Microsoft accused of infringing patents related to cloud computing, EPO extends closure of offices and more – IP News Center

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Microsoft accused of infringing patents related to cloud computing, EPO extends closure of offices and more

In this weeks Patent News Microsoft Inc accused of infringing patents related to cloud computing; Mad Dogg Athletics institutes patent infringement suit against Peloton Interactive; European Commission and EUIPO announce the official launch of Ideas Powered for Business SME Fund;

Microsoft Inc accused of infringing patents related to cloud computing.

A company by the name of Daedalus Blue has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft Inc. for infringing its patents related to cloud computing. Daedulus has named five patents in its lawsuit against the tech-giant, namely U.S Patent Nos. 7,177,886; 7,437,730; 8,381,209; 8,572,612 and 8,671,132. The company has filed the lawsuit in the Western District of Texas and is now seeking a declaratory judgment, a permanent injunction, an award for damages and royalty payments.

Mad Dogg Athletics institutes patent infringement suit against Peloton Interactive

Mad Dogg Athletics Inc., a U.S based company that markets bicycles, has instituted a lawsuit against Peloton Interactive for infringing its patents. The suit has been filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. According to the plaintiff, Pelotons product Peloton Bike+ infringes two U.S Patents 9,694,240 and 10,137,328. Mad Dogg has requested for a jury trial, an award for damages and other forms of relief.

European Commission and EUIPO announce the official launch of Ideas Powered for Business SME Fund

On 18th December 2020, the European Commission and EUIPO announced the launch of a 20 million Euro grant scheme called Ideas Powered for Business SME Fund. The grant scheme was created exclusively to help Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) based in Europe to develop IP strategies and protect their IP rights. As per the official website, the grant offersfinancial support in the form of reimbursementsfor IP pre-diagnostic services (IP Scan), design applications and trademarks up to a maximum amount of EUR 1500 per business.

You may click here for more information on the SME Fund.

EPO extends closure of offices

The European Patent Office has announced that its offices in Berlin, Munich and The Hague will remain closed atleast until the 10th of January 2021 from December 24th, 2020 due the COVID situation across most of Europe. Most countries in Europe such as Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece to name a few have already announced a lockdown between now and the 7th of January 2021.

Authored and compiled by Vibha Amarnath

About BIPs Patent Attorneys

The patent news bulletin is brought to you by the patent division of BananaIP Counsels, a top patent and IP firm in India. Led by Senior Partners, Somashekar Ramakrishna, Nitin Nair and Vinita Radhakrishnan, BIPs Patent Attorneys are among the leading patent practitioners in the country. They work with clients such as Mahindra and Mahindra, Samsung, HCL, Eureka Forbes, to name a few. The patent attorneys at BIP have strong technical and legal expertise in areas such as IT/Software, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Data Analytics, Electronics and Telecommunication, Mechanical, Automotive, Green Energy, Traditional Medicine and Bio/Pharma domains. The firm is a first choice for clients looking for support in patent filing, prosecution, management and strategy in India, and across the world.

This weekly patent news bulletin is a part of their pro bono work, and is aimed at spreading patent awareness. You are free to share the news with appropriate attribution and backlink to the source.

If you have any questions, or need any clarifications, please feel free to write to[emailprotected]

Disclaimer: Kindly note that the news bulletin has been put together from different sources, primary and secondary, and BananaIPs reporters may not have verified all the news published in the bulletin. You may write to [emailprotected] for corrections and take down.

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Microsoft accused of infringing patents related to cloud computing, EPO extends closure of offices and more - IP News Center

Amazon to skill 29mn people in cloud computing by 2025 – Express Computer

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is the Cloud arm of Amazon has announced that by 2025, it will help 29 million people globally grow their technical skills with free cloud computing skills training.

Teresa Carlson, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector at Amazon, said that the company will provide training opportunities through existing AWS-designed programmes, as well as develop new courses to meet a wide variety of schedules and learning goals.

We are investing hundreds of millions of dollars to provide free cloud computing skills training to people from all walks of life and all levels of knowledge, in more than 200 countries and territories, Carlson said in a statement during the AWS: re:Invent 2020 annual conference being held in digital mode.

The training ranges from self-paced online courses designed to help individuals update their technical skills to intensive upskilling programmes that can lead to new jobs in the technology industry.

We are building out our library of more than 500 free courses, interactive labs, and virtual day-long training sessions. Individuals looking to learn about cloud technology at their own pace have two robust resources in AWS Training and Certification and AWS Educate, Carlson informed.

In 2020, AWS Training and Certification has launched 50 new digital courses in addition to the hundreds of free courses already available and will continue adding more content and new ways to learn.

We will continue to invest in free digital training and exam preparation courses to help people prepare for AWS Certifications, which show technical expertise working with AWS, she said.

The plan to provide 29 million people around the world with skills training builds on the commitment the company made last year to invest $700 million to train 100,000 Amazon employees.

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Amazon to skill 29mn people in cloud computing by 2025 - Express Computer

Chery teams up with Huawei to develop smart cars – Automotive World

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On December 16, Chery Automobile Co., Ltd. (Chery) and Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (Huawei) concluded an all-round framework agreement for in-depth cooperation in fields such as cloud computing, big data and smart car solutions, to promote the business development of both sides.

Witnessed by Yin Tongyue, Chairman of Chery and Wang Jun, President of Huaweis Smart Car Solutions BU, Gao Xinhua, Vice President of Chery and Chi Linchun, General Manager of Marketing and Sales Service at Huaweis Smart Car Solutions BU signed the agreement.

Under the agreement, the two sides will carry out all-round cooperation in fields such as electrical and electronic architectures of smart cars, intelligent connection, intelligent cockpit, onboard computing, autonomous driving, intelligent energy and Intelligent Vehicle Cloud Services (IVCS). They will jointly explore 5G-based innovative application scenarios, and develop the technologies of 5G+V2X, vehicle-infrastructure cooperation and autonomous driving. Besides, the two sides will cooperate in big data infrastructure, storage, analysis, high-performance computing and informatization, to help Chery speed up its reform in the big data era.

The intelligent connected vehicle is an outcome of the integration of ICT and the traditional auto industry, and ICT-based software and hardware will play a greater role in the future auto industry, said Wang. In this historical context, Huawei will team up with Chery to develop core ICT technologies and help it make good smart cars. It is believed that the cooperation will promote the development of Chinas auto industry. Grasping the consumption trend of future mobility, the two sides will conduct joint exploration and innovation to build software-defined vehicles to create smarter mobility experience for consumers.

Mobile Internet and smart cars have significantly changed more than 100 years of history of the world auto industry, Chery is planning ahead, embracing the changes of the era and accelerating the transformation from traditional vehicles into smart cars and new energy vehicles, said Yin. Huawei is the pride of the Chinese people and its spirit is worth our learning. It is believed that the all-round cooperation between Chery and Huawei will boost the leap of both sides, turn vehicles from mechanical products into software-defined and intelligent products, and help Chinas auto industry master core technologies in fields such as software, intelligent cockpit and chip and go global as Chinas home appliances and mobile phone industries are doing today.

SOURCE: Chery

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Chery teams up with Huawei to develop smart cars - Automotive World

Hayley Paige and Bridal Company Are at War Over Use of Her Name, Instagram Handle – The Fashion Law

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Wedding dress designer Hayley Paige Gutman is at the center of a new lawsuit after leaving her post at her JLM Couture-owned brand. In a complaint filed on December 15, JLM Couture (JLM), the parent company to an array of bridal brands, including Hayley Paige, is accusing the designer of federal and common law trademark dilution and unfair competition, breach of contract, conversion, and breach of fiduciary duty, among other claims, and claiming exclusive rights in the Hayley Paige name and variations, thereof, on the basis of the employment agreement the parties entered into when Gutman was relatively new to the fashion industry in 2011.

According to its complaint, JLM which generated $220 million in retail sales between 2017 and 2020 claims that it enlisted Gutman to come onboard as a designer for its bridal collections in July 2011. As a result, the designer entered into an employment agreement with JLM, which is still currently in effect, as JLM exercised an option to extend the term of the agreement by at least 3 additional years in 2019.

The parties partnership has seemingly flourished since 2011, with JLM launching and Gutman designing, serving as the face of, and helping to advertise a number of successful Hayley Paige-specific brands and collections, in connection with which JLM filed for (and received) 37 domestic and international trademark registrations for the various iterations of the Hayley Paige name for its brands from Hayley Paige for using in connection with and La Petite Hayley Paige to Just Got Paiged, among others.

In addition to launching the Hayley Paige brands, in connection with which JLM began using [Gutmans name], as provided in the employment agreement, to sell and advertise clothing designed by Gutman, including by way of the then-newly-created Hayley Paige brands, JLM claims that it launched social media pages for the Hayley Paige brand, such as @misshayleypaige on Instagram, an account that Gutman assisted in maintaining in connection with the scope of her employment.

More than that, JLM claims that it obtained lucrative cross-marketing agreements and tie-ins to capitalize on Gutmans growing recognition, including on social media, such as collaborations with diamond brand Hearts of Fire, and a recurring role on TLCs show Say Yes to the Dress.

Despite the success of the [various Hayley Paige] brands, JLM alleges that things began to go downhill in November 2019 when Gutman began to take steps to not only assert control over JLM property, which has resulted in damage to JLMs business and intellectual property rights.Among the property at stake is the Hayley Paige social media accounts namely, the @misshayleypaige Instagram account which JLM argues that it has owned from the time that the accounts were created.

According to JLM, issues with Gutman began on November 2, 2019, when Gutman created a TikTok account under the misshayleypaige name. This was problematic, per JLM, not only because Gutman allegedly posted videos that did not properly represent the [Hayley Paige] brands, but because the misshayleypaige handle falls within the scope of the rights that Gutman granted JLM the exclusive world-wide right and license to use to JLM in accordance with her employment agreement.

JLM claims that in addition to the customary agreement that of the designs she created during her employment and the rights in such designs would become the property of JLM, Gutman was also required to grant it the exclusive right to use her name Hayley, Paige, Hayley Paige Gutman, Hayley Gutman, Hayley Paige, or any derivative thereof in connection with the design, manufacture, marketing and/or sale of bridal clothing, bridal accessories and related bridal and wedding items, including and all good will associated therewith for the term of the agreement, and for a period of two years, thereafter.

The exception? If JLM exercised its right to file for and obtain a federal trademark registrations for any such name, which is subject to a separate provision in her employment agreement that states that Gutman has irrevocably [sold, assigned, and transferred] all right, title, and interest to [JLM] that now exists or may exist during the term [of the parties agreement] and for a period of two years thereafter, to register [her] name or any derivative(s) thereof as trademark with the USPTO and/or other authorities in the U.S. or abroad.

The parties relationship further broke down in June 2020 when JLM alleges that in the midst of its offer to negotiate to further amend Gutmans employment agreement to increase the term thereof, and to provide Gutman with additional financial compensation, Gutman informed JLM CEO Joe Murphy that it was her position that the [@misshayleypaige] Instagram account was her personal account, which JLM says is at odds with their existing agreement.

Thereafter, JLM claims that Gutman began posting personal images in addition to bridal images to the account, as well as uploading posts promoting the goods of third parties, such as olive oil, beer, and nutritional supplements, none of which were approved by JLM, and none of which relate to the bridal industry.

This was followed by Gutman not only hijack[ing] the [@misshayleypaige] account, but [taking] steps to convert it from a JLM company account and its 1.1 million followers to her own business platform, as if she were an influencer.

With the foregoing in mind, JLM sets forth claims of federal trademark dilution, pointing to Gutmans confusingly similar use of the various Hayley Paige trademarks and the @misshayleypaige Instagram account since at least July of 2020, as well as her efforts to pass off [her] endorsement of third parties goods and services, as being part of, marketed, sponsored, licensed or otherwise authorized or approved by [JLM] when they are not, are eroding the distinctiveness of the [Hayley Paige] trademark and the @misshayleypaige trade name.

Beyond that, JLM claims that Gutman is engaging in false designation of origin and unfair competition by using its trademarks even if those marks include her name, as such use is likely to cause confusion in the marketplace as to the source, origin, or sponsorship of the goods being offered up and/or promoted by Gutman.

Still yet, JLM argues that Gutman is engaging in a whole host of other offenses, including breach of contract as a result of her use of the Hayley Paige trademarks, as well as her unwillingness to provide JLM with access credentials to the social media accounts, which she hijacked for her own personal use, and to promote non-JLM authorized goods and services.

On the heels of a court order last week, in which Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a temporary restraining order in JLMs favor, Gutman told the nearly 100,000 followers of her @allthatglittersonthegram account in a video published on Monday, I am mortified and devastated but I wanted to be the first to personally tell you that I am no longer posting or engaging on [the @ misshayleypaige] account until this matter is resolved in court, noting that she has resigned from her position at JLM following a year-and-a-half-long legal battle to negotiate a new contract with JLM Couture, one that has resulted in them suing me and convincing a court to grant them temporary control and access over my Instagram account, as well as my TikTok and Pinterest.

In the same video, Gutman states that she did not have a lawyer when she signed the original employment agreement, and says that if there is only one thing that viewers take away from her video it is that if anyone tells you that you dont need a lawyer to take a look at an agreement or contract, please get a lawyer.

Gutman further says in the video that it is with a heavy heart that I have resigned from my role as head designer of my labels with JLM Couture, stating that going forward, I will no longer be associated with any of their products, including the designs and dresses which bear my name.

*The case is JLM Couture, Inc. v. Gutman,1:20-cv-10575 (SDNY).

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Hayley Paige and Bridal Company Are at War Over Use of Her Name, Instagram Handle - The Fashion Law

Heres what the McLaren P1 designer has to say about Bugatti Bolide – Motor1.com UK

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The McLaren P1 is a wonderful machine not only because of its near-hypercar performance numbers but also in terms of design. Frank Stephenson is responsible for its styling, who actually got inspiration from a sailfish in penning the McLaren hybrid.

But what can Stephenson say about a new track supercar from Bugatti? As you may know by now, Stephenson has been active on YouTube, uploading videos wherein he shares his thoughts about other new cars. Some were praised, like the new Ford Bronco, while others didn't pass Stephenson's critic.

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The latest of this series of videos is about the Bugatti Bolide the track-focused supercar from the French marque that's said to be the last to use the W16 engine.

So what can the McLaren P1 designer say about the aggressively-styled race car? Well, let's just say that it turns him on. Yes, his words, not mine.

Among the many praises that Stephenson lashed out on the Bolide was mind-boggling and outstanding, mainly because he believes that its form is the performance. He absolutely loved how each of the design elements of the race car has a purpose and he thought that it's an absolute weapon on the track.

While his adoration for the Bolide was apparent on the video, Stephenson gave it an imperfect 9.9 score, just below the Honda E. Yes, that small, retro-looking Japanese electric vehicle got a perfect 10 from the P1 designer.

Though the Bolide's current form earned praises from Stephenson, there were several elements that he would rather change, such as in the headlight area, the snorkel, and the exhaust part.

