving because of that kind of shift in our revenue model. This is fascinating to me. So I come from. And advertising and publishing world, especially one that's geared towards black people and listening to what you are doing in this realm is making me connect those points. And, but I think all publishers Are in the business of trying to create a vision of the world that they want to live in. And so , you partially answered this question, but I'm going to try and get you to pull on this a little bit more because you're doing something that I think is creating better outcomes in your community. But how do you think GIS can best be used to make the larger world a better place? How do we scale up what you are doing? Yeah. So thanks for that, Erica. So we are working, our region is Riverside and San Bernardino counties where we're based, but then we have mapping black California that reaches kinda the state of California. So we think about scale a little in the way we build out, projects as an example. And right now, to answer your question, I'll do it on a kind of a more local scale, but you could see how it could be scaled up. One of the things we've developed is a partnership with our black led organizations. These are nonprofit organizations, and there's a group, it's a black equity initiative and they have a black equity fund. They've raised millions of dollars to support the development of and up skilling of black led organizations in our region. And one of the things that we recently wrote and was awarded a grant that will help those organizations better access data and information so that they can do a better job. They have the data to support the work that they're doing on behalf of the community. So we're thinking strengthen those organizations. And there's nobody really doing that specifically for black led organizations. So we're working with our local group, but we're also working with what's called the California Black Freedom Fund, which encompasses all the state of California with a similar, concept. But we're looking at developing tools that will help these groups better access the data they need. So if they're doing work on housing insecurity and they need data to show who's impacting for instance, in, LA County, 40% of the unhoused are black, right? We're less than 12% of the population so and where are those people in Los Angeles County as an example? I just wanted to use that one.'cause that one is such a stark, data point. But we, we're, we're working with group of the Sankofa birth workers that work with doulas. The, when you look at black maternal health rates, what does that look like? Locally? We wanna help provide the data so they can make the case for the work that they do and help them improve their chances of getting, larger grants and other support. So we become this part of the team. And like I said, we're looking at ways that we can use generative ai. They help, we're building, we're building like a chat bot where we have our data sets in an archive and. Allow them to query it for information that they need, we can scale that up. So we're starting with this two county area, which actually includes one of the fastest growing counties in our state, but we could do that for the state of California. We actually have over the last five years collected the largest database of black led organizations in the state of California. We have over 600 that are in a database. And so we look at that too as like a way of, okay, once we can do that here in the small, testing it with the small group, we can just then expand that across the state of California. And then I could see that as something that could be, replicated in other states. We always talk about that. How can that be replicated in other states? But that's how we're thinking of. The work and how we can scale it up. And then our role in the ecosystem, right? It's like we can I have a person, once again, she's self-trained, data analyst. She's a self-trained cartographer. We have another project director who, her actual work, she was an educator and a creative writer. So she thinks of how to take data and make sure we're telling the story. How do we tell the story with data? And then we have a whole group of others that we bring in as needed on projects. But that's how we're, structuring it. That's how we're thinking about it. And that's the thing, the role we wanna play in the ecosystem. ultimately to support thriving black communities. That's what we are. That's the goal, right? How do we get to that? I'm very excited by emerging technology and how organizations are using that. You've mentioned generative. I and my mind just, I was like, oh, that would be so incredible. But my mind goes off to I have this struggle. I'm going to talk about my experience or our local experience in Kenya. And the role of media and how we look at media. And so we are in this period where there's a lot of I think in the US it's called police brutality, we call it here. Militarization of the police force. And one of the key things, I look at when it comes to media and journalism. Is that sense of hope.'cause normally when something happens, I fast rush to the media houses I feel like would give the correct story. And now in the current ecosystem where everyone has a phone and you get that information anywhere, And so as you're speaking, I'm just thinking of the role of media. And I keep wondering what's the pathway towards having GIS mainly integrated in media, right? How do we get that, what are we doing wrong in the GS ecosystem that's limiting the mapping and maps when it comes to geo journalism