Monthly Archives: March 2022

Changing the Narrative is a research project with a purpose. The program seeks to change the way the general public views the houseless population by creating graphic novels based on the lived experience of people who have experienced houselessness. Dr. Kacy McKinneya Portland State professor and lead researcher for Changing the Narrativesaid the project is [a] collaborative, community and arts-based research project that seeks to change the ways that we talk, think and teach about houselessness and poverty.

McKinney saw houselessness and housing insecurity firsthand in her classrooms at PSU, where several of her students struggled with these issues. A Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative (HRAC) study conducted in 2019 revealed that 44.6% of students that participated in the HRAC study experienced housing insecurity within 12 months of taking the surveyand 16.1% were or had been houseless. The study outlined the need for an urgent response since housing insecurity can be a significant barrier to education for many students.

Changing the Narrative seeks to transform perspectives on housing, and make research profound through more accessible presentation in comic form.

I think it is really important to start a conversation about redefining what research is and what is considered valid and what is considered valuable research, said research assistant Kimberla Reffu during the PSU panel presentation. Because often research is inaccessible to the public.

The project attempts to correct the current public discourse around homelessness, which McKinney believes are incredibly harmful to individuals and communities.

[These discourses are] stigmatizing, stereotyping, denying dignity and respect, McKinney said. [They are] influencing policy and how we treat one another.

The idea to make Changing the Narrative a comic came from a similar project called El Viaje Ms Caro, or The Most Costly Journey, which is a comic that tells the story of migrant farmworkers in Vermont.

Comics provide a unique and digestible way of telling and understanding the stories of others. They also allow greater reader identification with the characters, given their immersive nature. Scott McCloudauthor of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Artsaid, When you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself.

Researchers chose ten PSU students that had faced housing insecurity, houselessness and poverty to participate in three interviews. After the interviews were completed, the participants stories were given to the artists. According to McKinney, nearly all of the interviewees gave multiple iterations of feedback to different drafts.

Trauma-informed interviews were of utmost importance to the researchers. Shawn Hardy, a research assistant on the project, explained the importance of sensitivity during the PSU panel.

It is up to the interviewee to give their stories to us, Hardy said. We cant force them to disclose anything that they would be uncomfortable with or find triggering so their narrative is very much their narrative.

The artists on the project were intentional with their work, doing their best to create something that would be relatable to the reader. Marin Jurgens, artist for the comic Toward Light, stated in an interview with Street Roots that it is the beauty of comics that can achieve this.

You can really speak about issues that are very serious, but in a way that people may be more susceptible to learning about, Jurgens said. In the end, I definitely realized how powerful comics and graphic novels can be in that way.

In Jurgens art, we follow the story of a woman named Star as she becomes houseless after leaving an abusive relationship in order to protect her baby daughter Light. Light is the only aspect that creates any color on the panels in the foremost part of Stars story. Jurgens said that the portrayal of Stars daughter was meant to serve as the source of not just happiness, but strength, throughout the comic.

Some of the comics in the project chose to acknowledge and focus on the inevitable tragedy, as Jurgens did in Lights story. McKinney said that some of these themes repeated themselves throughout the project.

We saw in [the stories] common threads of injustice and oppression, [a] lack of support system and services, and the overwhelming lack of affordable housing in the area for students, she said.

Other artists chose to take a more tragicomic approach, often as a way to represent the students personality. Christina Tranartist of Caldo pala Cruda, a comic about a woman named Danielasaid in her interview with Street Roots that the characters energy and outlook are purposefully vibrant.

The way she tells her story included bits of humor, so I really wanted to incorporate that into the comic and show her personality, Tran said.

The story follows Daniela as she grows up experiencing poverty, housing insecurity and houselessness. A few memories detailed include a time when cockroaches crawled out of her households toilet paper rolls, or when a knife fell on her leg when she was nine because her parents used it to mud a wall. While these are challenging experiences, the comical illustrations capture the view of Daniela in these memories, and support how she chose to tell them.

Tran said she owed this ability to the medium of comics in general.