Don't take out word for this. Let him explain his side by watching the video embedded on top of this page. But really, Honda E?

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Heres what the McLaren P1 designer has to say about Bugatti Bolide - Motor1.com UK

Barclays Bank refusing withdrawals to new customers – and getting away with it – FinanceFeeds

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Despite it being illegal to withhold customer funds in the UK, Barclays sticks to its line and will not allow new customers to withdraw funds or make transfers, putting every possible obstacle in the way.

Every professional within every sector of the non-bank electronic trading industry is fully aware that one of the most important matters with regard to operating a legal and compliant business, as well as maintaining a good and transparent reputation is that surrounding the handling of customer funds.

Over the years, it has been made patently clear by regulatory authorities around the world that the refusal of withdrawals, and intentional obstacles which are put in place to prevent withdrawal of customer funds is absolutely not acceptable.

FX and CFD firms in major financial centers have occasionally been on the receiving end of extremely harsh regulatory censuring for preventing withdrawal, often with reputation damaging consequences and large fines.

Today, FinanceFeeds discovered that what is not allowed for most, is standard practice within Tier 1 banks, which once again are allowed to break the law with little consequence.

Barclays, one of the worlds largest Tier 1 FX liquidity providers by market share a market share that is rapidly shrinking due to the BARX single dealer platforms odious adherence to last look execution practice and continual rejection of fills which has led to non-bank market making specialists such as XTX Markets and Citadel Securities taking the pole positions, has been engaging in the illegal practice of withholding client funds on its standard retail banking accounts.

In fact, more specifically, Barclays does not allow the withdrawal of funds for new account holders, yet allows them to deposit funds when opening an account online, a practice which landed Plus500 in regulatory trouble with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), decimating the companys share price and freezing all activity.

However, Barclays are allowed to carry out this practice.

It has come to light that new retail banking customers are able to open bank accounts with Barclays via the companys website, and complete the compliance and identification requirements via uploading a photographic copy of a passport, and then using a smartphone camera to take a selfie and a video to ensure that these match.

Within seconds, a bank account is open and live, and as much money as a client wishes can be deposited.

There is no mention whatsoever in Barclays terms and conditions that once deposited, a withdrawal would not be possible, nor a transfer into any other bank account until Barclays satisfies some reactionary verification criteria, which the bank will not tell customers what that is.

Over the past week, Barclays bank branches across London have been closed, despite the information on the companys website, and despite the telephone customer services team advising clients that they can go to a branch to perform a withdrawal or transfer during the early stages of holding a bank account.

It has been made clear to FinanceFeeds that many new Barclays customers are being sent to branches only to find that the branches are closed, with notices on the doors saying that they are unable to open due to unforeseen circumstances and no information on reopening is forthcoming.

Bearing in mind that Barclays closed its entire European branch network recently, this does not bode well.

FinanceFeeds has investigated this in detail, and has also found that customer service departments of Barclays are unable to facilitate withdrawals or transfers via the telephone, and that the app is locked down in terms of making transfers to other accounts until further verification has taken place.

Users of the app will note that they will not be able to access their money, and that no withdrawals are able to take place, no transfers can take place and attempts to add new payees is met with a message that says coming soon and that clients will have to wait four days from opening an account until they can make the transfer.

FinanceFeeds is aware of a case in which a client paid 9,810 GBP into a new account which was opened online on Friday, December 18, 2020, and is still unable to access funds, unable to withdraw any funds and unable to make transfers today, four days later, with the message still displayed. Various calls to customer services result in being read the same nonsense from a script, and refusal to be transferred to anyone senior.

FinanceFeeds contacted several members of staff at Barclays to investigate this, one of which spoke at length, repeating a corporate line that this is standard procedure.

We made it clear that refusal of withdrawals is a criminal offense, and that under British law, liners of financial institutions should be able to access their money at all times, however the bank continued to hold its line that it is able to establish accounts online, accept customer deposits and then not facilitate withdrawals until further notice or until a customer receives a bank card, which could be after the holidays now.

Of course, customers in the United Kingdom are protected up to 85000 under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) if they are the victim of a bucket shop or Ponzi scheme, or if withdrawals are blocked by a nefarious financial institution, however for customers depositing more than that, a risk is being taken, plus for those depositing less, an FSCS claim may take longer than is practical to wait.

It is clear that banks in the UK can get away with whatever they like, including committing withdrawal fraud, whereas non-bank financial services firms and OTC derivatives companies have to keep a clean copybook.

One rule for one, another for others. The old boys clubs of the Prudential Regulatory Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority favoring the banks.

FinanceFeeds has full documented evidence of this, and for those in the same situation wishing to go down the class action route, we would be happy to assist.

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Barclays Bank refusing withdrawals to new customers - and getting away with it - FinanceFeeds

The Chronicle of the Horse – The Chronicle of the Horse

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From South America to Europe to Hong Kong, if theres a major international three-day event taking place, Shannon Brinkman is bound to be there, shooting her signature images. Brinkman, 55, grew up riding in Jacksonville, Florida, and she fell in love with photography when she received her first camera at age 11. She studied art and photography at the University of North Florida before founding Shannon Brinkman Photography in 1991.

Brinkman, of Bywater, New Orleans, is the official photographer for many of the biggest events in the United States, and she took us through a day in her life this fall at the MARS Tryon International Three-Day Event in Mill Spring, North Carolina, as she prepared for cross-country and tackled seven hours of dressage with her team photographers.

6. a.m. None of us slept very well last night because the rain was pouring down so hard. We wake up early to study the cross-country course before dressage starts. Two of my team members [go] to the back of the cabin, return, and tell me the creek is three times the size of its normal width. I say, All right, were probably not going to be able to walk the cross-country today; lets just go see what it looks like.

I do not eat breakfast this morning. I normally eat some yogurt and cereal or an egg, but because we did not sleep, I just have a cup of coffee and some orange juice.

I have a crew of three with me, and then I have a couple more people helping with remote [cameras] on the weekend. We got a cabin, so we have a great space to work out of, and we dont have to leave the showgrounds; this is a luxury.

8 a.m. We get in a car and drive to the top of the hill and start walking down. When we get around the bend to where you can see the valley, the creek is running over rapidlywater is spilling out and flooding in some lower set areas. I run into [course designer Capt. Mark Phillips], and he tells me that if it stops raining, the course will drain well, and they will be able to run, but they will need an extra day to let it drain.

I like walking the cross-country multiple times. I especially enjoy walking the cross-country with my photographer friend, Alison Green, as she gets just as excited about cross-country as I do. We sometimes have very different ways of looking at the course, which is enjoyable and helpful for each of us.

When I look at a cross-country course, I try to look at the course from all different angles because I believe you can, of course, photograph a course from all different angles. So, my goal is to do a gallery that has some remote shots that have some skies, some blue. Essentially, some low shots, many long shots, and at least a couple side shots because riders like to see all the angles. I generally dont edit out a lot of photographs unless its blurry or something, and even then, a lot of times, were so busy that we dont even edit out all of that.

Its nice if the photographer does edit some in-camera, but I dont require that. The riders like to see the approach to the fence, the way the horse uses its body and where it takes off from a fence, and how it tucks its back legs underneath and where it pushes off. Sometimes, Ill have all of that in there, but basically, I want pictures from the front, from the side, from low, and some drama where we can see the horse and the riders face. Hopefully, somethingwith the landscape; it just depends on the course. So, if I find a pretty, scenic background, Ill try to get that in there if its a clean shot.

[The number of pictures I take] entirely depends on what is going on. Sometimes I shoot less at, say, a four-star or a five-star-cross-country day than I would at a lower level because there are more riders at the lower level. So, probably at least 2,000-4,000 images. Thats just mine personally, and generally thats because Im frequently using three cameras. I might have a remote or two set up, plus Im shooting with two other cameras with different length lenses.

9 a.m. We come back [to the cabin] because we couldnt look at the cross-country course. Luckily, I looked at it yesterday. We pack our gear for the day. For dressage, I always bring extra camera bodies, lenses, computers, hard drives, card readers, rain gear for all the cameras, monopodsIm like a walking camera store.

9:40 a.m. Start the [dressage] test rides. There are three rings and three of us photographing. My fourth person is walking around, doing candids.

[When taking dressage photos], Im looking at the way a horse moves. Some horses at the trotI might have to wait a moment if they have a high reach in the front, so I dont get the hind leg out behind them. Im looking at the expression. If the horse has its mouth open, I might not take the shot. At the canter, I generally watch the hind leg but not always. Sometimes, Im just looking at the whole movement of the horse. Its a lot about the expression. If the horse is pulling against the rider, I might wait a moment and not take that shot.

I like all the phases. [For show jumping], I love walking the course because I like to see where the rider will be looking, so I try to position myself at one or two places where I can capture the rider looking at me. Again, its kind of like cross-countrysomething from the side, something from the front, all of the drama. I look at the background. If its [somewhere] like Rebecca Farms [in Montana], maybe I can get a mountain in the back, something that gives you a sense of place.

We were always taught to photograph the knees up [on cross-country]. In the jumpers, to have the knees and the back feet on the same level when the horse is at the top of the fence. Thats because the fences are so big. If its a lower-level horse, theyre not going to jump like that unless its a one-off.

When digital cameras came into the amateurs hands, it seems like the idea of what the best moment was changed because a lot of people photograph with the front foot after the pole or the top of the fence, when the horse is coming down. I was taught that that is just not the moment. But a lot of people order those now, so I sometimes offer them too.

Sometimes though, it is nice when theyre coming down because maybe the riders face is hidden behind the horse going up, or you cant see the riders face as well until theyre coming down because maybe theyre looking down. Everybodys idea of photos is different. Im always interested in seeing what people order. Sometimes, if I see that they ordered a photo that I dont really like, I might, if I have a moment, say, Hey, I see you ordered this picture, but maybe this photo is slightly better, and Ill tell them why.

1:30-2:30 p.m. The break is later today. I have a peanut butter and honey sandwich and an apple. I eat way too much chocolate because MARS is the sponsor here and supplied their sweets.

They have the media center open, and because of COVID, I sit by the table by the front door and leave it open. Thats where I work by myself all day long. Whenever I am not photographing, I am sitting there uploading, sorting images for media. I really dont take a break.

This weekend, because its a championship, [Tryon] requires the official photographer to send five photos a day. I take photos for the U.S. Equestrian Federation, Eventing Nation, press for Tryon, and photos for a couple of riders who need photos because of COVIDtheir photographers arent here. So, I send some photos out to those riders. I do social media posts when I have a moment, which is never a moment because its always busy.

4:30 p.m. My ring finishes. I sit in the media center, finishing up the galleries, waiting for my photographers to send me their best of the three-star and two-star so I can send that to Tryon. Then, I edit everyones photos so everything matches, and it looks like one mind did it, even if it was three different photographers. I edit the images to bring out the color, so nothing is straight out of the camera.

I know some photo outlets have editors to file photos, but I think the best way to teach people is to have them edit their own or other peoples photographs. So, everybody that helps me is currently filing photos, either their own or somebody elses. And it helps with learning, seeing, Oh, look at how this person photographs. When we have an outstanding image we are proud of, we can share and be excited and inspired.

Each time we import a card, we [file with] the show initials at the beginning, the year, my last name, the date, what discipline it is with a d or an s or an x or hi for horse inspection, and the photographers initials. We have many hard drives with one hard drive where all the images are sorted into galleries. Sometimes we dont finish, and then I take the work home and file it at home. It just depends on the day. Tomorrow we have the luxury of only having a couple hours of dressage in two rings. My ring will go all day, so we will have all the dressage filed by tomorrow because theres not as much to do as we normally do that day.

7 p.m. I love to feed my crew really good food because we work so hard. Im a little crazyI buy all organic groceries, and somebody is always present that can cook. I really appreciate having wholesome food thats not from a can at the end of the day of working so hard. [One of my photographers] Alleyn Evans cooks, and she makes potatoes with meat and greens. The greens are from turnips she grew in her garden. The meal is delicious.

My whole goal is to make the team work together and have a happy team, people who really want to go do this because its long hours, and youre dirty and tired. Its not like only shooting dressage or show jumping because you have to do all three phases, and you have to be out in the weather.

10 p.m. I try to go to bed.

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The Chronicle of the Horse - The Chronicle of the Horse

Marketing A Backbone Of Remote Working In The Pandemic – Forbes

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Todays feature and last in this series celebrating marketing ingenuity in the face of the pandemic focuses on what has become for many a critical communications channel for remote workers. Here is the abridged interview with Julie Liegl, CMO of Slack.

MaryLee Sachs: When the pandemic hit in March, what happened at Slack. How did you mobilize?

Julie Liegl: It feels so long ago now. Taking myself all the way back nine months ago, or what feels like nine years ago, there were a few different areas of focus for us. First, we had to think about our employees and our offices. We can't forget that, as much as we had to think as marketers and about our customers, the first thing we had to figure out was, are we shutting down? Are we not shutting down? Are we canceling our global sales kickoff? What about the three trade shows we're supposed to go to at the end of the month?

Julie Liegl, CMO, Slack

There was definitely a lot of work as the news was unfolding and the decisions we made seem really obvious now, but back then, it was really unclear. Like, do we shut down our office? That seems very extreme. Restaurants are still open, school's still in session. I'm very thankful that I work in Silicon Valley where I think in general companies were more conservative and we did shut down before schools did, before a lot of other things did. But making sure we had the safety and then plans around how we were going to manage through that has been an ongoing focus area for us.

Secondly, we needed to think about what we were going to do for our customers and how were we going to make sure that they knew that we were there, that our service was available and ready to scale to whatever needs they had. But also that they had customer support reps and customer experience reps and all sorts of people that can help them. So I think we really went from that place of focusing on them first.

And then as a marketer, I obviously had to think about what is the opportunity beyond this? And I remember thinking at the time, This is such a scary thing. I don't want this to seem like Slack is chasing an ambulance or anything like that. But as we focused on our customers, what we saw was they were coming to us asking for help. And so this idea that we had a service that could help people be more effective as they were going through the same shift that we were going through of going from whatever businesses as usual looks like, to suddenly fully remote with no advanced planning, no advanced notice and no experience doing that. That we had a role to play there.

The future of B2B communications: Slack Connect replaces email, enabling secure collaboration with ... [+] external partners, vendors, and clients.

So we pivoted a bunch of our marketing focus to lean into that. And we did it in a way that felt authentic to Slack and didn't feel tone deaf to the situation that was going on in the world.

Sachs: What role, if any, did your sort of organization's purpose play in the ethos around how you mobilized?

Liegl: The idea of Slack is very much built as a human company, a very user customer-centric company. I think that that came to bear very much for us. We really took a human-first mindset. I don't know if you remember this, but everyone was coming out with free offers, A month of free video calls, or two months of free trials.