and reporting? So it's a two part question. So there's that. And then the second question would be the role of media and how does mapping enable us not just tell the numbers, but keep the human experiences behind these numbers and the credibility around that as well. How do you tackle those two things? Those are good questions. Things that I think about a lot, especially, I'll start with the, the first question around GIS integrating GIS into media more So I'm a part of organizations that are like big local news outta Stanford that's doing some work with GISI was just asked to speak at an event in Menlo Park. So in Silicon Valley next month where we're talking about GIS geo journalism data journalism, and so there are people who are doing it. I think that part of the challenge is just the nature of the disruption of our industry and resources. For the industry. And so most people can't afford to. hiring somebody who specializes in this. Like for me, it's been a homegrown We've developed a good team, but it's taken time. And they didn't come out knowing data journalism. they weren't journalism folks. They weren't data folks really. And they weren't mapping people. But I think because of my vision for it and I invested quite a bit of the resources until we got to this point now where we're meeting budget, we're meeting budget in February for the year but it took time to get there. And there's, I think when most media organizations, especially in the local news space, you just don't have that kind of. Time or resources to devote. And, we pay our folks well too. I pay them a lot more than actually my, they get paid more than the jour journalist because of the skillset that they've developed and what we're able to do with that skillset. So I think that's part of the challenge. I've been working though with organizations that are introducing GIS specifically to black students. And we have a reporter who actually works with it's a nonprofit organization and they teach young black girls. It's called, this is called Ignite Leadership Academy in in the Inland Empire here in Southern California, teaching them, introducing them to GIS as middle schoolers. What's interesting is it's, we don't have the data yet, but the interest that they have in GIS and going into the field, like GIS we're starting to see some getting degrees, right? but not necessarily where they'll come back and work in data journalism. There's just limited opportunities there. And I think also just in the inability to pay them what they could make in other areas of JIS. So I think that's a part of it. I don't know how to get around that except like the model that we're building is I think one way that folks do it.'cause we're doing that as this, as a small news organization on the storytelling. Question. Candace Mays is our project director for mapping black California, and she has a MFA in creative writing, and she's always thinking of story, where's you can throw out, you can throw out numbers, you can even, create a map, but if you don't understand the story, the data's telling. If you don't understand the story of the map, she's then you're you haven't done your job. So she's always thinking of how do we incorporate, story into the work? Or how do we look at a map and make sure that even on the kind of popups, on the map that is telling, is directing the reader or the person who's engaged with that map. The story. And we, we love story maps.'cause that's an easy way to do it, just the way story maps are designed. But she's thinking about it all the time when we're doing a project or when we're asked to work on a project. So I think you have to, you need a storyteller involved sometimes. It is great. We have our data person and our storyteller working in partnership. And as you mentioned, you have had to reimagine sort of the business you took over from your family over time and trying to keep up with how it's been evolving from then to now. And even with the emergence of technology and how society looks like currently and the storytelling. And so I'm curious on. challenges, if any, that you faced when it comes as you build up this legacy that your mother started, what does that look like? And have you had challenges re-imagining this model and trying to still stay relevant and have community impact, which is what your childhood was built on? What does that look like from a challenges perspective of building this legacy? So what's funny is I normally would tell this story not in a format that my mother can hear. So I'll tell it like in a, I just told it like two weeks ago to a group of global, it was this called Global Forward and it was a group of donors interested in supporting local journalism. So I, I'll tell people 'cause they think, oh, your parents must be so proud of what you've done or what you're doing with the legacy. And I'm like, not not, they may be proud now, but when I started making changes that, that was a huge challenge because I was going from a news organization that was rooted in community, but the stories we told were, of the community event, the Ilion or the debutante ball or the person in the community who passed away and, making sure we have that obituary. Or, we had major issues. I'm not saying we did not, we covered a lot of discrimination, a lot of racism that we saw in police shootings, for instance in our region or corporations that were discriminating against black Californians. So we were telling those stories, but there was still this kind of making sure we covered the events that were happening in the community. And so when I made this shift and we started doing more of these, like bigger projects, exa as an example, we have a platform called Combating Racism that we have. Actually Esri was wonderful. Esri was a wonderful partner and helped customize this platform for us. But we were working with a Starling lab for data integrity at Stanford. It was taking all the declarations that had been made in the state of California of declaring racism, a public health crisis, and registering them on a blockchain and creating a Web3 based platform where you can look at the map, see the declarations. We also were able to do some like web scraping of social media that was related to the declarations and created what we would consider an accountability tool. We also, like what were they saying in these declarations? And now it's a tool where reporters can go back and look at it. And say, okay, it's been two years, or it's been five years, it's been 10 years. What's, what's happening And we are actually working on how we can get other news organizations to, use that tool. So we're doing that kind of work, but that's, we do that kind of work. We're not doing as much of the, something just happened in the community. Are you there to report on it? And so the challenge has been trying to balance that so that the community still sees in the Black Voice News, a community focused paper that is a trusted messenger for them. But also that's, looking at how new technologies can help us even build better accountability tools than just the reporting. So that's been the challenge. it wasn't an easy shift and it was not an easy shift. And as a family business, it was uncomfortable to be making those changes. Same with the tours. I'll tell you our footsteps to Freedom Tours, when my mother did it, it was just a little side business. It was just not even a side business. If we made anything, it was like, wow, we made a, we made a couple thousand dollars. We did one tour, one bus every summer. So it was just our like little, it became like little vacation. Like I would go with my mother, I'd share a room with my mother. We'd just do this tour for eight days when my brother. Got a hold of it. He came home from, he was a, he had been working at Wilberforce university, which is where he had went to school, ended up coming home to California and, started looking at what he could do and he has a marketing background and he got a hold of the tours. And the first first year that he was a part of it, we went from one bus to two. Then he went on the tour, and now we have this summer we'll do four tours with two buses each. So it'll be eight buses. So we went from one to eight where we spend our summer on the road. And at first my mother was not happy with some of those changes. So another what are you doing with the tour? And my brother has really built it into a very viable, extremely viable business. And we also have a collection of artifacts from the Antebellum era. And so we're able to use those as conversations around primary source documents. So my brother takes those into schools throughout the year and, talks to young people, they have slave shackles, we have bills of sale of individuals. We have he has a whole collection of law books from like pre-Civil War. So to, and he has people read these are the laws. Sometimes we think about slavery as only impacting the person who's enslaved. But in those laws that when you read the law books, everyone was implicated. Everyone, if you're a free white person. You taught someone to read, you could be jailed, fined I think even if I'm not mistaken, there's potentially corporal punishment. And so he likes to read that.'cause he is we talk about being on the right side of history. And he is like, where would you be? This is the law. These are things that were the law at the time. And so we've built it up into this whole other business once again, not without its challenges because it went from. One vision to this much larger vision. And it It could be difficult. This is gonna be recorded, so mom might actually hear what you had to say. It might, mom. Sorry. Sorry. It's a brilliant legacy. I wanna circle back to something you said earlier in this conversation. You mentioned having had geo mentors that helped shepherd your use of GIS. And one of the things I'm always looking for is, what can we, as members of North Star do? What can we do for footsteps to freedom or mapping Black California? How can we be of service to you? thank you. a couple of ways. I'll just say we've worked with people we'll end up with projects where we just need more hands. Like we need folks with knowledge of GIS. So we can take on a contract or project, and it may just be a, something that's just for a, short period. It may be a three month and maybe a two month. Sometimes it may be six months. And that and once again, we, pay, so one of the things we're looking at is how do we create like a a database of folks who may be interested in working on cool projects. Like the one I mentioned, the races, the combating racism project we worked on. there's so many things that need to be mapped. I'll just as an example in California there was a law passed that is now gone into effect where the. Property deeds that had the racially restrictive covenants where, it was like, if you are black, if you are Mexican, whatever, you can't buy this home. Those are supposed to be redacted in California, like by law now. And so there's a group at Stanford that is building, using artificial intelligence, generative ai. They were building a tool where they could redact millions of documents at a time. And the first thing we started