Midterm report

Program story

2020

As Black Lunch Table (BLT) continues to cultivate our relationship with the Wikipedia movement, seeking out ways we can innovate within it, and continue to grow our project sustainably, we are more committed than ever to the ways in which the work we do makes Black artists visible. Our project raises awareness about the importance of this work, particularly as it pertains to the often unrecorded history of Black visual artists.

After completing our 2018-2019 Project Grant and making considerations about where the project was headed we decided on methods and strategies that would support our ongoing expansion through committed team member retention, crystallizing our nonprofit infrastructure, and maintaining and growing our edit-a-thons, collaborations, and initiatives.

Black Lunch Table’s application into the Simple Annual Plan Grant track found us with three determined lanes of focus for 2020: nonprofit operations, team, and events.

Briefly, the main goals and objectives for each nonprofit operations, team, and events are listed below:

Nonprofit Operations

Developing a new board of advisors and expanding the board of directors
Increase BLT partnerships with cultural and academic institutions
Increase organizational sponsors for BLT activities

Team

Increase the stability of the team and retain effective team members including

Project managers and assistants
Regional Proxies
Bookkeepers, lawyers, strategists
Coders, digital specialists, consultants

Redistribute operations from Leads to team

Leads should shift focus to strategy and vision.
Improve all of our staffing, training, hiring systems where each team member is operating more effectively, sustainably and the BLT project is becoming more stable overall.

Events

Events encompass our goals as it relates to edit-a-thons, editors, and our photobooth

Increase access to training and participation in marginalized communities
Host 40 Wiki events over 12 months
Develop and initiate a survey and assessment protocol within 6 months
Adopt GLAM and Wiki Education into our initiative
Develop contests that focus on our growing task list as well as ways to familiarize editors with Wikipedia’s many platforms and concerns.

Language and Translation (interpretation) initiatives and collaborations that connect Wikidata to Wikidata to our oral history database, and continuing to focus on events and methods that support thoughtful approaches to the multilingual space of Wiki and our project’s communities.

COVID-19 and The Movement for Black Lives

Importantly, the writing of this midpoint report comes approximately four months into the COVID-19 crisis which altered the operation of nearly everything globally. This required a cessation of all in-person Wikipedia events and edit-a-thons as directed by the Foundation while people sheltered and quarantined to remain safe from the virus. As everything that could move online did, much of our programming and event plans had to be shifted. The crisis, at least in America, appears that it will persist throughout the calendar year and into 2021. We continue to adapt our programmatic goals following the guidance of the WMF. Our detailed budget adjustments and programmatic outline can be seen HERE and HERE.

The detrimental impact of COVID-19 is felt most directly in the communities BLT supports and is a part of. This is due to the intersectional nature of systematic oppression on the basis of race, class, and gender, as well as a politic and policy of criminalization disproportionately suffered by Black Americans. The videotaped murder of George Floyd coupled clarified the fact that the COVID-19 crisis is not the only one we face now.

The alarming rate of COVID-19 death in the Black community and mounting evidence of police and state violence against Black people sent citizens to the streets. In response institutions and corporations wrote statements of support for The Black Lives Matter movement. We think it is worthwhile to include our statement about solidarity that went out with our summer newsletter.

By the time you read our summer newsletter, you likely will have encountered statements from numerous institutions and individuals telling you that they stand in solidarity with Black people and the fight to end racial injustice. The murders of Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and countless other members of Black communities have redirected popular discourse to focus on the ongoing work of Black artists, creators, activists, protestors, and families fighting to end white supremacy and the injustice faced by Black and marginalized people in America and beyond. Protests across the country have been met with statements of solidarity and support from corporations, arts organizations, academic institutions, and individuals echoing the words Black Lives Matter.

In these statements, what strategies are museum administrations advocating for? What opportunities and resources have they committed to share in order to educate their communities on the history of white supremacy, the ways their institutions have been complicit, and their plans to rectify their own systematic racism, violence, and implicit bias? In response to the death of George Floyd, the University of Minnesota cut ties with Minneapolis police, effectively refusing to fund an organization at the epicenter of the protests against systemic racism and inequality. Ben and Jerry’s corporate statement to dismantle white supremacy provided more history, context, and action than most of our political, educational, or cultural institutions. We ask: how are our colleagues in art institutions also doing this work?

