All politics may be local, as the old saying goes. But power isn’t always. At least not yet.
This is the general inspiration behind a growing collaboration being piloted this midterm cycle between the NAACP and Esri, a geographic information systems (GIS) software company that provides mapping tools to global corporations, governments, and NGOs.
It’s about getting good information into the hands of the people who need it most.
“We’re a 113-year-old policy advocacy organization,” Jamal R. Watkins, the NAACP’s senior vice president of strategy and advancement, tells raceAhead. Their mission is to find increasingly effective ways to help on-the-ground volunteers and advocates understand the specific issues that are urgently impacting the communities they care about. “Think of this like a franchise model…hyper-local, with a primary focus on racial equity through policy advocacy. And we do that by optimizing civic engagement.”
And that’s where maps come in.
“Maps help to augment the story of what the circumstances are on the ground,” says Clinton Johnson, who leads Esri's racial equity & social justice team, and who founded and leads the NorthStar of GIS, a community organization that focuses on racial justice and works to advance equity and belonging for Black people in the field. Mapping a political strategy is nothing new, he says. But looking at the physical world through a racial justice analysis is. “What policy interventions would emerge from a more complete picture of underserved Black communities?”
The partnership began earlier this year, and builds on an “aha” moment that happened during the NAACP's 2020 push for a complete census count, says Watkins. The tracking tools they used were invaluable. “All of that connectivity ended up being useful so that our community members could say in real-time, ‘I see in my neighborhood, 30% of the population who should be counted has been counted, we got more to do,’” he says. Then, COVID made the use case even clearer. “Maps were in our faces in a daily way, literally tracking the COVID rates. So, how do we use that technology to also track and connect the dots on things that can provide us more solutions?”
It's about putting the information in the hands of the people who live there, he says. “Having a map allows for our activists and community leaders to say, wait a minute, my neighborhood is behind in vaccination rates,” he says. Then, you’re mapping school re-openings and funding for schools. Suddenly, you have the receipts to have a better policy conversation. “You can ask ‘Is my school getting the same funding as other communities?’ and the maps can tell you,” Watkins says. “And if the answer is no, you can say, ‘Hey, school board, hey, mayor, something's wrong here because the dollars flowing to this other neighborhood to get these schools ready to reopen are not flowing to these schools in my neighborhood or the neighborhoods I care about.”
ESRI is a fascinating, privately held company with a wide user base—everyone from major retailers looking to identify the next successful location to governments to researchers tracking climate change are customers. But the company’s openness to invest so much in equity work comes from the very top.
"We look at issues of a social nature or an environmental nature and try to build some of the parameters of that kind of thinking into the basic tools,” Esri co-founder and CEO Jack Dangermond told Alan Murray and me on the Leadership Next podcast. “So, when our users buy those tools, they wind up doing usually a lot more than their basic mission… They do things more efficiently, they do things more sustainably.”
When the mission is democracy, efficiency matters.
For Friday, I’ll be checking back in with Johnson and Watkins to get a report on how the electoral work went and how some of their other projects—like a national voter hub—are progressing.
More reasons for hope, below.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
This edition of raceAhead was edited by Ashley Sylla.
