#especially if the business is owned by a minority group or nonprofit for a good cause

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

Let’s play a game of “How many sensory items can I accumulate before people suspect there’s something odd going on with my brain”

[gayenerd]

I just realized I didn’t post that 2007 Rolling Stone article I posted about here. 

Billie Joe Armstrong

The Green Day leader talks Bush, Britney and being a middle-aged punk for our 40th anniversary.

DAVID FRICKE

Posted Nov 01, 2007 8:19 AM

You have two young sons. What kind of America will they inherit?

This war has to finish before something new blossoms. There's no draft — that's why none of the kids give a shit. They'd rather watch videos on YouTube. It's hard to tell what's next — there is so much information out there with no power to it. Everything is in transition, including our government. Next year, it's someone else in the White House. There's no way to define anything. It's Generation Zero. But you gotta start at zero to get to something.

Is there anyone now running for president who gives you hope for the future?

Barack Obama, but it's a bit early to tell if this is the guy I like. I get sick of the religious-figure thing. People don't question their rulers, these political figures, just as they don't question their ministers and priests. They're not going to question George Bush, especially if he goes around talking about God — "I'm going to let God decide this for me. He's going to give me the answer." The fear of God keeps people silent.

When did you first vote in a presidential election?

In 1992. I was twenty. I voted for Clinton.

Did you feel like you made a difference?

Yeah. The Eighties sucked. There was so much bullshit that went along with that decade. I felt like Clinton was a fresh face with fresh ideas. There were times when he was dropping bombs, and I'm thinking, "What the fuck are you doing?" But he became a target. We have this puritanical vision of what a leader is supposed to be, and that's what makes us the biggest hypocrites in the world. We got so inside this guy's sexual habits. Now we have a president going around, killing in the name of what? In the name of nothing.

What did you accomplish with your 2004 anti-Bush album, "American Idiot"? He was re-elected anyway, and the war in Iraq is still going on.

I found a voice. There may have been people disenfranchised by it. People have a hard time with that kind of writing: "Why are you preaching to me?" It does sound preachy, a bit. I'm a musician, and I want to say positive things. If it's about self-indulgent depression or overthrowing the government, it's gotta come from my heart. And when you say "Fuck George W. Bush" in a packed arena in Texas, that's an accomplishment, because you're saying it to the unconverted.

Do you think selling nearly 6 million copies of that album might have an effect on the 2008 election? A kid who bought it at fifteen will be voting age next year.

I hope so. I made it to give people a reason to think for themselves. It was supposed to be a catalyst. Maybe that's one reason why it's difficult for me to write about politics now. A lot of things on that record are still relevant. It's like we have this monarchy in politics — the passing of the baton between the Clintons and the Bushes. That's frightening. What needs to happen is a complete change, a person coming from the outside with a new perspective on all the fucked-up problems we have.

How would you describe the state of pop culture?

People want blood. They want to see other people thrown to the lions. Do audiences want rock stars? I can't tell. You have information coming at you from so many areas — YouTube, the Internet, tabloids. Watching Britney Spears the other night [on the MTV Video Music Awards] was like watching a public execution. How could the people at MTV, the people around her, not know this girl was fucked up? People came in expecting a train wreck, and they got more than they bargained for.

She was a willing conspirator. She didn't say no.

She is a manufactured child. She has come up through this Disney perspective, thinking that all life is about is to be the most ridiculous star you could be. But it's also about what we look at as entertainment — watching somebody go through that.

How do you decide what your children can see on TV or the Internet? As a dad, even a punk-rock dad, that can make you conservative in your choices.

I want to protect them from garbage. It's not necessarily the sex and drugs. It's bad drugs and bad sex, the violence you see on television and in the news. I want to protect them from being desensitized. I want them to realize this is real life, not a video game.

The main thing I want them to have is a good education, because that's something I never had. Get smart. Educate yourself as much as you can, and get as much out of it, even if the teacher is an asshole.

Do you regret dropping out of high school?

Life in high school sucks. I bucked the system. I also got lucky. My wife has a degree in sociology, and there are conversations she has — I don't have a fucking clue what they're talking about. College — I could have learned from that.

But I was the last of six kids. At that point, my mother was fifty-eight, and she threw up her hands — "I'm through with this parenting thing." Also, I could not handle authority figures. But I wouldn't say I'm an authority figure for my kids. I provide guidelines, not rules.

What is it like being a middle-aged punk? Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

It's about the energy you bring with you, the pulse inside your head. I want to get older. I don't want to be twenty-one again. Screw that. My twenties were a difficult time — where my band was at, getting married, having a child. I remember walking out of a gig in Chicago, past these screaming kids. There were these punks, real ones, sitting outside our tour bus. One girl had a forty-ouncer, and she goes, "Billie Joe, come drink with us." I said, "I can't, I've got my family on the bus." She goes, "Well, fuck you then." I get on the bus, and my wife says, "Did that bitch just tell you to fuck off? I'm gonna kick her ass right now." I'm holding her back, while my child is naked, jumping on the couch: "Hi, Daddy!" That was my whole life right there — screaming kids, punks telling me to fuck off, my wife getting pissed, my naked son waiting to get into his pajamas.

There's nothing wrong with being twenty-one. It's the lessons you learn. At thirty, you think, "Why did I worry so much about this shit?" When I hit forty, I'll say the same thing: "Why did I worry about this shit in my thirties?"

What have you learned about yourself?

There is more to life than trying to find your way through self-destruction or throwing yourself into the fire all the time. Nihilism in punk rock can be a cliché. I need to give myself more room to breathe, to allow my thoughts to catch up with the rest of me.

Before Dookie, I wasn't married and I didn't have kids. I had a guitar, a bag of clothes and a four-track recorder. There are ways you don't want to change. You don't want to lose your spark. But I need silence more than I did before. I need to get away from the static and noise, whereas before, I thrived on it.

Are you ready for the end of the music business? The technology and its effect on sales have changed dramatically since Green Days' debut EP — on vinyl — in 1989.

Technology now and the way people put out records — everything comes at you so fast, you don't know what you're investigating. You can't identify with it — at least I can't. With American Idiot, we made a conscious effort to give people an experience they could remember for the rest of their lives. It wasn't just the content. It was the artwork, the three acts — the way you could read it all like someone's story.

Is music simply not important to young people now the way it was to you as a kid?

People get addicted to garbage they don't need. At shows, they gotta talk on their phones to their friend who's in the next aisle. I was watching this documentary on Jeff Tweedy of Wilco [Sunken Treasure]. He was playing acoustic, and he ends up screaming at the audience: "Your fucking conversation can wait. I'm up here singing a song — get involved." He wasn't being an asshole. He was like, "Leave your bullshit behind. Let's celebrate what's happening now."

We need music, and we need it good. I took it very seriously. There's a side of me where music will always send chills up my spine, make me cry, make me want to get up and do Pete Townshend windmills. In a lot of ways, I was in a minority when I was young. There are people who go, "Oh, that's a snappy tune." I listen to it and go, "That's the greatest fucking song ever. That is the song I want played at my funeral."

Now that you've brought it up, what song do you want played at your funeral?

It keeps changing. "Life on Mars?" by David Bowie. "In My Life," by the Beatles. "Love," by John Lennon.

Those are all reflective ballads, not punk.

I disagree. They are all honest in their reflection. The punk bands I liked were the ones who didn't fall into clichés — the Clash, the Ramones. The Ramones wrote beautiful love songs. They also invented punk rock. I'd have to add "Blitzkrieg Bop" to the list.

What is the future of punk rock? Will it still be a voice of rebellion in twenty years?

It's categorized in so many different ways. You've got the MySpace punks. But there is always the subculture of it — the rats in the walls, pounding the pavement and booking their own live shows. It comes down to the people who are willing to do something different from everybody else.

You are in a different, platinum-album world now. What makes you so sure that spirit survives?

I'm going on faith — because I was there. Gilman Street [the Berkeley, California, club where Green Day played early shows] is still around. And that's a hard task, because there is no bar — it's a nonprofit cooperative. It's like a commune — this feeling of bucking the system together, surviving and thriving on art. Punk, as an underground, pushes for the generation gap. As soon as you're twenty-five years old, there's a group of sixteen-year-olds coming to kick your ass. And you have to pass the torch on. It's a trip to have seen it happen so many times. It gives me goose bumps — punk is something that survives on its own.

[lastsonlost]

And this is from Buzzfeed. Not Fox. Not Breitbart.

She’s The Public Face Of #MeToo In Science. Now Critics Are Speaking Out About Her Tactics.

Seven leaders of the MeTooSTEM group have resigned, citing a lack of transparency and the founder’s combative tweets.

An outspoken campaigner against sexual harassment in science is facing a crisis of leadership at MeTooSTEM, the volunteer organization she founded last year to support victims and hold perpetrators and institutions accountable.

Since November, seven members of the leadership team have resigned, citing concerns about the behavior of its founder, BethAnn McLaughlin, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

In their resignation letters, former MeTooSTEM leaders said that McLaughlin kept them in the dark about key decisions and reacted with hostility when they asked about the small organization’s finances and legal structure. They also worried that McLaughlin had alienated allies through her combative tweets.

“There have been several instances where supporters of MeTooSTEM have been upset by the tenor of your tweets, up to and including blocking you or being blocked by you,” wrote Julie Libarkin, an environmental scientist at Michigan State University who has compiled a database of more than 770 academic sexual misconduct cases, and Tisha Bohr, a biology postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, in their resignation email sent in November.

“Some of them, victims themselves, have reached out to us for clarification and support ... putting us in an impossible position of trying to support victims as well as you and the movement,” the message continued.

The most recent three departures, on April 24, included the only two women of color on the MeTooSTEM leadership team. “We … felt that white leadership input was prioritized over our own,” wrote Deanna Arsala, a biology graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Vidhya Sivakumaran, a former biophysicist who now works for a health informatics company.