That was great and hugely valuable for people, but Slack already has a very robust free offering that a lot of companies use and a really great non-profit program. So we thought, Instead of just throwing it out under their discount, what do people really need? We have this world-class customer support experience, so we decided instead to offer free one-on-one consultations and lead with that. To be fair, we did not have all the answers either, but we knew how to use our service. We were trying new things every day. We were talking to other customers. So almost all the marketing that we led with at that time and the big sort of banner on our homepage was, click here to sign up for a free one-on-one consultation.

A Slack leadership Zoom meeting with (clockwise from upper left): Stewart Butterfield (CEO), ... [+] Jonathan Prince (VP, Comms), Brad Mattick (VP, Product Marketing), Tamar Yehoshua (Chief Product Officer), Ilan Frank (VP, Product), Paul Rosania (Director, Product), Jesse Hulsing (VP, Investor Relations), Julie Liegl.

The whole company ended up pitching in and signing up to take shifts. And literally there'd be messages in Slack channels. Like the person at two o'clock speaks Farsi, does anyone speak Farsi? It was really inspiring to see the way the whole company came together. But we really led with that sort of human touch thing. And it was extremely well received. We had thousands and thousands of sign-ups. And we also learned so much from doing this consultations on what the key challenges were, what questions people needed to have answered. And that then led us to build even more content, more stuff to put out in the world that there was going to help people as they went through this.

Sachs: What were the sort of two or three biggest challenges to making it all happen?

Liegl: I think the first is so obvious that it almost seems silly to say, but we were going through this too. We were human beings who had also been sent home, suddenly had kids at home, or roommates and bad wifi, and fear and anxiety, and a lot new challenges. And I'll be honest, Slack was not a company that did a lot of remote work. Certainly we have a global presence. We work with people that don't work in our office, but we were not a work-from-home culture. And suddenly everyone had to do this and we didn't have setups and desks.

Making space for people who suddenly had very different challenges and who were going through different things was really important. We had to come together as human beings and leaders first. That was just the first challenge.

Slack's Melbourne office/cafe

We had to embrace this idea that everyone's looking for answers and that none of us. That was challenge one.

Challenge two was, just as our culture wasnt about remote work, Slack as a product or service has so many applications, but we hadnt done a ton of work around why its so great for remote teams. It's funny, the team that originally built it as the company was developing, did have people in remote offices and they were using it that way, but we had not done a ton of work on that. So we had to harvest a whole bunch of new content and figure out how to repackage that. It was a shift in our positioning and messaging that we had really been leaning into. That's definitely always a challenge as a marketer and as a marketing team.

I think the third challenge was trying to figure out how tone should shift and how things should shift. Things were happening so quickly and also staying the same a lot. Even as everybody pivoted it then became, what do you stay true to? What do you stay attuned to that you know is true and core to your brand is? And how much do you respond to the shifting world outside? And don't forget, when this happened there was also the huge spotlight on racial injustice. It was not a year where one thing happened that changed everything. A lot of things happened that changed everything. And each time you felt like you kind of had it figured out, the ground would shift again.

Sachs: It was the perfect storm here for sure. When you think about going into 2021, what things have you adopted this year that you will carry forward?

Slack team developing remote applications

Liegl: I hope that we really have changed the way that we work. And obviously, I'm selfishly coming from Slack where I think Slack has a big role to play in that. I look forward to being back in an office and seeing people again and having some separation from home and life. I do not look forward to or expect to ever go into an office five days a week again. We have really leaned into and pushed the limits on how we can use our product to really change the way we work, not just to make work more fun and more productive, but really change the way that we work, and really lean into the idea of, does this need to be a meeting? Does this need to be, Zoom I love, but like, does this need to be a video call or are there other ways that we can accomplish this that are more welcoming to people with different schedules, different circumstances, different working styles? And I really hope that that stays.

My little rally cry has been like the future will be asynchronous and we still are getting the same amount, sometimes I think more work done, but being able to jump into a brainstorm when it works for you or review the materials and get all your questions answered in a dynamic natural way that isn't everybody sitting and staring at the same slides being read aloud. I think there's a lot of opportunity for people to stay on top of work, to stay involved in ways that allow them to integrate more balance into their life and have more flexibility. And I really hope that's here to stay.

Sachs: Are there any other apps or hacks that you've discovered working from home and working remotely that you think are useful to people?

Liegl: I think virtual whiteboards are huge and we're playing with those a little bit. I'm using Zoom to do more video recordings and putting them out to the team, such as recording a top of weekly mind update, and then just uploading it to Slack.

Finding ways to provide that human touch I think is really key. And then of course, obviously all the virtual event platforms that we've all been experimenting with. We had a great experience running our user conference virtually. And we used Slack in a way that we hadn't before to engage our attendees and create community there. So I guess our own products in different ways and Zoom in different ways.

Sachs: Going into 2021, what are your new priorities for marketing?

Comedian Sarah Cooper guest keynote at Slack Frontiers 2020 conference. Previously a UX designer at ... [+] Yahoo! and Google, Cooper worked with Stewart Butterfield, Slack Co-founder & CEO, and Cal Handerson, Slack Co-founder & CTO, together at Flickr.

Liegl: I don't think at the core our priorities are changing. I just think the way we get there is different. We still need to tell stories and create a brand that our customers love. We need to make our customers super successful so that they love our product and are advocates for us. We need to generate demand. We need to do all these things, but our toolkits just changed a bit.

Just like with my team, how do I inject more humanity and more connection? I think as marketers, its how do we drive more humanity and connection when there's no in-person. I think content has been king for a while. Its even more important because to get your story out there that people can consume in a way that they want and to keep that momentum going while you don't have those more in-person type experiences.

Sachs: Aside from the lack of face-to-face interaction, what else has been the most frustrating aspect of trying to market through the pandemic?

Liegl: This is maybe a strange answer, but I think in some ways a lot of positioning for a lot of different types of things coalesced. It's almost like everyone's talking about remote work instead of specific software tools, or contactless pickup in the retail world. We've coalesced around a certain set of messages. It's natural; we're all kind of chasing the same ideas. But it's made it even harder to break through. Like, what is the difference between Zoom and Slack? We're partners. We don't consider ourselves competitors, but you could start to see a world where people start to conflate them all together because they're all remote work tools. So some of the marketing is starting to sound a little similar. So how do you break through in that world and explain what makes your solution unique versus the other 55 solutions that are saying, We're going to make remote work easier? Because there are a lot of different solutions. It's very natural. Its become even it's more important than ever to be crisp on that differentiation.

Sachs: What have you put in place this year that you're likely to keep, going into the time where we can actually start getting together in person?

Liegl: First of all, I'm very much looking forward to having in-person events again, but I think they will now always have some sort of virtual component to allow that broader participation. I think that's going to be a best practice forever now. You can have the best of both and get more out of that content, more out of that stories, more out of that great marketing that you're doing.

For us, I think we also got a little scrappier during the pandemic, this idea figuring out what we can achieve in a short period of time. I hope that we keep a little bit of that grittiness as well.

We also launched Slack Connect. We did a lot of things separate from the pandemic. This was a huge new step forward on the ability to work with people outside your organization and channels. And we've been doing a ton of work on that. And I think that's another thing that's probably even more valuable in the pandemic because it's just another way to have closer relationships with your partners when you can't meet them in person.

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Marketing A Backbone Of Remote Working In The Pandemic - Forbes

A Pandemic of Discontent: The Growing Woes of Indias Food Delivery Workers – The Wire

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On March 24, after India first locked down to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, Raj*, a 27-year-old food deliveryman for Swiggy in Surat, stayed home for two days. Hed heard the police were stopping his co-workers and seizing their bikes.

Rajs boss called. Dont worry, Ill speak to the police if theres trouble, Raj recalled him saying.

Raj, whose name has been changed to avoid retaliation by the company, logged on to the Swiggy app and set out on his Hero Passion Pro bike. Many streets were closed off. At one checkpoint, a knot of policemen flagged him down and yelled, Why are you out? Go home.

Raj called his boss, who said, You deal with it.

You told us to call you, and now youre telling me to talk myself, Raj said while recalling the incident last month to this reporter.

I had to handle it myself, it took two hours.

Weeks later, you deal with it became company policy. While most of us stayed home this summer, Swiggy delivery persons fetched our food and groceries.

The government called them frontline workers; companies called them heroes. Swiggy and other startups dedicated a music video to them.

But in the background, employees were being fired, delivery persons say their pay was reduced, and the company was slowly replacing human managers with algorithms and digital systems. The company sold some of the moves as a response to COVID-19 but in reality, at least some of the actions were planned and set in motion well before the pandemic, according to former and current Swiggy workers. As far back as December 2019, some Swiggy managers knew that they were soon going to be without a job.

All the problems with Swiggy began about six to eight months ago. Before, the job felt more stable and we felt good working here, Kishan, a deliveryman in Surat, said in September. Now, it feels like slave work.

Modi ji praised us on Mann ki Baat, the company also praised us, but they havent given us anything, Vikram, a deliveryman in Delhi NCR, said. We did so much during corona times, but they didnt reward us, they cut our pay.

I feel so humiliated and depressed at that moment of time, said a former fleet manager, recalling his firing after five years of working day-and-night for Swiggy, attending 250-350 phone calls a day from executives, as delivery men are known in India.

By July, the company fired at least 1,450 employees, including managers.

During the pandemic, according to company messages seen by this reporter, Swiggy cut the base pay, or the minimum delivery fee per order, of riders to Rs 15, down by 57%, and implemented other pay cuts. Delivery men The Wire spoke to pointed out that their earnings nosedived even as fuel prices hit historic highs. Just two years ago, they were making Rs 40,000 ($543) or more a month if they worked enough hours. Attracted by the high pay, many said theyd left steady, non-gig jobs to join Swiggy. Now, after the cuts, Swiggy no longer made much financial sense for some but they have few options in a poor job market.

Today, in an average month, delivery persons The Wire spoke to said they make around Rs 20,000.

In 2018, Swiggy job ads on Aasaanjobs.com, an online jobs portal, promised up to Rs 40,000 per month; the same jobs today promise up to Rs 18,000 per month.

Swiggy, however, disputes these pay cuts. When contacted, a company spokesperson said its riders earn more today than before COVID-19, but did not provide The Wire with specific data. The spokesperson also emphasised that the base pay is only one component of the delivery fee and most delivery partners make more than Rs 15 per order.

Nevertheless, hundreds of riders in several cities across India like Chennai, Hyderabad and Delhi logged out of their apps and went on strike. But there were no managers left to hear them.

Theres nobody to escalate your demands to, said Rikta Krishnaswamy, a coordinator for Delhi-NCR at All India Gig Workers Union, or AIGWU. You keep getting messages but theres no way to communicate back.

In September, the company sent bouncers, or threat managers, to discourage the strikers in Delhi, according to Krishnaswamy, who was there. The company also blocked the accounts of some delivery persons at strikes, multiple sources said. Other news outlets have also reported similar claims from strikers across India.

Also read: COVID-19 Adds to the Woes of Indias Underpaid and Overworked Care Workers

When asked, a Swiggy spokesperson maintained that no account suspension was done for individuals at a peaceful protest, nor had the company sent any threat managers to discourage strikers.

The company did an end-run around the strikers in Delhi by hiring third-party manpower agencies like Rapido and Shadowfax to replace the drivers at premium cost until the men could strike no more, Krishnaswamy said.

In February, Swiggys valuation hit $3.3 billion. Although the company, like all delivery startups, has never turned a profit, it is flush with cash. It got $113 million from South African internet giant Naspers in February and $43 million in April from other venture capital firms.

Like all technology startups, Swiggy invests in distilling human interactions and relationships into automatable data sets. The company wants to replace human intuition-based systems with more intelligent systems, said Dale Vaz, Swiggys head of engineering and data science and a US-educated Amazonian who helped launch Amazon India, on an industry podcast in March. Last year, Vaz spoke of a worker in a Swiggy kitchen assembly line whose job is to look at food and say whether it is fish or chicken before sending it out to the customer. When a human has to do hundreds of orders an hour, he will make more mistakes than a computer, Vaz said. We talk about humans being a 3-sigma machine, we may get things wrong three times out of 1,000, Vaz said.

No one asked Vaz why he was calling a human being a machine.

This is a history of frontline gig-work for a multi-billion dollar unicorn during the pandemic. It is based on interviews between September and December with about 20 riders, employees and experts. The interviews have mostly been translated from Hindi. The executives are not identified to protect them from retaliation by the company.

Not all gig work is equal. Ask the people who deliver your food. Some are full-time Swiggy riders, others are part time a shift at Swiggy, another maybe delivering parcels for Amazon.

Three out of four gig workers have high school or even basic college degrees, according to preliminary results from a comprehensive survey of Indian gig workers by WageIndicator Foundation, a Netherlands-based labour data tracker. About 78% of them feel overqualified for the job. They are predominantly young men, and many The Wire spoke to were working jobs paying around Rs 20,000 a month before joining Swiggy.

Food delivery may be hardest kind of gig work. Delivery agents work long shifts in pollution on motorcycles. They have to log on and be continuously present in their area. They cannot simultaneously work for competing platforms, the way Ola or Uber drivers do. In order to earn incentives, which increase their pay, they need to be logged on for part-time or full-time shifts that can stretch to more than 10 hours. All this sounds like full-time work, but its not. They are called independent self-employed persons by the companies.

Photo: PTI

The workers have to deliver in a set number of minutes using a route computed by algorithms. Theyre tracked using GPS and more recently, using Bluetooth beacons in restaurants in one city. They need to keep uploading selfies showing theyre dressed correctly, theyre wearing a mask, theyve picked up food, theyve reached, theyre properly attired, theyve left the location. They have to request hangry consumers for five-star ratings, which determines their earnings.

Lately, their temperatures are being recorded.

Its like your phone is an ankle monitor, Krishnaswamy of AIGWU said.

Swiggy and its competitor Zomato are the most unfair gigwork companies in India, according to Fairwork, a project based out of Oxford University.

Raj did not mind how hard it was though, because the pay was good. When he was little, he used to dream that he would get a good job, in a good line, with a good salary. His grandfather and father were wrestlers in Surat. When his father injured his leg and became disabled, Raj went to work at Sari World in the market at 15. After 10 years, he became a supervisor. But competition was tough and his shop wasnt doing well, so when Swiggy launched in 2018, Raj joined.

I remember my first order the customer ordered two green sandwiches from Bombay Greens, he recalled. That day was tough he did not know how to use the app, how to navigate the map, how to check in at the touch points, like the customers home, where he had to confirm hed reached. But he learned quickly, and if there were problems he could call his friends or the fleet managers.

The money was good, Raj says, until February 2020. Working full-time seven days a week, Raj was making Rs 9,000 ($122) a week including bonuses, called incentives. After subtracting fuel and bike maintenance costs, he was making more delivering food than in his supervisor job. In November 2019, he got married and supports his wife, parents and two younger siblings who were in college till recently

A screenshot of the incentives and earnings being offered a particular week.

