 All right, well let's go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone. Thanks very much for coming. My name is Christy Bear and I'm the Assistant Executive Director of the Center on Finance Law and Policy. Welcome to our second ever virtual blue bag lunch talk. These lunch talks are a little different from some of the others that happened around campus and that they are intentionally interdisciplinary and highlight some of the excellent interdisciplinary research that's happening around campus. We have not one but two awesome speakers today. They are collaborators and I am especially excited to welcome them, Tawana Dilla Hunt and Julie Hoy from the School of Information because so much of their collaboration together about entrepreneurship has been very helpful for us at the Center on Finance Law and Policy in thinking about our role in Detroit, thinking about the experiences of micro enterprises and small businesses in Detroit and what they need and how we can be helpful in that way. So our first speaker today, Professor Tawana Dilla Hunt, she is an Associate Professor at the School of Information. She also has a courtesy appointment as an Associate Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She has published some fascinating research about entrepreneurship by necessity, about returning citizens and some of the other on the ground research about that is moded faded by what can be actually helpful. Her work more recently has been about the digital economy, the changing nature of work and about the digital divide. So she's gonna present today and then after that Assistant Professor Julie Hoy from the School of Information will also present and her work is also focused on human-centered design, human-computer interaction together. They and others have done just some really cool things and so I am looking forward to hearing their talks today. We are going to let each of them present and then we will hold questions and then rather, toward the end we'll open it up to questions and you can either chat in your questions to everyone. So keep it professional. Or you can at the end unmute and ask questions so we'll make sure we leave time for that. Before I start, I would be remiss if I did not do a shameless promotion for the Center on Finance Law and Policies upcoming Central Bank of the Future Conference. This will be held November 16 through 18. It's virtual so you can go no matter where you are. It will be co-hosted with the San Francisco Fed and they're the topics this year. We're building on last year's topics but there will be a lot about fintech, Central Bank digital currencies, Central Bank digital accounts and some other cool geeky finance stuff. Registration is now open for that and I'll drop the link to register into the chat. And so without further ado, Professor Dillahunt, I will turn it over to you. Thank you so much, Christie for that introduction. Good afternoon everyone and thanks again so much for inviting us to present our work and thanks Liz for your technical support. So I'm gonna start by providing an overview of a community-based participatory research project in collaboration with my UMSI colleagues Vaishnav King Swarn, Desiree McClain and Kentaro Toyama, the Eastside Community Network and their residents, Minnie Lester and Dolores Orr who are also authors on this work. I think our work serves as a good model for researchers especially those of us in technology-based fields to engage with community members and work with them as colleagues to understand how technologies could support community and economic growth. Overall, the work that Julie and I present today will explore what it takes to be an entrepreneur and resource constrained context and implications for technologies that wish to build, technologists who wish to build tools to support economic development. We were motivated to do this work because online technologies are increasingly held as enablers of entrepreneurship and income generation which provide a way out of unemployment. And today's technology platforms have supported entrepreneurship in ways that were not previously possible. Entrepreneurship in more developed contexts has been discussed in the areas of makerspaces, crowdfunding and the sharing economy. Particularly these technologies have been found to help entrepreneurs build self-efficacy, help entrepreneurs interact effectively with others, crowdfund and in the case of the sharing economy reduce infrastructural barriers such as the need for physical space. These technologies support many requirements necessary for successful entrepreneurship. Recent evidence suggests, however, that even the best such tools disproportionately favored those with pre-existing entrepreneurial advantages and little is known about how such technologies impact the day-to-day work of entrepreneurs and resource constrained contexts. Very little, if any, research explores how technology supports entrepreneurship and lean economies which Dapo Olapade defines as environments where community members manage slim resources innovatively and resiliently. And there's little research about this concept within the U.S. where many individuals face social economic inequalities and may be entrepreneurial novices. We begin our investigation by exploring what Mark Ackerman defines as the social technical gap or the divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support through digital technologies or what we can support technically. We extend this theory to lean economy context to ask the question, what are the technical and non-technical requirements needed to support entrepreneurship and lean economies? To answer this question, we took a participatory action research approach which is an applied research method which involved active and authentic engagement from community members. This was the major data collection and analysis method used. Our team consisted of a university research team, as I mentioned before, Vaishnav, Desiree, Kintaro and I, our community partner, the E-Sci Community Network in Detroit, our community researchers and our community participants who were community members who participated in at least one community meeting but due to special circumstances didn't make it to the