thinking about was, wait, before they're redacted, we need to preserve because, once again, we wanna make sure that you don't that this history is not erased. And so that was one of the, so we called the folks at Stanford Starling Lab and we're like. How can we work on this, but we would need like a team of people to work on it. So things like that come up. If we had access, if North Star had a database of folks would be interested in projects that we could tap into, that'd be great. Another a thing that helped us when we were working on the combating racism platform, was that needed to be this customized, we needed to customize mapping work. And so Esri, so Don Wright, who has just been an advocate, I love Don, we call each other sister, she's been an advocate for our work. So she learned what we needed and she was able to help assemble a team. And so they were able to customize a project that project for us. So that was great. Clinton came on our footsteps to Freedom tour. He's working on his, I think it's Empathy Atlas and the work he's doing will feed into and help support the work we're doing. We talk about our work as historical empathy work, and so any tool he builds any research he does can help us make the case for the work we're doing. Anyone who is interested in, attending the, one of the tours. We always have a few seats that we save, for, like with Clinton, we're like, Hey, come on the trip. And so now you know, he's incorporating that into his work with non with National Geographic. But yeah, that's, those are ways that, people can help. I would add one other thing is that really passionate about the work we do with Ignite Leadership Academy and, they actually have more students than they can handle. So we tapped into our footsteps to Freedom network of educators and they ended up with putting the call outs. We have all of these students who are interested in taking these Saturday classes and they learned GIS they, I think they used a survey, 1, 2, 3 tool. They do story maps, they're I think we used to have Joe Marsh who worked for Esri and his, I think his wife now, they. Volunteered their time to help build out a curriculum for Ignite. And it's, I think it's something that they still use, in partnership now with the, with our journalism work. But any of those projects we just need people who are interested in helping and we're just trying to, create a database where we could access them and say, Hey, this is what we're working on. Send a call out and see if people are interested in helping. We are in the process of trying to get that on our platform. So from your mouth to our ears. Soon. Soon. Coming soon. I just appreciate what you're doing. I look forward to all the, the programs that North Star does. I'm excited about the podcast. We're starting a podcast this year for footsteps to Freedom. And I, just wanna talk about history and the role of the importance of history to when we look at the future and making sure that we don't erase our history and that others don't try to erase our history. And we are, so we're doing a podcast inspired by your podcast. We're doing a, we're gonna be doing a podcast we're launching this year. Oh wow, congratulations. And Paulette, you've obviously had a lot of breakthroughs and through this conversation as you're speaking, I'm just like, oh wow, that must have been a big win and it keeps coming. I think one of the things I read recently was you know how mapping black LA pH was one of the catalysts towards having a bill that was passed to ensuring that data is racially desegregated in California workers' data. And I thought that was such a big win. I should have started with that actually, when you started the Port, but congratulations on having that bill passed in California, being the only state that has that. And so what would you say has been your biggest breakthrough in this journey, and why was that important to you? I think probably the one of the first ones, which was. Being awarded that California census 2020 contract because first off, it was like a seven figure contract and it allowed us to bring together a team that I now have with us that's building out all of these other, cool projects and also thinking about our North Star. What are we really doing? And it's like providing, access to data is like the key to what we do that and it's not just data for data's sake, but to help build thriving black communities. So that was probably the first like thing that we were like, okay, we got something here. And, from there it's just it's grown and we've, we found just so much great support from the GIS community, especially the black GIS community. And I, and I appreciate the support that have gotten from the folks at Esri and, with Jack and Laura at the top, they've become, personal friends and, I remembered we did the work for a couple of years and I realized that I hadn't updated Jack on what we were doing. Like I just hadn't updated him. So I'm like, let me do a briefing for Jack. And I was a JSK fellow at Stanford at the time. So I remember taking the Zoom call while I was up in, in at the Stanford campus, and I just had our team like, Hey, this is what we do and this is what we've built. We support the newsroom in this way. We've built these flagship projects in this way. We've done consulting in this, and we're building it into the sustainable model. And I just remember him just like being shocked happily just surprised. Like you've done so much in this short amount of time, especially starting at Zero Knowledge. And I just, I, and I think part of it is that, like I said, that first