Shafiq, a deliveryman in Surat, said the bonuses, targets and level-ups in the app used to make him feel like he was playing a real-life video game.

In 2019, Swiggy lost Rs 2,367 crore ($46.5 million), partly due to high operational costs as the company expanded to 500 cities.

In September 2019, employees say that Swiggy decided to remove fleet managers, who worked out of Swiggy hubs and were the points of contact for delivery agents. The plan, they say, was to replace some managers with digital systems.

Fleet managers are crucial for operations, said Noopur Raval, a research fellow at New York Universitys AI Now Institute who has studied food delivery work. For example, Bangalore had more than 25 fleet managers overseeing zones in the city, she said. There are many languages spoken in the city, its streets are chaotic and the ground situation changes rapidly.

Somebody on the northern outskirts or suburbs might not have any idea of what to do [to resolve a situation] in the southern part, and it would take them a minimum of one hour to even get there if something went wrong, Raval said.

In December 2019, Nikhil*, a former Swiggy senior fleet manager in a major Indian city, heard that he and 53 others would lose their jobs by mid-March.

For five years, Nikhil handled one hub with 11 assistants and around 2,900 delivery executives. His team worked shifts from 7 am to 4 am Nikhil would be there for 9 to 10 hours. They would call executives, ask about delays, track them using GPS to ensure orders get delivered. They knew most of their executives personally.

When a delivery person had an issue, like with payments or if hes had an accident, he would talk to a manager, whod pull up details on his laptop and resolve the issue quickly.

Also read: What Should Be an Acceptable Employment Rate for India?

Nikhil said he could never really turn off as he oversaw the operation. On weekends, hed receive 350 calls a day. He took pride in his job and achievement as his hub was the top performing months on end. When higher ups wanted to learn how the system works, theyd come to his hub, he recalled.

In January 2020, the bots began taking over, Nikhil said. Swiggy launched its digital system, called Remote Operations Control centralised call centres staffed by anonymous operatives.

Where managers like Nikhil used to interact personally with the delivery executives, this process is now digitised and automated. If, say, an order within 4 km has been picked but not delivered in around 30 minutes, the system now notes it and informs a human in Remote Operations Control, who calls the executive to warn him.

All errors made by the riders are noted by algorithms, which flash automated messages to warn them:

This is to notify you that more than 30% of orders delivered by you in the Week were delayed by more than 10 minutes ID is permanently deactivated after 3rd notice

Or, 1st WARNING: It is observed that lately you are raising high no. of fake tickets. Next time, make sure to raise a ticket only in case of genuine issues. If not, your ID will be at risk of deactivation.

The warnings may be followed by a call from Control, and if there isnt improvement, the drivers ID is blocked.

Remote management is possible because Swiggy has long been collecting data from its delivery persons. Their GPS pings, their speed, satellite data maybe even drone-based surveillance in the future has allowed Swiggy to map city streets in greater detail than Google Maps, according to a Swiggy webinar. In a pilot, the company has placed Bluetooth beacons inside stores that can detect whether an executive is within five metres. In comparison, GPS has a 50-metre resolution. Using the Bluetooth system, Swiggy can detect whether an executive is across the street, or inside a restaurant as he claims, according to the engineer on the webinar. Such innovations allow bots to track workers in near real time, leaving little room for human fallibility.

A Swiggy spokesperson said that the Bluetooth beacons are not meant to track delivery partners but to act as an additional signal for location accuracy to allow for better customer communications.

Data is the new oil at this point, Vaz of Swiggy AI said last year at an event. Data is going to be the proprietary asset a company has. At this point, we are just at the game of saying, Lets just gather data. And once you gather that corpus of data, which you then have enough of content, then we can monetise that.

But despite all the talk of AI and data, Swiggys system is still mostly digital. The difference, according to Rituparna Chakravarty, who runs TeamLease, a manpower agency, is that when a workflow is digitised, humans in call centres execute simple, bite-sized tasks rather like bots. The setup is one step away from full automation, where humans are entirely eliminated.

Now, when an executive faces a problem while delivering, he informs a chatbot on his app. Then, he waits for a call from an anonymous voice from Remote Operations Control. The voice is polite, but it is not allowed to identify itself or say where its calling from.

Photo: PTI

Sahil, a delivery executive, in Bangalore got an order in September at 10 pm. When he got to the restaurant, the item was not available. He waited for a call from Control for 1.5 hours. The customer kept calling me like it was my issue to resolve, when it wasnt, he recalled.

Finally, the order was rejected and cancelled. After all this, they paid me cancellation charges of Rs 10, he said. The partner support in the app sometimes does not connect at all, when it should be immediate.

Around March, Swiggy launched an online form, hosted on Google, where executives can enter their grievances. Nikhil, the fleet manager, was instructed to tell his executives not to call him anymore. Everything had to go through the form. As not all delivery persons know English, the more experienced riders help co-workers fill the form and act as intermediaries with the company. They arent paid for the additional managerial role.

Irshad, a deliveryman in Surat, said that he now needs to write down if he makes any route deviations due to road closures, which could trigger a warning. His weekly day off is wasted filling the Google Form to dispute warnings or recover payments, he said.

The Google Form system distills the interaction between delivery workers and fleet managers into a codable spreadsheet, which means the system is on its way to being automated in the future.

A Swiggy spokesperson said that at our scale of operations, its humanly impossible to manually run most of our operations and hence technology (AI) plays a crucial role.

March came and went without the expected layoffs in Nikhils city, he recalled. Maybe the system wasnt ready, he said. The lockdown began. The streets were unpredictable. Delivery executives The Wire spoke to said they got little support from the company during COVID-19.

Police stopped riders in the initial weeks. In Surat, they seized delivery man Faizals bike and he paid Rs 2,000 to retrieve it. He asked Swiggy to reimburse him. A voice called him and said, Work if you want or go home, Faizal recalled.

During the lockdown, Faizal would deliver food to doctors at hospitals. Some refused to collect at the gate and hed have to go inside, he said. I must also look out for my own safety during these times and would like to stay away from hospital wards where people are being treated for COVID, he said. Who will take the responsibility if I get the virus? Definitely not Swiggy!

In April, a bike rear-ended former Swiggy executive Irshads vehicle. His bike slipped and he fell, hurting his left hand. Thinking it minor, he continued working for two hours before he realised the pain wasnt abating. He logged off, went to the hospital and got it X-rayed. There was a hairline fracture. A friend took him to the hub. Irshad said that when he joined Swiggy in 2018, he was promised paid leave if he got injured on the job. But during the pandemic, Swiggy was only giving paid leave to virus-infected employees, and the fleet manager (they were still around) said it did not apply as Irshad didnt have COVID-19.

Independent self-employed persons, as delivery executives are called, dont get paid leave.

There was a programme, called Swiggy Smiles, where executives could earn paid leave, or vouchers, through points, but it was abruptly discontinued this year. If a delivery man stays logged off for too long, his ID is blocked an algorithmic way of firing a human. Multiple executives said that the way to avoid being fired is to request unpaid leave through Google Form ahead of time almost as if they are employees on the companys payroll.

When contacted, a Swiggy spokesperson said, We received feedback that they would prefer the rewards to be directly included in their payouts. Hence the amount has been re-invested in the form of easy-to-achieve incentives for a larger set of partners.

Swiggy, however, did not clarify which, and by how much, incentives have increased. All delivery persons across India The Wire spoke to said the company cut incentives during the pandemic.

On May 18, Sriharsha Majety, Swiggys co-founder, sent a company-wide email announcing job cuts. The company began chalking out a path to profitability last December, he wrote. We had mentioned we will be focusing on being efficient everywhere including employee costs

The letter implied the cuts and changes were out of Swiggys hands and caused by the pandemic. A key focus would be to identify and significantly reduce every single indirect cost like hubs, office infrastructure, etc., Majety wrote. Weve all done some of the greatest work of our time at Swiggy over the last few weeks working remotely, and thats reason enough to believe this can be done. He said the company was working to improve the unit economics that is, cost per delivery.

Majety said thered be layoff benefits, such as a months extra salary for each year a person has worked.

The next day, 18 managers were fired in Nikhils city and hundreds were fired across India and hubs were shut down, according to multiple sources.

Earlier there was decent support provided by fleet managers, Faizal, an executive in Surat, said. But I dont know what happened, the fleet managers are no more and we have no support.

A WhatsApp group where DEs look to sort out their payment troubles.

In June, Nikhil was invited to a video call with his boss and the HR manager. They requested him to join Quess, a third-party workforce management company and work at Remote Operations Control. Nikhil declined politely. He felt the role was beneath his skill level, and knew the Quess job would be temporary as Swiggy aims to fully automate operations. He worried that if he moved off Swiggys payroll and was later fired, he would not qualify for layoff benefits.

The next morning, he was locked out of the operating system. He lost his job. So did all managers, except the few who moved to Quess, Nikhil said.

He said has not received the promised layoff benefits from Swiggy. When The Wire reached out to the company, a Swiggy spokesperson disputed that any laid-off employee would not receive benefits and added that all employees that transition out of the system are given tenure benefits as per the policy.

In June, the food delivery business began to recover as India started winding back some of its lockdown rules.

Still, on July 28, Swiggy fired 350 additional employees, again blaming COVID-19. A Swiggy spokesperson at the time said that orders were still half of pre-COVID-19 levels in July so we had to, unfortunately, go ahead with the final realignment exercise.

AIGWUs Krishaswamy believes the company saw the COVID pandemic as an opportunity for distraction while it terminated jobs and cut the pay of the lowest-paid, most disenfranchised workers.

Nikhil agreed, and put it more colourfully, quoting a Hindi proverb: A branch was about to break when a bird thought, Ill sit on that branch for a while, Im tired. And as soon as it sat, the branch broke. Its like that these people needed a reason and COVID was there for their assistance.

Since the beginning of the year, Swiggy has drastically cut payments to delivery persons, according to riders The Wire spoke to. They said they now earn around Rs 20,000 during an average month, not including bonuses tied to festivals like Diwali or cricket. After fuel and bike maintenance costs of Rs 3,000 a month, the take-home pay is meagre. Many men The Wire spoke to earned more in their old jobs before they joined Swiggy in 2018, attracted by potential payouts of up to Rs 40,000.

Also read: Labour Laws Perform a Redistributive Function. Diluting Them Has Serious Consequences.

There have been multiple cuts. A route optimisation algorithm developed and piloted before COVID-19 increasingly clubs deliveries together, but a two-for-one delivery pays less than two separate orders, said Asif, an executive.

The scheme benefits them more than it does for us, he said. Suppose a normal order would pay us Rs 35 and now with the multi-order scheme, they group two orders together and pay us between Rs 10 and Rs 18 for the second order.

Swiggy, however, says that order batching is beneficial to executives because it saves them time it eliminates the wait time between two separate orders, and a rider does not have to go back to the restaurant to pick up a second order.

As noted above, a company spokesperson disputed the pay cuts and said its riders earn more today than before COVID-19 but did not provide data to back up this assertion.Swiggys payments are on par with industry average, the spokesperson said.

Riders The Wire spoke to said if they leave Swiggy, they can only move to Zomato, which has also been called out for its dismal work conditions by Oxford Universitys Fairwork project. Jobs are scarce.

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A Pandemic of Discontent: The Growing Woes of Indias Food Delivery Workers - The Wire

One couple is giving sneakerheads a new marketplace to flip kicks – Kulture Hub

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Adena and Chad Jones, founders of Another Lane, didnt just see a hole in the sneaker marketplace. They saw a glaring lack of sincerity.

Another Lane is a sneaker resale marketplace bringing originality and genuine connections back to the sneaker industry.

For Adena and Chad, the former with extensive experience in media and the latter a sneakerhead to his core, the connections between collectors and buyers have been missing for quite some time. And thus it is Another Lanes mission to bring fairness and honesty back to the forefront of what it means to love sneakers.

Chad ponders an old adage he learned. You can tell a lot about a person by the shoes that they wear. He sits on it.

The truth is Im more focused on the people in this thing than the sneakers. Scrape everything away, especially with this pandemic, and what do you have? The people in your network and your relationships. Nothing else matters.

Adena and Chad Jones believe there is an authenticity lacking in the sneaker community and marketplace. The relationship between sneakerheads (collectors and buyers) should not be so torn, but the transactional nature of the industry leaves a barren landscape bereft of love and inspiration.

I think that a lot of these brands have gotten away from the true nature of the sneaker community and what it was here for. To bridge gaps, to unite people.

Organic connections fuel the greatest sneakers at our disposal. Check inside your closet. Chances are the hottest and most unique pair of kicks you have was based upon a genuine and inspired connection between two parties.

Chad Jones sees that connections are forced, and there is no honest nostalgic emotion crafted by brands to motivate collectors to seek out retro products or reimagined sneakers. And when the collectors feel slighted, other collectors and buyers lose out.

With this in mind, Another Lane has tailored itself to be just as much for collectors as it is for buyers.

The sneaker industry is a two-sided marketplace, and both sides, working together like a sea anemone and a clownfish, must work together in a symbiotic relationship to prosper. Another Lane and its sneaker marketplace thus nurtures both sides.

The buyers feed the market in most industries, often leading the sellers to engage in a dog-eat-dog sneakerhead style of fight for the power grab.

But collectors are buyers and sellers at the same time, and the work that goes into finding a collection of kicks, gathering them, and flipping them, means a lot more when it comes from an impassioned place.

Chad, as a sneaker connoisseur and collector himself, has seen both the good and the bad in the sneaker industry. And Adena, as Chads partner, has witnessed it as well.

We noticed a hole that people like Chad werent taken care of, and that there was an opportunity to serve them. And when you nurture that side of the equation, it almost seems like a waterfall moment that buyers will be nurtured also.

Chad and Adena noticed that there was a glaring lack of respect and appreciation out there for the collectors and sellers hard work.

Credit for transactions, accolades, and even the hefty payload often goes to the consignment shop, while the person who did all the work is left by the wayside.

The sneakerhead who travels for years finding shoes, builds honest and beautiful connections with like-minded shoe-lovers. In some cases, they get their enjoyment out of the journey and, in an altruistic sense, want to share that collection with another sneakerhead.

There has been a glaring lack of fun and creativity within trading sneakers in recent years. For fans of collecting, sharing, and treating sneakers like the unique and hot commodity they are, it is demoralizing.

But Chad and Adena linked up with a common love for sneaker value and a plan to help change the culture.

Now, with each other, they can finally put their mission to fruition.

With a nurturing and appreciative disposition, Another Lane sets itself up to earn sneaker collectors undivided attention, respect, and admiration.

Another Lane sets collectors up with editorial content surrounding their stories. As well as digital marketing, photos, studios, and even help with uploading their collections.

Its an arduous thing. And it can be overwhelming. So were here for them.

Adena has worked at ESPN and Bleacher Report before, exploring stories around NBA players. With her experience, she is an expert storyteller in digital media.

And then there is Chad, a lifelong lover of sneakers and collector who can relate to others within the industry perhaps better than anyone.

As Chad mentioned previously, Another Lane is focused more on the people behind the sneakers than the product itself.

What inspired them to make this collection, gain knowledge from the package, or end up buying it?

It is within those stories of the sneaker marketplace, within the fine lines of business transactions that are often swept under the rug, that beauty is found.

Also, it is there that Another Lane sets itself apart from the pack in restoring authenticity and inspiration to the culture.

Another Lane had its public launch on December 15, and is encouraging sneaker lovers to apply and sign up to be members on the site.

Memberships are complimentary and no seller fees are taken off of sales. Adena emphasized that Another Lane is looking for the impassioned public to join their community, because it is about them.

What will start as a site predicated towards its members, will expand into a community that feeds itself and helps everyone thrive.

Another Lane is for the culture. Join here.

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One couple is giving sneakerheads a new marketplace to flip kicks - Kulture Hub

5 Best WooCommerce Tips for Higher Conversions – News & Features

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Successful WooCommerce stores are generally alike; struggling WooCommerce stores are always unsuccessful in their own ways.

Regardless of the niche, effective WooCommerce vendors typically have responsive customer support, quick loading times, and affordable prices along with outstanding products.

While every vendor is obviously different, taking some basic steps to optimize your site and streamline your workflow will have a positive impact on almost every WooCommerce store.

Similarly, installing a few top WooCommerce extensions will open up opportunities that arent available in the vanilla version.

In this article, well cover some of the most powerful ways to improve your WooCommerce store to attract more traffic and generate more sales.

Professional WooCommerce hosting can be expensive, but budget-friendly hosting options may not meet your performance needs. If you get a sudden boost in traffic during a sale or product launch, for example, an unreliable hosting service could lead to long load times and prevent users from accessing your site quickly.

SiteGround, A2 Hosting, and other top hosting services offer reliable speeds and the ability to respond to any changes in traffic. Alternatively, you can also invest in a Virtual Private Server, or VPS, if youre willing to put a little more money toward your stores success.

While dependable hosting wont make any sales for you on its own, it will improve your sites performance and help you avoid losing any sales to long loading times or any other slowdowns.

Its more difficult to visualize what youre buying when you shop online, so high-resolution images will go a long way toward giving your audience a better idea of how your products will look and feel. Excellent images make your site appear more professional and will give visitors more confidence in the quality of your products.

However, upgrading to high-resolution images will also lead to much larger files. You dont want to sacrifice loading times for the sake of your product images, so make sure to compress all images on your site in order to minimize the size of each file. This is especially important if your product pages contain more than one photo.

The simplest way to compress your images is to either download an image compressor online or use a web-based service like TinyPNG.

Of course, compressing those images manually takes time, and youll need to run every new image through the compressor before uploading it to your site. Thats not an issue if you only have ten or twenty photos, but it isnt a particularly elegant or scalable solution.

Instead, vendors with lots of images should consider using a WordPress plugin like ShortPixel or Smush. Along with a built-in image compressor, it also supports automatic image resizing and various other quality-of-life tools.

Furthermore, Smush enables lazy loading, which stops offscreen images from loading until the user scrolls down to see them. This strategy minimizes loading times and ensures that elements near the top of the page will load before anything else.

Your WordPress database is constantly growing as you add new elements to your site. The database stores a variety of data points including login credentials, posts, themes, comments, settings, and more. If youre using WooCommerce, you might also be storing product-related information such as categories, tags, and the product pages themselves.

Since your database grows larger over time, its important to keep it optimized in order to keep your site running at full speed. WP-Optimize and other database optimization plugins make it easy to stay on top of your database and minimize loading times.

In addition to optimizing databases, WP-Optimize can also compress your sites images and cache your pages for even better load times. Research indicates that over half of all mobile users will leave a site if it fails to load in just three seconds. With that in mind, even a small improvement in speed could have a significant effect on your sales.

While large images, cluttered databases, and poor hosting can be detrimental to your sites speed, the physical distance between your visitors and your server can also contribute to poor loading times. Content delivery networks help vendors get around this problem by providing a network of servers distributed across a wide range of locations.

With a content delivery network, your sites content will be cached on servers around the globe. Cloudflare, one of the most popular content delivery networks, has servers in more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. Their network will ensure that your visitors are never too far from the nearest server.

Furthermore, access to the Cloudflare content delivery network is completely free. You can pay for additional features such as image optimization, DDoS alerts, and 24/7 customer support, but those arent necessary to use the CDN itself.

With that being said, there are far too many content delivery networks to cover in a single article, so you should take some time to compare the top providers before committing to a paid subscription.

A content delivery network can reduce loading times by caching copies of your site on various servers, but it cant match the performance of a site thats been cached locally. Caching your site on a users device will make the site load even more quickly the next time they visit and mitigate the effects of a weak connection.

Unsurprisingly, there are many reliable caching plugins available for WordPress and WooCommerce users. Comet Cache, WP Rocket, and WP Super Cache are just a few of the best providers and most popular caching plugins.

Improving your WooCommerce performance takes time, but optimizing your site will have an immediate impact on traffic, sales, and the average length of each visit. These are just a few of the most effective ways to improve the site experience for your users and turn more first-time visitors into loyal customers.

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5 Best WooCommerce Tips for Higher Conversions - News & Features

Treehouse is trying to cure L.A. loneliness with co-living – Los Angeles Times

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On a Sunday evening in late September, with wildfire smoke hanging in the air, a few dozen people gathered in the rooftop kitchen of a Hollywood apartment building called Treehouse for their weekly communal dinner.

The buildings co-founder and chief executive, Prophet Walker, stacked plates and cleaned up cutting boards behind the tiled kitchen island, while the buildings designer, Sean Knibb, manned the pans of turmeric chicken sizzling on the stove.

The rest of the residents drank wine and chatted as they waited to eat. A woman with the vibes of an Instagram astrologer waved hi at a man who seemed to leap from a Vineyard Vines catalog. One wall of the kitchen was open to the deck outside, but people were squeezed together at small tables. Nobody was wearing a mask.

It looked like a scene from the past, or from the future. These people werent friends, at least not before they moved in. They werent family, save a few parents with their children. They were co-livers, a building-sized pod in the time of COVID, in a housing experiment with grand ambitions.

Co-living isnt a new idea, or even a new target for tech money. Start-ups like Common, Bungalow and WeLive, the co-living division of the smoldering office-space Hindenburg WeWork, have been raising venture capital and carving up apartment buildings across the country in recent years. Most sell rooms to renters as a cheaper option, a nouveau-SRO with foosball in the laundry room and catered Taco Tuesdays on the patio.

Treehouse is taking a different tack. Walker and co-founder Joe Green, a tech entrepreneur in the Facebook orbit and big booster of psychedelic research, say they want to create the togetherness of intentional communities like co-ops, communes, or Burning Man without the anticapitalist politics or freegan cuisine. In an era when luxury is synonymous with isolation private jets, private islands, Uber Black versus Uber Pool theyre betting that real community can be packaged as a premium, an amenity that keeps atomization at bay as surely as heated floors banish cold feet.

From the outside, the five-story building on Carlton Way near the open cut of the 101 looks like any other upscale new construction sans serif font, little balconies, black-painted steel. But inside its walls, things look different, starting with a floor plan heavily tilted toward shared spaces.

The laundry/art room in the basement.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

Rotating committees of residents determine which rental applicants get approved, and the process involves more checks of vibe than credit. Leases come with signed commitments to community values, and instead of simply showing up for scheduled events, residents are encouraged to create their own classes and shindigs for the rest of the building. Only 10% of the units are set aside as affordable for low-income tenants, but all are currently occupied by poets.

The rooms are pitched at the upper middle of the rental market in central L.A., with rents starting at $1,715 a month, plus a $210 fee to cover utilities, housekeeping, free coffee and Sunday dinners, yoga classes and other events.

Specifically, theyre pitched at people like Kimberlee Archer. When Archer left Facebook for a high-ranking job at Snap in May, the 38-year-old marketing executive could have rented an upscale pad with ocean views or found a spot up in the hills. But she wanted to live with other people, pandemic be damned. Before leaving Oakland, she googled coliving space.

A few weeks later, she moved into one of Treehouses units really just a bedroom and a private bathroom, furnished in the style of a cozy boutique hotel (Knibb also designed the Line Hotel in Koreatown).

Ive lived by myself, Ive lived with family members, Ive lived with roommates, Archer said. But after a career heavy on work travel, she realized she didnt need a lot of space she was used to living in a hotel room. What I enjoy is having really good conversations with people I dont work with.

A bedroom in Treehouse Hollywood.

(Treehouse)

She shares a kitchen with four other suitemates and shares the common spaces of the building with the rest of Treehouses 40-plus residents: Theres the lobby/cafe, laundry room/art studio, screening room/Japanese-themed bar, two-story library curated by the resident librarian, and on the roof, a garden, a deck, the communal kitchen, and yes, a little treehouse, wrapped around a 100-year-old olive tree shipped in from Sacramento.

The company views the Hollywood building as a beta test for its bigger plans: a network of Treehouses across Los Angeles, from Koreatown to Compton. A complex keyed toward families interested in co-life is already in the works in Leimert Park. Residents will be welcome to stop by any other Treehouse in the city for coffee or drinks on the roof when theyre in the neighborhood.

Walker and Green make an odd couple of utopian housing entrepreneurs. What brought them together was loneliness.

Walker grew up in Watts, broke someones jaw in a fight over a DiscMan and went to Ironwood State Prison on an assault and robbery charge when he was 16. He got out and got into Loyola Marymount University, then worked on some of L.A.s splashiest real estate projects as a developer with Morley Builders, attempting a run for state Assembly in 2014 along the way.

Green grew up in Santa Monica and went to Harvard, where he found himself sharing a dorm with Mark Zuckerberg. He declined a chance to quit school to go work at the social network but managed to start a series of successful tech companies of his own. In 2013, he teamed up with Zuckerberg to start FWD.us, a lobbying shop that used tech money to push for immigration reform, among other issues.

By the time Green and Walker met in 2016, both had reached a similar conclusion: They had found success but felt more alone than ever.

I never experienced lack of community until I made money, Walker said. Growing up in Watts, he said, he felt like the child of everyone on the block. Prison, if anything, was an even more intense experience of closeness with his neighbors. Living in a hundred-person open dorm requires radical transparency literally theres no dividers between 15 toilets, Walker said. We needed each other to not go crazy.

After his run for office, he started thinking about how L.A. bred loneliness the skyrocketing rents, the neighbors who never met, the way that markets and neighborhoods in the city segregate people by race, class, age and interest.

For Green, loneliness struck when he was on a spiritual sabbatical following the self-described failure of his lobbying efforts. Alone with his thoughts, he realized he had been happier as a kid first in his Santa Monica neighborhood, with friends up and down the block, and then at Harvards Kirkland House, where undergrads lived in separate rooms but shared common space.

He began reading about the spread of loneliness in modern society, and was drawn to the work of Johann Hari, who argues in his book Lost Connections that leaving the multigenerational home and familiar neighborhood is a new phenomenon of the last 70 years, and that this isolation is to blame for increasing depression, anxiety, addiction and suicide.

In 2016, mutual friends introduced the pair at the opening of Locol, a burger stand in Watts started by celebrity chefs with the mission of bringing healthier fast food to low-income neighborhoods. Walker had helped build the restaurant with a construction crew drawn from the neighborhood, and he says he was looking for a new project that captured the same feeling of building community and using physical space to actually do so.

They hit it off, but Treehouse wasnt fully born until Green went on a silent meditation retreat a few months later. I spent several days being unable to get my mind off of a vision for this building, Green said. When he got back to San Francisco, he spoke with his friend Michael Birch, the tech millionaire behind the elite S.F. social club the Battery, who reintroduced Green to Walker. Soon, they started scouting out locations.

Unlike most co-living companies, which reconfigure existing apartment buildings, Walker and Green saw that they needed to build from the ground up to get the mix of public versus private space they wanted.

But the decision to start from scratch presented its own challenges. Banks typically finance real estate projects based on dollars per rentable square foot, a model that assumes that shared spaces in the building, such as stairwells and lobbies, are worthless. Green and Walker had trouble finding a lender willing to back their plan. It was, frankly, through some relationships and luck that we finally found a bank that was willing to do a construction loan, Walker said.

A number of prominent tech names have since bought into the vision, though Green is the largest financial backer. Alexis Ohanian, who started the online community Reddit, chipped in, as did L.A. investor Arlan Hamilton and Justin Kan, who co-founded the streaming platform Twitch.

By that Sunday in late September, it seemed like the vision was working, at least to a visitor, even in the face of the pandemic.

After Knibb introduced the meal squash blossoms, jeweled rice, chapulines and a big salad along with the chicken Elizabeth Williams, an Australian screenwriter, saw that a journalist had joined for the evening and immediately introduced herself.

Williams had moved into Treehouse after a few cripplingly lonely months in a Studio City apartment, after moving to the U.S. in 2019. She explained that she grew up in a close-knit neighborhood in Townsville, North Queensland, no locks on doors, the kids would just swarm around like bees, where her fondest memories were of neighborhood game nights and jam sessions. She was happy to pay extra for a built-in community.

Michele Esquivel, Treehouses lone inhabitant older than 50, sat eating squash blossoms and rice at a table with three building mates. Her 14-year-old daughter, Violeta, hung out at the next table over.

For years, Esquivel had wanted to move into the city from Orange County, where she worked as a nurse at Kaiser, mostly to help Violeta pursue her budding career as a slam poet. The closest place they had been able to afford was in Long Beach, until she heard about Treehouse earlier this year.

Now they live in a suite with three other poets, whose rooms make up the 10% of units that are affordable in Treehouse, which the building includes in exchange for denser zoning allowances. Esquivel said that it could feel like a retirement home for millennials from time to time, but she was surprised at how well it was working out.

I felt the vetting process was long and tedious, and they asked really odd questions, but I understand it now, Esquivel said. To maintain the vibe of the building, potential renters have to go through an extensive application process, with other renters serving on the application committee. Everyone has to sign a commitment to the buildings core values being kind, present, curious, candid and responsible as part of their lease.

Prophet Walker, left, and Joe Green in a communal space at Treehouse. Every Sunday, residents gather here for a shared meal.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

One question had been what she would bring to the table as a resident; she had picked her cooking and her massage therapy practice. Now she sets up her table on the roof deck and gives massage sessions to residents. Other Treehousers give fitness classes in the basement gym, or teach lessons on medicinal herbs in the rooftop garden. Every Sunday, a rotating group of residents gets a $500 budget to cook or order family dinner for the whole building.

The building shares a Slack for internal announcements, which also plays host to the occasional call-out and heated conversation. To keep conflicts to a minimum, residents have set up a regular series of conversations, called Tree Talks, where the community values are often invoked to keep things kind and candid when residents are being less than responsible. A resident who washed their dogs clothes in one of the shared machines was a source of building-wide tension. Now, after a Tree Talk, a washer and dryer set is earmarked just for items that might have pet hair on them.

Esquivel said there were some initial issues with dish-doing and living room clutter within the poets suite, but the benefits have outweighed the rough patches. We would have never met anybody in these circles, Esquivel said, and especially for her daughter she thinks its been a wonderful experience, shes learning to cohabit with other people, other age groups.

A dissenting voice on the deck came from James Swiderski, who owns a solar energy company. He had always lived alone, and described his decision to move into Treehouse as a personal challenge. He planned to leave soon. Im glad I came, I dont regret it, Swiderski said. But it was an overstep for me, to be honest.

For Green, too, co-life has only been a temporary change of pace. When the pandemic first swept over California, he was staying in the spacious Beverly Hills house that his dad grew up in, which he said was in certain ways the peak of what Americans think they want. But Beverly Hills got lonely.

He moved into a room at Treehouse, where residents had created a building-wide bubble of viral trust after a few nervous weeks that had left the common areas mostly empty. Immediately, Green said, he could feel his COVID isolation anxiety melt away. He could post on Slack and 10 minutes later have a Settlers of Catan game going on the roof. It felt so much better, because I had people to be around. Still, after several weeks, he returned to his primary home in San Francisco.

Walker has no plans to leave. After the meal wound down and people began to filter back to their rooms, he finished doing the dishes, then plopped down in a booth, proud of the social feat he was in the process of pulling off: filling a building with strangers who were becoming friends, or at least fond acquaintances, against the head wind of a pandemic that has mostly driven Americans further into isolation.

Between its opening in fall 2019 and the beginning of the pandemic, Treehouse had rented only a third of its rooms. In the months since, the building has nearly filled up. The pandemic showed us if nothing else how important community and proximity is, Walker said. We have all these massive online communities, and thats like cool, cute, but people in quarantine in New York and Italy still felt compelled to sing out their windows with their neighbors during the first lockdowns.

Walker reached for a painful memory from his teenage years in Watts to underscore the point: I watched my best friend get murdered in front of me, Walker said. That should be like a death knell to anyones psyche, but he credits the neighborhood with saving him.

The entire block came outside, Walker said, and then when they saw what happened, every single person, just about, hugged me, like youre gonna get through this, this sucks, but weve got you, and every day weve got you. His hope for Treehouse is that it can build that kind of neighborhood, one where everyone knows your name and comes together in tough times, but for people like him who left their neighborhoods behind.

And of course, he hopes that it can make a lot of money at the same time. It just so happens that through density arbitrage, through a host of laws, through real estate financials, the Treehouse business model is an incredible investment, Walker said. But truly, were trying to build a community.

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Treehouse is trying to cure L.A. loneliness with co-living - Los Angeles Times

Badger Bank grants $35000 in Targeted Impact Fund relief – Daily Union

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This past fall, Badger Bank once again has partnered with the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago (FHLBank Chicago) to help the communities it serves by contributing matching dollars to the Targeted Impact Fund.

FHLBank Chicagos Targeted Impact Fund provides grants to support relief efforts for populations hardest-hit by COVID-19.

Through this program, Badger Bank reaffirms its commitment to support communities by granting $35,000 to the Targeted Impact Funds qualified community members who have been significantly impacted by COVID-19.

Seven $5,000 grants were granted to local qualifying small businesses and non-profit organizations. Eligible beneficiaries of the Targeted Impact Fund must align with at least one of the following program priorities:

Support for Minority Business Enterprises (MBEs) and/or Womens Business Enterprises (WBEs) to develop, grow, and/or rebuild small businesses classified as an MBE or WBE; an MBE is a business with over 50% minority ownership, and a WBE is a business with over 50% female ownership.

Advancement of Black and Latino communities through organizations that promote a fair and inclusive society or otherwise promote equity and racial justice.

Empowerment services for populations hardest-hit by COVID-19 including but not limited to Black, Latino, Native American, elderly and rural communities.

Support for affordable housing sustainability to assist low- and moderate-income households through entities that provide or promote affordable housing via rental assistance programs, housing counseling agencies, homeless services, fair housing agencies, and affordable housing projects in need of operational support.

The Targeted Impact Fund demonstrates our investment in the communities we serve, said Steve Dehnert, president and CEO of Badger Bank. Our local non-profits and small businesses need to flourish in order to keep our small communities thriving. Badger Bank is grateful to be able to invest in the very reason we continue to keep our bank local.

Cambridge Area Resource Team (CART) is the recipient of one of seven $5,000 grants. Helping Neighbors in Need is their slogan, and they do that indeed. CART is in the business of changing and shaping lives. The non-profit organization is aimed at providing a holistic approach to solving some of societys biggest challenges. They make sure their partners are empowered by creating opportunities for individuals and communities. For more information visit cartforhelp.org.

Badgerland After School Enrichment Program (BASE) also received a $5,000 grant. The nonprofit organizations mission is to provide quality, out of school care that will inspire the local youth to be contributing, productive and responsible community members through intentional programming that supports positive character development and unique opportunities to grow as individuals.

BASE offers critical after school care during the hours of 3 and 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, at all four public elementary schools in Fort Atkinson. BASE also offers a full summer wraparound program from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.

BASE is very appreciative of the support of Badger Bank through the Targeted Impact Fund, Said Alicia Norris, executive director of BASE Fort Atkinson. This donation comes at a critical time when we are supporting kids and families with our full day virtual learning support program.

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Badger Bank grants $35000 in Targeted Impact Fund relief - Daily Union

What We Learned in the Trump Era – The Indypendent

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When Donald Trumps presidential term ends on January 20th, it will mark the end of one of the most tumultuous eras in American history. One shocking incident (or tweet) followed another. Millions of Americans responded by taking to the streets over and over again. Now that the Trump era is winding down, what have we learned about ourselves and our country that should inform us as we go forward?

I was dating a white guy in November 2016 when Trump was elected. It was one of those needlessly tumultuous relationships wherein the people dont fully understand why its so hard and why theyre trying. Wed been dating since August and had known each other since June, when he began subletting a room in the collective house I lived in in Crown Heights. He, like me, was a native Brooklynite. He, like me, had been educated mostly in NYC public schools. He, like me, believed in intentional community and collective living. Unlike me, however, he could go to his parents upstate country cottage when Brooklyn became too overwhelming.

The morning after Trump was elected I threw up something white and frothy in the sink; some strange mixture of mucus and panic. I called my white boyfriend at his country house that afternoon to tell him how I was feeling and seek comfort hed never shown the ability or desire to provide.

Itll be fine, he said matter-of-factly.

Thats easy for you to say. Youre a rich, white male! I exclaimed. Im not.

Yeah, he continued, sort of ignoring my outburst. Theres no way theyre going to let him do all the crazy stuff he talked about.

The certainty in his voice kind of made me doubt my misgivings. I mean, how different really could his reality be from my own?

We hung up soon after that, then broke up in the early months of Trumps presidency, then stopped speaking to each other a few months after that.

This June, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and its demands for accountability and acknowledgement, I reached out to him. He said that hed pretty much vacated his Brooklyn house and lived mainly in his upstate abode.

Its crazy down there! COVID and now the protests! Things are getting worse.

When I brought up our original conversation about Trumps election, he said that hed been thinking a lot about it lately. Who could have foreseen things getting this bad? He quipped.

I did, I said flatly. So, Im out there protesting so things dont get worse. Its hard.

You dont have to, he offered. You can come up here and not deal with it at all. And with that, I realized, wed always lived in different realities.

Natasha Santos is a native Brooklynite with almost 20 years of child welfare advocacy, writing and organizing experience. These days you can find her hosting forums and attending classes on Zoom, in the streets declaring that Black Lives Matter and going for bike rides around her Brooklyn neighborhood.

Following the police murder of George Floyd, an estimated 10-25 million people took part in Black Matter Lives protests across the country and around the world. The largely multiracial but Black-led protests were the largest civil rights demonstrations in U.S. history. In that mix, was a number of Black-led wildcat strikes and rent strikes.

After Donald Trumps 2016 victory, many on the left saw the Black Lives Matter Movement as an example of identity politics that alienated the white working class. But Trumps racist dog whistling and the rapid growth of white supremacist networks under his watch made a resurgence of #BlackLivesMatter a necessity.

As Trump leaves office, we can see there are really two #BlackLivesMatter. There is the universal hashtag, that is a sign of solidarity, and used by celebrities and influencers to draw attention to the oppression of Black people. On the other hand is a growing Black left, one that roots Black oppression within a critique of capitalism. Recently elected Squad members Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, and Ilhan Omar represent this wing, as well as sections of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party. Additionally, there is an influential wing of #ADOS, American Descendants of Slaves, which is seeking to create a third way between patriotism and a demand for reparations.

These factions cross over, conflict and at times coalesce with each other. Now with Biden heading to the White House, there is a necessity for a radical Black left to emerge to challenge the center. This radical Black left must produce what Michael Dawson called Black counterpublics rooted in protest politics and grassroots democratic culture. This is particularly true with the shockwaves of gentrification and economic depression threatening the existential and political standing of the Black community.

Kazembe Balagun is a cultural historian and writer living in the Bronx. He works for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung New York Office.

Four years of Trump have exposed the fault lines of inequality, including in both independent and legacy media. For years there has been an outcry by Latino journalists that they, who are intimately familiar with their communities issues, are not called upon to provide information and perspectives, frequently not captured by English-language media. Hence the unexpected surprise for many when the Latinx voter preferences in the recent election revealed a more nuanced reality underlying the one-size-fits-all Latinx appellation.

Had Latino journalists been consulted or assigned to cover the elections, engagement of their communities would have been more granular and the egregious opacity in our comprehension of what diversity looks like in U.S. society would hopefully be diminished. To not avail ourselves of these journalists expertise is to negate/obliterate the vast cultural differences among Latino communities whose political legacies shape their social and political engagement. This is akin to trying to navigate a terrain where vast segments of the map remain blank. This willful negligence, this lack of inclusivity, is irresponsible to us all.

Juana Ponce de Lens many years in publishing, the nonprofit arena and government have been dedicated to ensuring a cultural conversation inclusive of the myriad voices representing the diversity of American society. She is former Director of Media Diversity Relations for City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, Former Executive Editor of New York Community Media Alliance, and is currently heading the communications group for Queens Borough President Dovonan Richards transition team.

As Trumps presidency comes to an end, what stands out is the degree that we have been reorganized tribally. The topsy-turvy distribution of class and party affiliation upends basic Marxist principles. Gender, education level, degree of religiosity are among the most decisive factors in determining peoples political behavior. The considerable degree of activism is encouraging. The degree to which the Republicans know that they cant win a fair election is evident and not likely to change. Therefore they will continue to go down an extreme rightwing path. These circumstances make it imperative that we build a broad front that cuts across ideological lines.

Gerald Meyer is a professor emeritus of history at Hostos Community College and author of Vito Marcantonio Radical Politician (1902-1954).

We learned over the last four years that groups of people cant be treated as monoliths and Democrats are fast losing the working class. Spanish-speaking voters in most states and cities, including New York, swung heavily toward Donald Trump, as did Blacks to a lesser degree. Trumps coalition was more diverse than it was in 2016 and Democrats need to think really hard about why that is. Voters without college degrees are increasingly voting alike and they arent voting Democrat. The Democratic Party is becoming a coalition of educated elites, maintaining its Black and Latino base thanks to a legacy of GOP racism and liberal achievements that are now more than a half century-old.

The goal of the Democratic Party should be to reverse this slide calling Trump a racist and fascist isnt good enough. If the next generation of Democrats dont prioritize broad, ambitious, and popular economic programs that can uplift millions out of working class precarity and poverty, they will not have unified control of the federal government for a very long time. If bold economics arent a part of that messaging, culture wins, and Republicans have been winning the culture war, despite what Twitter thinks. If people dont have trade unions and dont feel like the government is helping them, they can default to whatever it is Republicans tell them. This is the future Democrats face if they dont change course. Conversely, if Republicans get smarter about economics and keep their culture message, Democrats wont wield power again.

Ross Barkan is a writer and journalist from New York City. He is a columnist for Guardian and Jacobin, and the author of Demolition Night, a novel.

When Andrew Yang became the first presidential candidate to propose UBI of $1,000 per month, he was almost universally derided as an idealist pinning his run on an impossible policy goal. Two years later, the CARES Act turned into a real-world experiment in what happens when federal wealth is directly redistributed across the economic spectrum whether you were formerly making $30,000 a year or $300,000 a year, you received $600 per week, every week. The result? Unequivocal success: the economy averted an immediate meltdown because money kept flowing in a way that would have been impossible otherwise.

In my household, both of us were suddenly unemployed in March. My job eventually returned; hers did not. The $600/ wk in addition to small unemployment amounts was absolutely critical to us paying rent, but it also allowed us to keep spending money in our community. Without that money, wed have been scraping by at best, and spending the absolute minimum possible. Instead, we were able to let money keep flowing through our lives and through the community. I know this is true for countless numbers of friends whose jobs in entertainment, food, service, and events have been eviscerated. The CARES Act isnt an exact analogue for UBI, but its close enough for us to learn the basic lesson: spreading money directly into the bottom and middle tiers of the economy is fantastic economic policy. If anything, Yangs revolutionary idea wasnt revolutionary enough!

Without intending to, Congress proved to America what a profoundly positive impact direct payment to citizens can have on our society, on our quality of life, and even on our institutions. They will surely do everything in their power to unlearn this lesson, so its up to us all to remember how immediately effective those payments were, and to push for a new economic model for our country based on what we learned from the CARES Act.

Evan Sult is a publication designer, printmaker, writer and musician based in Brooklyn. He is currently the art director of the Detroit Metro Times, Cleveland Scene, and St. Louis Riverfront Times.

The Trump era was an important object lesson in the vulnerability of a political system founded on white supremacy. If institutionalized racism has always been at the base of American democracy, radical right-wing ideologies have gained new currency under an administration that has emboldened far-right extremists and mainstreamed their beliefs.

In Trumps America, the count of right-wing hate groups has risen significantly. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented, the number of white nationalist groups increased by 55% between 2017 and 2019, reaching a record high of 1,020 in 2018. Many openly advocate for violence, including terrorist attacks or a race war. The FBI reports that the majority of domestic terror attacks in the US today, approximately 1,000 per year, are motivated by such extreme far-right ideas.

But Trump did not simply amplify and intensify right-wing ideologies through divisive rhetoric, he also anchored them in policy and law. His administration hired members and allies of hate groups into high-level positions. And Trump personally sought to undermine an independent judiciary by attacking judges and tilting courts in favor of his appointees.

While the rise of hate violence in America is deeply unsettling, I retain some hope that intervention by political organizers and community leaders is possible. What is more troubling, to me, is Trumps success in legitimizing a far right-wing policy agenda that will have consequences for decades to come.

Maresi Starzmann is a Research Associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, a national non-profit research and policy organization. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Binghamton University. Views expressed are her own.

When Donald Trump declared victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, corporate media began soul-searching, wondering how they could have gotten it so wrongand the last four years have shown how rotten that soul is. Believing they just hadnt spent enough time really understanding Trump supporters, establishment journalists have filed countless chin-scratching puff pieces interviewing folks from Trump Country. But with no evaluation of whether those supporters proclamations have any basis in reality, what is the function of such reporting besides to reinforce them?

The whole framing of the problem is wrong: We already know plenty about what Trump supporters believe. Journalisms deepest failure hasnt been its lack of attention to them; it has been its inability to stop normalizing Trump and Trumpismof which the uncritical Trump supporter stories are part and parcel.

Every time a news outlet writes gently and inquisitively about the Nazi sympathizer next door, or waters down Trumps racism and xenophobia, or paints his unprecedented weaponization of the powers of government against his opponents as a spat between him and his cabinet, or deems his press briefings newsworthy, no matter how much misinformation they contain or how much credibility they unjustifiably confer on him, or insists on an objectivity that must conjure an equivalence between both sides no matter how extreme one side might be, the media reinforce the idea that Trumpand support for Trumpsimply fits into the usual narratives of democratic politics.

By repeatedly conferring legitimacy on a fundamentally antidemocratic president and his actions, media paved the way for our countrys dangerous slide toward authoritarianism which will surely not end with the 2020 election.

Julie Hollar is the managing editor of Extra!, the magazine of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.

The idea that a audiotape of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump referring to women in vile ways would solidify a female vote for his opponent was uninformed, poorly thought through, and even sexist in its own way. Women are divided by race, class, sexuality, religion, immigration status, and region of the country in which they live. Our well-being is in almost all cases intertwined with the men in our lives: concerns about economic stability and the carceral state cross gender lines. Both Latinas and Asian Americans have significant internal divisions of nationality that incite memories of war. And in truth, many women simply do not identify with the well-dressed, conventionally attractive, white middle class women who Trump preyed upon. This accords with a fact prosecutors know well, that female jurors can be harder on rape victims: blaming or disbelieving female accusers renders the illusion that the rest of us are less vulnerable and thus need be less scared.

Identity politics has been hijacked by elites who disassemble our complex social identities and ignore those aspects of our lives that require radical and systemic solutions. In the face of this, the focus on identity based concerns needs to become more thoroughly intersectional. #MeToo is winning significant legal reforms, yet too few impact the broad multi-racial working class. The truth is, women in lower paid professions are the likeliest victims of on-the-job sexual harassment, but their ability to navigate around pig-bosses has everything to do with their immigration status, whether they have a union, whether they have an employed partner who can handle the bills while they look for another job. Some may have voted for Trump on the basis of his promise to create jobs, precisely because they hoped this, and his alliance with social conservatives, would help them fend off the dicks at work. Sexual harassment is an employment issue that affects women as a class, but the means by which we can manage the problem differs according to our intersectional situation.

Linda Martn Alcoff is a professor of philosophy at Hunter College. She is the author of Rape and Resistance and The Future of Whiteness.

The lack of respect for science has been a hallmark of these past four years. It is accurate, although one-sided, to place primary responsibility on Trump for the historic and intentional failure to prevent hundreds of thousands of American deaths from COVID-19. Years of favoring privatization and defunding public health infrastructure by both political parties was never going to be overcome overnight once the pandemic hit. Indeed, Gov. Andrew Cuomos central political legacy in healthcare prior to COVID19 was decreasing the amount of hospital beds and decreasing Medicaid spending in New York. And then theres the intransigence nationally and locally of both political parties to anything resembling universal healthcare access.

As a nurse, I got to see first hand the entire spectrum of pathological lying to the public during this crisis Trump saying Covid-19 was under control, Cuomo saying we had enough personal protective equipment and Mayor Bill DeBlasio saying opening schools was safe. The bipartisan lack of commitment to public health and a public safety net as a subset of the pernicious and opportunistic antiscience denialism very much helped further the spread of the virus and made the experience of caring for people during this pandemic an unmitigated hellscape.

This denialism of course has been mirrored in the larger, more existential crisis of our generation climate change. While Trump denies its existence, the Democrats practice a different form of denial in the idea that there is compatibility between supporting fracking and profitdriven climate solutions with the future of human existence on the planet earth.

Sean Petty is a nurse at the Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx and a member of the executive board of the New York State Nurses Association.

Starting the day after the 2016 election, people decided they had to get more involved withsomething. Whether expressed through volunteering, running for local office, or going to a protest, millions shared an understanding that Trumps shocking victory was an indictment of a dangerously broken political system that could no longer be trusted to function without their active participation.

Many named that system capitalism, and the result has been a sudden revival of American socialismwith scores of elected officials, a thriving subculture of publications and podcasts, and an 87,000 member strong Democratic Socialists of Americahas been almost as stunning as Trumps election.

When a marginalized idea goes mainstream, there is always the danger of diluted demands and co-opted leaders. Will the price of socialisms further growth be its redefinitionas many liberals would preferas a handful of mild measures that leave arrogant billionaires mildly annoyed but still firmly in charge? The answer will likely be determined less by what is said in Congressional debates, Twitter rants, or even voting booths than by what is done in workplaces, schools, and highways.

The heart of socialism is that the working class majority should run society, and the emergency siren of malevolent incompetence blaring from the White House for the past four years has pushed the populace to maintain its 2016 vow to start taking matters into our own hands.

Increased voter turnout was one result, but so were student walkouts over gun violence and climate change, bombed-out police stations and toppled Confederate statues, teacher strikes demanding wealth redistribution from billionaires to poor Black and Brown students, and tech worker rallies against sexual assault and employer collaboration with the Pentagon and ICE.

Were still a long way from having the infrastructure of parties, unions, and community organizations that can seriously raise the possibility of socialist transformation that 2020 has shown we desperately need. But the last four years showed us that another world just might be possible.

Danny Katch is the author of Why Bad Governments Happen to Good People (2017) and SocialismSeriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation (2015), both from Haymarket Books.

We knew at the beginning of the Trump era that the labor movement was in trouble, and the number of voters from union households who went Trump was one big signal of how bad things were. That number hasnt improved much in four years: 40 percent of voters from union households still backed Trump in 2020. In other words: things are still bad, and the narrow margin of victory reminds us just how bad they are.

Its because of this that the big union victories of the Trump era stand out all the more: by and large, they were won by teachers unions, notably in Los Angeles and once again in Chicago, though many people probably think first of the Red for Ed movement kicked off in 2018 in West Virginia. But in both red and blue states the fights contained many important lessons: that the public sector is worth fighting for and a ground on which labor can win; that teachers across ideological backgrounds can come together to fight for their students and themselves; that parents and students will stand with their teachers if its made clear that the gains are for all; that teachers are well positioned to win gains for the broader working class in whats called bargaining for the common good; and perhaps most importantly in the Trump years, that fighting racism, xenophobia, and sexism are part and parcel of union struggles. The Chicago teachers, whose 2012 strike provided the model that education unions have drawn from ever since, put racial justice at the forefront of their demands, and from St. Paul to Los Angeles, teachers have incorporated the lessons of movement struggles to demand defunding school police, protections for immigrant students, and even access to housing at the bargaining table. These demands helped the teachers win where other unions were losing.

Sarah Jaffe is a labor journalist and reporting fellow at Type Media Center and the author of Necessary Trouble and Work Wont Love You Back (Jan. 2021).

Democrats inherit catastrophe from Republicansillegal invasions, economic collapse, a pandemic, the denial of truth and science. Obama patched things up. The Biden Administration is tasked with saving organized life on earth. Of course, they are not up to it. But, just maybe, we are.

Having joined forces to elect a man who went along with stuffthe crime bill, Clarence Thomas, Iraq we need him, now, to go along with us: 350.Org, Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, Black Lives Matter, a Green New Deal. We must insist upon and push meaningful climate legislation and real change: renewable energy, sustainable transportation, health projects for the common good, much more. Hundreds of thousands are dying from a pandemic that did not have to behad we had universal health care and sound environmental justice policies.

Trumpism was the last gasp of Reaganism. We require a rapid turn toward veganism: eat some meat, if you must, but eat with conscious understanding of who has died to give you what you need, including meat packers and creatures. Consume with the principles of an honorable harvest, to quote Native botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer: the indigenous way of being in which everyone has enough, no one uses more than they need, and we return to the living earth what we take. Climate health is not separate from public health. Right now, we and our world are sick and dying. It need not be so. We are alive, together, on a living planet; all is connected. Time is running out. These could be the most exciting years any of us have lived: the contagion of changing consciousness from grasping to caring would be euphoric. Think of living at a time when creativity and collectivity give new, rich meaning to every life and we join with Gaia to thrive.

Karen Malpede is a playwright, co-founder of Theater Three Collaborative and a professor of environmental justice and theater at John Jay College.

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What We Learned in the Trump Era - The Indypendent

Investment in children’s’ health is critical to their future – The CT Mirror

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Kids are resilient.

This is a statement we often say as adults to help settle ourselves when children are forced to deal with adult issues. In reality, kids do the best they can with what they have, making it that much more important for all of us to remember they require our intentional and proactive commitment to provide them with the resources and support they need.

David Hopkins and James Shmerling

The year 2020 has been tough for all of us and the challenges children currently face are great. From disruptions to their education, caregivers losing jobs, and social isolation, there are no shortage of ways that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected young people. The good news is that we can put kids on a path to success if we all work together to make them a priority. When state leaders convene for their legislative session in January, we call upon them to prioritize children, particularly BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of color) as they chart Connecticuts path forward, and offer ourselves, the Urban League and Connecticut Childrens Medical Center, as partners.

Investing in our States future requires us to collectively prioritize actions that will contribute to the success of kids and families across all zip codes, and in some respects, boldly speak to the structural barriers rooted in racial inequality that has prevented it from happening sooner.

Why focus on kids? Because the resources we direct towards children represent an investment.

We know that the care we provide for infants and children early in life is critical and will have lifelong implications for their physical health, emotional wellbeing, and future success. By prioritizing our youth, advancing policies in the state budget that support their health, and increasing cultural sensitivities in care for BIPOC, we strengthen families, communities, and the states future workforce.

It is an unfortunate reality that children growing up in low-income communities many times experience poorer health outcomes than their peers in more affluent communities. COVID-19 has made these disparities all the more stark.

Given the pandemic, children are spending more time at home than ever before and for some kids that means living in older homes that contain toxins and hazards like lead-based paint, mold, and unsafe windows and stairs that can lead kids to get sick or injured. Many families will also be faced with the choice of heat or eat this winter, meaning they will have to choose between paying their heating bill and going grocery shopping. Many also struggle with access to affordable and healthy foods as well as safe outdoor spaces to exercise and connect with nature.

All of these factors, often referred to as the social determinants of health, are strong factors that impact a childs ability to grow, learn and succeed to their fullest potential. Only about 10% of a childs overall health is the result of the health care services they receive. While equity in the health care system is critically important, we must focus on building equitable and healthy communities in order for all children to thrive.

Did you know that the average time between the onset of behavioral health illness symptoms and the start of treatment for kids in Connecticut is seven years? There are many reasons for this including stigma, insufficient community resources and, unfortunately, inequity in the quality of care given to minority populations. We know that COVID-19 has only exacerbated this crisis.

Now is the time to take action to strengthen our systems of care that support childrens emotional health and wellbeing.

It is essential that in 2021 Connecticuts state legislators, local leaders, for-profit and non-profit partners prioritize policies and programming that address the social determinants of health in our communities and promote health equity practices among our health care providers and systems. We must pragmatically support children in everyday life, as well as during crisis and trauma, so that they are ready for whatever the new year holds and reserve resilience for pursuing their dreams.

James E. Shmerling is the President and CEO of Connecticut Childrens Medical Center and David J. Hopkins is the President and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Hartford.

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Aurora James Is Helping Companies Invest In Accountability With The 15 Percent Pledge – Forbes

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Aurora James, founder of 15 Percent Pledge.

Corporations are often valued by the market based on whats called forward-looking statements whether its a new product or service, or a projection of elements of their business that will grow. This year, many of those statements included the language of racial justice and anti-racism, acknowledging the dire need for companies to do better when it comes to supporting the Black owned-and-operated economy, following a summer of mass visibility to the horrors of police brutality.

For some companies, like Paypal, putting their words into action looked like committing $530m to Black business support, in the form of direct grants and investments through community banks and credit unions. For other companies well, 2021 will evaluate who really meant their commitments and who were just trying out a new marketing strategy.

The skepticism about actual structures of accountability and transparency in business practices resonated with fashion designer and entrepreneur Aurora James. Thus she took matters into her own hands, and the 15 Percent Pledge was born.

The 15 Percent Pledge urges major retailers to commit at least 15% of their shelf-space to Black-owned businesses (in alignment with the size of the Black population in the US), offering consulting services to help these corporations reach that goal. As of this writing, pledgees include some brands you may already know and love: like Sephora, West Elm, Yelp, Madewell, Vogue, Macys, Rent the Runway, and Bloomingdales. As a result of her efficient and smart advocacy for financial inclusion, James was named one of this years Bloomberg 50 an annual list of innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders who have changed the global business landscape over the past year.

At my investment firm Candide Group, this year we took stock of the companies and funds that weve directed capital to, and found the majority of them were BIPOC and/or women led (with about 18% being Black-led). While theres always more work to do in deepening our alignment with racial justice, this outcome has been the result of just seeking out who we believe to be the best people for the job vs any specific commitment we made. However, we recognize that were an anomaly in the business world, and that many companies need an explicit commitment to hold them accountable to Black communities. I (virtually) sat down with James to talk about this, the importance of financial activism, and what investors need to know as we continue building a more just and sustainable economy.

Before we talk about how youve been driving capital into the Black business ecosystem, I want to touch on what brought you here namely, your own experience as the founder and owner of a small business. For entrepreneurs, we know that access to capital is often a recurring hurdle. Whats your money story when it comes to Brother Vellies?

James: I believe that historically, Black women have had to work twice as hard to get half as many opportunities. After launching Brother Vellies with just $3,500 of my own money, I never took outside investment. My brand has been completely self funded, which makes me very lucky and extremely rare. This year specifically has been tougher than others due to the pandemic, but it has for every business owner. I wasnt awarded anything from the first round of the PPP assistance money which meant that I had to get creative to ensure that my business would survive. We didnt want our community to have to think about buying luxury shoes and handbags to support a small business, so we launched a new section of the site called the Bodega that lists all items that cost less than $100. We also launched a subscription service called Something Special, where for $35 every month, our community members received something that we felt could bring comfort and joy at a time when there wasnt much to look forward to. This allowed us to continue working with our artisans around the globe, as well as allowed me to keep my employees and my business.

How did the idea for the 15 Percent Pledge come about? And why choose to focus on consumerism as your tool for social change?