[Comics] allow for a kind of intimacy with the storytelling thats also really accessible, she said.

To get the comics out to the general public, the team from PSU partnered with Street Roots, who printed and distributed the comic through their vendors. Editorial Producer Kanani Cortez noted their popularity at the PSU panel.

[The comics] sold like hot cakes, Cortez said. They sold like fried chicken.

The PSU and the Street Roots team are currently looking for more ways to make the comic books accessible to the public.

The stories told in the projects comics demand that some readers interact with worlds outside their current comprehension, while other readers can see pieces of themselves portrayed in artmaybe for the first time.

In addition, the stories insist that people stop seeing the houseless as an inconvenience or as an annoyance and start seeing them as real people deserving of respect and dignity. Tran Cortez said that this is one of her goals with her work on the project: I hope these stories keep helping people turn towards the real people behind the stories.

Continued here:

Changing the narrative of houselessness through comics - Vanguard - Psuvanguard.com

Photo by Frederik Trovatten.com on Unsplash

If you need a ride to the airport, wish to order a pizza, plan a vacation, or search for a job, there is a good chance that you will use an app to get it. We live in a platform world, where technological apps connect consumers directly with goods and services. Electronic transaction platforms like Amazon, Uber, Grubhub, and Airbnb have perhaps permanently changed the way that we live and work. Platform apps seem to offer convenience at low cost and with little effort. But their impact on workers and economies is far from positive.

Seven of the 10 largest American companies are platform companies. In 2021, the five largest platform companies in the worldGoogle, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoftaccounted for 19 percent of all US market capitalization, valued at a whopping sum of $10.2 trillion. The booming platform economy includes well-known online marketing businesses such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy; transportation network companies such as Uber and Lyft; food delivery services such as Instacart and Grubhub; and freelancing contractor apps such as Taskrabbit and Upwork. These platform companies have not only grown their economic power, they also enjoy near-monopoly control over their industries. For instance, Uber has transformed the taxi industry in the decade following its inception in 2009,and now dominates 69 percent of the ride-sharing market.

Even as these companies rake in massive profits and outperform their more traditional competitors, the life of the platform worker is not getting better. And the workforce is steadily growing: in the United States, the number of platform workers increased by 34 percent in 2021, one out of three workers has become defined as a temporary or freelance worker, and so-called independent contractors are expected to be the majority of the workforce in the near future. Yet, because of their designation as independent contractorsthat is, because they are not defined as full-time employees of a companyplatform workers have very few protections or benefits. This contractor status makes it easy for companies to exploit platform workers by forcing them to pay high premiums for affiliation with the platform or even refusing to pay them for jobs. Uber workers, for instance, are required to pay extortionary commission fees to the company that amount to 25 percent or more of all ride fees. As corporate algorithms minutely track each drivers labor, workers are vulnerable to dismissal without recourse in response to customer dissatisfaction.

Though some jurisdictions like California have recently proposed to classify drivers and delivery persons as company employees with worker benefits, platform companies have worked hard to overturn these efforts. In 2020, multiple platform companies, including Uber, Lyft, Instacart, and Postmates, spent over $205 million to pass Proposition 22 in California, a law that classifies platform workers as independent contractors, not employees. For these companies, defining workers as outside of the scope of traditional employment is an important strategy that allows them to slash labor costs by avoiding such rules as minimum wages, overtime pay, and workplace safety regulations.

To slash labor costs even further, some of these companies are heavily investing in automation technology that replaces human workers with robots. Uber even thought of removing all labor costs of drivers by investing heavily in self-driving automobiles. Although Uber terminated this plan in 2020, selling off its self-driving technology, many platform companies are on the way to developing technology that works to replace their human employees. In the face of this drive to make them obsolete, workers are organizing to resist platform hegemony and create new forms of cooperation.

Collective action has historically been the most successful way to address injustice in the workplace. The labor movement has usually consisted of workers negotiating with companies over wages and working conditions or pushing for social change. In the United States, labor unions developed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s and gave rise to legal protections enshrined in federal law in the early twentieth century, such as the 1935 National Labor Relations Act which provides workers the right to unionize, or the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which created the 40-hour work week, the minimum wage, and the right to time-and-a-half pay for overtime work.

Similarly, there has been a global rise of worker-managed platform cooperatives in response to the rise of platform companies. These platform cooperatives use the same technology as platform companies but operate as cooperatives owned by the workers themselvesnot by a small number of investors and executives that steer companies like Uber or Airbnb. These platform cooperatives seek to deliver a higher portion of company revenues back to workers in the form of higher wages and more benefits. Platform cooperatives also have democratic decision-making processes, so that members of the cooperative have power over the way that the business is run.

These organizations have emerged out of the everyday experience of platform economy workers who want to put a stop to their exploitation. For instance, the Drivers Cooperative in New York started in an educational classroom among Uber and Lyft drivers, after workers became tired of paying high commission fees to these platform companies while also being required to pay for their own job expenses such as insurance and repairs. Drivers talked about their dream to somehow run their own app as an alternative to Uber. After one year of planning, New Yorks Drivers Cooperative was born in May of 2021, with a goal to launch an on-demand app owned by workers themselves which customers can use as an alternative to Uber and Lyft for hailing rides. The development of a fully functioning on-demand app is expected to bring more visibility to the cooperative rideshare community in the coming year. To support this vision, the Drivers Cooperative has been successful in raising more than $1.4 million through its ongoing crowdfunding campaign. Today, it has over 5,000 members.

Following these successful developments in New York, the Drivers Cooperative has an ambitious plan to expand to other cities in the future, so that drivers and customers will be able to use the same worker-managed rideshare in communities across the United States. The organizers at the Drivers Cooperative have been talking with possible international community partners as well. To achieve these goals, the Drivers Cooperative faces substantial challenges.How to raise capital to develop a sophisticated app that is able to compete with Uber? How to build significant partnerships in order to boost prominence and achieve a growing customer base?

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As some of the most powerful civic institutions that exist in this country, labor unions have long played a critical role in improving the wages and living conditions of workers. Since the mid-1990s, labor unions have revitalized themselves to focus on the direct organizing of workers, building broader partnerships with various community organizations and expanding their scope into sectors or industries where workers dont already have union protections. But unions have had difficulty organizing platform economy employees because of their classification as independent contractors, which excludes them from protections under the National Labor Relations Act. Organizing and achieving collective action among platform workers is often difficult because workers are decentralized, lacking a common workplace and a means to communicate with each other.

In response to these new and often challenging conditions, labor unions have tried to embrace new forms of organizing fit for a decentralized workforce. For instance, union leaders such as Larry Williams Jr. founded UnionBasean online organizing platformin 2015 to promote digital social networking among union members. SEIU supported Coworker.org, a digital political advocacy organization that lobbies for policy change and helped create the Workers Lab. These promising innovations show how labor unions have tried to stand in solidarity with platform workers by embracing new strategies that serve worker needs, pursue policy changes, and pioneer campaigns among platform workers.

The global financial crisis in 2008 also led labor unions to re-imagine new partnerships with various worker cooperatives, both in and out of the platform economy. The largest worker cooperative in the US, Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), is a union co-op, whose homecare worker-owners has been affiliated with SEIU 1199 since 2003. Recently, SEIU United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU- UHW West) in Oakland California also helped launch AlliedUP, a cooperative staffing firm owned by allied professional healthcare workers, by investing in startup costs. For the past five years, SEIU- UHW West has explored union-coops as a solution to the crisis of healthcare staffing shortages and other problems relating to poor pay and poor working environment. In January 2016, SEIU-UHW West organized licensed Vocational Nurses (IVNs) to create a union-co-op, Nursing and Caregivers Cooperative, Inc.although this cooperative fizzled due to the lack of a contract with hospitals for workers. As co-op owners, workers receive $35 an hour on average, which is $3 to $5 more than what other healthcare workers receive. AlliedUP workers even receive worker benefits and patronage dividends at the end of a fiscal year.

