Early Interests
Looking back, it’s no surprise that I’m in this space. My mom used to be a math teacher. My dad used to be an engineer. I knew that I liked building things. I liked playing with Legos, K’NEX, etc. But I also wanted to help people. I started thinking, how do I merge these two interests of wanting to nerd out about math and science, wanting to build and create and innovate, while also wanting to make sure I was doing something that went back to my community?
At the time, I was also really interested in development challenges. My parents would tell me about themselves growing up [in Nigeria] and adversities with electricity, with transportation, with infrastructure. So in college I studied mechanical engineering and international development. But I saw this tension between the two. There were two separate spaces. The classes didn’t overlap. There weren't international development classes that were scratching my STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics] brain. Engineering classes didn’t talk about social impact or sociology. So I had to hodgepodge this pathway and then figure out, how do I use tech for good in order to really amplify community impact?
In college, I studied abroad in Brazil. I did a program focused on public health, race and human rights. I also worked in Nairobi, Kenya. I was really fascinated with going back to the continent, and I found this really incredible ed-tech non-profit that was doing a lot of design thinking for social good with high school students across Nairobi, South Africa and Sierra Leone. Some of those experiences are how I pieced together the dual skillset.
Explorer Work
About two years ago, I started a tech justice non-profit called trubel&co (pronounced “trouble and co”). The goal is to blend these two worlds – this world of liberation and this world of innovation. I didn’t think that STEM and civics should be separate in education and I wanted to figure out how to provide those opportunities to [integrate them].
trubel&co empowers the next generation to use data, design and technology in order to advance equity, responsibility and justice. What has landed at the heart of what I do – which is actually what brought me to National Geographic – is that we use GIS [geographic information system] as one of our core tools that students are learning and using to bring out community narratives, document inequity, but then also map what a more liberatory future could look like.
In doing this work, we use this geography-bound form of data science in order to tell those stories and then give students real skillsets. We are hoping to build that capacity so that students, teachers, non-profits and advocacy groups have access to this readily accessible tool in order to tell the stories they need to tell about their communities, and explore how they can make more data-driven decisions around their own visions for justice and liberation.
A lot of our work is getting students to reflect on: What’s a problem that you hear about? Let’s explore it. Let’s map it. Let’s document this inequity. Let’s find data. Let’s capture some stories that say what’s happened. And then we’re going to ideate. We’re going to tap into radical imagination. Think through systems, interventions and policies that may not exist yet and figure out, What’s the impact that this could have on our communities? And put that together in a digital application and mapping platform that really shows the user the outcome of these scenarios.
These students are 16 years old and they’re tapping into these tools that companies and governments are using. They’re saying, we can use these tools for our own goals. We can advance environmental justice, social equity and economic mobility.
We want to democratize access to these toolkits that are typically used to sell us things, used to profit off black and brown folks, used to, unfortunately, marginalize populations. We want to flip that.
Oftentimes when we’re diversifying a space, when we’re providing a different perspective, a different narrative, we may be seen as troublemakers. Let’s lean into it. We’re thinking about the ways we can disrupt these notions within STEM, within society, and shift the power back to frontline communities.
The Power of GIS
Once you see the maps and you do the work, it clicks. It is so incredibly obvious. I mean, of course if you’re doing public health, you need to know where you have a rise in cases. If you’re improving school systems, you need to know where the schools are located and how that overlaps with zip codes or demographics. All of these social issues are so tied to place. You intuitively are engaging in geospatial data in order to make any decision about environmental, social, economic issues.
I can guarantee you that every job will need to tell a story with data, so being able to convince folks of the value that GIS brings that is so widespread and needed, has been a fun upward challenge. I’m excited to now be a GIS evangelist of sorts in making sure we can democratize access to this sort of tool.
Amplifying Voices
In our innate desires to understand the world, to dive into the world to see what’s there, we don’t often think about what happens as we enter and leave those communities, how we’re partnering or not partnering with them. That is something that’s been on my mind for a long time. When I think about the Explorer Mindset, I’m often thinking about: How do we amplify those narratives that often don’t get told? And provide access to populations who may not be able to travel or know these communities or meet this person, but in a way that’s not extractive, in a way that doesn’t reduce them to a single story, in ways that really honor their own humanity and dignity? It’s hard work. We often stop at that first step, like, I got there, I told a story, I shared it out, done. We really need to think about, did they want to tell these stories? Whose stories got uplifted?
Most Exciting Part of Your Work
I really think about the opportunity to take these skills that are often wedged in the world of engineering, wedged in the world of data science, and say, you don’t need a PhD to do this analysis. We’re really hoping to bring the power of these tools to frontline communities facing the maximum burden of environmental disasters of climate change and social inequity.
Most Demanding Part of Your Work
If I'm being honest, I started trubel&co in a world where everyone was finally starting to care about racism, in that post-2020 glow of paying attention to all these issues. Amidst the pandemic, there was this wave of all these corporate and governmental commitments to addressing these harms in communities. I felt like, I can finally start an organization that says we’re abolitionists. I felt compelled that we could do this work, that we no longer had to hide our values because people were really starting to get it. But as a country we’ve taken some steps back, which is really scary. We started a program in Florida, but because of anti-DEI laws, we lost funding because we talk about things like equity and we include gentrification in our curriculum.
It’s been a struggle to figure out how to sustain this work and to garner the right support. Yes, we’re young, but we’re data-driven. We evaluate our work and we’re very iterative. But we’re still playing this game to garner the right support in order to scale this work to the communities who need it.
Advice to Students About Pursuing GIS Work
Just do it. Try it. The more you dive into an opportunity, an example or project, the pieces will start to click. I know it can be complicated at first. There’s a lot of buttons, a lot of tools and terminology. Once you land on a project and know what you want to explore, you pick it up much more easily. You start to uncover, What are the questions I want to ask?
We get so lost in the nitty gritty of STEM education. We’re presented STEM as if it’s apolitical. We just kind of receive an instructional guide. But for me, STEM comes alive when it’s tied to identity and purpose. You learn best by working through something. So that’s why when we teach GIS, yes we have some tutorials, some learning guides, but for the most part, it’s project-based. It’s driven by students’ interests. And we also get students to learn by working through ambiguity. Science is messy. You learn by starting to explore, working together and trying to drive a certain insight, and that will help the connections and the rest of the details of the technological rigor of it will fall into place.
Get Involved
Mapping Justice operates through three sites:
- MIT, which operates nationally
- Local, tailored programs in Florida and Hawaii, featuring summer intensives
Smaller workshops in select cities are on the schedule for 2025, as are goals to scale the work and provide opportunities for students who don’t live in those areas.
Visit https://www.trubel.co/ for more information.