Right after the tragic killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, we saw a lot of brands and influencers from across industries posting messages of solidarity, but not actually changing anything about their business. And at the end of May, I was on the phone with a friend talking about this as well as the struggles Black owned businesses are having during the pandemic. Statistics have shown that Black-owned businesses have been hurting more than any other racial group during the pandemic; at least 40 percent of Black businesses will not survive. As a business owner, and a Black person, I was especially torn up by this information and it inspired me to launch the 15 Percent Pledge. The Pledge urges major retailers to allocate 15 percent of their purchasing power to Black-owned businesses. Originally, I called out four retailers Target, Whole Foods, Shopbob, and Sephora. Sephora was the first major retailer to take the Pledge, but if all four had committed, we could have collectively put $15.5 billion dollars back into the Black community. Black people traditionally spend money within their own communities, but right now, with the rate of Black owned businesses shutting down or struggling to survive, the money leaves the community faster. We need to support these businesses, we need to close that financial inequality gap.

The instagram page obviously was and continues to be a huge public facing element of the campaign strategy. What was going on behind the scenes as you learned corporate partners were interested in signing on? How has the onboarding of these companies been?

The goal from day one was to partner with corporate retailers. We were thrilled when Sephora stepped up to become the first major retailer to commit to the Pledge. Their early leadership paved the way for retailers like MedMen, West Elm, and Macys Inc. M to follow. The onboarding process for each retailer or corporation is a bit different as their goals and strategies also vary. We make each process personal and then we work with them on their accountability and commitment to set a strategy with clear and attainable goals. We work together in the mission to put billions of dollars back into the Black community.

"Black culture is no longer available for free consumption."

The 15 Percent Pledge recently became a full fledged non-profit, complete with the exciting recent announcement of LaToya Williams-Belfort, a champion in the realm of racial justice, as the Executive Director. Why did you decide to codify this work into a 501c3 entity? For activists who may be working on similar campaigns, what would you say is the benefit of forming a registered non-profit?

After seeing countless acts of injustice and police brutality with zero accountability for the systemic inequities in our society and economy that allow racism to flourish in this country, I knew it was time for change. Meaningful DEI efforts and accountability from major retailers, corporations and business leaders was long overdue, and I saw a need to help provide companies clear, tangible solutions to drive equity across these industries. We are thrilled to have LaToya join us at The Pledge, and her years-long experience in the nonprofit sector and passion for DEI will be invaluable assets to our team. Forming a nonprofit allows us to build a community an intentional space for people to stay informed and get involved in this movement.

Pledges are of course powerful because of their ability to trigger real accountability. What are currently the main systems of auditing corporate partner supply chains? How do you envision the 15 percent pledge growing to other industries beyond retail and which ones?

The first step in committing to the Pledge is taking stock. We ask each brand to conduct an audit of their current spending power and how that is allocated. We find that if the retailer does its own audit, it will help keep them more accountable. We have already begun working with corporations that are not traditional retailers. For example Vogue Us committed to the Pledge with a goal of increasing its Black freelance talent representation to a benchmark of at least 15 percent of the total hires throughout the year. Talent includes writers, photographers, beauty teams and stylists. When Yelp joined, amongst its goals were to increase the representation of Black-owned businesses within its network through it community events calendar, to increase the share of Black-owned businesses in its network, and to develop its platforms Black-owned business attribute where businesses can self-identify as Black-owned on Yelp if they choose to. There are many ways that corporations can commit to the Pledge and if they want to do the work, we want to help them get there.

Switching gears a little bit, I know youre writing a memoir. Im anticipating youll be giving some of your perspective on the fashion industry, including sustainability. What do you think investors are getting right or wrong about the sustainable fashion industry?

I think we need to focus more on what brands are telling the investors as well as their own customers. The word sustainability has been used so much over the past few years and it has taken on so many different meanings. I feel that to be truly sustainable, we need to think about how we are treating the people we work with, what is going into and out of our supply chain, what is the content were putting out there and are we using that to inspire our community to feel like the best versions of themselves? The biggest shift I have seen in sustainability in my community has been the overall desire to consume less and cherish what you have more - which is definitely the ethos behind Brother Vellies. Its a little counterintuitive to the fashion industry but it's the language of Mother Nature.

Lastly as we approach the new year I have to ask, what are you most looking forward to in 2021?

There are so many things but I think its important that as we start the new year, that we dont go back to business as usual. We need to continue the work that we started in 2020 marching towards equality. I am excited to see what next year brings us.

Thanks to Jasmine Rashid for her contributions to this piece. Full disclosures related to my work available here. This post does not constitute investment, tax, or legal advice, and the author is not responsible for any actions taken based on the information provided herein.

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Aurora James Is Helping Companies Invest In Accountability With The 15 Percent Pledge - Forbes

Congress Approves Creation of National Museum of the American Latino – hiplatina.com

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The National Museum of the American Latino is one step closer to becoming a reality after Congress approved legislation to begin the process of development of the museum as part of a $900 billion must-pass Covid-19 relief spending bill, NBC Latino reports. The bill just needs to get approval from President Trump who would need to veto it since both the House and the Senate approved it. Supporters have spent decades trying to get congressional approval for the Latino museum including the Friends of the American Latino Museum (FRIENDS), the only non-profit organization dedicated to the creation of a National American Latino Museum in Washington, DC. This year marks 26 years that the charitable organization has been advocating for the creation of the museum.

Rep. Tony Crdenas from California and a co-sponsor of the museum bill said the legislation would establish a Board of Trustees to help guide the Smithsonians development of the museum, and would also authorize a 50 percent federal match to money raised privately for design and construction costs. We need a Latino Museum not only for its symbolic significance but, more importantly, for its educational purpose, Crdenas told NBC.

The National Museum of the American Latino Act was added to the spending bill after Sen. Mike Lee of-Utah, blocked a scheduled voice vote on the museum and on a bill to establish a womens history museum. He said with regards to the Latino museum that the nation was creating an array of segregated separate but equal museums for hyphenated identity groups. NBC reports.

Latino representation is sparse among the collections of the Smithsonian, the largest museum, education, and research complex in the world. In 1994 the Willful Neglect report demonstrated such a strong absence of Latino history that it seemed intentional, a fact the institution acknowledged in the report. The report included 10 recommendations among them the development of a Latino museum and an increase in the number of Latinx in the Smithsonian workforce. The National Museum of African American History and Culture established in 2003, was the last Smithsonian museum approved by Congress and The National Museum of the American Indian was established in 1989.

Estuardo Rodriguez, President, and CEO of FRIENDS previously shared with HipLatina that the objects that would be included would reflect the cultural, political, scientific, and medicinal contributions by Latinos in the U.S. It would also highlight how Latinos have fought in every war since the Revolution, and prominent Latino leaders and changemakers including astronaut Ellen Ochoa, baseball player Roberto Clemente, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez.

Among the supporters for the museum are music producer Emilio Estefan, actress Diane Guerrero, actor John Leguizamo, and writer and activist Julissa Arce who celebrated the historic moment by posting an emotional video on Instagram. There will be a Latino museum on the National Mall in DC, where we deserve to be, where our stories deserve to be told, she said.

Twenty-six years in the making, the determination of so many in Congress, in business, the arts, and across our communities, finally pays off. A museum that highlights the contributions of Latinos and Latinas to our nation at a time when the pandemic has so disproportionately impacted our community seems very fitting, Estuardo Rodriguez, President & CEO of FRIENDS tells HipLatina in a statement. We are eager to see the White House sign the bill into law and continue our work to not only help raise the millions that will be needed but ensure that the National American Latino Museum opens its doors alongside all of the iconic museums on our National Mall for the millions of tourists that desire to understand what has truly made our nation great.

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Congress Approves Creation of National Museum of the American Latino - hiplatina.com

Urban Gardens Created To Address Food Insecurity In Honolulu’s Vulnerable Communities – Patch.com

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December 17, 2020

O'AHU Working together with residents across O'ahu, the Honolulu Department of Community Services (DCS) organized the creation of urban gardens at seven City-owned, special needs housing locations this week. With the goal of providing sustainable, fresh produce for those facing food insecurity, more than 160 garden beds were crafted and 20 fruit trees planted through a Food Security-Scaping Program seeded with CARES Act Coronavirus Relief Funds. The project will benefit nearly 1,100 residents from vulnerable communities including: previously homeless families & youth, kpuna, domestic violence survivors, and low-income families.

"Growing our own food on-island is vital to making our community more resilient," said Mayor Kirk Caldwell. "Expanding our food production footprint will not only provide locally grown produce; it is part of a movement where the food we eat is grown, picked, processed, distributed, and prepared by the people of Oahu for the people of O'ahu. Along with helping to sustain the bodies of those affected most by the pandemic, this project will also feed their spirits as they see their hard work grow into what will become vibrant urban gardens."

At ALEA Bridge in Hale'iwa, program coordinators installed 13 garden beds and fruit trees like mulberry and avocado in late November. April Keller and her young son venture out to the flourishing gardens every morning to look at the array of growing vegetables, including tomatoes, squash, lettuce, and kale as well as herbs like mint.

"My son really loves tomatoes and picking them off the vine so we are both really excited to see them growing," Keller said. "He is fascinated with the whole process, and it's a good teaching opportunity for him."

Keller looks forward to tending the garden and making healthy meals and mint tea for her family. She recently harvested cabbage, cilantro, green onion, parsley, and kale from the gardens to create kalua pig and cabbage with cilantro rice.

"This pandemic has truly shone a light on the need for food security among our vulnerable communities. Each of these project locations is a place that has offered safety and stability to 'ohana through housing," said DCS Director Pamela Witty-Oakland. "Now we get to work together to plant literal seeds for their future that will help to feed nearly 1,100 residents not just for weeks or months, but for years to come."

Participating Affordable Housing Sites

People Served

ALEA Bridge serves formerly homeless families and youth.

15

Mnoa Gardens provides affordable rentals for kpuna.

92

West Loch Senior Villages provides affordable rentals for kpuna.

173

Hale Maluhia shelters survivors of domestic violence.

56

Kahauiki Village serves formerly homeless families.

549

Vancouver House serves formerly homeless and at-risk families.

107

DE Thompson Village provides affordable rentals for kpuna.

100

"The project emerged out of an intentional response to implement multi-faceted solutions, prioritizing sustainable relief to individuals and families being hit the hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis," said Lala Nuss, climate resilience and equity manager at the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability, and Resiliency.

This project is inspired by the City's Community Recreational Gardening Program, founded in 1975 and supporting nearly 1,230 plots at 10 community gardens. In addition, the Mnoa Gardens plot neighbors the public community garden located at Mnoa Valley District Park. "This is a fine example of how a community garden model can be incorporated into diverse properties and potentially make a significant impact on food security and the health of our communities," shared Joshlyn Sand, Director of the Honolulu Botanical Gardens and the City's community garden system. "We have seen the passion that our communities have for these kinds of gardens, and now this amazing program can help empower more future gardeners in so many ways."

The project is made possible by a private-public partnership with the Honolulu Department of Community Services, the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, Department of Parks and Recreation, Department of Land Management, Hawai'i Community Foundation, SSFM International, Supersistence, local landscaping companies, and community-based nonprofits.

The Department of Community Services (DCS) is an agency of the City and County of Honolulu focused on creating opportunities to improve the quality of life for the people of O'ahu. DCS oversees the City's work in key areas such as housing, homeless services, community development, aging & disability resources, grants, housing & rental assistance, workforce training, and youth services.

This press release was produced by the City and County of Honolulu. The views expressed are the author's own.

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Urban Gardens Created To Address Food Insecurity In Honolulu's Vulnerable Communities - Patch.com

CI HERO: Pekin man helps men break free from the clutches of addiction – CIProud.com

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PEKIN, Ill. (WMBD) Fighting the clutches of the opioid epidemic is Pekin man Joe Rogers. He advocates for Central Illinois men battling against drug and other substance controlling issues.

This weeks CI Hero said its his duty to lend a hand up away from a path of addiction.

On the outskirts of Pekin lies a nondescript building. Inside it houses the mission of Adult and Teen Challenge Illinois (ATCI). It helps men ages 18 and above fight against the opioid epidemic. Its located at 2400 N. 8th Street in Pekin.

The impact that were having in this area is significant, not only just to the area but our entire state and all the communities. Addiction doesnt discriminate.

Rogers is the director of operations for ATCI. The 12-month faith-based recovery program is a base-model for future centers across the nation.

Teen Challenge Illinois, our Pekin mens center, has been elected by Teen Challenge USA as the innovation center for the future, said Rogers. So, what that means is they use our center as a model moving forward for all Teen Challenge centers in the United States. And part of that is because of some of the programming that weve added to our program.

Rogers holds his reasoning for advocacy close to his heart.

I lost my 24-year-old son to an intentional heroin overdose, said Rogers. That really put it on my heart to do what I do. Im also a product of this program, so I kind of came through the ranks.

ATCI has been impacting lives for 20 years. Rogers also serves the area through his involvement in the Peoria mayors Opioid Task Force, Peoria Recovery Project, and Dont Shoot Program.

Pekin ATCIPhone: 309-673-3716Website: https://www.teenchallengepeoria.org

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CI HERO: Pekin man helps men break free from the clutches of addiction - CIProud.com

The rise of the plain-text email newsletter – Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard

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TL;DR:

Pull out the red pen and start crossing out whats no longer working. Do not go into 2021 with the mentality of this is how weve always done it. This year has shown us that we need to adjust how we serve our audiences.

Pull all the email data you can for the past three years. If the data is showing you that no ones reading your sports content in email, pandemic or not, then nix that newsletter. Find out what other channels resonate more with that audience, create a strategy around serving them there, and invite those newsletter subscribers to join you.

Do this for all your newsletters. Commit to developing a more intentional strategy around your newsletters that have high engagement, retention and loyalty rates.

If you think automating your daily and weekly newsletters will take work off your plate, youre wrong. Theyll make your job harder when your subscribers start tuning out and unsubscribing and youll have nothing to show for all your work at the end of the year.

The next time you think of automating a newsletter, instead think of how you can innovate. Innovation sometimes looks like subject-line testing, removing content from the lineup thats not performing, suppressing chronic non-openers for a few sends, developing segments, implementing re-engagement emails, and trusting your news judgment on what your subscribers need in the moment.

Less is always more. Modern designs are impersonal and they signal transactional relationships especially after the holiday onslaught of retail emails well all be drowning in soon enough.

Redefine your relationship with your subscriber via the more simple and intimate: plain text. Plain text is where its at, my friends. And if you insist on an image, go ahead and add a simple header to that email but thats it. Use your good old print-days typography and layout skills to weave a story via email.

Curation and engagement are now the bare minimum required to keep anyones attention past the welcome email. Think beyond the click and toward the share for increased retention and loyalty rates. You want your subscribers to rally their network toward your publication by sharing signup links on their socials, group chats, and the online communities theyve invested in. Nurture them toward these actions with carefully crafted retention journeys and loyalty programs.

Jacque Palmer is a senior content strategist focused on newsletters for Gannett.

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The rise of the plain-text email newsletter - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard