Nevada St

Digital cultural centers for communities.

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Inspiration

Marginalized communities have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19.

Black Americans make up 33% of Covid-19 fatalities, despite making up only 14% of the population. Native American tribes lack testing kits--the National Indian Health Board hasn’t sent any supplies whatsoever to half of the 574 recognized tribes. Latino/a immigrants are held in crowded detention centers with dozens of detainees per room, and the inadequate medical care plus impossibility of social distancing make outbreaks inevitable. Outside these detention centers, small businesses by immigrants and POC receive less than their share of the trillions of stimulus and PPP loans they need to keep them afloat.

These communities all have lower than average income, and their members are more likely than the average American to work in particularly hard-hit workplaces: food services, hospitality, or caregiving. Poor working conditions and poor pay mean time off is often an impossibility. Little to no access to health insurance means those who do get sick don’t receive adequate care.

The impact of these inequities extend beyond their immediate domains. Lack of healthcare, lack of financial resources, and fear of losing loved ones are all additional stressors for members of marginalized communities to deal with. These stressors compound in ways that impact their normal lives: their schoolwork, their relationships, and their mental health. Since quarantine, marginalized communities have seen their mental health deteriorate at a rate faster than non marginalized.

We need a system-wide solution to help support the marginalized at the University of Illinois with these unique challenges. Before Coronavirus, we had one: the University of Illinois and universities around the country built cultural centers. These centers served as gathering spaces, sources of information, and event spaces both for members of the community and for all students interested in learning about them. They are the most direct and the most impactful systematic effort to answer the challenges of discrimination.

But Covid has largely ended that. The buildings cannot host large events, nor can they serve as gathering spaces. Moreover, their online presence is disparate, spread out on dozens of websites that students have to individually seek out. That is unacceptable; in order to adequately serve their mission, they need to be a fundamental part of the University’s remote learning strategy. They need to be easily accessible to every student, so new freshmen and graduating seniors alike can stumble upon communities like they could their physical buildings.

So, we built that. We built Nevada Street: Digital cultural centers for marginalized communities in the time of coronavirus.

What it does

We want Nevada St to be a core piece of the university’s remote learning strategy, and we want it to be instantly accessible to every student. So, we built as an extension of the Illinois App. The Illinois App is open source and built on the Rokwire Project, a platform that universities and cities use to develop their digital presence.

We added “Communities” as a campus resource on the homepage of the app, alongside “Events” “Sports” and “Dining”. Within the communities section, users can scroll through the different cultural centers: BNAAC, Native American House, La Casa Cultural Latina, etc.

Each cultural house’s space is an internal social network designed to help them manage events, provide resources such as books and artwork, serve as a gathering space, and inform curious new students about the center.

We integrate text chat and video chat into the app in a configurable number of channels. There is, for example, a persistent video chat anyone can join and chat with members of the community. There are a number of different text channels for different purposes: Social, Mentoring, Meetings, etc. Students who are curious can join the Mentoring text/video call, and someone can explain the purpose of the center, the functions it serves, and the events they organize -- they provide a human introduction to the center. All throughout the page artwork from the community is showcased: the video loading screen, image backgrounds, etc.

How We built it

The front end is a Flutter app forked from the Rokwire Project’s Illinois App. We built a Communities section that integrates seamlessly with the existing services like Events and Dining and Sports.

We also built a RESTful backend Haskell server, with the intention of using it to scrape the web for news articles related to

What's next for Nevada St

We built Nevada St on the Rokwire platform, and we kept our styling consistent with the Illinois App. So, we plan to submit a Pull Request to the Illinois App, quickly and seamlessly adding providing these digital cultural centers for the 50,000+ students at Illinois.

We also hope to flesh out the backend to parse the web for local, national, and world news that impacts the community.

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