#ForThePeople: Open Genealogy Initiative

Founded by Eugenicists and rooted in anti-Blackness, genealogy and family history research have long been intertwined with racial bias and privilege. The shift to online research and genealogy tech tools further exacerbates disparities between BIPOC and white communities. Existing gaps in digital literacy are deepened by disinformation, digital exclusion, and inadequate access to records.

 #ForThePeople: Open Genealogy Initiative is an open education platform that broadens access to the tools, resources, and support needed for BIPOC people to uncover their family history.

 Scaled globally, our equity-centered, culturally competent approach to genealogy:

1. affirms BIPOC folks and cultivates positive identity formation

2. equips people of all backgrounds with the analytical tools to critically examine and understand our shared history

3. reconciles this history in order to dismantle today’s social injustices and build a more equitable, just world

4. democratizes access to historically gatekept information

BIPOC’s access to genealogical resources is limited. This is the outcome of a long history of genealogy being used to forge sociocultural dynamics that maintain racial bias and racialized public policies and institutional practices. Along with eugenic theories and Lost Cause propaganda, genealogy formed the basis of supposed justifications for discrimination, racism, and genocide in North America, Europe, and Africa.

Today, similar ideology is spread by government officials, the Internet, and mainstream media. Debates over what to teach students interfere with addressing racial bias and disrupt factual discourse on the history of injustice in the United States — thus undermining progress made since the Civil Rights Movement.

Desegregation of public archives, digitization of records, advanced search engines, and the pandemic have shifted genealogical research online. However, technology further exacerbates biases through algorithms that codify racist metadata and UX/UI design that reduces usability for diverse peoples. Additionally, inequalities exist in the preservation of and access to records as libraries and schools in communities of color are historically underfunded. 

Discrimination in education, tech, and other fields has caused a $16 trillion+ USD economic loss. This stifles innovation, erases BIPOC contributions to history, and prevents progress towards the SDGs.

#ForThePeople: Open Genealogy Initiative is an open education platform that broadens access to the tools, resources, and support needed for BIPOC people to uncover their family history.

It is a trauma-informed, culturally-competent curriculum that centers BIPOC and presents topics that are relevant to and reflect the experiences of BIPOC researchers. #ForThePeople mixes multimedia content, online and project-based learning best practices, and community in order to scaffold learning and engage the multiple intelligences of our users.

Users may enroll and complete lessons at their own pace as well as be in community with other researchers. It is no-cost and may be accessed via mobile phones, desktops, tablets, and laptops. 

 The platform is human-centered, equity-centered, anti-racist, ADA-compliant, Unicode compliant, interoperable, and allows the use of assistive technology like text-to-speech software.

Through this, we aim to impart BIPOC folks with greater agency and equity in genealogy.

Our primary target population is Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color. However, given that we’re all bound by a shared history, #ForThePeople: Open Genealogy Initiative also impacts archivists, descendants of enslavers, and other groups who can directly support the efforts of our community.

Since January 2021, we’ve engaged this population via participatory educational programming, direct dialogue, and community research projects which delivered both immediate value and informed the need for the Open Genealogy Initiative. 

Black families were deliberately severed during enslavement in order to enforce racial hierarchies, diminish resistance, exploit labor, settle debts, and erase their sociocultural ties.

As such, we’ve piloted a project that explores the genetic consequences of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

From this project, we realized advancements in technology allow us to reconnect families disconnected by chattel slavery and the Great Migration yet the same technology currently widens existing gaps in digital literacy, education, and access. 

Our solution highlights this community’s specific need for culturally-competent educational materials, tools, and processes uniquely-designed for the BIPOC genealogical research experience. Additionally, it builds a movement to lobby against regressive racialized legislation, destructive institutional practices, and cultural dispossession in the public and private sector.

As a BIPOC-led initiative, #ForThePeople: Open Genealogy Initiative sets forth a new paradigm in a space where others only unpack part of the problem — whether targeted at the descendants of enslavers or totally bereft of cultural competence for BIPOC communities.

Genealogy began as a method of justifying and legitimizing human bias against BIPOC. This resulted in the depriotization of archiving records of non-white people. The above compound into inadequate access to records of BIPOC people. 

BIPOC researchers experience human bias and prejudice when they visit state archives, county courthouses, and family research libraries. As more genealogy research moves online, so does the bias.

The industry leader's decisions about which record collections to prioritize, the UX/UI for searching and contextualizing these records, who leads the company, its ethics policies, and the marketing of its services reflect both human and algorithmic biases.

The project developed out of a series of chance encounters on the Clubhouse app between our founders, Jourdan Brunson and Tameshia Rudd-Ridge. We started as complete strangers and later learned we’re long-lost cousins.

In January 2021, we began building Black Genes Club - an online community that hosts weekly conversations and virtual events at the intersections of Black family history and culture. This community is built out of shared interests in family history but shaped out of the needs, desires, and input of its members.

Just five short months later, we’ve grown to over 3000 dedicated members, hosted over 200 virtual events and conversations, and reconnected 500+ kin through creating an Ancestor project database that explores the genetic consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade; thus demonstrating both BIPOC people’s growing interest in learning about their family and the greater need for culturally-competent tools and resources to support this endeavor. 

Our solution currently serves over 3000 community members in a test environment, Black Genes Club. At our current growth rate, this community will scale to over 8500 by the end of 2021. 

With the launch of the Open Genealogy Initiative and the introduction of new partnerships, services, and marketing channels, we anticipate growing to serve over 20000 people by the end of Q2 2022. In 5 years, our goal is to reach 2 million BIPOC family history researchers.

Our 2 co-founders currently work on the solution part-time.

Joining the Solver community will positively shape the trajectory of #ForThePeople: Open Genealogy Initiative. Funding is key to helping power our solution however community is what motivates us to apply for this challenge and what we hope to be the outcome of becoming Solvers.

 Community is central to our work and we aim to bring diverse people, perspectives, and ideas together towards our goal of connecting BIPOC people to the tools, support, and resources to uncover their family history.

 We welcome the opportunity to partner and engage with a range of professionals and students as well as organizations and institutions including artists, cultural workers, librarians, archivists, universities, public historians, geographers, social entrepreneurs, developers with social impact experience, museum professionals, open education and adult learning experts, restorative justice practitioners, law clinics, and others who are mission-aligned and adjacent.

We’re thrilled about the opportunity to learn from and engage entities on MIT’s Campus such as MIT Open Learning and the School of Humanities. 

 Last, we look forward to learning from and being in cahoots with other Solvers who are working to bring about positive change and impact BIPOC people and humanity at large.

We’re thrilled about the opportunity to learn from and engage entities on MIT’s Campus such as MIT Open Learning, MIT Media Lab, the School of Humanities, and the School of Engineering.

Partnering with these entities would be pivotal to getting the #ForThePeople: Open Genealogy Initiative in market as their missions are adjacent to ours and they have experience launching and supporting similar projects.

We'd also be able to offer students project-based learning opportunities.