Equity, starting a non-profit, and Doctor Who with Clinton Johnson

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with Clinton Johnson, Racial Equity & Social Justice Solutions Lead at Esri, the global market leader in GIS mapping technology and the founder and a leader of NorthStar of GIS, a 501c3 nonprofit working to create a more racially-just world through more racially-just GIS, geography, and STEM fields,  about equity, starting a non-profit, and Dr. Who. Read his full bio below.

Help us continue to create great content! If you’d like to sponsor a future episode hit the support podcast button or visit www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com/sponsor-form

Showtimes:
1:50 Nic & Laura talk about Recruiter roles/ Hiring Process
7:29  Interview with Clinton Johnson Starts
13:58  Equity
31:00  Starting a on-profit
38:29  Doctor Who

Please be sure to ✔️subscribe, ⭐rate and ✍review. 

This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Clinton Johnson at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ClintonGJohnson.

Guest Full Bio:
Clinton Johnson is the Racial Equity & Social Justice Solutions Lead at Esri, the global market leader in GIS mapping technology. At Esri, he connects individuals and organizations from all sectors with geospatial data, technology, and methodologies to advance equity at the intersection of all systems of oppression. Clinton is also the founder and a leader of NorthStar of GIS, a 501c3 nonprofit working to create a more racially-just world through more racially-just GIS, geography, and STEM fields. Essentially, Clinton remains focused on racial equity, social justice, and innovation for and through collaboration, community, and compassion throughout all his work.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-transcribed

[Intro]

Laura 
Hello and welcome to EPR with your favorite environmental nerds Nick and Laura. On today's episode, Nick and I discuss a recruiters role during the hiring process. We talked to Clayton Johnson about equity nonprofits and Doctor Who. And finally, it's impossible to burp in space. Thanks for this one Nick. On Earth gravity pulls liquids and solids to the bottom of our digestive system, which allows gases to rise where they can be forced back out as a burp. Since there's no gravity in space that can't happen in space. Instead the air food and liquids in your stomach are all floating together like chunky bubbles. None of you were hungry, just know. So if you ever find yourself blasted out of an airlock without a spacesuit on take comfort in the fact that you won't let out in embarrassing built at the wrong moment. I love this. I know you do hip hop music

[NAEP Event News]

Nic  
NAEP is now accepting abstracts but 2023 annual conference and training symposium in Phoenix, Arizona, from May 7 to 10th 2023. showcase your work to an audience of national and Arizona environmental professionals at its 2023 conference. Abstracts can be submitted for oral presentations, posters, workshops and special sessions. On national of national and Arizona concern. abstracts are due by September 30 2022. Please check it out@www.hp.org We appreciate all of our sponsors and they will keep the show going. If you'd like to sponsor the show, please head on over to www that environmental professionals radio.com and check out the sponsor forum for details. Let's get to our segment

[Nic & Laura's Segment: Recruiter's Role/Hiring Process]

Laura  
we just have a recruiter. Yeah, yeah, we got

Nic 
a whole recruiting team. Yeah, this sort of sifting through all the resumes so I don't have to and you know even that's a little challenging sometimes because they'll miss some. So, you know, we have to go through but we got the more you do it. The better relationship you have with the recruiter, the better it gets. It's right. Yeah. It's nice. Actually, we have that I worked with on this. Do they do the negotiations to it depends. Typically, we're involved because they just don't know anything about the positions other than this is what we think this position is worth. And then they can they can kind of lead that and we go back and forth that way. So that they don't, it kind of keeps us from being like you will work for this amount or not, you know, kind of thing. So they'll actually talk to them about it.

Laura 
Yeah, because the question that some people ask me when they're looking for jobs is you know, should I? Who should I reach out to and should I hire a recruiter and no recruiter working for you is not the same as hiring a recruiter for themselves. But right now everybody wants to know like, what is the recruiters role?

Nic 
Or what is the recruiters role in hiring process at a company or do you mean for an individual?

Laura 
Both? I mean, they don't nobody knows. You know what it means like there's this mysterious person called a recruiter. Why would I want to be in touch with one and there there are ones who are freelance and work for themselves that you know, you can as a career secret you could reach out to or their recruiters who are hired by companies who are more like Headhunters, right, you know, working on their behalf.

Nic 
Right. So I guess for us, there's, you know, there's a couple of different things that they do, they do all of those things, but for us for our projects for our jobs, when we have a requisition that we want, you know, hey Amber, this is the new job we have this is what we're looking for in a candidate. And you know, I want to put this out, this is an essential be like, Nick, I told you 1000 times, please fill out the form. And, you know, so that we can talk about this kind of stuff, you know, and so we we have a system for how we do this. It's actually not just a form series of forms, really. So to get all that information, like you know, what's the job description? What are we going to be doing? Ideally, databases is their travel all this other stuff, right? You know, is that any other and then they will post it on all of the job boards. They'll post it on LinkedIn. And so if you saw my LinkedIn, I shared that job. out. And they're also you know, we'll just start we'll start getting resumes and they will sift through those resumes. Send me people, they'll set up the interviews like hey, do you want to interview this person? I say yes or no. They set up the interview, do all the logistical stuff so all I have to do is show up my pretty face, smile, talk and conduct the interview. I usually we usually do that with like three people. So I'll even tell the recruiter Hey, we want these three people to be on this interview. And I tend to do that I have a team. Our team is great. I really do love who we work with. I know it sounds that I really do genuinely mean that it's easy to say but like for the hiring process, right? Like I'm a very excitable person when I see somebody I meet someone that I like I get really excited about

Laura 
all the time on the project and

Nic 
I don't know you're talking about but I always have somebody who's more even keel. I don't want to say Laura type. But you guys have similarities actually. The person that I usually have on interviews with me, because she's much more like, not me, logical matter of fact, you know, and so if I'm really excited, and she's like, No red flags, I'm like, okay, all right. That's good. We both agree. We have different levels of agreement, but we both agree. And so then the recruiter will work with that person. Like hey, look, we're interested in hiring you I have to develop an offer letter, they send that offer letter out. So I pick the salary, they send it out, and then if there's a back and forth on salary, the recruiter will work on that. And so I don't I don't specifically work through salary with that person. But usually it's not that complicated. Usually, it's just like, hey, this is what we think your worth. And then the person will say, yeah, that works for me, or maybe a little bit more. No one ever says last money. It's very funny. But yeah, that's kind of how we do it. And so that's the recruiters role on on that and for me, and then otherwise, like you said, you can have them go out to trade shows to try to find people. That way. We'll take like a list of, Hey, these are the jobs that Dawson has open, come talk to us about them. And they'll they'll have pen 1520 Whatever it is, and if that works for you at a trade show or at a conference or whatever it is, and you give them a resume, or you know, your contact info and work through that way. There's lots of different things they do. Cool. Let me explaining.

Laura 
No, I think that there are people listening don't don't know that. You know what I mean? Especially early job seekers, any job seekers I think it's that's good.

Nic 
Dan was pointing to herself, that's funny. Anyway, and I would say to like for the recruiter role, like if you're like, Dude, I talk to recruiters or the person who's hiring. The person who's hiring is far more important on for you getting the job, but you might not be able to get to them without the recruiter. So they're both important people. Obviously, whoever's hiring is going to be the person that makes that decision. But again, if you want to reach that person, sometimes that's the easiest way to do it. This good point, you know, and if you pitch the you have to kind of pitch the recruiter to a degree, you know, hey, this is a job I'm interested in. I have these qualifications. I would love to set up an interview. And you know, good recruiters will be able to say, okay, Nick told me what he's looking for. This looks like what he's looking for. I have keywords that I'm searching for key components that I'm looking for. And this is it. So sure.

Laura 
Awesome. That's good stuff. Let's get to our interview.

Nic 
Sounds good.

[Interview with Clinton Johnson Starts]

Nic
Hello, and welcome back to EPR. Today we have Clayton Johnson on the show is the racial equity and social justice solutions lead at Esri global market leader GIS mapping and technology and the founder and leader of Northstar of GIS a 501 C three nonprofit working to create a more racially just world through more racially just GIS geography, and STEM fields. Welcome, Clinton.

Clinton Johnson 
Thanks for having me, Nic.

Nic 
Why don't you tell us a little bit about your career path and when you started learning GIS and how you ended up at Esri.

Clinton Johnson 
That's a really interesting question. And it always takes a different angle every time I think I answer it. But I started working at the City of Philadelphia in the 1990s in an engineering role, and I used to as a hobby, I was our program. I would like write code for fun at home. And then I saw opportunities to do some of that work. And the world just started to look like data to me. So I would, I would turn the things that we were doing and I was in the highways division for the Streets Department. We were permitting the use and occupancy of the public right away. So I started to look at all of that stuff as data in some way that I could code around to make things more efficient. And that data that a lot of the you know, the right away. It's it was a geographic element that the city managed. And someone said to me at some point, have you heard of GIS there's this you know, there's work downstairs. You know, you might be really interested in in this GIS thing. Because everything that you're doing is about geography. I had not made a single map, I used maps that were already made all the time that I had contributed to the creation of a single map. And at that point, it was really hard. It was really hard to make maps. I want to say even in the late 90s at the City of Philadelphia, the network was I will say it was trash. I think everyone went down many times a day. And I just couldn't understand why people were doing this. Like why would you even spend so much of your day trying to pull data from one department to the next and make a map that maybe it's going to take you half a day to produce but you know, have fun, but there was something about the community. That was interesting to me. Every time I've ever interacted with GIS people they've been such a consistent and in some ways cohesive community and all of them seem to feel like all of the communities and and the people who sort of gravitate toward them seem to feel like they are here to do something great in the world, you know, make the world better. And so when I got my first invitation to a GIS role, it was to be the city of Philadelphia's first geo database administrator. It was kind of the title was kind of made up around this new concept of geo databases, taking geography and putting them into databases and given geography, all the benefits of a database and that made sense to me because it was so hard before to pull all this data into one place. And so now, I could help put it all into one place and manage that one repository. And later, I got back to some of the code and routes and I was the city's second GIS programmer in the first to sort of take that role and make it be more about application architecture and helping all of the cities departments figure out how they could more strategically apply GIS to the work that they did. And I would say from there, everything else in my career included, highly recommending that people take from the benefits of GIS and bring them into their work. I think sort of the pinnacle for me at the City of Philadelphia was becoming the first chief Enterprise Architect officer and an enterprise architecture is a fancy language for saying this obvious thing. Hey, let's make sure that everything that we're doing what technology has a business purpose, a business purpose that aligns with our strategy, and as much as it would seem that that organizations you know, spending millions of dollars on technology would of course do that. Not the technologists sometimes just roll Yeah, and think a piece of tech is cool, then, you know, you sort of can make the case for it. And maybe that piece of tech is dangling over here, doing some interesting things off on its own, but it's not contributing anyway. So GIS just always seemed to me like this glue that could bring our data together the data about people and our activities were people in the assets that we managed for people, you know, together and with apps wrapped around that, you know, drive action more effectively. And then from there, I ended up at Azeri, which was sort of like a dream job earlier in my GIS career and that is the version of the story I will tell today.

Laura 
I gotta step in for a second because you ended up at ESRI. ESRI is in Redlands California you are in Philadelphia have just ended up at ESRI.

Clinton Johnson 
You know, I thought I thought that too. And even even though I've been working with ESRI for my whole GIS career, and what did that mean? That meant, you know, watching them grow a Philadelphia office that was still kind of small, and having some sense of awareness of the other offices, but it still felt like you know, as it was in California, and do I want to leave Philadelphia and go to California and even though San Diego where the the conferences it's like, feels like paradise that week that I'm out there every single year. I like I like the four seasons that Philly offers. While half of half of ESRI is in Redlands for sure the other half is scattered across the country in several different offices. And that is I'm able to be positioned. I was able to work out of one office and some of us actually work remote and we've been some of us have been working on remote update before the pandemic but now with the pandemic. While we have home offices in different locations. Again, I'm one of the people who works remote.

[Equity]

Nic 
Yeah, I gotcha. Yeah. And I love I love your point too about technology is it is funny because there are times where companies are like, Oh, wow, look at this laser. Isn't it neat? And you're like, Yeah, but we make tennis balls. What are you doing? You know, and it's like, it has to happen a lot. But when you get to work in lots of different projects and lots of different areas. So like, what are some of those projects that you actually that you work on? Or that you have?

Clinton Johnson 
I've worked on things like being the city's sort of wet city of Philadelphia as webmaster and through that opportunity trying to get GIS plugged into some of the capabilities that different departments make available online. I'm just going to sort of like move through the career before ESRI was offering web services and, and taking its tech and making it more accessible and available to developers helped to design and oversee the implementation of the city of Philadelphia's first web services deployment that was used by many agencies that was completely focused on GIS, making it easy for people to pull geocoding into things like any of their core business apps or Excel spreadsheets, helping folks to go from an address to a meaningful city asset and laying the foundation for making it a lot easier for folks to just turn around applications in a much more cost effective way. At the city. I also worked on projects like the second phase, I want to say the city's 311 implementation. And again, callers are calling in to talk about something happening in the city, about a thing that's in the city and most of those things are assets managed by a city agency. So I thought it was really important to again, bring GIS into that so that when you get that call, you can have a conversation with the person on the other end. Find that asset in our system using a map because maybe someone wrote by a pothole or row by a downed stoplight and all they can remember is it was at this intersection. I think there was a church there. And you know, with information like that we wanted people who receive those calls to be able to find it on the map. And there's just a number of other apps I've helped to either influence or work on directly in it and that EZRI I have the benefit of moving from, from organization to organization largely helping them design strategies for how they're going to take advantage of all of the GIS capabilities that they already have towards their missions. And from the first encounter I had with the customer ESRI to the last every single one of those customers and now it makes more it'll make more sense why they do today. But every single one of those customers in my first three and a half years, had expressed interest in using GIS to tackle some challenges related to equity. Sometimes they were very explicit saying things like I hope one of these customers is listening and recognizes themselves in this because it was always like really inspirational to me. You know, I had my first customer said, we have a lot of money to spend on equity. We don't have an aging population, but we have increasingly more older people moving into our community to retire and we want to make sure that our ambulance services, our emergency response services are in the spaces where they may be needed the most. We had customers who would say to us, we're all our team is relatively new to the city. And what we've inherited is a set of policies and practices that we know create disparities for people along the lines of race or sexual orientation, or gender and we know that location has something to do with it. You all have lots of location data help us find out where our policies are creating racial disparities for our neighborhoods and city. People said these things directly to us. And so now I find myself largely working to to help equity officers and department heads and GIS managers and professionals figure out how to wrap their heads around those issues and figure out how to take advantage of GIS as a tool set to help them find out where the problems are, find out where the needs are the greatest and then take action to address them.

Nic 
Yeah, and I think equity and data is something you know, some people when they hear it, that doesn't make a lot of sense, right? They're just like, Okay, well, those are two different things. How is the data informing equity? And so I don't know, when you see it, obviously it makes sense to you, but how would you explain to someone else

Clinton Johnson 
there's so many different angles that come from with it. And I think that's the trickiest part. Another thing that people will say is, well, if we say, if we use the data to say that there is racism, isn't that racist if we use the data to say that there's sexism isn't that sexist? And the data that we're talking about using the site? Oh characteristics like race, gender, sex assigned at birth, those kinds of things. But what I try to tell people more and more is, well, every organization is a system and systems interact with each other. And we're all you know, trying to make sure that the systems that communities need to fit need and benefit from are healthy, and that there are no external forces operating against them, like racism, or sexism or homophobia. And so when you think about systems like food systems that are influenced by governments whose policies make it easier or harder for grocery stores to emerge in certain communities and for their prices for their produce to be at a level that is affordable or national policies that may guide or influence how easy it may be for a farm for food to go from a farm to a convenience store or a restaurant or to someone's table, but at the same time, not just government but you know, those businesses to decide to to pop up or, or make decisions about where they should be located, are all sort of contributing as if people sort of get the okay so data about that stuff makes sense. But like what about the equity part? Or what about the racism? part or the sexism, part of the socio economic inequalities part? Well, we don't literally have a lot of data that says, This is racism. This is sexism, homophobia. There are you know, some organizations who are set up to do things like map and identify where there are organizations that are organized towards those ends, but that isn't largely what we're working with. So instead, what we have are data about people that can help us understand whether or not groups of people are experiencing things differently. So now when we think about a food system and data about the people who are impacted by food systems, well now we can ask questions beyond just well, how is the city doing? Or how is a neighborhood doing? We can say, well, how are social groups of people doing? You know, we look at who has access to grocery stores. That have affordable, fresh produce, we can look at that in terms of well, what percentage of the population of the black population in the city do or do not have access relative to maybe the percentage of the white population or the Asian population or the Latin American population? And so now with that data about race we can start to see whether or not there may be systems of oppression at play in our systems that help communities succeed. And when we when we identify those issues. Well, now we can do something about it now. Not only that we know that the city of Philadelphia is dealing with the burdens of climate change and, and heat. We know that certain neighborhoods in the city are dealing with it more so and we also know that certain communities in terms of race and indoor income are you know, again, much more impacted. So now we can really focus in on the different reasons why those different communities are being impacted differently. To get to the point where hopefully we run out we do the analysis, we ask the data again. Is there a difference between how communities are faring and the goal is to get to No, no, there's no difference because we we've acted,

Nic 
and which is really, really incredible and and we want to touch on EZVIZ role here, too. So you're you've been the lead the team lead for the racial and social justice team for two years. So it was that team knew or is that when it started? Or is it been around for a while and then what are your goals? For that team?

Clinton Johnson 
Though? And 118? I started to realize that Well, I told you all customers are asking equity, equity, equity, racial justice, it's all over the place. The part I didn't mention was that well, most of the time in those conversations. She is professionals in a room have sort of the reaction that you were describing, Nick, there thinking, Well, that sounds really hard. Racism is this thing that maybe it's happening in someone's head or heart or mind. And when when you all have figured out what you want to do Sure, we'll make a map because what could we possibly do about this or man racism? Is that something we're supposed to talk about at work? So for all of these different reasons, the GIS folks would back away from the conversation very often in these conversations, but whenever we would see geographers jazz people stepping forward, we started to gravitate towards that action. And lift those voices up and that that work really started in 2018. I want to say, mid to late 2018. And I got some approval to do some more investigation and to begin to support customers. So it's like me, and one other person at the company, a Marvel board and so we just started to connect with more customers and and pull their stories into focus. So when we were approaching 2020 for ESRI user conference, it's like where you really get a sense for what the Esri GIS community is focused on. Well, we said hey, can we put a couple of topics into the mix so that when people submit papers, they can maybe think about picking one of these topics and so the topics we propose were equity and social justice and diversity and inclusion as separate topics, and we got a lot of people submitting and some of the organizations that typically would submit papers and different topics, we're now submitting them and this new set of topics and we got approval to host I want to say it was like five sessions. So we went from zero to five sessions, and some other team five sessions on equity and social justice two sessions on diversity and inclusion and a session has two papers each, which meant we had about three times that many papers submitted that we had to weed out. So like that work meant that it was interesting, it was intriguing, and then the pandemic hit, and we didn't go in person. And at the same time, the pandemic hit, and it was this pause and people could sort of stop and see things like racial disparities in COVID-19. That meant that more black and Latin American people were hospitalized or died then maybe needed to if racism was not a thing, and then again, the pandemic hit, and we saw how Asian folks were being treated, because the virus itself got racialized, and then the pandemic hit, and we saw George Floyd be murdered after a succession of other folks being brutalized or killed, and enough was kind of enough for Ezri and we formalized a team around the work that we had started in 2018. And while before we were, we were operating under the sort of heading of equity and social justice, Jack and others started with Jack Dangermond, the owner of as we thought it was important to amplify racial equity and so we became a racial equity and social justice, unify a team, unifying efforts across the entire organization, to make sure that there are capabilities being generated from products to services to the way that we engage in business development conversations. With folks to help people tackle these issues. So effectively, our goal is in many ways is to make sure that any product you pick up, that's going to help you influence decisions, informed decisions that impact people will either have baked within it some capabilities that enable you to apply an equity lens into advance positive practices for racial justice, or there will be a set of practices defined either in our our training materials, blog posts, or through solution templates that that help you get there help you do the same thing. Identify and address racial and social injustices.

Laura 
That's awesome. It's really good to see as read taking the lead and you know, we need more companies like ESRI that are influential to step up and be doing the right things. Jack is amazing. Have you gotten to meet him?

Clinton Johnson 
I haven't. I met him in person super briefly when he was on his way to his car. And that was when I was thanking him for providing support for another important initiative and that was our first ever black as we You see, meetup where you know, for the first time in a special interest group we invited black jazz students, professionals, entrepreneurs, educators and their allies to come together. And you know, he helped make that happen. So I walked up to him. I didn't say who I was. I just thanked him for him. But since then, I've met with him a number of times, virtually, I won't say we talk very frequently, but we do talk, maybe more often than most people get a chance to talk to him.

Laura 
Yeah, very cool. I've seen him present several times over the years working with GIS and he just seems like a really great leader and you can see it obviously through the products and services that Esri delivers and how they deliver them. Okay, so you've been doing this a while and you got all these amazing projects are there any that stand out as hot topics are ones that have particularly good results they want to talk about, I think,

Clinton Johnson 
not necessarily projects that we've worked on that I want to lift up but I do want to I want to lift up work by Milwaukee County, city and county Milwaukee, where they do a really great job of using GIS to tell the story to get on the same page with a community about what the issues are on the ground, and then to come up with plans to take action. They do a really great job in that regard. There's the City of Tacoma and so many other cities Seattle, who do a great job of sort of advocating for the creation of indices to address specific areas. You know, a lot of people think that you can create one view of what problems look like when you think about racial, social or gender inequities of any kind of social economic I met, but they do a good job of building atlases of indices, since you have a collection of maps around a variety of issues. I think all of that work is really great. There are myriad organizations that are starting to bring together AI machine learning to look at imagery to detect things like paving, impervious surfaces and, and vegetation to then align that information with policies like redlining and land use policies that disproportionately harm communities of color. I think all of that work is really exciting. But the thing that I'm probably going to give a lot more attention to in the coming year is finding more and more ways to systematically enable sort of the transformation of community experience as just sort of conversation and things we sort of know anecdotally into data. So helping people take all the stories that we know about how people feel about the disparities in their communities, with the their experiences when they you know, it's not it's one thing to say, You got hospitals in a community, that community should be fine. It's another thing to understand what happens when, when different people go to the hospital, do they all get served the same way and, and how do they feel about that? It's one thing to say here's what as a city or GIS professional, but I think the inequities are just another thing to understand the community's perspective to see if they validate that perspective. It's one thing to say you've got a great initiative that's serving the community well, and everyone's involved. It's another thing to understand the degree to which communities impacted are aware of issues and get a chance to participate in the designing and planning. So kicking off from the user conference, we identified a set of people that you know, I won't name to participate in an advisory council for our team to help us add to our overall framework approach, some methods, some techniques, and some guidance to help people to transform stories into data stories as it relates to equity into data that people can map and analyze. A little better than what we have today. A little more consistently than what we have today.

[Non-profits]

Laura 
Hey, cool, That's awesome. I want to move on to the nonprofit that you founded that we mentioned in 2017. You started the North Star of GIS, which is people of African descent in geography, GIS and geosciences. So tell us a bit about the work that they do and your goals with that. Yeah.

Clinton Johnson 
So when we started, we were this community initiative, looking for her name, and Northstar was just going to be this code, this code name in the meantime while we came up with something and so that community included people who were working at as three but largely included HBCU educators and administrators that included business owners, largely black business owners who operate in GIS space. It included some philanthropists who will operate in and around GIS and geography and all of us, you know, realizing that that separately, we were having some impact, you know, around our our initiatives, and we had seen others have impacted on their initiatives, but we needed to do something that was more about paving a way forward. And that sort of just charting a path because you can always look back and say, Oh, I remember someone so in that time that he, you know, had an impact or or that she did something and was very successful. But when they you know, when they retired when they moved on when they advanced in their career that work stops so we wanted to build something that would pave paths. So that ultimately became well incorporated profit. We also, you know, sort of saw ourselves as influencing the business of GIS in a lot of ways, the work that that community initiative was doing, to research practices for advancing racial justice fit its way back into as resold out of what we have, and at ESRI is our framework came from, you know, research that folks in that Northstar community were doing. We also want it to bring awareness to have visibility to black people who have been working in geography and GIS for a long time who just are often, you know, there seem to be so few black people that people treat it as if there are none. And we also wanted to bring to bring more into that space. And how could we do that as now an organization and with a sort of a clear vision and so then we have what sometimes feels really corny to say, but this this vision of creating a more racially just world like we realized that what we were trying to do is not just influenced GIS we wanted to influence GIS as a community to include racial justice is a primary motivator and focus area. Anytime you're doing analysis that relates to people how can you possibly leave out the systems that harm and ensuring that your results will create benefit? We want to make sure that people who look like us the full breadth of the African, the black African diaspora exists in all the spaces that matter so that I've had this experience where you're talking about an important issue 30 to 50 people are in a room virtually, and very often I'm the only person of color I'm the only black person in particular. And sometimes the topic is, will how do we address racial injustices that are affecting black people? And it's really difficult for a room like that, to begin in to continue and to close out a conversation that would effectively address those issues. So you know, we know that we we all bring our lived experiences together with our professional expertise. So when we say a racially just world through a racially just GIS we recognize that geography matters GIS professionals, they matter and when policies are being designed, implemented and influenced, geographers are in the room, helping to make sure that the grand plans of politicians and and CEOs actually have a real impact on community and if those groups of geographers don't look like our communities, and don't focus on racial justice, then what likely happens is you implement policy that lands on us differently and sometimes that difference is harmful. So that's sort of our you know, this grand vision of get more black people in the space get more people in the space, focusing on racial justice and the world. gets better. So we do that work in four connected programs. I'll talk about two of those programs closely together, the telescope and events so the North Star telescopes, magnifies black stars and GIS is how we increase visibility and make sure that folks get credit for the valuable work. That they do. You just happen to look like us. We just happen to be black and very often don't see themselves taking center stage. And when we think about taking center stage, the North Star events program is a series of virtual and in person events that create space for for black students, educators, entrepreneurs and professionals. And for anyone who does projects or anyone who does work to implement technology that advances racial justice, so we create space for all that. Then there's Northstar guides. So that's us taking like a number of the of us have gotten training and certification in diversity, inclusion and equity and related topics. And so we take what we know about, you know, advancing these tough conversations about racial justice, not just sort of generic equity conversations because very often generic equity conversations intentionally step away from race because race is harder to step away from race at intersections of other things because it's harder, and they go to things that are some things that are either more abstract or seem more simple, like gender, but you know, gender is complex, just in the spectrum of gender and then when you think about gender at the intersection of other things, again, it's really complex, but so we try to provide guidance and make it easy for people to have those conversations. And in some ways that guidance sometimes that guidance shows up as paid for work services like fee for services that we do, and there's the Northstar Bridge, which is our work to try to make connections between black people and opportunities in GIS and to be a sustaining platform so that folks can better sustain their success in GIS. We find that a lot of GIS are not sure it's but a lot of diversity and inclusion initiatives operate more like catapults, they fling people into spaces that that weren't necessarily designed to nurture them and in some ways, bring with them some of the social elements there were designed and are designed sort of to be toxic to people, and then you're off on your own. So you're on you got there, you're on a great team, but you're, you know, you're by yourself and like where do you find great mentorship? And how do you get help to be successful over the long run? So the bridge itself is a platform and it's our community connecting and providing resources. And today, one of the things that we do through support of ESRI and our other donors, we provide cash grants to black students who are pursuing geography curriculum at HBCUs. Those that are four programs that we run and all of them are ways to highlight black folks bring more black folks into GIS and to get people thinking about how they can use GIS to advance racial justice.

[Dr. Who]

Laura 
That's awesome. Yeah. It's also a perfect segue. So talking about the bridge and even you're talking about your experience and all of the reasons why there aren't more people of color and of African descent in the GIS spaces and stuff. Is part of it right is that it isn't cool for black men to be coders and technology people and nerdy, right. And I feel like that's changing as well. I mean, have you experienced that? With your whole life growing up working in the data? And Nick is going to ask him his favorite question next. Related to that,

Clinton Johnson 
yeah, Nick, you want to put that question out?

Nic 
Oh, yeah, I'm well okay. So so you know, you mentioned doctor who saw us I love Doctor Who, right. Love it. I will throw out yeah, that's that is. Absolutely. I think that's kind of a challenge. It's kind of fun because it came back, you know, and it was oh, nine, something like that. I think you're a bigger fan than I am, which is pretty awesome. So what brought you to Doctor Who? I'm going to ask you a really unfair who is your favorite? But yeah, what brought you there and who's your favorite?

Clinton Johnson  
Yeah. So I'll try to bring out try to like respond to both of those things at the same time. For sure. When I was a kid a long time ago. When I could I coded in my room in the quiet and I didn't tell anybody. I was excited about it. But you know, I didn't think my sister or my mom or the kids on the block would be excited about it. When I watched Doctor Who I really thought that I was the only person in the neighborhood watching Doctor Who. But as it turned out, like my my sister was also watching Doctor Who I had no idea she's two years old. And she was also watching Doctor Who and it happened, you know, because my mother watched a lot of PBS and she would fall asleep watching TV. I thought my mother was watching Doctor Who but she's asleep and now that concludes on mystery has gone off but doctor who was on and it was just so captivating to me back then. And I didn't even notice I thought my sister had left the room where she was doing something else. But you know, she was very much interested. And I think when it comes to I want to come back to like my favorites. Around that to who later but when it comes to like sort of like this notion that it's not cool to be in tech and like to like things that people think of as nerdy I think, well, that's a consistent theme for kids in America for sure, regardless of their racial background. And there is this whole blurred community that's now you know, has stepped forward to say no, it's super cool. You know, like, I think there's the whole nerd community that says nerding out over things like tech and comics and the like, is really cool. And there's a lot of like now I think it's really cool. To be a nerd and I think people recognize that regardless and then the blurred spaces say they do a number of things. It's cool to be black and nerdy. And you know, sometimes we need spaces to be black or nerdy because when you look at Doctor Who and I watch doctor a lot but when I look at the history of people of color showing up in Doctor Who the first time a black man showed up in Doctor Who he was essentially someone's enslaved man servant who was happy to be the answer and sacrifice their lives this second time a black person showed up in Doctor Who it was the same guy and he again played circuit, strong man who served a white guy happily and faithfully and all he was was strengthened grunting and sacrificing his body for people. And you know other times when people of color show up and Doctor Who is like, okay, they're going to now on this episode, we're going to talk about racism and colonialism and they and the voices of of that will be the people of color. And I just like I invite you to watch old Doctor Who and in fact watch. Maybe he doesn't watch any Doctor Who and anytime racism and sometimes when sexism comes up or colonialism comes up and colonialism it's coming up a lot because we're there are are colonies all over the space and time and Dr. Hill and they try to use that to sort of like talk about those issues. Watch how often the person who says something that's racist is a person of color, and then sort of gets punished for it quickly, verbally is the thing. But you know, like in a broader nerd space, you can't talk about that. Like nobody else really cares about that. And and in fact, when they when you talk about it at the same time, you have to sort of educate them about all of the related issues while you're educating them about those things. So So blurs person spaces exists to say it's cool, and to give people spaces to see that they're not by themselves. And now it's at a point where they're just like really captivating spaces and that I imagine everybody wants to you know, like wish so many more people wish they were more nerdy. Again, regardless of their background. I also had an uncle who was a coder, and I just really didn't think about that too much would actually make me take coding more seriously. He took me to a bring your your kid to work day I did not want to be there. I just wanted to be doing anything else. And it was belt Hill and one of the and it was like that it was a room filled with people who were just coding all day. And the person who was like the inspiration for me to like, really take it more seriously was a guy who was blind. And he had a whole special keyboard set up to code with and this was just not something I expected to encounter. And I'm like, wow, if this person is blind coding is all writing and seeing what you write and seeing what you write come into for whinchat fruition. So much of it. I thought I thought about it that way. There's other ways you can also like experience the result of code, but that's what I was thinking as a kid. And if he could do this, and if it was so important to him to do this. Then I could take this a lot more seriously. I could code more whether for fun or for other kinds of impact. But yeah, I think largely what happens is there's just this lack of awareness. Who even knows the GIS is a thing I mean, who's involved in GIS and has an answer try to explain to friends and family what they do

Yeah. Exactly. It's like when someone when people started to understand tech better, I just started to say I work in tech, please. Please don't please don't ask me to go further. Right, because like 10 people understand what people don't understand. Yes. So similarly, like when you find black people in GIS, I hear them very often. Say, Oh, I have a non traditional path into GIS because a lot of geographers have had family who were interested in geography or GIS or showed them how to get into those spaces. But while there are lots of people who sort of bumped into GIS, I want to say that that's a big part of the story for the black professionals that I've encountered. It's much more likely that a black person bumps into GIS while they're already pursuing curriculum or pursuing a career they're well on their way in the career and then they just they bump into it. So I think awareness is is a bigger issue and, and we don't necessarily think about this, but when we're spreading the word about GIS, we're sort of we're creating what the next generation look like. And so by doing it just through our regular networks, we're just going to continue to have it look the way it looks. So we want it to be a space that more people who look like me or or from other underrepresented groups are involved and we have to like invest differently in how we promote it. We've got to not just make tech available to schools, but find those schools that are in those predominantly underrepresented communities, and just invest in making sure that those folks know that this is a cool interesting exciting field to be in that cuts across everything. No. Yeah. In my favorite I'm not gonna I don't have I don't have a favorite guy.

Laura 
Like ready he's like what

Clinton Johnson 
I came up on I came upon on Tom Baker. Right. So Tom Baker, and he was a cool, you know, pretty interesting Doctor Who in a lot of ways, I really liked the first the, I don't know the number aecosim I'm saying Oh, yeah. Yeah, like 10 because he only got a year. Yeah, like he only got a year though. I don't know what that was about. Certainly. Dave was great. Like, you know, there's been just so many great doctor who's but my current favorite is, I like the second season of the 13th doctor and the team around them. There's something about the first season that was like really slow and in the last season, the most recent season has like been kind of, I don't know the stories have been weird, but I do like the lady doctor. But if I if I was pressed though, and I want you to really think about this next like the most exciting doctor on the screen is the black woman. They gave her insurance. Yeah, her interest is so bold like she's exciting every scene that she's in she's just not in you know that many?

Nic 
Yeah, my nearly enough yeah. Totally right up until a good

Clinton Johnson 
decade for like, really strong stories and a really great character and I just could not understand why we were trying so much time with with this couple on the introduced.

Nic 
Yeah, and I thought wow, okay, I guess we'll never see her again. I was wrong. It was gonna

Clinton Johnson 
write great

Nic 
stuff in here soon because we're gonna

Laura 
like when I when I pull the plug on this conversation

Nic 
that's the best part about Doctor Who is always a new person. The next one.

Clinton Johnson  
I'm excited to see America. Yeah, the next person has been in and out. So I think it's gonna be really interesting. I didn't want to know. But the news got me the spoiler.

Nic  
I didn't want to say most Yeah, yeah, I heard it too. Yeah. We won't stay here you guys.

Laura 
Talk. We are sadly at the end of our time, though. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about Clinton that we didn't talk to you about yet?

Clinton Johnson  
I probably, but boo boo could say yeah, I think just I want to see more geographers, more GIS professionals, not just tacking on oh, let's address the systems of oppression and the systems that we're working on at the end. But just you know, realizing that that all the systems that you're trying to interact with and make more healthy are being they're under attack. They're under attack from these other systems that we call systems of oppression. So study those simultaneously, and make sure that you're that hey, if you're missing race, gender, ethnicity, socio economics, intersections of those in your study, you're probably missing a lot about people and the systems that are that are harming them. And when you look around the room that you're in, if you don't see people who are from other racial backgrounds of the genders, other socio economic backgrounds, as comfortable as it may feel, to be able to talk to them and hang out with them after work and talk about things like Doctor Who or whatever else you're interested in, you're missing something really valuable from your your team experience. And from the work products that you produce.

Laura 
Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing all your insights with us and all of your doctor knowledge. We're looking forward to seeing how all of this grows and people start bringing this really into heart and into their practices. Can you now tell us where people can get in touch with

Clinton Johnson 
you? Yeah, people can find me on LinkedIn. I use Clinton G Johnson on LinkedIn. They can also find out information about Northstar using GIS Northstar on any platform, Patreon, LinkedIn, the internet GIS northstar.org, Instagram, Twitter, all of it. Awesome.

Laura 
Thank you so much.

Clinton Johnson
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Laura
That's our show. Thank you, Clinton for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. And don't forget to subscribe rate and review. Bye.

Nic
See you everybody.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai