Fellowship Spotlight: Shalin Brahmbhatt

The following was written by Shalin Brahmbhatt as a part of the 2022 TechShift Summer Fellowship program.

When I started college, I was confused about the path I wanted to take and on what issues I wanted to focus my effort. I eventually found articles on public interest technology, where technologists were using their skills to make the world a better place (or, at least, a small corner of the world). I learned it was possible to combine an interest in social justice causes with technical skill and catapulted myself into the world of social good. After jumping around a bit, I ended up applying to the TechShift Fellowship where I was paired with Goodwill and Requirements Engineering Cares (RE Cares) to work on gang and gun violence prevention among youths in Southbend, Indiana. RE Cares is an annual event that pairs groups of students with stakeholders in order to develop a public interest technology. In our case, the team was tasked with creating a dashboard for social workers to view cases and contacts in gang-affiliated regions in the area. Before I joined, the group consisted of a few incredibly hardworking students from Cal Poly who were happy to have an extra helping hand with their work during the summer. Having vested interest in criminal justice, I thought of this as the perfect opportunity to bolster a mechanism to promote fairness and equity. To that end, I saw my work as part of a larger ecosystem of coordination efforts between social workers and technologists to come together and assist those in need. With gang violence on the rise, it remains ever important to intervene nonviolently and ensure that the youth are provided with the necessary resources to thrive in their environments and communities. Goodwill sought to do exactly that by empowering its social workers with a deeper understanding of their work via our dashboard. They would be able to see existing connections and contacts with gangs and chart their progress over time. Moreover, the dashboard would also serve as a general information center for viewing the stories of ex-gang members and ways in which they overcame their struggles.

Requirement Engineering Cares 2022 Logo

https://conf.researchr.org/track/RE-2021/RE-2021-re-cares

Our dashboard consisted of a “My Effort” tab for social workers to view their work, a “Gangs” tab to view gang affiliations, and a “Stories” tab to make apparent the school-to-gang pipeline many individuals went through from a young age. Goodwill social workers were collecting a variety of data points: data on gangs, intervention techniques and their outcomes, and opportunities for individuals in need. By utilizing this data, the goal was to open the public’s eyes to the difficult journeys that many young women and men from marginalized communities have to go through in the context of gang and gun violence. Additionally, leveraging data for storytelling and analysis gave social workers the tools to quantify their progress and seek to improve on their work. Viewing geographically the merging territories between gangs, for example, could act as a factor in social workers deciding where interventions may be most effective. 

In that regard, let’s delve into the weeds here. What exactly did I do this summer? Stare for hours at documentation and Stack Overflow – naturally. Jokes aside, I worked on two main aspects of the dashboard: specifically, on the “Gangs” tab. The first task was to add a bar graph visualizing how many contacts Goodwill had on the ground with each gang. The second task extended this visual by creating a hover tooltip that, when hovering over a specific gang, would show the locations of the affiliated contacts. In theory, this was a fantastic idea; however, as someone who had little to no experience with React Leaflet – a geographic embed tool we decided to use for the project – it ended up being quite the challenge. It took many matcha-fueled hours of reading the Leaflet APIs to even get the map to show up when I hovered my mouse. I remember being so excited when hovering over a bar actually showed the contacts Goodwill had in that gang; I was in a library though, so my jump for joy was more of a silent fist pump of fervor. I feel like the weeks I spent trying to create these tools taught me so much about full-stack development and extended my knowledge of React, of which I previously had limited understanding from previous Hackathons I competed in. Not only that, but the work felt like I was making a difference. Using programming to assist social workers thousands of miles away with preventing gang violence felt good, as if a spark had gone off in me.

Contacts that social workers had within each gang

I feel like this Fellowship gave me the opportunity to throw myself into something that would serve as a phenomenal learning opportunity while also alleviating the inner guilt I had previously of not contributing to a socially good cause. Through my work I learned that it is more than possible to make an impact as a technologist. I want to use this knowledge of social justice technology and continue venturing into the world of public interest, figuring out where I can make an impact without stretching myself too thin. I would like to extend a large thank you to the TechShift community for assisting me throughout this summer, including the other three fantastic fellows with whom I worked for the past few months. I’m a fan of meeting new people and finding individuals interested in the same work as I am. When working in the impact realm, including the fellowship, it’s all about making space for such wonderful conversations about what social justice means in a technical context. Not only that, the fellowship brought in wonderful speakers to talk to us about work in public interest technology and how we can make a difference in various collaborative fields. With such a plethora of opportunities, I have no doubt anyone reading this can find a pocket of  the world to improve.

If you’re coming into this work for the first time, let yourself be curious. It’s okay to make mistakes and it’s okay to take longer on the work you do as you prioritize quality. The social good realm is severely lacking technologists to bolster it in an age of artificial intelligence and millisecond computation. One thing I can be sure of is that this summer has solidified my interest in applying myself to make the world a better place. If you read this far, you should consider it too.