final tours. We began our engagement in July, 2015, when we met with potential community partners. We focused specifically on neighborhood tours because of the minimal startup costs and the fact that neighborhood tours leveraged local knowledge and it doesn't require special training. In addition, there were several city tours that were already ongoing which suggested that the idea could lead to sustainable business. ECN expressed interest at this meeting and in February, 2016, invited us to one of their monthly meetings to introduce and propose our concept. We informed the community about the support that researchers would provide to help them conduct tours to raise supplementary income and fundraise for their community block clubs. We also informed them that there was no guarantee of success and that the program was free. Our first tours meeting with the community was held in late February and continued regularly for eight months. In these meetings, participants brainstormed and researched tour ideas and attended a historic tour conducted by one of our community partners, MINI, which was especially beneficial. We used MINI's tour, one where she had hired her own tour guide as a baseline and source of inspiration going forward. Shortly after attending a sample tour, one participant suggested a bootleggers tour or prohibition tour, which our participants rallied around. Ultimately, the community participants selected this tour dropping all other brainstormed ideas. To prepare for the bootleggers tour, community participants conducted external research to find out more history to include in the tour. The goal was for community participants to take on as much as they could on their own. We, the university team, assisted only when needed and encouraged community participants to determine next steps to brainstorm ideas for preparation, prepare and conduct the tour. As this cycle continued, we gathered information about tour content and discussed details at tour meetings. Some meetings were designated as practice meetings and we held a couple of impromptu role play sessions and practice tours. Overall, the university team provided technical and financial support and provided some coaching or mentorship as needed. For example, we created a tour website for marketing, evaluated and used platforms to manage payments. We also provided upfront financial support such as reserving the bus and providing snacks so that we recuperated these costs before net proceeds were paid to participants. After about 10 months, we held our first set of tours on October 22nd, 2016 and the tours grossed a little over $1,000 from ticket sales which came to a net profit of over $600 after subtracting the bus rental costs, tour snacks for customers and payment portal fees. The two tours concluded several sites of interest to Detroit's prohibition area history. We first stopped at a church that smugglers paid to have expanded so that they could store their alcohol. A point on the Detroit river will alcohol smugglers cross from Canada, a house that served as a speakeasy with an underground tunnel to a neighboring house and a bar adjacent to a creek known for bootlegging traffic. Finally, after the tours, we held interviews with our two tour guides and conducted observations throughout the process. So to summarize in terms of methods, there are observations at community meetings and the tour itself. We conducted surveys at the end of each tour and we conducted interviews with many in Dolores. Our data included detailed field notes from our observations, tour feedback and interview transcripts. We used the interviews as the basis of our analysis and followed a contextual inquiry method. Two members from the university team coded interview transcripts and field notes and meant to resolve discrepancies, identified common themes and coded for categories identified in Markman and Barron's person entrepreneurship fit to identify characteristics needed for successful entrepreneurship. So to answer our question, what are the requirements needed to support entrepreneurship and lean economies? In terms of technical requirements, we leveraged the platform to manage credit card payments and payment discount codes. The internet was used to conduct research on tour content and to get a sense of cost analysis for local tours. We advertised through a personal tour website as well as through social media to reach friends, families and colleagues at our respective organizations and technology facilitated communication between teams. However, even after providing these technological resources and upfront financial capital, there were many gaps or hidden requirements. In addition to upfront financial capital, we confirmed with Markman and Barron's entrepreneurship fit that human capital and individual capacities were requirements for success. We also experienced unanticipated personal challenges, such as having to take care of personal health issues or those of your loved ones, which are difficult to overcome without having a strong safety net. Business development and incubation included the facilitation of team meetings and pricing for competitive analysis, which the university team provided, while infrastructure and institutional support were artifacts needed for the business to function. For example, ECN provided free space for the meetings and a place for free parking for the tours. As stated earlier, university researchers helped to facilitate the payment and tour website, which we also labeled as infrastructure support. We encourage you to read the paper for more detail, but it was clear through these challenges that a purely technological approach to the project would not succeed. Perhaps the most interesting and most salient findings were the intangibles or factors that we label human capital and individual capacities, which we found unlikely for technology to address. Community participant motivation and self-efficacy are two factors that technology cannot easily bridge. At a basic level, most of the participants kept coming back to the planning meetings, even though there were no tangible short-term rewards and any potential payoff was distant. Several community members faced transportation challenges to attend meetings, but still returned multiple times. Generating income was indeed a motivation, though generating income was not guaranteed. The most frequently expressed motivation was a desire to share a different side of the city from the one that was portrayed in mass media, which tends to emphasize Detroit's economic problems. Dolores believed the tours would be a way for her to share her positive childhood experiences. After the tour, she reiterated this point. The tour was very good for me because it gave me a time to express how I really feel about growing up here. I think I had a fantastic childhood. The city was a wonderful place to be, and that was something that I felt good about being able to talk about. This motivation stemmed from our participant's ability to use the tours to share their positive stories about their community and offset the media's often negative portrayal of their community. Consistent with past research, community researchers indicated that boosts to self-efficacy was the most salient result of the project. Greater self-efficacy in public speaking, developing a tour itinerary in script, planning and execution, and in running an enterprise. For example, many noted that she could now give her own tour for which she previously hired a paid guide. Some of these gains in self-efficacy came from deliberate efforts on the part of the university team to offer moral support through basic acknowledgement, validation, and encouraging feedback. This kind of encouragement delivered in person in face-to-face meetings was repeatedly and insistently cited as a critical part of the community researchers sustained participation in the year-long planning process. Families were also cited as a source of social support and gave community guides encouragement throughout the experience. We outlined three additional components to distill the root causes of the gaps identified earlier. In addition to the buildup of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, there's also trust between the entrepreneur and supporters, which probably comes as no surprise. The context of our work allowed no alternative to establishing trust to those in-person meetings. Once we developed that trust, communication could move to phone and email. Both many and Dolores noted that their trust in the university team increased over time because we, the university team, were willing to make the one-hour, one-way trip to each meeting. Conversely, the community participants came back to each project meeting, which signaled to us their commitment to the project despite doubts that were expressed during the initial meetings. As stated earlier, many resources that were needed were provided by each of the stakeholders. ECN, our community partner, provided a space to meet. University team members helped to set up technological platforms. We all helped to market the tour, and the community researchers executed the tour. While many of these resources may come easy to wealthier context, this was not the case for Detroit's East Side. However, the marshaling of external expertise came after a period of developing personal trust and in-person meetings. As mentioned earlier, several technologies exist to support entrepreneurship. However, none of our community participants had received help online for it. Community participants had smartphones in some degree of data access. For the transfer of knowledge and skill to the entrepreneur to occur, there must be social engagement to help to absorb this information. This knowledge transfer also depends on trust. So in summary, technical requirements to support entrepreneurship in a lean U.S. context included technology to help us advertise our tours, manage payments, communicate and use the Internet to conduct research about the tours. However, a successful tour required non-technical requirements such as the buildup of self-efficacy among our community researchers, trust, skill and knowledge transfer, and the marshaling of external support. Our findings reflect those of past work in our field which discuss the importance of developing relationships and building trust with communities and community partners. This work speaks to the importance of providing direct support to address barriers to digital literacy, the need for upfront capital and self-efficacy. Intermediaries help to expand technology's reach. In a seminal paper, Mark Ackerman defines the social technical gap as one of the central intellectual challenges of our field and our work shows that in a lean economy context, this gap is wider. We found from this investigation that in addition to technical requirements, a range of non-technological efforts is needed to manage projects, build self-efficacy and otherwise support community participants. Our findings offer a counterpoint to over-generalize claims about well-designed technologies, being able to address certain classes of social challenges. Next, Julie will present the latest developments of this work and our continued efforts toward a sustainable business model. Can you see my slides? Not yet. You might have to press the share. How about now? Yeah, perfect. Awesome. Thank you, Tawana. So my name is Julie Hoi and as said before, I'm an assistant professor in the School of Information and I'm excited to present this work, Community Collective's low-tech social support for digitally engaged entrepreneurship. While Tawana presented the initial work outlining the opportunities and drawbacks of using technology for entrepreneurship and under-resourced settings, this presentation will focus on what this community engagement looked like over time. And so I'm presenting this on behalf of the co-authors, community partners, which included Nefra Barber, Wendy Casey, Suzanne Glee, Danny Dolly, and Frances Worthy, as well as my UMSI colleagues, Kintaro Toyama, and Tawana Dilahunt. One of the reasons we focused on digitally engaged entrepreneurship was that we see this individualized way of working, lauded, and growing narratives around entrepreneurship on digital platforms. Gigwork platforms like Uber are marketing themselves as gateways to entrepreneurship by highlighting inspirational stories of people who leverage their flexible schedules to build their business. Similarly, platforms like Facebook have pledged to train business owners with the digital skills needed to compete in today's workforce. Yet there is competing evidence of whether digital platforms are supporting entrepreneurship effectively and equitably. Scholars setting the entrepreneur realization of work describe how workers are feeling the pressure to take on increasing responsibility and risk. And while this previous research has primarily focused on tech entrepreneurs of middle class populations, our work uncovers how these pressures disproportionately affect those in the most precarious conditions where there are limited safety nets, resources, and opportunities to express agency. Understanding this population is important because an overwhelming number of self-proclaimed entrepreneurs in the United States fall in this category of being more necessity driven. Oftentimes, these efforts are considered side hustles or informal businesses and typically have less than five employees or primarily employee, just one cell for family members. And within this population from previous work than the one that I'm going to be describing today, we continue to find the persistence of entrepreneurial aspirations and how they were entangled with digital technology use in under resource context. So one entrepreneur said, I want to know how to use tech because I just want to. I get a message every day that someone's following me on Instagram and I'm like, well, what does that mean? And to become aware of these tools and learn how to use them requires additional labor of traveling to places with technology, teaching yourself how to use the different tech and acquiring internet access. So another entrepreneur said, I would probably go to the city county building to use a computer and that's half a day. I don't want to be left behind. So I'm trying to catch up. I don't want to be caught up in snail mail when everyone else is on Instagram. And so given these local desires to learn digital tools in order to build their businesses, we proposed this initial resource research question, which is how do we foster sustainable structures for digitally engaged entrepreneurship in under resource communities? And I just want to point out that the term under resource was chosen by participants when asked how they wanted the socioeconomic status of their community described. To answer this question, we took a participatory action research approach and partnered with a local nonprofit. And together we co-led meetings following this process throughout the months that we were engaged. So as participatory action research suggests this interaction meant that the university team and community members actively, both actively participated in the research outcome through an iterative process of planning, acting and reflecting. In planning, we worked together to identify local goals with a nonprofit, revisited goals with communities members throughout and set individual goals and timelines. So this also involved the extensive upfront work that Tawana described of setting up the partnership and building up trust. In acting, we co-developed a meeting structure that worked for everyone, had opportunities to share ideas and resources from both sides and collectively troubleshooted barriers, which I'll describe later. And then finally, in reflecting, we had regular conversations on the university community engagement. So what was working, what wasn't working and iterating on that relationship, reflecting on whether people were meeting their personal goals in progress and having regular discussions. So just to summarize before we go into the findings, the key takeaways were that the digital platforms meant to democratize entrepreneurship often assumed access to basic resources and that low tech social supports are critical for supporting early stage business progress online and offline. First challenges to digital engagement include that existing supports for digital engagement were highly digital to begin with. So people were not proactively surfing the web for resources and searching for online tutorials on how to use digital tools seemed counterintuitive. And also platforms that were meant to democratize entrepreneurial activity did not take into account local issues of class and race, which often made participating on these platforms unnecessarily difficult. So just for an example, some of our participants wanted to join Airbnb experiences. So I'm showing a screenshot of the Airbnb experience homepage. If you haven't heard of it before, Airbnb experiences is similar to Airbnb, but instead of renting out a room in your home, you would provide an experience. So like giving a tour or a cooking class, something that you could do together now either online or offline. So in our study, two members were interested in marketing their cooking class. And this is an example conversation that happened in one of the meetings. What we saw was that not having certain resources like having access to a space created barriers to participation on these platforms. Barbara said, I couldn't figure out what to do with the expensive venue and the 20% Airbnb overhead. That's a lot. I looked at Airbnb experiences around the country and they all had their own storefront. Casey said, so they had already, everything already set up. Barbara said, but I don't have that, the storefront. If you don't have all that set up, it'll be over $100 to rent this space per class. And Casey said, what about schools with cooking programs? And then another member said, my friend said she could let us use her space at this location. So this is an example of how regular in-person meetings were critical to troubleshooting around these challenges around technologies and allowing people to collectively identify ideas and pull resources together in order to participate online. We also saw the importance of paper-based supports in motivating engagement online. Community members were on the whole, comfortable typing on a computer or phone, but they reported that they felt documenting their drafts directly onto the technologies seemed too official at first. They wanted to keep their brainstorming unpublished and then preferred transferring their written words to digital platforms only after their thoughts were organized on paper. So in this slide, I'm showing examples of how members organize their plans on notebook paper, often meticulously rewriting these plans multiple times until it reached a final version that they were happy with to transfer online. In response to seeing this activity, we created worksheets mimicking how people were already planning their tours out on paper. So this helped people organize their thoughts according to what was needed for creating online business pages. And it was also particularly useful for those other members who were having trouble getting started. So we saw that some people were proactively planning out their tours and some just didn't know how to get started. And so providing this kind of paper structure to begin with helped. So on the left, you see an example of a worksheet being used to plan out a tour and on the right, how they use the details of that to make their Facebook page. Together, we identified four core elements critical to supporting the onboarding process of digitally engaged entrepreneurship, including resource connecting organizations, regular in-person meetings, paper planning tools, and practice opportunities to practice and have validation. If we really want to support equitable engagement on these platforms that say they support entrepreneurship, we really need to broaden our idea of what a support ecosystem looks like. It doesn't just mean providing people with the digital tools, they need to succeed like an online tutorial or a MOOC, but also providing local social supports while each of these individual elements may not sound particularly groundbreaking. We emphasize that fostering an ecosystem of support outside just online platforms and tools helps provide multiple pathways for engagement. And to give an example of how this collective fit into the current entrepreneurship ecosystem, the neighborhood, in this quote, one of the entrepreneurs said, not everyone is ready to make that prosperous commitment. And so prosperous is considered one of the initial programs that you should engage in if you're thinking of starting a business. So not everyone is ready to make that prosperous commitment. They need to flesh out the idea first. Sometimes you don't have people to talk things through, but here I have people to talk to, and it's a great idea. So we see how Casey describes it in order to get to the point where she can engage in the first level of support that the community already provides. It takes a significant amount of upfront work to just flesh an idea out. And so these informal collectives provide an opportunity and space to do that with others. And reflecting on this process of working with communities, we initially found what were important were general principles that have been stated in a lot of previous work on community-engaged research, like building trust with local organizations first before talking specifically to people, being transparent about your motivations. But if we had to distill how we spent most of our time or much of our time, it was understanding and moderating conversations within the collective about how to identify shared goals and motivations. So there wasn't always a cohesive vision from the neighborhood. We had to moderate discussions and figure out common interests that were critical for making progress and to develop the eventual vision for the collective. Finally, one of our key commitments was making sure that there were ongoing structures to sustain these efforts. Some steps that we have taken to sustain the group without researcher support was having leaders elected within the community. So while we, the university researchers initially did a lot of the meeting coordination, local leaders have started to take on these responsibilities. We co-authored a local grant with a nonprofit partner which helps pay for needed resources like transportation as well as the time that local leaders are putting into organizing the collective. We co-authored a mission and vision statement which will be used to help recruit future members and also just created a cohesive vision for the group. And some of the members have developed ongoing partnerships with local organizations such as museums which allows them to build up individual reputations as entrepreneurs outside of the collective. Just to summarize again, this participatory action research approach to support digitally engaged entrepreneurship led us to find that digital platforms meant to democratize entrepreneurship assumed basic access to basic resources like space or transportation. And that low tech social supports were critical for creating a more comprehensive support ecosystem for early stage digitally engaged businesses. And so this included things like having regular meetings and paper-based worksheets. After this project, we came away with even more questions around how to do participatory action research more broadly. So like how do you engage with ecosystems beyond the research or community partnership to ensure project sustainability? This is something that we've been thinking a lot about right now. So how do you sustain it beyond grants and sustaining the collective activities? What conversations do you have to have before and during the partnership to ensure agency? And how do we ensure that true community participation is happening in the research and design process? So we're excited to continue our work together with the entrepreneurs but also to further engage with these methodology questions. I would like to thank my co-authors for all the effort that they've put in to carry out this project as well as the Eastside Community Network for sharing their space and their networks as well as our sources of funding. And we look forward to your questions. Thank you. So interesting, so interesting. I have 7,000 questions but I think it might be best for me to give the students and everyone else on the call a chance to jump in first. So if anyone, again, the way we're gonna handle questions you can either chat them to everyone or if you want to just, I guess, unmute, we could probably, this group is probably small enough that we could let you just ask your question. But I'll start while y'all think about it for a minute. You know, I thought, part of what I thought was so interesting is the discussion about building trust and that's definitely something that we have come up with over and over. And I think that people think that that would be something that's easy because you feel like, oh, I'm a decent human being. So this would be something that's easy but I don't think it's quite that simple. I would be curious to hear you say I guess this could be to either of you to hear a little bit more about how you go about doing that and if there is some kind of, I don't know, structure for approaching building relationships that are trusting. I can start and I'll start with the efforts made to get the first part of the project started. So one thing I think that's great about University of Michigan, so we do have the Detroit Urban Research Center and that center consists of executive directors of nonprofit organizations in the community and they know community-based participatory research. They know about action research and so we went to the Detroit URC with some of our goals as researchers. I'm interested in economic mobility broadly and technology's role in promoting economic mobility and those organizations who are at that round table, ECN expressed interest. And so once you now have the interests of the community they're overlapping goals. They know why you're interested and they see the overlap and then they kind of bring us into the community. So that trust already, there's a level of trust because the organization kind of, you know, they vouch for us and they allowed us in their space. So I think that was the beginning of it and then we had, you know, we had a session where we would answer questions and, you know, there were questions, what is in it for you? And we had to explain as researchers here is what, you know, we're interested in and that, you know, there's a chance of failure. Like we had to be very honest upfront and so from there we have a group of community members who are meeting with us regularly and I think they're seeing the commitment because, you know, Detroit is, you know, an hour away. And so we're driving back and forth, we're sending emails, you know, and, you know, there were a couple of times when, you know, people were skeptical and, you know, again, what's in it for you? And, you know, it was like, this is part of the, this is part of our work, this is part of our, you know, approach. Here's what we'd love to see technology to better support economic mobility and economic growth. And we need to do this and understand, you know, what we need to do as technologists. And so over time, I mean, it takes time, over time we were able to build trust. So it's definitely not an easy thing, but having, you know, support from, well, having, you know, an entity like Detroit, URC and then having support of the intermediaries is a really good way to work towards building that trust. And if I could add on that, I feel like in my experience, it was doing a lot of outside activities beyond research, like doing just research is like very, very small part, like volunteering for different community events that weren't part of our project and just doing a lot of additional support for each of the business businesses that, yeah, that may not like go into a paper ever, but it was for their benefit. Yeah, I'd like to, you know, add on to that. I mean, some of the volunteer work, I mean, they came to us and they asked if we would be willing to have what they call the bring your own device. And that's kind of like open office hours for technology. So their community members, you know, we would go, you know, I think once, was it once a month, Saturdays we brought our students and we'd provide technical support, that, you know, we've helped people, you know, use Skype, unfriend someone on Facebook. And then they recently, you know, reached out to a submit COVID to ask us if we could hold a session, a Zoom session, where we could, you know, walk them through Zoom before they organize their community. So it is a partnership. I think East Side Community Network continued to do those, bring your own device events after that, didn't they? I'm pretty sure someone told, yeah, that's awesome. Carly, do you want to ask your question? Yeah, so my question was actually sort of on how the roots of the partnership. So you actually answered that as part of the first question. That was really interesting. Okay, Jose. Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for the presentation. I've learned a lot and I appreciate the work that you've done. My question was around the brainstorming period when you're working with the entrepreneurs and kind of finish on the tours idea. Could you speak a little bit about that community conversation facilitation and how you worked with the community partners to reach functional consensus on moving forward with the tours idea? Sure, and Julie, you know, so I guess you can think of it as multiple segments. So in the early segments, there were pottery tours, ideas for pottery tours, and somewhere just local, let's walk around the neighborhood, I think it was part, what's needed, right? Do community members actually need to be able to drive to get there? Now, I think in the initial sessions, community members, I would say in their thinking, they only felt like people in their community would be interested in going, right? So they were only thinking about how people in their community would have access to such things. Whereas I think as being at the University of Michigan, I heard my colleagues say, well, I would love to go to Detroit, but some people were, I'm afraid to go, I don't know anyone there I would love to have. So we saw this from our side and saying, well, if we could get a bus or people could walk, but so there were many constraints in that brainstorming and it was less walk through this together and see what it would look like. And there were things about, well, what if someone's an elder in the community, what if they're wheelchair bound? I mean, there were those types of questions. And I mean, I think with the bootleggers tour, it was something that one person wanted to have for a very long time. Everyone just got excited about it. And I don't think they thought that they would never get to do the pottery tour or the urban garden tour. I think they were just excited to, hey, let's use this as our pilot. And I would say that I feel like a lot of the interest around the tour business, what came from this desire for storytelling and then creating a business around that. And also that it didn't create, require a lot of outside resources to get like, you don't need like a specific license or degree or something to do that specific business. So it was a nice kind of initial business to get started with. And then now a lot of our members, they're branching out of the tour ideas. So they want to do like cooking classes or how do you make certain crafts? And so that is, I think it was interesting to see how it was just like one initial spark and then not limiting it to tours but other things that people are interested as well. Can I ask, are you, so with those other ideas of like these other like cooking classes and that kind of thing, are you guys considering like ongoing involvement or are you kind of sticking around and seeing how this tour situation goes? But I know you had a lot of open questions about participation and research and your commitment. Yeah, the idea was to come by every once in a while just to like make sure questions were answered but we were no longer like organizing or leading the meeting but at least like probing the leaders to make sure that they're organizing. I would say that COVID definitely stopped a lot of the efforts. I think people just got overwhelmed with everything that's going on. So this might be something, some people are interested in like continuing with virtual tours. And I know that Airbnb experiences has like virtual experiences now but it's definitely a much harder because of the lockdown. So our intention was to stick around and like slowly phase out, but then now we can't. Yeah, we have had a, you know at least one community member reach out with an interest in writing a grant or submitting a grant proposal. I think thinking about the future but COVID is definitely, and we check in every now and then but COVID is definitely kind of put this project to a halt except for the conversations around virtual tours. Elizabeth? Jim, I'd have read your question. Okay, Elizabeth asks, each presenter provided evidence that successful entrepreneurship using technology requires an ecosystem of social support and needs to bridge the social technological gap. What policies, legislation, incentives and funding would help to develop a social support ecosystem to bridge that gap? As a citizen interested in improving opportunities for marginalized communities, what policies should I be asking my elected representatives to support? I love that question. I do, Julie, do you wanna, do you wanna? Well, I was wondering if you wanna talk about the tech collective idea but at least something that just came out of this study was just like the typical things like better public transportation, maybe better support for initial programs that support early stage entrepreneurs. I feel like there's so much money poured into like later stage tech entrepreneurs. And I wouldn't say that's the interest of the majority of the people that we were talking to. So maybe more funding for a wider diversity of businesses, especially in places that are not just like Midtown but other neighborhoods. That was a big complaint or if people felt like on the East side they just weren't getting the type of funding that was available to these other neighborhoods. Yeah, I would agree. And a lot of the infrastructural support that was required, having the spaces, having a place to park for free, having a space to meet was important. And still is important, it still is important. And even there's a tech hub there now that is needed to kind of help bridge some of the gaps in having access to technology. More of that would be great. But also someone there to kind of shepherd or teach or coach people to use the technology. Did you wanna talk about the tech collective idea or not? Oh, you can, yeah, you can go ahead and yeah, you can talk about the tech collective. Okay, yeah, I think another thing is like building capacity within the community. So something that we're thinking of doing is how do you build like trainers within the neighborhood? So people aren't always relying on outside support for advice or training. And we're trying to put something together in terms of like providing youth like an employment opportunity to be part of like tech support and then having them support their community with answering questions or setting anything up. Yeah, the model builds from what's known as community health workers if any of you are familiar with that space. So community health workers are people that exist in a community to help other members to navigate the healthcare system. And so the community tech collective is like that. So you would have people in the community who are helping others in the community to navigate digital technology. I have the tendency to always think about employment and how can you put this on your resume or how can you create an opportunity and the tech workers, the digital tech workers would be employed, they would be paid and they would be provided with training. So I think this is really important based on other work that I have with my colleague Tiffany Vino because COVID pushed us to tell a health, right? Like you have people in the community that have to call into the doctor's appointment and we need to build capacity within the community so that people can successfully speak with their doctors. Finding employment, like you have to go online to apply to work. There are so many things that require digital literacy or some comfort with technology that it almost seems strange that such collectives don't already exist. I'm gonna speak up at this point because I appreciate that you liked my question. I'm sort of an outsider, although I'm not entirely an outsider, I actually graduated from University of Michigan more than 50 years ago and I'm really excited by what you're describing but I'm old enough to be impatient and everything you're saying makes a lot of sense but it needs funding. How do we get this information in an actionable form in simple enough terms to our legislative people and you've got a few Democrats in Michigan and more that wanna be elected in the hopes that we have a better administration in the next year or so. How do you put this into language that people can understand so it can be made into legislation that can get funded and the dream you have of tech consultants wandering around neighborhoods helping people do telehealth is real and sustainable. I appreciate your question, Elizabeth. I've been working with Patrick Cooney at Poverty Solutions and thinking of public policy experts to get out briefs, policy briefs. Now you've kind of forcing me to think about this a little bit more as a technologist. I was thinking that the technology brief would be the output but I have to think harder about what else because you're saying you're impatient and so if we need this tomorrow, what do we do? And I mean, if some of you on the call have the answer, I would love to it because I mean, I would love to hear your response because I'm limited in what I know from a policy standpoint all I can think of are like policy briefs, get those out but I'd love to hear from you all. What else can we do to see this happen tomorrow for Elizabeth and everyone? Just for me. For everyone, right, right. No, I appreciate your question. Robert asks if you all work with Tech Town. I know we do, but I don't know if it was part of your research. No, we weren't working with Tech Town. I think we've talked to some people there but to one, I don't know if you reached out to them. I haven't reached out to them lately, it's just been ECN as our primary partner and then Prosperous, there's a connection there as well but not Tech Town. It seems to me like most of your research was focused on people who are not currently tied in to the, were not at least currently tied into the entrepreneurial ecosystem and so much of the work that you were doing was helping people to talk through the vetting of their ideas and things. Jose, you wanna ask your question? Yeah, definitely. I think I'll make it brief. I noticed on the ESide Community Network page they have a designated kind of business corridor work that they do and I was wondering how the business corridor kind of plugged in to support your tour entrepreneurs and if there was some, was there some kind of resource sharing or some advice provision in that capacity? I wouldn't say that they were connected. I think that the Mac Ave was still in the early stages when these tours were happening. So the idea was that eventually they might be able to connect up but they didn't see like an initial connection there yet because the businesses weren't there yet. I mean, there were some, there were, you know, we had brainstorming sessions where the community members wanted to reach out to others to see how their tours could kind of fit in with, you know, how their tours could fit in with people on the outside and I forget what this was called. It was like a, almost like a showcase of the tour guides and what they want to do at this business district. So Suzanne Clegg, who's also a co-author on the work that Julie presented has a closer connection to that and she was, you know, able to give some of the members an idea of what it would take to, you know, kind of showcase their tours there. But at least one of our tour guides, Francis, did do a music tour with, I think it was Toyota. So she was able to repeat her music tour, you know, kind of on her own and advertise her tours, you know, to a broader audience. And I think that, you know, that's the goal of this work. Yeah, the end goal was to highlight some of the local businesses there as part of the tours. So hopefully that could happen one day. Okay, so we are, we have about 45 seconds left. Drew, do you wanna, you can have the last word, if you like, to talk about some of the connections between this and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation. Yeah, thanks for the chance to chime in. Excuse me, to the question earlier about how do we integrate this research into programs that are on the ground. We, I was actually alerted to this talk by Justin Erickson, who works at the U of M Detroit Entrepreneurs Project. So thank you, Justin. But I think this research echoes a lot of things that people who work in the small business support ecosystem encounter all the time where we have a really wide range of entrepreneurs that come to us and there is a huge digital divide that makes it difficult for many people who want help to get help, especially during COVID. So I participate in a work table with Justin and members of probably a dozen other organizations that work with small businesses here in Detroit. And that's a really great way for all of us to consult with one another and think critically about the programs that we have and the methods that we use. So in a very, very real way, we can take this research to that table and it can influence the way that the people who are working on the ground do their work every day. So I really appreciate your research and I thank you for the chance to just stay a little bit there. Thanks. Thank you and we can send our papers. I don't know if they're available. I sent them in the chat and I want to echo that too and say, Professor Hoy, Professor Dillahunt, your papers have been hugely influential to me and to Justin in thinking about the Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project and how to engage thoughtfully, respectfully and in a mutually collaborative way with the small businesses we work with. And so thank you very much for taking the time to write them, to do the research and to share your work with us today. So we are going to end here. I want to say thank you to Tracy Van Dusen and to Liz Smith behind the screen who have managed to pull off two blue bag lunch talks in a row without any major technical glitches and they have thus earned their paychecks for two months in a row just by accomplishing that Herculean task. So thanks to both of you. Thank you so much. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks for the questions. Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks everyone. Come back next month. Bye-bye.