project, being able to hire Candace and once again, Candace didn't know GIS, I just said I need a good person who's willing to learn. And who can look at this bigger vision. And she had an education background, she had a storytelling background. And so she's just been amazing in leading us and leading us forward. So that was, the key thing that started all of this at least, as a sustainable business for us. There's a question that we've asked many of our guests, Paulette, I'm going to ask you what was not on your bingo card for 2024 that actually came to fruition. You talked to us about how the organization grew one bus to eight buses. I'm sure that was not something that your parents imagined mom wanted her one week vacation, but what was not on your bingo card for 2024? I did not expect for and I probably should have, but I just didn't expect that we would see The dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, the way we're seeing them and everything, and this kind of, clearly anti-black effort. Like we wanna get rid of blackness. Like they're scrubbing things from federal websites on the history side. Like my brother and I keep sending each other these, text messages. Wait a minute, this World War II veteran is taken off the site. Because, how do you connect even a DEI initiative with a, like a, his, a historical figure because he is it's like this erasure of blackness. And we, my brother sent me another, I sent him one, he sends me one. The other is, and I feared this but I didn't. Fully think about what that would look like. But also the erasure of data that we need. And I, there's this, there was this moment for me where now because of the work we did with the 2020 census and how important, data collection is for all the, all the work that we do, I was like, I fear that all of the data by race, will just start to disappear. And it is, and I was talking to somebody in public health and they were like, oh my God. You have all these efforts now of trying to take those sites and that data and preserve it somewhere by like third parties, right? It is it's like data that should be. Accessible to everybody. People are just trying to right now capture it before it's gone. so our team is like, what does that look like for us? And that's something we hadn't anticipated. So we actually had a call recently where we were talking about our combating racism platform. And, we need to be the ones tracking Five years ago it was declared a crisis and now you're saying it doesn't exist and you're penalizing people who are actually doing that work, right? So people are, they're fearful. There's an intimidation that's happening. And that's what's interesting to me too. So anyway the I that was not in my mind fully. Yeah. Even though, I know who won the election, it was not among mind that it would be. I should have. There was a project 2025, and I think it's, that was the playbook. But I just didn't, I remember looking at the project 2025, but not thinking, okay, gosh, they're gonna just start pulling things and then what does that look like moving forward? And the impacts go even beyond our communities. I think they are doing something to us. They don't understand that by pulling these data resources, they are hurting the country and some hurting people outside of the country as well. Thank you so much Paulette, for gracing us with your presence today. This was a very insightful conversation. We celebrate you, we celebrate the work that you do with media and your journalism. I think your work is very inspirational. And we can't wait to get the podcast as well. We'll be the first subscriber and your biggest supporter. So we can't wait to get to get the first listen to that. And we are definitely here sharing you on and happy to support some of the pointers you've given on how Northstar can support the efforts that are being done by your team. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more about North Star of Gs, check us out on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube at GIS North Star. We want to thank our sponsors of the 2024 Homecoming event, our institutional partner, reg Grid, and our sponsors, new Light Technology, ATech and Black at work. We'd like to thank our keynotes, Tara Roberts, Linda Harris, Dr. Paul Hinz Brown and Vernice Miller, Travis. We'd like to thank Howard University and the staff at the Interdisciplinary Building and Photography by Imagery by Chioma. We also wanna thank our guests for trusting us with their stories. Tara, Linda Paulette, Christian Abraham, Jason Vernice, Stella Beye, Karen, Nikki, George Frank Ladi, Toussant, Victoria. I'm the HBCU Environmental Justice Technical Team. And finally, thank you to the North Star team and our wonderful volunteers. We are your hosts of the season two of the North Star Gas Podcast, which is based on the 2024 Homecoming Conference event. Thanks for listening to the North Star Gaze, intimate stories from geo luminaries. If you're inspired to advance racial justice in geo fields, please share this podcast with other listeners in your community. The intro and outro, or produced by Organized Sound Productions with original music created by Kid Bodega. The North Star Gaze is produced in large part by donations and sponsorship. To learn more about North Star of Gs, check us out at north star of gis.org and on Facebook or Instagram at GIS North Star. If you'd like to support this podcast on North Star of gis, consider donating at North star of gis.org/donate or to sponsor this podcast. Email podcast at north star of gis.org. You've been listening to the North Star Gaze.