Black Lunch Table is committed to being a resource for amplifying voices and experiences of Black visual artists, collecting and archiving their histories as they are lived and experienced, and using our model of catalyzing these conversations in integrated settings as well. But as we continue to face injustice, white supremacy, and systemic violence with impunity, we must note that Black people should not be relied upon to fight for our lives and educate others on how to stand with us. Resources for supporting individual Black artists, Black-owned arts organizations, and donating to community organizing efforts have been shared across social media platforms to direct and guide all of those looking for some way to help. These resources are incredibly important right now and everyone should have access to reliable channels to both demonstrate and access support. And still, you should not be relying on your Black friends, family, colleagues, and mentors to do this research and education for you. We ask you to question: what does solidarity look like?

From every vantage, be it protest, riot, sit-in, defunding, hiring, or petition, the ongoing movement led by Black people across America and around the world remind us that empty promises, ambivalence, and blanket statements will no longer suffice. As you contribute to the ongoing work of Black people, we ask you to truly consider what it means to stand with us. To stand up against white supremacy. To educate yourself and your community on racism and injustice. And to act. We ask you to consider what it means to act and participate in this ongoing movement of change and justice.

The work began before now, and it will continue until it’s done.

Signed,

The Black Lunch Table Team

Amidst the challenges that COVID-19 have presented and with the added burden of protesting and protecting our lives, we persist to reach our goals of writing and visualizing Black artists who are statistically underrepresented on Wikipedia. This report outlines the progress we have made towards our goals this far.

Program Progress

Nonprofit operations

In June 2019 our application to become a nonprofit organization was approved by the IRS. After legal recognition, the next steps for becoming and maintaining a functional organization are being taken. For 2020 our focus has been on establishing efficient, sustainable, forward-looking operations appropriate to our new status. Below is documentation of the steps we've taken so far.

Target and develop a plan for board directors/advisors/mentors/liaisons Expand bylaws Identify and select nonprofit insurance Strategize for future expansion including employee benefits and full-time employment

Revised and focused our dream list of folks in February
Took steps to move to streamlined payroll system with bookkeeper/accountant
Work with the strategist, which began in June, has delayed expected time frames of reaching goals

Increase BLT partnerships with cultural and academic institutions

All of our detailed goals can be seen in our annual plan HERE, however many of these goals had to be put on hold due to the COVID-19 crisis. Considering the pandemic, we spent significant time working together to define our priorities during this new circumstance while keeping our mission-centered. We thought about new audience outcomes that would only be possible/necessary while sheltering in place. Our programmatic changes and successes are outlined in events below and in the second half of the year with a little more stability can return to these more specific goals, knowing they will have to be amended due to the pandemic.

Increase organizational sponsors for BLT activities, identify and target (fiscal, corporate, promotional) in 2 months

Secured grants from Warhol Foundation, Rutgers University, and financial support from CommonField
Applied for funding from NEH, Field Foundation
Completed a partnership with TUSK highlighting diverse workplaces and communities

Develop a long-running strategic plan, including fundraising and budget advisement

Identified cultural institutions to establish ongoing partnerships with (currently working with the Hyde Park Art Center and are a community partner with MCA Chicago)
Outreach to professors (creative writing, art history, studio art) moving to online learning. Featuring Wiki in Classrooms special edition online workshop this summer. Published resources for WikiEdu on meetup page.
Completed a comprehensive social media style guide to support general awareness of the project and specific program developed during the pandemic.

Team

As a project, we are moving towards a more efficient and effective team that will allow a more thoughtful engagement strategy with our publics. We want to be able to fund the project and maintain a trained and competent team beyond temporary contract terms and temporary funding. Some of this has shifted due to the pandemic but the need to establish, hire and train a team to which the day to day operations can be moved away from the lead organizers so that they may focus on the longer-term fundraising and strategic plans for the project remains. Below are the stated goals and progress we have made towards them.

Retain effective team members

Rehire 3 team members who are on a budget-dependent hiatus in next month

Rehired legacy regional proxies in Los Angeles, CA, Houston, TX and Ilorin, NG for an engagement during the granting period

Immediately renew contracts with 3 team members in addition to accountant and lawyer:

Renewed Co-lead contracts for a year term
Renewed Project Manager contract for a year term
Accountant Ed Balthazar contract renewed for year term, split with larger BLT project scope

Hire 4 new team members in the next 12 months in addition to contracting a non-profit strategist in the first month

After a three-month search, interviews, and deliberations, a NFP strategist was engaged. At the beginning of June BLT Co-leads are are engaged in a self-assessment in order to aide the goals with the strategist.
Other hiring is on hold due to COVID-19

Over the next 12 months existing team members, strategist and Leads will successfully train or re-train all 10 core team members on their specific day to day operations.

In February BLT engaged a project assistant who supports the project managers and leads.
In May BLT engaged a second project manager to assist with the additional administrative and organizational needs that have been presented by COVID-19 programmatic changes. Our second project manager is implementing changes to workflow and organization now but much of our systems need to be rebuilt or imagined with new pandemic considerations. Other hiring has been on hold.

Redistribute operations from Leads to the team. Leads should shift focus to strategy and vision and develop a process where each team member is operating more effectively, sustainably and the BLT project is becoming more stable overall.

This is an ongoing process. Over the first half of the year we have established dedicated methods in meeting agendas and regular schedules to establish responsibility and accountability for the variety of work the team undertakes. There is a culture of openness and transparency that has been cultivated that allows team members to address issues as they happen.

Events and Edit-a-thons

As we planned our year of events we always kept a focus on ‘thoughtful and sustainable engagement, and person-to-person attention’ as a guidepost. Much of our work goes beyond calculable metrics, even before COVID-19 which requires a new and even more radical empathy for interpersonal relating, we held our metrics in balance with individual impacts on the artists we write about and the editors we engage.

Before COVID-19 Programming

Our annual goals were to maintain and grow our edit-a-thons, collaborations, and initiatives.

Host 40 Wiki events over 12 months:

4 of these will be international
4 of these will be hosted in de-centralized areas (outside major metropolitan art hubs)
At least 10 of these will be outside of the BLT home areas

During January and February 2020 we held five total events with two hosted in locations outside of major metropolitan hubs or our home areas and meeting our goal of targeting new editors by hosting with partners like the College Art Association and The African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities Initiative at UMD.

Thursday, February 13, 2020: CAA Annual Conference, Chicago, IL
Friday, February 14, 2020: CAA Annual Conference, Chicago, IL
Tuesday, February 18, 2020: Black History Everyday, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Tuesday, February 25, 2020: SAIC and Flaxman Library, Chicago, IL
Tuesday, March 3, 2020: BLT at MITH @ UMD, College Park, MD

Unfortunately, an event we really look forward to, the Art + Feminism and MoMA event in NYC marked our transition to online events. We have hosted successful photobooths through this collaboration in the past and A + F with guidance from MoMA as the physical host first postponed and eventually canceled the event. Although we all experienced a lot of upheavals we were disappointed to see the Black is Tech Conference with a keynote by WMF COO Janeen Uzzell and BLT led edit-a-thon canceled as well.

As we transitioned so did events and partnerships, already in place, some moving online more easily than others. For example, we hosted an edit-a-thon in April with The Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, a longstanding community arts center on the Southside with no attendance. Although we had successfully hosted with them in-person, the transition online simply did not capture the attention of this particular audience. Other events did find more success, later that month we hosted a well-attended event with students and faculty at Davidson College.

Overall, while we continue to amend our goals because of the unpredictability of the crisis we anticipate having smaller numbers and more events that resist traditional methods of tracking when we report our final metrics.

After Covid-19 programming

In order to provide continued Wiki content to our editorship and bring in opportunities for artists and other experts in our community to share, we came up with some creative solutions to operating within these new constraints while being mindful of the many ethical, ideological, and practical challenges bound up in this online shift. We utilized the kind of feedback we were getting from our transitional events and were hopeful that the adapted approaches would be beneficial and generative to folks in our community. Below are the descriptions of the four types of programs that we have held since transitioning to an entirely online schedule.

BLT: Bacon + Lettuce + Tomato: BLT has always sought to provide a space for communion, affirmation, and discourse and has been the reason for our roundtable series’. We recognize the extraordinary need for community spaces and see value in conversation as a space for catharsis and movement, of communication and resource. Meet virtual neighbors! Bring a bag brunch to your computer, take that short commute to your couch. Noon EST.

BLT:Live Artists are central to all facets of BLT. As exhibitions and freelance work are canceled due to the virus, what we can do to support the continuation of the archive we depend on is ask and compensate artists as they share and commune with us through a series of online “talks”. Noon, EST. Find them on IG Live @blacklunchtable.

Topic Focus and Online Edit-a-thons: Join us for online Wikipedia editing and assistance. Help record history as it unfolds by updating related Wikipedia articles, editing know-how is not necessary. In addition to regular editing together, Topic Focus sessions will feature experts on WikiEDU, editing on mobile devices, Wikidata, and Spanish language editing. All skill levels are welcome! Noon, EST.

BLT BINGO: BLT BINGO is a contest series that celebrates the work of artists by working to increase information about them on Wikimedia platforms and increasing editors' fluency with all the Wiki platforms. New cards and prizes are released each month.

Our schedule is HERE and the archive of our BLT: Live and Topic Focus series are available online HERE.

We believe that this programming attends to a number of needs that have arisen at the moment as well as goals we set out with before the arrival of COVID-19. Topic Focus/online edit-a-thons expand our monthly edit-a-thons and making the decision to record and archive these conversations makes them more accessible. With many educators adopting asynchronous learning techniques there is no reason that our skill shares should not also be accessible whenever editors would like to access the information.

Education became a larger focus for us than we would have anticipated even while planning to adopt GLAM and Wiki Education more centrally into the project. As well as outreach directly to educators with resources for integrating Wiki into the classroom our Topic Focus sessions have provided pathways, we are especially excited for our event hosted by Professor Alexandria Lockett later this month focusing on the foundations and pedagogy of Wiki in the classroom and a Spanish language edit-a-thon with Catherine Feliz at the end of August.

BLT BINGO cards have focused on a variety of artists and collaboratives over the past few months as well as a card entirely focused on making additions to Wikicommons. While providing a quarantine friendly activity it also attends to our goals of spotlighting and developing the artist’s articles, or lack thereof, on our task list and moving them towards structural completeness. Via a daily twitter BLT BINGO Tip campaign that supports the artists on the board, appreciable changes are being made.

These four types of programs are scheduled to continue through the end of August at which point we will assess what is best to continue for the last quarter of the year. We anticipate focusing on the events and contests that our regional proxies will lead and returning to online partnerships with institutions. In the fall we will be partnering again with Fisher Libraries at UPenn and Sam Oyeyele, a regional proxy in Ilorin, Nigeria will be leading a contest focused on artists in the region.

Spending update

Budget

Our original sAPG budget is HERE

The amendments we made for COVID-19 are HERE. These changes were submitted on May 25th, 2020 as discussed and reported to our grant officer Woubzena Jifar. The narrative of these changes is documented in detail on our discussion page HERE.

As of the submission of this report, we have spent $26,740.84 dollars of our $80,000 granted by WMF.

Grant Metrics Reporting

Our goals for 2020 edit-a-thons and collaborations that increase access to training and participation in marginalized communities:

Host 40 Wiki events over 12 months

4 of these will be international
4 of these will be hosted in de-centralized areas (outside major metropolitan art hubs)
At least 10 of these will be outside of the BLT home areas

Develop and initiate a survey and assessment protocol within 6 months

Calculate a more dynamic metrics system to assess and reflect our goals
Set goals based on a 10% increase in our numbers

Our dashboard for events so far this year is HERE.

We have to take into account that many of our COVID-19 programming can not be tracked on Outreach Dashboard. Additionally, we anticipate that attendance and participation as measured by Outreach will overall be lower than attendance at public events.

Unfortunately, Outreach Dashboard is not effective for capturing events like BLT: Bacon + Lettuce + Tomato or the number of viewers in attendance for BLT: Live but we can point to our social media campaigns as sites for engagement with our revamped COVID-19 programming. We may need to consider how to manage metrics for the rest of 2020 for this reason, we can offer measurements for engagement outside of Outreach. For example, our hour-long BLT: Live session with Kenya (Robinson) and her father, on father’s day, which is viewable on our IG page has received nearly 400 plays. Our BLT BINGO Tip campaign highlighting an artist a day from our game board has directly resulted in articles being written, artist Sheena Rose lacked a page and before the end of the month an article was written for her.

Our social media campaigns promoting our programming can be seen across all our platforms:

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