ADE Blog - Alliance for Digital Equality | Empowering Communities Across The Digital Divide

CHAOS OR ONE AMERICA

posted 11/14/11

CHAOS OR ONE AMERICA

_{On this past Sunday evening, instead of watching the New England Patriots and New York Jets football game, I tuned into a special documentary narrated and hosted by CNN's Soledad O'Brien entitled " The New Promised Land" Blacks in Silicon Valley. It was a griping documentary that revealed the harsh barriers that both African-American and Latino entrepreneurs must overcome in order to find traction as developers of technology platforms. Furthermore, it also revealed to a larger extent the age-old disparities facing minorities in the private sector - the lack of access to both venture capital and marketing resources to jettison the commercial viability of their goods and services.}

_{In terms of workplace diversity, from the standpoint of minorities employed by Silicon Valley technology companies, their employment diversity is dismal compared to other regulated technology companies such as AT&T and Verizon. This is a sad commentary and will certainly tarnish the legacies of digital technology purveyors if they continue to ignore the cries for greater diversity in both their respective workforce and supply chains. In an interview with Black America Web.com last February, we discussed the long range promises of digitalization as it relates to providing minorities with a platform to overcome decades of income inequalities.}

_{Last week, the FCC launched a program entitled "Compete to Connect", which will go a long way in helping to close the digital divide by providing connectivity and computers to low income children in our public schools. We congratulate the FCC and others for implementing this initiative. It is the first step in a series of public-private initiatives that must be deployed to close the growing economic divide that will continue to spiral out-of-control, especially in underserved communities, if we fail to achieve digital literacy for 100 million Americans. The stakes are simply too high for us to fail as the US economy goes full throttle into transforming itself into a digital-based economy.}

Whitney Young said, "It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one, than to have an opportunity and not be prepared." I saw parts of the documentary and concur with the post here. However, I would like to add that it is important to have opportunities but if we are not prepared for them, they will disappear. It is important that WE prepare ourselves to take advantage of these opportunities in addition to working towards creating others. Last year I participated in a program called NFTE (Network For Teaching Entrepreneurship). They go into high schools in distressed and urban areas to teach youth how to develop a business plan, how to start a business and provide $50 seed capital for each student to implement their plan. Less than 10% of the outside presenters that volunteered relected the communities where the programs took place. All in all, an excellent program, however, we need to do more for our own. (www.nfte.org)

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