Black Miami leaders strive to build a tech presence that reflects the area’s diversity
With events like the forthcoming MiamiWeb3 Summit, Miami continues affirming its status as an emerging tech hub.
While companies like Uber and Spotify continue to follow city Mayor Francis Suarez’s invitation to build in Miami, those resources have not always reached the nearly 20% of Black residents in Miami-Dade County.
Black technologists in the community want to change that.
Venture Miami executive director Erick Gavin sees the potential Web3 has in preparing Black youth for the future and wants to bridge the gap between the emerging tech sector and the minority community. He’s concerned because many Black students he speaks with do not see themselves in tech, a mostly white, male-dominated industry.
Mayor Suarez is an ardent supporter of Miami’s tech economy and in conversations with him, Gavin has discussed the emergence of Web3. With the latest iteration of the internet, Gavin said it’s important for the future of institutional systems to have access to different payment options that include cryptocurrency. For Web3 to be fully realized, Black people need to be supported in it.
“When you think about technology historically, I don’t know if tech was for us [Black people] in the past,” Gavin said. “It doesn’t mean there weren’t Black technologists or biz leaders who took a huge step forward. [However,] as a community, technology isn’t something we gravitated towards even though we were really well-suited for technology roles.”
Like many Black technologists, Gavin’s path into tech wasn’t linear. In his career, he has seen tech professionals from non-technical backgrounds find viable careers in tech roles as developers or non-technical roles as project managers. It can all start with early engagement, he said.
As a way of supporting local youth with dreams of working in tech, the Venture Miami Scholarship Fund provides tuition support on a need-based basis for Miami residents who have been admitted to science, technology, engineering and math or similar programs at local colleges and universities such as Florida International University, Florida Memorial University, Miami Dade College and University of Miami.
There’s been $6 million raised for the fund, and early next year money will be allocated to students. Gavin thinks it’s important for local students from underserved communities to attend college free. If students know they have funding opportunities and support, he said they can thrive.
“When we’re talking about kids from Overtown, Little Haiti or Little Havana, we need to understand what is going to engage these kids in a real way,” he said. “And when understanding, how we’ll turn that engagement into an economic pathway.”
‘Having the right access’
On a warm Wednesday evening at Wynwood’s Freehold restaurant, a small crowd of people socialize and amble about. Black technologist Sharon Holm quickly moved through the crowd as if she were a Bitcoin electronically transferring between users. The Miami Tech Happy Hour is happening, and it doesn’t look like a regular cryptocurrency event. There are Black and brown people, many women, and people of different ages.
It looked like Miami’s actual community.
Echoing Gavin’s sentiments on the historical lack of space for Black people in tech, Holm wants to seize the moment and help bring more Black people, especially women, to the table.
“Us as Black individuals were never brought into those spaces to have those discussions,” she said. “Us as Black women face the biggest obstacles in financial education. We only occupy 4% of the crypto space. That’s why I’m championing for more education of women of color to build a portfolio and generational wealth in this space. It’s here to stay.”
For Sharon Holm, Web3 represents community. She was joined at the happy hour by Ashley Caines, a Web3 strategist from a Caribbean family; Somara Jacques, an attorney; and Sharonda Davis, a registered nurse and local Web3 organizer. Each Black woman has had her unique professional path, and found another connection through the potential of Web3 as a tool to build the future.
Holm has spent the past 25 years as a marketing professional around the world in places such as Spain and Hong Kong. Since moving back to Miami in 2010, she has worked in tech and learned about Web3 during her time at GenoBank, a tech company specializing in building ownership over genetic data. She wants to see more Black people working in tech and that change starts with exposure.
“There are not enough of us in engineering or tech as a whole, and we’re not at the bigger companies and are not stakeholders,” she said. “We’re not at the table making decisions. If you’re not in the Web2 space, it’s hard to make it to Web3. It all comes down to us having the right access and not being a part of the equation to get in this space.”
Holm sees the value in meet-ups for local Black residents interested in tech because “blockchain can be complicated,” she said. When combined with systemic inequities that have led to Black people not building generational wealth, Web3 can seem dense and education on it can be essential to growth in the space.
“It’s been challenging for us to be a part of the traditional financial model,” she said. “It’s a new frontier and it’s becoming decentralized. It all comes down to education. [People need] a lot of education resources and you have to be a part of the community where you know the information is trustworthy.”
During a recent panel at Pérez Art Museum Miami hosted by The Miami Foundation’s Web3 Equity fund, Simone Berry, a Web3 advocate, spoke about the subject with a spirited candor that was punctuated by her Jamaican accent.
As a Black Web3 founder with a background in fashion, Berry was intrigued by the ability to have equity in her work as a digital creator. Every time a non-fungible token asset is minted, it is attached to a ledger on the blockchain that shows its transaction history. With smart contracts, creators like Berry can get paid in cryptocurrency every time their work is sold. Historically, Black artists across the media have lacked ownership in their work.
“This is about us, as a community, creating our own tables,” Berry said, during a recent Zoom session. “I appreciate the permissiveness of blockchain. I don’t need anyone’s permission to create anything.”
Berry is the cofounder of People of Crypto Labs. People of Crypto is a collection of 8,430 NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that were designed to reflect the society’s diversity. Each avatar that has been sold has one of 36 skin shades and a respective unique ethnic, gender and sexual identification. Many NFTs also reflect people with disabilities.
In addition to building equity for Black creators like her, Berry thinks Web3 also can represent them. Like Holm, Berry said that only can happen with the education of communities like Black Miami.
“I do know that if we’re not participating or educating ourselves on what this is and what it can do, we’re going to be on the other end of this,” she said.
This story was originally published November 23, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
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