Connections between labor unions and industries especially impacted by the platform economy have helped cooperatives come into being. These connections are often fostered between union workers who learn about platform worker exploitation. For example, local CWA 7777 president Duncan Harrington opened his office in 2004 to immigrant taxi drivers so that they could talk about creating a different kind of business that is less exploitative.The result of this solidarity was the formation of two union cooperatives: Union Taxi in 2009 and Green Taxi Cooperative in 2016. Although there are still only a few labor unions supporting platform cooperatives, there are emergent connections between Communication Workers of America (CWA) 7777 and the platform drivers cooperative.

Even though these first two union cooperatives left the CWA 7777 some years later, it was not the end of the unions efforts. Now, the union is showing support for rideshare drivers by organizing the Colorado Independent Drivers Union (CIDU) in Denver, supported by CWA District 7. It has also welcomed the concept of a platform drivers cooperative, entering into a partnership with the Drivers Cooperative in New York. A growing collaboration between these two organizations is genuine, as both organizations seek to address the mounting challenge of platform exploitation of workers in their communities.

How can unions overcome powerful platform corporations? For now, a large part of their efforts is in the political arena: In 2020, labor spent $5.28 million on political lobbying, and another $1.8 billion on the presidential election. While lobbying and elections are important ways for unions to deploy their political power in the service of worker empowerment, established unions could also pursue the promising strategy of supporting platform cooperatives, so that these grassroots organizations can have the organizing infrastructure and financial support they need to develop technology platforms that can compete with powerful multinational companies like Uber and Airbnb.

It may seem idealistic to imagine a world where different communities organize platform cooperatives in partnership with labor unions, so that local people begin using platforms that their own community groups are invested in, but as Rebecca Lurie has written for NPQ, these collaborative strategies are exactly what is needed to advance worker empowerment and transform the economy. Instead of people simply using Uber by default, driver cooperatives could be organized in cities in the US and around the world, all using direct-to-consumer apps designed with union support and owned by the workers themselves rather than by platform economy corporations. Instead of using the Grubhub app, local restaurants could organize their own collective platform and band together to localize delivery efforts, keeping money and power in local communities.

These efforts are quickly becoming a reality, as the movement to organize platform workers has already started to make change in a growing number of communities. In helping platform workers see these organizing efforts through to completion, labor unions are one of the best natural allies to stand side-by-side with platform cooperatives. In the digital and platform era, intentional alliances between labor unions and platform cooperatives are necessary to create a stronger labor movement. It all begins with working-class solidarity between labor unions and the growing worker cooperative movement.

Read more here:

Raising the Floor of the Platform Economy: Co-ops, Unions, and the Struggle to Transform Technology - Non Profit News - Nonprofit Quarterly

From innovative design spaces (think drive-thru only storefronts and special locations that serve universities and military bases) to a punch-powered social media presence to an ever-changing yet traditional menu that has maintained and recruited customers for over five decades, its clear that Wendys knows what its doing.

Per the company's last earnings report, Wendy'sreported a revenue of $470.3 million in Q3 of 2021, up 4% year over year.

And as the brand sets its sight on growth, its choosing to focus in on what really pumps and drives business and builds community its franchisees.

Weve had a lot of change and evolution in our franchise system over the last five, seven years, we've gone through a big effort around what we call system optimization, Abigail Pringle, Wendy's President, International and Chief Development Officer tells Entrepreneur exclusively. Were a 52-year-old brand, so we've had folks that have been in the system for a long time, and we've gone through a lot of succession planning. We have next generation franchisees coming into the system, but we've also been actively recruiting new franchisees. And we're now accelerating that.

A whopping 95% of Wendys restaurants are franchised, and now the company is making moves to increase both accessibility for and diversity among franchisees through its new initiative dubbed Own Your Opportunity, which aims to specifically increase Wendys ownership among women and people of color.

We really want to increase the diversity of our franchisees. And so importantly, we have a very intentional focus on bringing more women and bringing people of color and they are definitely not the majority of our profile, Pringle says. And we have been increasing it over the last few years. But we think we need to accelerate even further.

Pringle explains that standard Wendy's franchisees are people that arewell-capitalized with a strong growth mindset but more importantly, have the leadership profile that fits the Wendys MO: investing in the people that they serve (through creating long-lasting careers with training development, fostering a strong and exciting work culture) and representing the communities that their restaurants serve.

Related:Wendy's President Reveals the Special Sauce Behind Their Design Strategy

Though Wendys hasnt specifically benchmarked their franchisee profile to date (the company began doing so within the last year) Pringle explains that franchisees are encouraged to self-identify though its not a requirement, explaining that women are definitely more of the exception, not the rule when it comes to the standard franchisee and that they are on the minority side.

With the Own Your Opportunity initiative, the company is taking specific steps to change that.

One of the big things we saw that was a hindrance was how do we find great women entrepreneurs and how do we narrow the gap in terms of getting them access to capital, Pringle tells us, explaining that the chain partnered last year with First Womens Bank, the first women-founded and owned bank based in Chicago. Were a mission partner of that bank and they're helping us find great women entrepreneurs, they're helping finance some of these new franchisee deals.

Pringle says that the company has also doubled down on efforts to talk to existing women franchisees through focus groups and networking events in an effort to connect franchisees from different communities with each other and help find a way to attract new female entrepreneurs that would be interested in owning their own little slice of the fast-food titan.

Wendys has also changed its financial requirements for interested franchisees in an attempt to make opportunities more accessible to those in underrepresented communities.

We realized we weren't very competitive and it really was a high bar in order to be able to come into the system, Pringle admits. We can be financially smart and also be more competitive, so we changed our financial requirements forallnew or existing franchisees."

This includes changing benchmarks for net worth and liquidity for aspiring franchisees, while also making an effort to increase effort to capital for those interested by creating financing opportunities with major lending partners like City National Bank, Huntington National Bank and Wintrust Franchise Finance.

They're really partnering with us to make access to capital much more approachable for candidates who want to build one restaurant and then build two and then build three right over time. And so that's a really big unlock, I think that will change our ability to recruit more folks, Pringlesays.

Wendys has also launched a Build-to-Suit development fund which will take most of the heavy lift off of franchisees who hope to start with the company.

Related:'I Have Tears In My Eyes From Laughing So Much': Wendy's Rips Into McDonald's French Fries In Savage New Billboards

We're putting our own money into this equation, Pringle tells us. We actually have a turnkey program where we find the site, we build the location, and we hand over the keys to a new franchisee. And so they have part of the financial requirements, but we also are investing our capital to create an opportunity through building the restaurants. It really does change the game, I think, to be able to say, Gosh, I don't have a background in development or I'm not sure how to go and buy real estate. We've done all of that for them and engage and partner with them on that kind of a program.

The variation in different Wendys restaurant design types allows for massive (and seemingly endless) options and opportunity for those looking to open a their own franchise.

Though standard Wendys restaurants aremostcommon in the U.S. (which is the companys biggest market), theyre not the only store design option for franchisees.

The DNA, the core design and the experience is the same, but the way we bring [Wendys] to life can be different in each community. And I think that's part of better serving the community that we're in, Pringle says. I think that design evolution has changed things. And I think it will open up the door.

Design evolution certainly helped the company succeed through the pandemic where so many faltered amid restaurant closings due to pandemic protocols and early-day lockdowns.

Its this success and momentum within the company that has the company in the ideal position to double down on franchisee expansion and to look at the future with an accelerated pace.

I think that the brand is never been stronger. Our brand is in a really healthy position. In the U.S. we're now the number two hamburger chain, we are growing market share traffic and dollar share we are doing that in all other parts of the world, Pringle says. We believe that we can grow the brand. There's a huge opportunity to be able to better serve customers in the communities. We want to be able to grow.

Wendys was up nearly 6% year over year as of Monday afternoon.

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Exclusive: Wendy's President Talks New Franchisee Initiative Zeroed In On 'Diversity of Franchisees' - Entrepreneur