Bearing witness to the historic reckoning with systemic racism, and amplifying dialogue to drive change that delivers on the promise of racial equality.
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- It’s important to make events more accessible. A concern from the beginning for many participating in the protests was the lack of ASL-interpreters at events that would allow those events to be more accessible and inclusive to the deaf and hard of hearing community. One follower, an interpreter themselves, reached out asking if there was already an organized effort to provide those services. After realizing there wasn’t, they established their own coalition of interpreters who coordinate with us on which events interpreters are attending so that we can help get the word out to our deaf and hard of hearing followers.
- Be on more than one platform. Instagram has been vital to us being able to spread the word about protests, but it’s also important to share information across multiple platforms. We’ve now expanded to Facebook and Twitter, as well as sending out a daily schedule via email. This ensures that we have more ways to share information in case of any technical issues—[one] weekend, [our] account was temporarily unable to post any posts or story for over 12 hours. It helped us realize the importance of using multiple channels to communicate important updates.
- Find ways to center Black voices. The most powerful thing about this movement is seeing people with such diverse backgrounds coming together in support of Black lives. As the number of protests and actions began to grow, we noticed increasingly more comments and DMs asking which events were led by Black organizers. We started denoting Black-led events in our daily schedule, and, at the same time, we saw non-Black protest organizers reach out to Black members of their community in a more intentional effort to center Black voices.
- Provide real-time updates on Instagram stories. This is probably the characteristic that makes our account so distinctly valuable and facilitates the kind of sustained participation [we’ve seen] in NYC. If someone can’t necessarily join at the start, with the updates [we post] they can join when they can. Providing live updates and helping people get to the protest has allowed individuals to feel as if they almost have a “friend” to encourage them to join and guide them there. We’ve kept our real time updates quick, organic, and to the point. Sometimes organizers will keep us updated, but more frequently members of our community will volunteer to DM us real-time updates every 15–20 minutes.
- Use your personal voice. One of the most important overarching lessons we’ve learned is how much trust people place in the people behind this account, and how much responsibility comes with that. Whether it be getting people to vetted protests, making those protests accessible, or being transparent about who’s leading each protest, we have built a trust with our followers. One of the more unintentional ways we built that trust is instilling a sense of humanity in the account.