MeTooSTEM was formed after a string of sexual harassmentscandals involving leading scientists, amid growing recognition that sexual and gender harassment is a pervasive problem in science. The rifts within the organization come against the backdrop of a debate about how best to tackle these problems, as McLaughlin’s burn-it-all-down zeal clashes with efforts by some activists to work with the academic establishment to achieve reform.

“I am aware that BethAnn is a polarizing person. Much of her effectiveness has been in bringing truth to power and being in your face,” said Carol Greider, a Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University, who earlier this month agreed to serve on MeTooSTEM’s board. “And sometimes those approaches do undermine the effectiveness.”

McLaughlin declined multiple requests for comment.

Leaders who have stayed with the organization defended McLaughlin’s activism, much of which is not in public view, they said.

“In my experience, all ideas were welcome and supported,” Britteny Watson, MeTooSTEM’s business manager, told BuzzFeed News by email.

“On the whole, I have personally had positive experiences with BethAnn and MeTooSTEM. I have seen her consistently go above and beyond for survivors, especially for transgender people of color and people who are dealing with issues related to immigration,” said Johanna Folk, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco.

Folk added, however, that she can’t speak for anyone else. “My overall positive experience does not negate the concerns of others. All the people who left MeTooSTEM are ones I really look up to and value both personally and professionally. I am grateful for all of their work."

MeTooSTEM is not the first grassroots activist organization to face growing pains: Occupy Wall Street was riven by infightingamong its founders; the Women’s March was accused of anti-Semitism; Black Lives Matter has wrestled with debates over its future direction; and the March for Science, formed to protest the Trump administration’s science policies, added women of color to its leadership in 2017 after complaints that it was neglecting the concerns of minority groups.

McLaughlin is a particular lightning rod within the #MeToo movement in science because she has become its public face amid concerns that her combative approach may sometimes do more harm than good.

“There is a distinction between trying to speak truth to power and just bringing heat.”

“There is a distinction between trying to speak truth to power and just bringing heat,” said Kate Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana and an longtime advocate of women facing sexual harassment in science, who reached out to former volunteers after seeing their resignation tweets.

“What I’m hearing and seeing is heat being brought to women of color, heat being brought to grad students, and heat being brought to victims of sexual harassment,” Clancy said.

McLaughlin’s public activism grew from turmoil in her own career at Vanderbilt. Her application for tenure was put on hold after another Vanderbilt neuroscientist, Aurelio Galli, accused her of sending abusive tweets about him and other colleagues from multiuser accounts.

Galli had already been accused of sexual harassment by a former PhD student, who in July 2014 sued him and the university. McLaughlin later testified in support of a research collaborator from the University of Washington who in January 2015 alleged that Galli said, during a dinner at his house, that he would spend “every last penny” to make sure the person who accused him was ruined. (Vanderbilt settled the lawsuit brought by the PhD student in December 2014, and the judge dismissed her case against Galli.)

McLaughlin’s tenure application eventually restarted in 2017, but a faculty committee voted against her. She filed a grievance, which was rejected in February. (Galli has left Vanderbilt for the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and filed his own lawsuit against McLaughlin for defamation in October 2018.)

McLaughlin rose to public prominence in May 2018, when she launched a petition asking the National Academy of Sciences remove members who had been sanctioned for sexual harassment. She followed up with a similar demand to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and later pressured the National Institutes of Health, the main federal funding agency for biomedical research, to stop giving grants to harassers and to exclude them from committees that help decide which scientists should get funded.

Through her acerbic Twitter account @McLNeuro, McLaughlin railed against “harassholes” and sparredwith scientific leaders including NAS President Marcia McNutt. In June 2018, she founded MeTooSTEM, initially as a website for women in science to tell their own stories about harassment.

She got results. In June 2018, the website RateMyProfessors.com dropped its “chili pepper” rating of professors’ “hotness” after a McLaughlin tweet criticizing the feature as “obnoxious and utterly irrelevant” was widely shared. In September, the AAAS announced a procedure to remove elected fellows involved in cases of sexual or gender harassment. And in February this year, NIH Director Francis Collins and other agency leaders cited McLaughlin’s activism in a statement that apologized for a failure to “address the climate and culture that has caused such harm” and promised: “We can do better. We must do better.”

Praise for McLaughlin culminated in November 2018 with the $250,000 MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award, which she shared with Tarana Burke, the civil rights activist who founded the #MeToo movement, and Sherry Marts, who has worked with scientific organizations and other nonprofits to make their events more inclusive.

But by that time, volunteers who had joined MeTooSTEM were starting to leave the organization.

First to depart, on Nov. 9, were the two scientists behind the @9replyguys Twitter account, launched to highlight the trolling and unhelpful comments that women often experience on social media. Scott Barolo, a cell biologist at the University of Michigan, said that he and the anonymous @shrewshrew, the account’s other author, were worried about a lack of transparency over the direction, structure, and finances of the organization.

“@shrewshrew and I became concerned that we were publicly associated with a fundraising organization that we didn’t understand and couldn’t get any information about,” Barolo told BuzzFeed News by email.

They were followed later that month by Bohr and Libarkin. “I left because I felt like attempts to organize structure and incorporate inclusive language were dismissed or ignored, that credit wasn't being properly allocated, and that differing opinions were often met with hostility both privately and publicly,” Bohr told BuzzFeed News.

“The things which people want (bylaws, structure, hierarchy, communication) are all critical,” McLaughlin replied to Bohr and Libarkin’s resignation email. “But those things do not have to happen now.”

Other leaders said that they pressed McLaughlin to give them designated roles. “When we tried to make long-term plans, BethAnn wasn’t really interested,” Erica Smith, a physics postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University Bloomington, who resigned in April, told BuzzFeed News. “We had a leadership team in name, but not really in practice.”

Smith, Arsala, and Sivakumaran left after a tense exchange of messages with McLaughlin after they asked questions about MeTooSTEM’s nonprofit status and finances, boosted by a GoFundMe launched in October 2018. The campaign has so far raised more than $78,000 toward a $200,000 goal. The money, according to the donation page, will be used to file for status as a tax-exempt nonprofit and to provide legal help for victims of harassment.

McLaughlin has also clashed on Twitter with activists who have disagreed with her. In August 2018, Anna Waymack, a humanities graduate student at Cornell University, responded to a McLaughlin tweet that told victims of campus sexual assault: “Title IX is broken. Go the the police.”

After Waymack argued that survivors should make their own choices, and pointed out that some have been further traumatized by the criminal justice system, McLaughlin cut her short with a one-word tweet: “Bye.”

“Being blown off like that was personally upsetting but also concerning because it replicates what the academy already does with that sort of dismissiveness,” Waymack told BuzzFeed News.

Last month, McLaughlin tweeted angrily at Hontas Farmer, a transgender woman of color who teaches physics at the City Colleges of Chicago. In a thread about student–faculty relationships, Farmer noted that it would be “unenforceable to forbid relationships.”

“Get off my time line with your pro-preying on students garbage,” McLaughlin responded. “Grown ups are talking. #STEMTrollAlert.”

That hashtag had previously been used to encourage allies to defend women scientists being trolled on Twitter. In response to its use against Farmer, one Twitter user tweeted an image of Jimmy Fallon in a wig. (The user later deleted the tweet, and apologized to Farmer.)

Farmer told BuzzFeed News that she has experienced worse attacks online, and she has continued to retweet McLaughlin after the incident. “I’ve dealt with people like BethAnn before. They’re very driven by what they believe and that sometimes makes them do wrong things,” she said.

McLaughlin’s strongly held beliefs extend to the current debate about how best to reduce sexual harassment in academia. Speaking at a meeting at the NIH on May 16, she condemned an effort launched in April called the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education, led by the National Academies and involving more than 40 colleges, universities, and research institutions.

“Every single one of them takes this Action Collaborative as a gold ribbon that they have done something right,” McLaughlin said. “They have all done something terribly, terribly wrong, and they have the wrong people at the table.”

That position has put her at odds with advocates including Clancy and Greider, who argue that reform should involve leading institutions. “I disagree with BethAnn about that,” Greider said. “We can have disagreements about approaches and still go forward.”

The volunteers who have left MeTooSTEM said that they are still committed to its wider goals of supporting victims of sexual harassment. “I believe that STEM would greatly benefit from having an organization, or more than one, with the goals of fighting sexual harassment and discrimination,” Barolo said.

“My hope is that we can learn from this experience to make a stronger and more inclusive community intent on battling harassment,” Bohr said.

[deniscollins]

F.D.A. Targets Vaping, Alarmed by Teenage Use

Federal law prohibits selling e-cigarettes to anyone under 18, but the F.D.A. reports that more than two million middle and high school students were regular users of e-cigarettes last year. If you were an executive with Juul, which controls 72% of the market and valued at $16 billion, and the FDA gave you 60 days to come up with a viable plan to keep the devices away from minors or face a ban against your product, what would be your plan for regulating your industry? Why? What are the ethics underlying your plan?

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday declared that teenage use of electronic cigarettes has reached “an epidemic proportion,” and it put makers of the most popular devices on notice that they have just 60 days to prove they can keep their devices away from minors.

The order was part of a sweeping government action that targeted both makers and sellers of e-cigarettes. If Juul Labs and four other major manufacturers fail to halt sales to minors, the agency said, it could remove their flavored products from the market. It also raised the possibility of civil or criminal charges if companies are allowing bulk sales through their websites.

The agency said it was sending warning letters to 1,100 retailers — including 7-Eleven stores, Walgreens, Circle K convenience shops and Shell gas stations — and issued another 131 fines, ranging from $279 to $11,182, for selling e-cigarettes to minors.

Federal law prohibits selling e-cigarettes to anyone under 18. In a briefing with reporters, the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, said that more than two million middle and high school students were regular users of e-cigarettes last year.

The government’s tactics underscore a dilemma in the public health community: In addressing one public health problem — cigarette smoking, which kills 480,000 people in the United States each year — e-cigarettes are creating another — hooking teenagers who have never smoked on nicotine.

E-cigarette users inhale far fewer toxic chemicals than do smokers of traditional cigarettes. But they can take in higher levels of nicotine, which is addictive.

“The developing adolescent brain is particularly vulnerable to addiction,” the F.D.A. said in its statement announcing the actions.

In particular, the agency has been watching the wildly popular Juul, which offers especially potent nicotine hits. Juul Labs launched the sleek device, which looks like a flash drive, in 2015. It comes with “pods” in eight flavors, among them mango, menthol and creme. In a short time, Juul has become the dominant seller of e-cigarettes and a fad among students. According to Nielsen data, Juul controls 72 percent of the market, and is valued by investors at $16 billion.

In an emailed statement, a Juul spokeswoman said: “Juul Labs will work proactively with F.D.A. in response to its request. We are committed to preventing underage use of our product, and we want to be part of the solution in keeping e-cigarettes out of the hands of young people.”

Dr. Gottlieb said the F.D.A. would look closely at whether Juul and the other manufacturers were allowing bulk purchases of products through their own websites — a practice where the buyer could then sell to minors.

If such “straw sales” are happening, it should be readily apparent to the manufacturers, he said. “If the companies don’t know, or if they don’t want to know, we’ll now be helping to identify it for them.”

The other four products facing the 60-day deadline are RJR Vapor Co.’s Vuse, Imperial Brands’ blu and devices made by Logic. They said they were working with the F.D.A. as well.

RJR, Imperial and Altria are all major tobacco companies. As smoking rates have declined, the industry sees e-cigarettes as an important piece of its survival, a fact that makes some in public health mistrustful.

“They say they’ve changed from the days of Joe Camel,” Dr. Gottlieb said. “But look at what’s happening right now, on our watch and on their watch. They must demonstrate that they’re truly committed to keeping these new products out of the hands of kids.”

Dr. Gottlieb has said many times he believes that e-cigarettes and similar products known as electronic nicotine delivery systems may be effective options for adults who want to stop smoking but still crave nicotine. But he said teenage vaping has become so concerning that regulators may have to curb the availability of the devices to keep them out of the hands of youths.

“Inevitably what we are going to have to contemplate are actions that may narrow the off-ramp for adults who see e-cigarettes as a viable alternative to combustible tobacco in order to close the on ramp for kids,” Dr. Gottlieb said. “It’s an unfortunate trade-off.”

Dr. Gottlieb’s aggressive approach against private industry is unusual for an official in the business-friendly Trump administration which has sought to roll back numerous environmental and health regulations. But critics said that his decision last summer to extend a deadline for e-cigarette manufacturers to demonstrate that their products comply with public health concerns helped perpetuate the current problem.

“It’s nice they want to do something but realistically, what are they going to accomplish this way when they could be so much more effective by following the regulatory plan that had been ready to put into place and that the commissioner postponed?” said Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, a nonprofit health policy group.

She also pointed to the popularity of vaping among young adults. Researchers generally believe that the adolescent brain continues to develop through age 26. “It’s a big epidemic among people ages 18 to 30, too,” she said.

And while the F.D.A.’s announcement struck many as tough, legal experts said the agency could face a protracted legal fight if it follows through on its threats to ban flavors and curtail marketing.

Marc J. Scheineson, a health care lawyer and a former associate F.D.A. commissioner, said that the agency was relying on public opinion and its own bully pulpit to push the targeted manufacturers into “voluntary compliance.”

Some antismoking groups, while encouraged by the F.D.A.’s actions, expressed caution: “Asking the tobacco industry to come up with solutions is the proverbial case of asking the fox to guard the hen house,” said Robin Koval, the president and chief executive of Truth Initiative. “After decades, there is no evidence that the tobacco industry is able to regulate itself.”

In April, the F.D.A. announced it was investigating Juul’s marketing practices to determine if the company deliberately targeted youths. The agency requested reams of documents from the company, including focus group reports and toxicology studies. Juul has submitted thousands of pages of records to the agency, but neither the F.D.A. nor Juul have made them public. Dr. Gottlieb said the agency’s tobacco division is still poring through them.

While the actions against the industry are alarming to the e-cigarette companies, they are also problematic for the F.D.A.

In July 2017, as part of a broad plan to reduce tobacco deaths in the United States, the F.D.A. extended the deadline for e-cigarette makers to comply with new tough federal guidelines, which, among other things, require companies to prove the e-cigarettes are beneficial to public health. In granting the five-year extension till 2022, Dr. Gottlieb said he would also force manufacturers to cut nicotine levels in traditional cigarettes, to render them nonaddictive. For that to work, he said, smokers needed more and better cigarette substitutes.

But in an interview, Dr. Gottlieb said the immense popularity of vaping among teens and the growing addiction among young people was not something he foresaw last summer, and the agency must rethink its policy — perhaps moving the deadline closer and requiring companies to gain F.D.A. approval to stay on the shelves.

Risa Robinson, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology, began studying e-cigarettes six years ago for the F.D.A. The early products did not have enough nicotine to cause concern, she said. But later products, like Juul, had more nicotine and, she said, can become even stronger depending on how deeply a user puffs.

“I’m highly concerned now,” Dr. Robinson said. Beyond nicotine, the addition of heat to the e-liquid flavors generates chemicals that have not yet been studied in depth, she added.

The attorney general of Massachusetts, Maura Healey, who recently began an investigation into the marketing and sale of e-cigarettes to minors, praised the F.D.A.’s action.

“We’ve worked too hard over the past 50 years to reduce smoking rates among young people to let these companies profit off of getting them hooked on nicotine,” Ms. Healey said. “This move by the F.D.A. is a good first step to shut down companies targeting minors.”

A Juul spokeswoman, Victoria Davis, said recently that the company had already stepped up its own patrol of retailers who advertise to youths or who don’t enforce age requirements, as well as social media posts. But it’s not always easy.

From Jan. 1 through July 28, Ms. Davis said, Juul asked Instagram to remove over 5,500 posts, and the social media company complied on 4,562. Facebook Marketplace was less agreeable. The company agreed to remove 45 of 144 posts. Amazon took down 13 of 33.

Dr. Gottlieb said he was not impressed by the measures Juul and the other companies have taken.

“It didn’t have the intended impact or I wouldn’t be viewing the statistics I’m now seeing,” he said.

[journeydb]

September 11 2019 Boulder

The Boulder County Social Venture Partners (SVP) Fall Social was held at our house tonight and was a big success.  I’m grateful to everyone who helped me prepare for it, especially our friends Beverly and Shelley, who helped with the gardening, and Shannon and my Spanish teacher, Camila, who brought food to add to the food I made. 

Shannon, who is the Chief Relationship Officer with SVP, along with Spencer, who is the Volunteer and Programming Officer, greeted guests at the door, including Elly, with the big grin, who used to be the Program Manager for Reading to End Racism, and with whom I worked for several years as a volunteer reader.

Most of the guests were SVP partners, but some were folks who were interested in learning more about SVP to decide whether they wanted to join.  Others were staff from non-profits which have either been investees of SVP or have an interest in becoming investees. 

Bruce and I are among the founding partners, having joined SVP in its infancy nineteen years ago, and we may be the only remaining active partners after all this time.  Many partners have been involved for a long time, and many in much more active roles than we have recently taken, given that we live in Spain half the year.  I do what I can when I can, like hosting this event, and we pay our dues every year, so that’s our contribution.

According to SVP’s website:

“At SVP Boulder County, we bring good business practices to good causes. We know what it takes for our nonprofit participants to be stronger, better and even more efficient in delivering on their missions.Our capacity-building programs utilize private sector professional and business proven practices for greater community impact by helping nonprofits implement the strategies, structures, processes and leadership to move to the next level.In addition to our work with local nonprofits, we believe engaged, educated and connected givers have greater impact.

That’s why we build relationships, provide professional development and engage our members (called Partners) in volunteer service.By bringing nonprofits and philanthropic change-makers together, we’re building a more vibrant and thriving Boulder County for all.” 

To learn more about SVP, visit the website at: https://www.socialventurepartners.org/boulder-county/

Bruce and I have been supporters of many non-profits in the Boulder County community for more than thirty years so I’m familiar with and have been affiliated with many of these great organizations over the years.

Camila’s empanadas were delicious and much appreciated and she looked so authentic in her outfit from Paraguay! It was good to see Jenny, the Director of Development with Intercambio Uniting Communities, which was one of SVP’s earliest investees.  I was on the SVP team which supported Intercambio and I was also an ESL tutor with Intercambio for over fifteen years.

We had hoped to host a garden party but I came home this afternoon after taking care of our grandnephew, Indie, to find that our lawn company had chosen today, of all days, to aerate the lawn without notifying me, and when it began to rain, it turned into a muddy mess.  Needless to say I had a minor meltdown and fired the lawn company, which I was on the verge of doing anyway, took a few long breaths and devised a new plan.

We pivoted (a favorite word these days in the business and non-profit communities) and turned it into a different kind of party, using most of the rooms in the main area of the house, as well as outside patios, and decks because about sixty people attended and we needed the space.  We moved the food into the pool room and the meeting and breakout rooms were the kitchen, family room, living room, and dining room, and it ended up working out quite well.

It turned out that Shelley, on my left, knew many people at the event, having been a dentist and a professor of dentistry in Boulder for decades, and it was fun to see her catching up with many folks she hadn’t seen for a while.

Lori Canova, our good friend who has been the CEO of the I Have a Dream Foundation of Boulder County for over twenty-two years and is poised to retire, has been an inspiration to many other executive directors and non-profit CEOs for a long time and she shared much of her expertise and experience during the break out sessions.

Jim, next to Bruce, has been friends with Bruce for many years and they play tennis together.  We supported his wife, Edie, in her bid to become a Colorado state representative in 2016, and she won! 

Ruth, in the red dress, and I have worked together with SVP since our sons were in middle school and now, of course, they are all young adults, making their way in the world, leaving us more time for our own work and play.

Our dear friend, Ruby, in the brown jacket, whom we have known since she and Hobie were in kindergarten together, is a very talented singer and songwriter.  She has created, with her friends Rebecca and Trace, the musical trio, LittleWolf, and they performed wonderful background music for the event and also did a couple of songs which people could enjoy while breaking into groups for the working sessions.  Ruby performed at another SVP social that we hosted several years ago that really WAS a lawn party, so she knew quite a few people who attended the event.  I met Rebecca and Trace for the first time tonight and I’m pretty sure we’ll hire them again for other events because they were wonderful.  To learn more about them visit:

https://www.rubybegay.com/little-wolf-trio

[go-redgirl]

The History of Presidents Using Military to Restore Order Within US Fred Lucas / @FredLucasWH / May 31, 2020 /

Minority-owned businesses are among the worst-hit targets of looters and rioters who rampaged in Minneapolis and then other cities after a black man died in police custody, according to news reports.

“Expressing grievances to our elected officials in the form of protest is a time-honored tradition,” Stacy Washington, co-chairwoman of the board of Project 21, a black conservative group, said in a public statement Monday.

“But what we are watching unfold across the country is a coordinated effort to destroy the rule of law and order in our communities and to gin up racial tension,” Washington said. “In video after video, we see masked white protesters dressed all in black destroying property in black neighborhoods. And it’s blacks who are trying to stop the Antifa protesters from defacing small businesses.”

During remarks Monday evening in the Rose Garden, President Donald Trump noted: “The biggest victims of the rioting are peace-loving citizens in our poorest communities, and as their president, I will fight to keep them safe.”  

The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>

Prosecutors charged Derek Chauvin, 44, with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd, 46, who was being arrested Memorial Day evening on suspicion of passing a counterfeit 20-dollar bill.

Cellphone video showed Chauvin, at the time a Minneapolis police officer, with a knee pressing into the neck of Floyd, prone and handcuffed on the pavement, for nearly nine minutes.

Floyd, who was black, could be heard begging Chauvin, who is white, to allow him to stand and saying “I can’t breathe” before he fell silent.

A medical examiner determined Monday that Floyd’s death was a homicide. Outrage over his death has united Americans across political divides, as well as police chiefs and police unions.

“I understand the anger, but I do not understand destroying your own neighborhood to protest an innocent man’s murder,” Marie Fischer, an information technology specialist and Maryland political consultant who is black, said of those looting and setting fires.

“I do not understand many who are bailing out these ‘protesters’ as a sign of support. How about you fund the minority business owners whose stores and businesses have been destroyed by rioters?” said Fischer, who also is a member of Project 21. “They should fund those who were and are building these communities instead of the ones tearing them down under the guise of social justice—which in this case is neither social nor just.”

Here are six examples of minority-owned businesses across the country that were vandalized, desecrated, or destroyed by rioters.

1. Minneapolis: Where Unrest Began

Luis Tamay, an immigrant, reportedly saved for more than 10 years to open his Ecuadorian restaurant, El Sabor Chuchi, in Minneapolis seven years ago.

After guarding his restaurant during the first couple of nights of unrest,  Tamay obeyed the city’s curfew Friday night and went home, believing the Minnesota National Guard would keep order.

When Tamay arrived at his restaurant Saturday morning, it was burned to the ground, the Minneapolis StarTribune reported.

“Seventeen years of work is gone,” he told the newspaper.

Nearby, a Spanish-language radio station, La Raza, also burned down. Station owner Maya Santamaria wrote on her GoFundMe page: “Small, minority business owners found themselves with the businesses that they worked their fingers to the bone building destroyed, looted, vandalized and burned down. Some had no insurance. Others have no resources.”

Jeff Lusuer, a Minneapolis barber who is black, had two shops. One was burned down; someone broke into the other and stole supplies.

Still, Lusuer expressed empathy for the looters after what had occurred in Floyd’s killing, saying he is fed up with police.

“Even though it hurt my businesses, I understand,” Lusuer told the StarTribune.

Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, and peaceful protests began there before others turned to violence, looting, and arson.

The StarTribune reported: “The riots and arson that followed protests of George Floyd’s death have devastated organizations and businesses that serve communities of color.”

The newspaper reported Monday that looters burned a nonprofit center for American Indian youth.

La Michoacana Purepecha ice cream shop lost power as a result of the riots, and employees tried to give popsicles away.

“People right now are going to want to stay away from Lake Street, and that is understandable,” business owner Ricardo Hernandez told the newspaper, referring to the location of his ice cream shop.

“It’s very hard to see your whole life savings go down like this,” Hernandez said. “We used up all our money to build something nice for … not just the Latino community, but everybody.”

2. Atlanta: ‘A Very Sad Day for Us’

Atlanta has a strong legacy in the civil rights movement as the one-time home of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who promoted peaceful resistance to injustice in the 1960s.  

Still, the city erupted in riots as badly as any other in the nation over the weekend. Some of the stores that were broken into and damaged were black-owned businesses, Fox 5 Atlanta reported.

The TV station highlighted Attom, the first black-owned business to operate in an outdoor mall called The Shops at Buckhead, known for high-end retail stores.

“I don’t know if people know we’re owned by a black man because we don’t put it on the front of the business,” Attom owner Zola Dias told the station. “But this is a very sad day for us.”

The store is boarded up, like most of the other shops in the outdoor mall, Fox 5 reported.

“I’m a black man, I’m young, but there is another way to go and protest,” Dias added.

A group of black women set up a fundraising effort to assist black-owned businesses that were destroyed or vandalized, the station  reported.  

3. Looting in Texas Capital

Looters targeted a black-owned salon over the weekend in Austin, Texas, NBC affiliate KXAN reported.

The owner of Private Stock Premium Boutique set up a GoFundMe page and as of Monday had raised more than $60,000 to help rebuild.

Another black-owned business, World Liquor & Tobacco, was looted twice Sunday, KXAN reported.

4. ‘Frustrating’ Vandalism in Denver

A Denver restaurant called Buffalo Bills Wings and Things, owned by Zac Gabani, was a target of vandalism.

“It is frustrating,” Gabani told CBS4 in Denver, adding that breaking things “is pretty counterintuitive.”

Gabani’s eatery reportedly was one of the few businesses that tried to remain open during both the riots and peaceful protests in Denver.

“We were the only place open to feed them,” Gabani said. “We like to support the community; we just wish they would help support us as well.”

5. Milwaukee: ‘Not a Way of Finding Justice’

Dozens of minority-owned businesses in Milwaukee were ransacked by looters, Fox6 Milwaukee reported.

Sam Rahami, owner of the store Trend Benderz, smashed over the weekend, told the TV station:  “Destroying somebody’s business, somebody’s livelihood, is not a way of finding justice for anyone.”

Another store owner, not identified by name in the news story, complained to the station that the destruction was counterproductive.

“What they’re doing is against their benefit. We are here to be part of this community,” the owner of a Cricket Wireless store that was looted and damaged said.

6. Philadelphia: ‘For My Own Community to Do It to My Business’

Black leaders in Philadelphia held a forum calling for peace and in part highlighting that many black businesses were being destroyed, ABC-6 reported.

The forum included black clergy in Philadelphia as well as Human Rights Coalition 215 and Philadelphia Community Stakeholders.

Among those speaking at the event this week were Elliott Broaster, owner of Smoke N Things, a shop that was burned down.

“When I got home alone, I shed a few tears. I saw my business burn down and it hurt me a lot. And especially for my own community to do it to my business, that’s what really [hurt],” Broaster told ABC-6.

The news station reported: “What took years for this Temple grad to build was destroyed in a matter of minutes.”

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

OPINION:  Well, no-one can blame President Trump for all these unfortunate out of control people that are destroying their own communities which does not  make any sense.

Where is ‘ole’ big Mouth Al Sharpton, Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and others that always complaining about everything but don’t have the gaul or ba**s to try to calm down these young Black Americans running through this country destroying ‘Black Own Businesses’ in their anger of a man that was murdered by a Police Officer in his community.

Certainly they are mis-guided and its certainly not a way to handle such and awful situation.

Our prayers going out to his family and friends! 

[abcnewspr]

ABC NEWS PRESENTS SPECIAL COVERAGE OF THE DISPARITIES IN RACE AND CLASS AMID THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

‘Pandemic – A Nation Divided’ Begins Tomorrow, May 20, Across All ABC News

ABC News announced today it will present special coverage for three days across ABC News to examine the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities amid the coronavirus pandemic. “Pandemic – A Nation Divided” kicks off on Wednesday, May 20 with new stories about how the virus has heightened racial/ethnic and socioeconomic divides coast-to-coast. The most recent statistics are troubling: in the nation’s capital, Latinos have been seven times more likely to be infected with coronavirus than white residents; black residents in Chicago are nearly three times more likely to die than white city residents and in Georgia 80% of COVID-19 hospitalizations are African Americans; in New York City African Americans are twice as likely to die of the virus than white residents and in New York State, of the 21 zip codes with the most new COVID-19 hospitalizations, 20 have greater than average black and/or Latino populations.

“As the COVID-19 global pandemic became a black, brown and working class epidemic in America, we quickly recognized there was an urgent need to tell more stories from these communities,” said Marie Nelson, SVP of Integrated Content Strategy, ABC News. “It is incredibly heartening to see every corner of ABC News think big and deeply for a cohesive examination of the many sobering stories that have made the racial and class divide, stemming from this pandemic, more apparent across this country.”

The latest ABC News reporting on COVID-19 is available here: https://abcnews.go.com/alerts/coronavirus.

MaryAlice Parks serves as Supervising Producer on “Pandemic – A Nation Divided.”

This special coverage between May 20-22 includes:

“Nightline”

Co-anchor Juju Chang will     give a glimpse into the pandemic’s epicenter in the U.S. – the Bronx. As she     walks neighborhood by neighborhood, Chang will connect the dots about     public housing, close quarter living, food deserts and underlying health     hazards. She talks to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a NYC bus driver who     has lost co-workers to the virus and now works double shifts because     thousands of his colleagues are out sick and a young city council member     raised in public housing. “Nightline” also meets a local Latino doctor     working to expand testing. 

Co-anchor Byron Pitts will     bring viewers to central Mississippi, where an immigrant, who was detained in     massive raids that targeted local meat processing plants in early August,     opens up about the hazardous conditions and outbreaks inside the area’s     poultry plants and detention centers. He says he and other detainees say they asked for PPE for weeks before receiving any. “Nightline” talks to Mayor Chokwe Antar     Lumumba and Dr. Charles Robertson, who works at one of the largest     hospitals in the state and has built 170 ventilators of his own design.

Correspondent Deborah     Roberts will shine a light on the suburbs of Chicago where a     family with mixed immigration status live in a multi-generational home.     One family member works at an Amazon warehouse, another at a meat-packing     plant, and their story displays the risk of going to work and the     complications and limitations of trying to social-distance at home.     “Nightline” also speaks with other Amazon center employees who have been     calling for safer working conditions, fearful that they could bring the     virus home.

“World News Tonight with David Muir”

Chief National     Correspondent Matt Gutman travels to Navajo Nation, the     reservation spanning the corners of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, that     has lost more of its citizens in the pandemic than many states with     experts predicting their peak is yet to come. “World News Tonight” speaks     to Native doctors who are battling the virus that has ravaged their people     and distributing food and medicine. The report examines how the Navajo are     fighting to keep traditions alive amidst some of the strictest lockdown     measures in the country and features one hard-hit multi-generational     family that lost relatives and even their home.

Correspondent Alex     Perez reports from the streets of Chicago, a city facing two     public health crises: COVID-19 and continued gun violence. Despite safer     at home measures, the city has experienced an uptick in crime. “World News     Tonight” follows an outreach worker in the Roseland area, who is part of     Chicago CRED, a frontline group working to break the cycle of violence in the     community and now informing the public about the seriousness of the     pandemic, and visits a testing center performing approximately 100 tests a     day in a mostly African American and Latino neighborhood. In     addition, an emergency room physician paints a real picture of racial     disparity in COVID-19 cases in city hospitals.

Correspondent Adrienne     Bankert visits the Bronx to report on how community groups like     East Side House Settlement are helping families find solutions to the challenges     they’re facing during the COVID-19 crisis including remote learning, food     shortages, and job insecurity. Bankert interviews Daniel Diaz, Executive     Director of East Side House Settlement, about how the organization has     given out free hotspots as well as more than 230 tablets to students in     its community so they can continue their learning. Diaz also shares the     various other ways the nonprofit has pivoted from workforce/education     development to filling even the most basic needs for residents including     distributing food weekly, making remote health and safety check-ins on     families and students and helping pay some residents’ bills. “World News     Tonight” also highlights some Bronx families willing to give an inside     look at how they’re tackling distance learning and their plans for the     summer and concerns as the fall 2020 school year quickly approaches.

“Good Morning America”

Senior National     Correspondent Paula Faris will report on the role that     The Boys and Girls Club has played in offering child care to essential     workers.

Multi-Platform Reporter Rachel     Scott will interview leaders at Howard University who are     offering free coronavirus tests in especially hard-hit communities in the     nation’s capital.

“The View”

Senate     Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will discuss the racial disparity in     COVID-19 cases plaguing communities across the country when he joins the     co-hosts on Thursday.

“Pandemic: What You Need to Know”

Mississippi     Gov. Tate Reeves will address the deep racial divide in cases and the     explosion of cases near detention centers, prisons and meat-packing     plants.

Jonathan     Nez, President of Navajo Nation, will discuss how the virus has threatened     their communities, and Birmingham, Alabama Mayor Randall Woodfin will     highlight his economic plan for bringing his city back.

Dr.     Monica Goldston, CEO of Prince George's County Schools, will add her thoughts     on how to make sure no low-income and minority children in Maryland get     left behind.

A     profile of Fawn Weaver, an inspiring African American woman owner of a     whiskey distillery, will feature how she pivoted her company to respond to     the crisis.

“ABC News Live Prime” with Linsey Davis

Anchor Linsey Davis will     explore how the virus has set back residents of disadvantaged     neighborhoods struggling to get out. She looks closely at one Brooklyn neighborhood     where a child mourns the loss of his mother who died in a hospital     struggling to stay open. This child who will now have to be raised by his     grandmother now faces a future uncertain because the school he attends     doesn’t know if it will reopen in the fall.

Correspondent Diane     Macedo will profile the struggles of an Illinois and Texas family     with mixed immigration status who are trying to wade through COVID-19     benefits that appear to have left many of them out.

Scott will examine the COVID-19     experience on one of the wealthiest and poorest neighborhoods in our     nation’s capital.

Roberts will spotlight black     leaders who have stepped up as the cavalry to save their own     neighborhoods.

ABC News and GMA Digital

ABCNews.com will pay tribute to     thought leaders and pioneers who have been lost to COVID-19, offer a look     at how the black church in America will rebuild after losing so many     members of clergy and provide a close examination of how minority-small     businesses are struggling to get federal economic relief.

A feature on Asian     American-owned small businesses will give an inside look into the unique     economic realities and hardships they’re facing.

Original produced video pieces     will feature experts offering reasons for long-standing health and economic     disparities in the country and next steps.

GoodMorningAmerica.com will     feature and profile graduating seniors, extraordinary young men and women     of color, who overcame incredible odds.

FiveThirtyEight

A new investigative project will launch that analyzes testing     site availability and breaks down how access to COVID-19 testing varies by     race, income and more.

“This Week with George Stephanopoulos”

The Powerhouse roundtable will     discuss voting and voting access, as well as new polling about the uneven     toll of the virus and anxieties about getting back to work.

ABC Audio

“Start     Here” podcast hosted by Brad     Mielke will explore the intersection of COVID-19 and race through     health and the pre-existing conditions that lead to greater sickness, the     lack of resources for vulnerable populations and the potential for     skepticism of medical care in general; the economic impact on families;     and how this crisis has shaped communities for the long term and could     exacerbate historic inequities and where things could land a generation     from now.

Special editions of the daily radio special and podcast “COVID-19: What You Need to Know,”     hosted by Correspondent Aaron     Katersky, will be released each day. In addition to answering     questions about the virus itself, the special editions will examine how     COVID-19 affects different communities unevenly.

This Friday ABC Audio will also release a special edition of the     radio newsmagazine and podcast “Perspective,”     hosted by ABC News Radio Anchor Cheri     Preston. The hour-long program will focus entirely on issues of race     and ethnicity, and how some groups have been more at risk during the     pandemic.

ABC NewsOne

The affiliate news service of ABC News will offer stations a     report from Multi-Platform Reporter Alex     Presha on the challenges minority-owned small businesses are facing in     the time of the pandemic and his interview with NAACP President Derrick     Johnson. NewsOne will also provide resources for ABC stations to support     their coverage of this issue. NewsOne provides news content and services     for more than 200 ABC affiliates and international news partners.

ABC Owned Television Stations 

On Wednesday, 6abc/WPVI-TV     Philadelphia will contribute to the Pandemic: A Nation Divided special     with anchor Nydia Han airing a report on the racial     discrimination faced by the Asian American community and the support to     extinguish racism, and reporter George Solis presenting a     digital reporter’s notebook from the perspective of a Hispanic American     reporter and the impact on his community. And, on     Thursday, WLS-TV Chicago will air an investigative report on     Cook County to examine the health complications more likely experienced by     African Americans and the increased likelihood of Latinx communities to     contract the disease.  

On Wednesday, ABC7/KABC-TV Los     Angeles will host a virtual town hall, “Race and Coronavirus: A SoCal Conversation,” featuring Veronica     Miracle and Los Angeles-based doctors and leaders to discuss how     the virus has affected the health and finances of racial and ethnic groups     and contributed to the rise of discrimination.  

On Thursday, ABC13/KTRK-TV     Houston will host its second virtual Town Hall to discuss the racial     impact of COVID-19, focusing on the Asian American Community. Hosted by     ABC13’s Eyewitness News reporter Miya Shay, the town hall     coincides with the observance of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI)     Heritage Month to discuss the disparate challenges of COVID-19 faced by     the 7% of Houstonians that identify as AAPI. KTRK-TV Houston’s first virtual town hall (5/7/20) featured Houston     Mayor Sylvester Turner and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. 

The virtual town halls are the     latest in a series of community offerings across the owned markets:     WABC-TV New York hosted an Instagram Live Town Hall ‘Coronavirus Pandemic Impact     on African Americans: Mortality, Messaging and Money’ (4/29/20);     KABC-TV Los Angeles exclusively streamed the Minority Health Institute Virtual Town Hall on the Impact     of COVID-19 in African American Communities (4/30/20); WPVI-TV     Philadelphia hosted a Town Hall about The Virus of Hate (5/14/20), and KGO-TV San     Francisco hosted three-part “Bay Area Conversation about Race & Coronavirus.”     All town halls are available for streaming on digital and the stations’     connected TV apps across Amazon FireTV, Android TV, Roku,     and tvOS.  

Additionally,     stations continue to report the disparate impacts from COVID-19 that     exist within communities with previous notable     coverage including WTVD-TV Raleigh-Durham's broadcast of a half     hour report called The Racial Divide on the financial, health, and     educational disparities resulting from the pandemic (5/7/20), WABC-TV New     York’s “Upclose with Bill Ritter” that recently     featured New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, “Tiempo” and “Here and Now” public affairs     programs, and WPVI-TV Raleigh-Durham's story on uncovering     the challenges in the Latinx community.

For more information, follow ABC News PR on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

-- ABC –

[rickhorrow]

10 To Watch : Mayor’s Edition 72219

RICK HORROW’S  TOP 10 SPORTS/BIZ/TECH/PHILANTHROPY ISSUES FOR THE WEEK OF JULY 22 : MAYOR’S EDITION

with Reed Weber

Shane Lowry pocketed a cool $1.935 million for winning The Open Championship. He also netted thousands of new fans, and helped to unify Ireland through his sport. The affable Lowry, who came oh-so-close to winning the 2016 U.S. Open before blowing a four-shot lead to winner Dustin Johnson, has career earnings of close to $19 million, and his win on Sunday will almost certainly also include a bonus from primary sponsors Immedis and Banc of Ireland. However, the 2019 Open could potentially make an even bigger cultural mark. "This is the beginning of the Open taking its place as the Open and moving around the world…In my lifetime it is possible to see it being played in the Netherlands or maybe Australia," two-time winner of the Claret Jug Padraig Harrington shared with the Irish Times regarding Royal Portrush serving as a catalyst to take the major around the globe. Lowry is certain to be the face of Irish golf in the yearlong run up to the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, especially as colleague Rory McIlroy struggles with his big-stage game.

Major League Baseball could allow for sponsorship patches on its teams’ uniforms within three years, the league confirmed to SportsBusiness Journal. The success of the NBA decision to allow jersey branding, which brings in an average $7 million a year per team, has reportedly created “considerable interest” for MLB teams to follow suit. Van Wagner Sports & Entertainment confirmed to SBJ that it had been approached by MLB franchises for evaluations of the potential new inventory. The Excel sports agency, which worked on multiple NBA patch deals, also revealed that it had received inquiries from “curious” teams regarding the marketplace. “We’re examining the patch, but clearly we have things to work through first,” MLB EVP Noah Garden told SBJ. “I’d say it’s inevitable down the road, but certainly not immediate. This is something that requires a fairly long runway.” The new patch sponsorships would require the approval of the MLBPA as part of the next collective bargaining agreement, but MLB’s current uniform deal with Nike reportedly includes provision for uniform patches. Van Wagner estimated that deals could be worth $6-$8 million, with select high-profile teams able to secure more.

A 22% minority stake in the Oklahoma City Thunder has been put up for sale, according to Bloomberg. The team share was previously owned by late oilman Aubrey McClendon, who passed away in a car crash in 2016. McClendon’s 22% ownership stake has reportedly been held by his estate since his death. The Thunder are worth $1.475 billion, according to Forbes, which would value a 22% stake in the team at around $324.5 million. However, Bloomberg’s report added that a value for McClendon’s stake could be discounted because it comes with voting rights but little else. The share does not come with representation on the board or any decision-making authority. The Thunder are controlled by Clay Bennett, whose Professional Basketball Club investment group purchased the Seattle Supersonics in 2006 before moving the franchise to Oklahoma City ahead of the 2008-2009 season. Likely also for sale soon: The multi-million dollar estate former Thunder star Russell Westbrook just completed in Oklahoma City suburb Nichols Hills – although there’s no yard sign up just yet. OKC residents continue to appear supportive of the star point guard even though he left the franchise, as the city is dotted with “Thank You Russell Westbrook” signs. 

LeBron James’ agent starts a sports division at major Hollywood firm. United Talent Agency, one of the leading representation firms in Hollywood, has joined with the agent for nearly two dozen NBA stars, Rich Paul, to create a sports division for the entertainment company. Paul, who most famously represents James under his Klutch Sports Group banner, was named the head of UTA Sports. The alliance calls for Klutch, with Paul as chief executive, to operate as United Talent’s sports division while retaining its own branding. Klutch’s deal with UTA was initiated by the investment adviser Paul Wachter, who helped broker Fenway Sports Group’s 2002 purchase of EPL club Liverpool, as well as James’ lifetime deal with Nike. UTA, which restricted itself to off-the-field sports business until now, said it needs Paul’s muscle as it moves into direct competition with the established sports divisions at its primary rivals in Hollywood: CAA and WME. For years, Paul’s achievements were often dismissed as a natural by-product of his close relationship with James, who was still a teenager when they became friends. Today he is a force to be reckoned with, not just in sports, but now in entertainment.

MLS’ Fire to pay $65.5 million to move matches. According to JohnWallStreet, MLS’ Chicago Fire Soccer Club, ranked last in home attendance (averaging 11,417 per game), will amend their SeatGeek Stadium lease to allow for future home games to be played “in other Chicagoland sports venues.” Majority owner Andrew Hauptman believes moving games from the Village of Bridgeview to downtown Chicago will give the club “the opportunity to play [in front of] more fans than ever.” The Fire reportedly plan to play home games at Soldier Field next season. Chicago Fire SC is paying $65.5 million to get out of their existing lease. The organization will pay the Village $10 million upfront and make an additional $5 million donation to upgrade sporting facilities around the stadium. The $50.5 million balance will be paid in $3.5 million annual increments through 2036. Hauptman is paying $30 million more to move the team's home matches than he paid to acquire the club in 2007. But with expansion franchises now selling for $200 million, even with the buyout – and the $70+ million he’s lost over the last seven years – he will likely come out ahead.

X Games Minneapolis 2019 is set for August 1-4 at U.S. Bank Stadium, and ESPN is putting the finishing touches on its sponsor roster. This year, Wendy’s is joining returning sponsors Hotels.com, Monster Energy, Nexcar First Aid Products, Pacifico, SoFi, The Real Cost, and Harley-Davidson. Geico will once again serve as the official music stage sponsor. The sponsorship packages include a media presence within the 18 hours of coverage scheduled on ESPN, ESPN2, ABC, and the ESPN App, as well as content creation and on-site activation at the event. The Tokyo Olympics are now one year out, and those Games will feature more extreme sports than ever before, including new entrants sport climbing and surfing joining skateboarding, BMX racing, and other X Games staples. With that in mind, it is highly likely that the upcoming X Games Minneapolis will see a bigger viewing audience as well as the expanded sponsor roster.

REI looks to bolster environmental and outdoor journalism. According to PR Newswire, REI Co-op will debut its own print magazine this fall, as well as a new partnership to channel matching funds directly to local, nonprofit newsrooms covering crucial issues facing the outdoors. The 81-year-old retailer will retire its full-price mail-order catalog in favor of their print magazine, Uncommon Path, published by Hearst Magazines in collaboration with an in-house team of journalists and editors at REI. Uncommon Path will be available at all 155 REI stores and in select newsstands nationwide starting this fall. The purpose of the switch to magazines is to inspire a life outdoors by supporting compelling storytelling – both REI’s own channels and by supporting independent nonprofit journalists in communities across the country. The retailer is also announcing a new partnership with NewsMatch, a nationwide campaign to strengthen local journalism to help bolster climate change coverage and make people more conscious of life outdoors.

Yahoo! Sports starts NFL short-form series “Play It Forward.” According to Deadline, “Play It Forward” has two 11-minute episodes each week on Mondays and Thursdays for eight weeks across the off-season and feature the likes of Antonio Brown, Adrian Peterson, and Desean Jackson. The show will give viewers a glimpse into the players’ rise to the top and the ways they give back to the people who have supported them along the way. “Play it Forward” is produced by Bright Bay Creative, the nascent production company run by former Ice Road Truckers producer Brandon Killion and his wife Jill, in association with Complex Networks. The philanthropy isn’t necessarily on a non-profit level, but it shows the difference players can make in individual’s lives off the field.

Texas Rangers slugger Joey Gallo discovers his off-field power to help dogs find homes. According to the MLBPA’s Infield Chatter on Twitter, Joey Gallo has overcome his childhood fear of dogs and teamed up with Operation Kindness to find homes for the original no-kill animal shelter in North Texas. By harnessing his image and posing next to animals from the shelter, Gallo posted photos of some of the shelter’s dogs on social media and saw an immediate response. Within an hour of posting photos with the adoptable dogs, Operation Kindness had found homes for the animals. Gallo has also owned his own Labrador Retriever named Ranger for four years and plans to continue his philanthropic efforts as he says the best part about being an athlete is the stage to “promote good in the world.”

The fifth annual Mixed Doubles Charity Classic is ready to fight opioid abuse. According to the York Dispatch, the Charity Classic at the Country Club of York has the goal of raising money to fight drug abuse that has plagued the USA and specifically New York. In previous years, the event has raised more than $100,000 for charity, including $65,000 raised last year for the York Opioid Collaborative. The fifth annual tournament is sponsored by UPMC Health Plan and will again benefit that same cause which “seeks to reduce opioid deaths in York County,” according to the non-profit’s website. The tournament features high quality tennis players including Jenni Goodling and has a total purse of $5,000 for the winners. A total of 16 teams are lined up to compete. New York saw 172 overdose deaths from opioids in 2018 and has seen a reduction to just 36 so far in 2019 thanks to the awareness around the crisis which has been aided by charities and media events such as the Mixed Doubles Charity Classic.

[athany-hasley]

Swot

SWOT analysis (alternatively SWOT matrix) is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and is a structured planning method that evaluates those four elements of an organization, project or business venture. A SWOT analysis can be carried out for a company, product, place, industry, or person. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieve that objective. Some authors credit SWOT to Albert Humphrey, who led a convention at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) in the 1960s and 1970s using data from Fortune 500 companies. However, Humphrey himself did not claim the creation of SWOT, and the origins remain obscure. The degree to which the internal environment of the firm matches with the external environment is expressed by the concept of strategic fit.

·         Strengths: characteristics of the business or project that give it an advantage over others

·         Weaknesses: characteristics of the business that place the business or project at a disadvantage relative to others

·         Opportunities: elements in the environment that the business or project could exploit to its advantage

·         Threats: elements in the environment that could cause trouble for the business or project

Identification of SWOTs is important because they can inform later steps in planning to achieve the objective. First, decision-makers should consider whether the objective is attainable, given the SWOTs. If the objective is not attainable, they must select a different objective and repeat the process.

Users of SWOT analysis must ask and answer questions that generate meaningful information for each category (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) to make the analysis useful and find their competitive advantage.

��Internal and external factors

So, it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

SWOT analysis aims to identify the key internal and external factors seen as important to achieving an objective. SWOT analysis groups key pieces of information into two main categories:

1.      Internal factors – the strengths and weaknesses internal to the organization

2.      External factors – the opportunities and threats presented by the environment external to the organization

Analysis may view the internal factors as strengths or as weaknesses depending upon their effect on the organization's objectives. What may represent strengths with respect to one objective may be weaknesses (distractions, competition) for another objective. The factors may include all of the 4Ps as well as personnel, finance, manufacturing capabilities, and so on.

The external factors may include macroeconomic matters, technological change, legislation, and sociocultural changes, as well as changes in the marketplace or in competitive position. The results are often presented in the form of a matrix.

SWOT analysis is just one method of categorization and has its own weaknesses. For example, it may tend to persuade its users to compile lists rather than to think about actual important factors in achieving objectives. It also presents the resulting lists uncritically and without clear prioritization so that, for example, weak opportunities may appear to balance strong threats.

It is prudent not to eliminate any candidate SWOT entry too quickly. The importance of individual SWOTs will be revealed by the value of the strategies they generate. A SWOT item that produces valuable strategies is important. A SWOT item that generates no strategies is not important.

   Use

The usefulness of SWOT analysis is not limited to profit-seeking organizations. SWOT analysis may be used in any decision-making situation when a desired end-state (objective) is defined. Examples include non-profit organizations, governmental units, and individuals. SWOT analysis may also be used in pre-crisis planning and preventive crisis management. SWOT analysis may also be used in creating a recommendation during a viability study/survey.

Strategy building

SWOT analysis can be used effectively to build organizational or personal strategy. Steps necessary to execute strategy-oriented analysis involve identification of internal and external factors (using popular 2x2 matrix), selection and evaluation of the most important factors, and identification of relations existing between internal and external features.

For instance, strong relations between strengths and opportunities can suggest good conditions in the company and allow using an aggressive strategy. On the other hand, strong interactions between weaknesses and threats could be analyzed as a potential warning and advice for using a defensive strategy.

Matching and converting

One way of utilizing SWOT is matching and converting. Matching is used to find competitive advantage by matching the strengths to opportunities. Another tactic is to convert weaknesses or threats into strengths or opportunities. An example of a conversion strategy is to find new markets. If the threats or weaknesses cannot be converted, a company should try to minimize or avoid them.

 Corporate planning

As part of the development of strategies and plans to enable the organization to achieve its objectives, that organization will use a systematic/rigorous process known as corporate planning. SWOT alongside PEST/PESTLE can be used as a basis for the analysis of business and environmental factors.

·         Set objectives – defining what the organization is going to do

·         Environmental scanning

o    Internal appraisals of the organization's SWOT, this needs to include an assessment of the present situation as well as a portfolio of products/services and an analysis of the product/service life cycle

·         Analysis of existing strategies, this should determine relevance from the results of an internal/external appraisal. This may include gap analysis of environmental factors

·         Strategic Issues defined – key factors in the development of a corporate plan that the organization must address

·         Develop new/revised strategies – revised analysis of strategic issues may mean the objectives need to change

·         Establish critical success factors – the achievement of objectives and strategy implementation

·         Preparation of operational, resource, projects plans for strategy implementation

·         Monitoring results – mapping against plans, taking corrective action, which may mean amending objectives/strategies

Marketing

In many competitor analyses, marketers build detailed profiles of each competitor in the market, focusing especially on their relative competitive strengths and weaknesses using SWOT analysis. Marketing managers will examine each competitor's cost structure, sources of profits, resources and competencies, competitive positioning and product differentiation, degree of vertical integration, historical responses to industry developments, and other factors.

Marketing management often finds it necessary to invest in research to collect the data required to perform accurate marketing analysis. Accordingly, management often conducts market research (alternately marketing research) to obtain this information. Marketers employ a variety of techniques to conduct market research, but some of the more common include:

·         Qualitative marketing research such as focus groups

·         Quantitative marketing research such as statistical surveys

·         Experimental techniques such as test markets

·         Observational techniques such as ethnographic (on-site) observation

·         Marketing managers may also design and oversee various environmental scanning and competitive intelligence processes to help identify trends and inform the company's marketing analysis.

Below is an example SWOT analysis of a market position of a small management consultancy with specialism in HRM.

 Strengths

Weaknesses

Opportunities

Threats

Reputation in marketplace

Shortage  of consultants at operating level rather than partner level

Well  established position with a well-defined market niche

Large  consultancies operating at a minor level

Expertise  at partner level in HRM consultancy

Unable to  deal with multidisciplinary assignments because of size or lack of ability

Identified  market for consultancy in areas other than HRM

Other  small consultancies looking to invade the marketplace

                          In community organization

The SWOT analysis has been utilized in community work as a tool to identify positive and negative factors within organizations, communities, and the broader society that promote or inhibit successful implementation of social services and social change efforts. It is used as a preliminary resource, assessing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in a community served by a nonprofit or community organization. This organizing tool is best used in collaboration with community workers and/or community members before developing goals and objectives for a program design or implementing an organizing strategy. The SWOT analysis is a part of the planning for social change process and will not provide a strategic plan if used by itself. After a SWOT analysis is completed, a social change organization can turn the SWOT list into a series of recommendations to consider before developing a strategic plan.

  Strengths and Weaknesses: These are the internal factors within an organization.

Human resources - staff,     volunteers, board members, target population

Physical resources - your     location, building, equipment

Financial - grants,     funding agencies, other sources of income

Activities and processes     - programs you run, systems you employ

Past experiences -     building blocks for learning and success, your reputation in the community

Opportunities and Threats: These are external factors stemming from community or societal forces.

Future trends in your     field or the culture

The economy - local,     national, or international

Funding sources -     foundations, donors, legislatures

Demographics - changes in     the age, race, gender, culture of those you serve or in your area

The physical environment     (Is your building in a growing part of town? Is the bus company cutting     routes?)

Legislation (Do new     federal requirements make your job harder...or easier?)

Local, national, or     international events

Although the SWOT analysis was originally designed as an organizational method for business and industries, it has been replicated in various community work as a tool for identifying external and internal support to combat internal and external opposition. The SWOT analysis is necessary to provide direction to the next stages of the change process. It has been utilized by community organizers and community members to further social justice in the context of Social Work practice.

  Application in community organization Elements to consider

Elements to consider in a SWOT analysis include understanding the community that an organization is working with. This can be done via public forums, listening campaigns, and informational interviews. Data collection will help inform the community members and workers when developing the SWOT analysis. A needs and assets assessment are tooling that can be used to identify the needs and existing resources of the community. When these assessments are done and data has been collected, an analysis of the community can be made that informs the SWOT analysis.

Steps for implementation

A SWOT analysis is best developed in a group setting such as a work or community meeting. A facilitator can conduct the meeting by first explaining what a SWOT analysis is as well as identifying the meaning of each term.

One way of facilitating the development of a SWOT analysis includes developing an example SWOT with the larger group then separating each group into smaller teams to present to the larger group after set amount of time. This allows for individuals, who may be silenced in a larger group setting, to contribute. Once the allotted time is up, the facilitator may record all the factors of each group onto a large document such as a poster board, and then the large group, as a collective, can go work through each of the threats and weaknesses to explore options that may be used to combat negative forces with the strengths and opportunities present within the organization and community. A SWOT meeting allows participants to creatively brainstorm, identify obstacles, and possibly strategize solutions/way forward to these limitations.

When to use SWOT analysis

The uses of a SWOT analysis by a community organization are as follows: to organize information, provide insight into barriers that may be present while engaging in social change processes, and identify strengths available that can be activated to counteract these barriers.

A SWOT analysis can be used to:

Explore new     solutions to problems

Identify     barriers that will limit goals/objectives

Decide on     direction that will be most effective

Reveal     possibilities and limitations for change

To revise     plans to best navigate systems, communities, and organizations

As a     brainstorming and recording device as a means of communication

To enhance     “credibility of interpretation” to be utilized in presentation to leaders     or key supporters.

  Benefits

The SWOT analysis in social work practice framework is beneficial because it helps organizations decide whether an objective is obtainable and therefore enables organizations to set achievable goals, objectives, and steps to further the social change or community development effort. It enables organizers to take visions and produce practical and efficient outcomes that effect long-lasting change, and it helps organizations gather meaningful information to maximize their potential. Completing a SWOT analysis is a useful process regarding the consideration of key organizational priorities, such as gender and cultural diversity and fundraising objectives.

 Limitations[edit]

Some findings from Menon et al. (1999) and Hill and Westbrook (1997) have suggested that SWOT may harm performance and that "no-one subsequently used the outputs within the later stages of the strategy".

Other critiques include the misuse of the SWOT analysis as a technique that can be quickly designed without critical thought leading to a misrepresentation of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats within an organization's internal and external surroundings.

Another limitation includes the development of a SWOT analysis simply to defend previously decided goals and objectives. This misuse leads to limitations on brainstorming possibilities and "real" identification of barriers. This misuse also places the organization’s interest above the well-being of the community. Further, a SWOT analysis should be developed as a collaborative with a variety of contributions made by participants including community members. The design of a SWOT analysis by one or two community workers is limiting to the realities of the forces, specifically external factors, and devalues the possible contributions of community members.

[richardmperry88]

3 Ways to Debug Tech’s Diversity Gap in 2020

Silicon Valley is struggling with a bit of an image problem. That image? Straight, white, male.

In 2018, women filled only 25% of all computing-related occupations — which is about the same percentage that we saw in the 1960s. For African-American and Hispanic populations, the representation in these fields is far below the national distribution.

And at the intersection of race and gender, the state of women in tech is even bleaker: 65% of women in computing occupations are white, 19% are Asian/Pacific Islander, only 7% are African American, and 7% are Latina.

In 2019, computer programmers are no longer high-school geeks, but meritocratic winners who wield considerable power in society. Engineers at Facebook — or more precisely, the algorithms they program — decide what news we see and what ads we get served.

(If you think that ads aren’t linked to economic opportunity, think again.)

Many formerly analog tasks — hailing a taxi, dimming the lights — now rely on code that only programmers can hope to understand fully. If women and minorities are left out of coding jobs now, that omission could have ramifications on the structure of our society for years to come.

It’s clear by now that social and environmental forces contribute to the differences in earning potential for women and minorities, and that these forces also hold the same people back from careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). What needs to be done? Let’s take a look at how to debug the diversity gap.

DreamHost Takes Inclusivity Seriously

We regularly report on diversity, accessibility, and representation in the tech workforce. Subscribe to our monthly newsletter so you never miss an article.

Sign Me Up

1. Give Every Student Access to Computer Science Classes

Early exposure to skills is crucial for securing a job in one of the best-paid and fastest-growing industries around. Yet only 35% of high schools nationwide are currently teaching computer science classes. Some schools in the U.S. are exposing young people to the basics of programming, which serves to improve their familiarity and comfort with these subjects. But to open the doors of the tech meritocracy to the underprivileged, coding needs to be taught in public schools, as early as possible — even in elementary school.

There are a lot of barriers to this.

Because the public education system in the U.S. depends heavily on local control, it’s impossible to design and implement sweeping changes to curricula in one fell swoop. National standards like Common Core and testing-focused federal programs like No Child Left Behind often leave little room for enrichment classes or electives.

In some cases, nonprofits and businesses are stepping in to fill the gap; for instance, this year Google pledged $25 million to support programs that help Black and Latino students have access to computer science education. But a charity initiative here or there isn’t likely to create broad-based change.

Related: What it’s Like to Be a Black Woman in Tech — Q&A with Kaya Thomas

It also won’t be enough for schools just to offer coding classes: the coding gap will only close with specific outreach to marginalized groups. There is substantial data to suggest that a learned lack of confidence can discourage minority groups from choosing certain subjects in school. And one 2016 study found that boys and girls begin school achieving in math at similar rates, with a gender gap appearing as early as third grade — this is significant, as previous research suggests that early achievement in math predicts interest and confidence in the subject in middle and high school.

Even more concerning, the study indicated that elementary school teachers perceive girls with nearly identical math scores (and classroom behavior) to be less proficient in math than boys.

This unconscious bias contributes to female students lacking confidence and performing worse in future math classes.  Unless teachers work to recruit girls and minorities to coding classes and overcome their own perceptions that girls aren’t as good at math, such biases will continue to keep their numbers in the tech sector low.

2. Expand the Scope of Nonprofits

We’ve certainly been entering the Era of the Nonprofit for the past few years, and nonprofits that aim to teach coding to women and people of color abound. (A few examples: #YesWeCode. Girls Who Code. Black Girls Code.)

Lack of access to training isn’t the only issues these groups face. In the case of underprivileged youth, for instance, a major challenge is the limited access some of these underrepresented students have to computers.

But the challenges extend beyond the physical, especially when it comes to connecting students with jobs that utilize their training. Limitations experienced in this realm — such as the absence of a professional network or an unfriendly corporate culture — can prevent any would-be software engineer or developer from thriving. Successful nonprofit coding programs will be those that succeed in the final stretch: job placement, hiring, and support during the transition.

Related: 30 Ways to Be an Ally for Women at Your Tech Company

3. Retain Diverse Talent in the Workplace

It’s not just a lack of candidates in the pipeline that’s keeping representation low; it’s also a lack of retention. Support needs to continue after coders become established in their careers. At 10 to 20 years into their tech careers,  56% of women leave the field, at a quit-rate double that of men.

Why are they leaving? One small study found that the most common reasons women leave tech jobs are a lack of opportunity for career growth, poor management, and the gender pay gap. Older research cites poor workplaces including few opportunities for development and training, little support for outside-of-work responsibilities, and undermining bosses.

Related: 6 Things Women in Tech are Tired of Hearing

A 2019 study published in Nature found that nearly half of women in science leave after having their first child, compared to 23% of men. Clearly, something needs to be done to better support parents in STEM fields, particularly working mothers.

There are a number of ways to support and retain female and minority coders, starting with simply calling out their accomplishments and good ideas. Nonprofits that encourage professional networking, like Women Who Code, can certainly help women find their tribe in the industry, but in the end, it will be up to tech companies themselves to enact policies to retain female talent.

The Reality of the Diversity Gap in the Tech World

The tech industry is booming, which, in theory, should mean more demand for programming labor. But with barriers to intercontinental communication quickly vanishing, more and more programming and web-design jobs based in the U.S. are being outsourced to lower-paid workers in other countries. In fact, computer programming jobs are projected to decrease by 7% over the next eight years in the U.S., even as the computer technology industry is expected to grow by 12%.

Whether computer programming serves to be an equalizer or perpetuator of inequality in the U.S. may depend on how fast minority groups can participate and get a “piece of the pie,” so to speak, before the available opportunities shrink.

Related: Fixing Tech’s Gender Gap — 10 Questions with Author Therese Huston

The bad news is that it’s looking like underrepresented groups will still have to try twice as hard for a shot at the same jobs, which is truly unfair.

The good news is that people are more aware than ever before that the diversity gap in tech is a real problem. Ultimately, the U.S. education system will adapt, nonprofits will grow, and more female and minority students will find — and stay in — careers in computing-related tasks.

After all, diverse teams are the only way companies will keep up with the changing demands of a world where computers are not going away.

The post 3 Ways to Debug Tech’s Diversity Gap in 2020 appeared first on Website Guides, Tips and Knowledge.

from Website Guides, Tips and Knowledge https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/ways-to-debug-tech-diversity-gap/

[riichardwilson]

July boycott: Marketing without Facebook Ads

Prominent brands and civil rights groups are leading the charge for a July 2020 boycott of Facebook Ads. They want to see changes implemented to the platform and are organizing under the hashtag #StopHateForProfit. 

Whatever your views on these issues, it’s important to make an informed decision about how your business will approach this boycott. We offer you inspiration for an alternative media plan if you do decide to divert funds from Facebook Ads. 

Here are some media planning ideas to help shift advertising dollars while continuing to drive momentum with marketing agency efforts in July. In general, keep in mind testing of new tactics and platforms can take time to build traction — allow for leeway on performance targets. Also, remember Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by Facebook and aren’t viable alternatives if you want to fully participate in the boycott. 

Example media plan: DTC beauty brand

The following hypothetical direct-to-consumer (DTC) beauty brand caters to a younger female demographic. 

Prospecting/awareness

The objective for this section of your media plan is to reach net-new customers.

Connect prospecting/awareness tactics to conversion tactics

Before you get started, make sure your prospecting tactics have a clear path toward supporting bottom-of-funnel conversions. Here are a few ways to do this: 

Ask an SEO Company professional to help optimize your PR and social content so that you retain lasting value from your PR efforts. They can also provide baseline brand search volume reporting. That way, you can anecdotally measure increased brand search volume — and thus brand awareness and conversion intent resulting from all these upper-funnel tactics. 

Coordinate with your paid media team to ensure you have the proper pixels on your site to reap the benefits of growing your site retargeting audience list and conversion campaigns. 

Sync with your email team to drive email sign-ups from site traffic generated by awareness tactics. This will fuel both your email marketing agency and custom audience lists to give conversion-focused paid media retargeting a boost.

PR and organic social

Share that you’re supporting the #StopHateForProfit movement and diverting some or all of your ad budget to supporting the cause. You may just wind up with the same (or better) reach than you otherwise would from Facebook Ads. 

Snapchat and TikTok

Because this example beauty brand is targeting Millennials and Gen Z, Snapchat and TikTok are good options. Both have self-serve platforms that are easy to use for those already familiar with Facebook Ads Manager. 

Snapchat users are primarily Millennials, and the experience is similar to Instagram Stories. Some advertisers have seen efficient CPMs on Snapchat Ads by utilizing trending hashtags. A newer option is Snapchat’s Dynamic Ads, which create personalized ads for either prospects or site visitors who have shown interest in specific products on your site. This is billed as a “direct response” tactic, but overall, we would consider Snapchat an upper-funnel tactic.

TikTok skews toward Gen Z and the platform’s videos tend to be edited and lip-synced, aiming to provide lighthearted entertainment. Core features of both apps focus on user-generated content. Brands are seeing success garnering reach and awareness through hashtag challenges on TikTok.

In-app programmatic

In the world of programmatic advertising, mobile in-app advertising has been gaining traction due to higher engagement rates and more precise targeting, particularly with a growing mobile gaming audience among women. For this beauty brand example, we evaluated MoPub with its reach of 1.4 billion devices. It is good for promoting influencer-generated videos, as well as leveraging native ads to drive more awareness or even prospects to the site.

YouTube In-Stream Ads

With 2 billion users, YouTube is an excellent channel to drive awareness. Advertising on YouTube can be done through the Google Ads platform. For this beauty brand, we recommend affinity targeting, custom intent, in-market targeting, video remarketing agency, and similar audiences (lookalike) targeting. When testing out YouTube, it is important to note that the definitions for video metrics such as video views and impressions are drastically different between YouTube and Facebook, so it may not be as easy to draw a direct comparison.  

Nurture

The objective for this section of your media plan is to build intent among those who are familiar with your brand.

Email & organic social

Share messaging to convey you’re supporting the #StopHateForProfit movement, pausing Facebook Ads and if applicable, donating to important causes or taking other concrete actions like improving diversity on your board or leadership team. 

Influencer marketing agency

If your brand has not worked with influencers, now may be the time. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, 4 out of 5 brands surveyed intend to dedicate budget to influencer marketing agency in 2020. For this DTC beauty brand example, we recommend working with beauty influencers ranging from micro-influencers to mid-tier influencers to diversify target audience segments and experiment with different content formats to increase intent. Be sure to review reporting to avoid influencer fraud.

Pinterest (organic)

With Pinterest’s inspirational and trend-driven content, 73% of Pinners say they have purchased something after seeing it on Pinterest. Big beauty brands like L’Oréal Paris have been leveraging Pinterest since 2015 and have a steady 10M+ monthly followers. We recommend this example beauty brand establish an organic presence on Pinterest for increasing brand recall and driving intent. 

Direct media buys

Direct buying with highly relevant websites is a good way to establish a strong brand image. Direct buys can guarantee premium ad placements and allow creativity in terms of content formats. For this beauty example, we’ll test a takeover and submit sponsored content on HarpersBazaar.com and Elle.com. Remember to negotiate a bundle deal with cheaper rates and added value by choosing multiple publishers owned by the same holding company. 

Conversion/retargeting 

The objective for this section of your media plan is to drive sales and re-engage customers.

Email

Having first laid a strong foundation and rapport sharing messaging about your brand’s commitment to action with causes like #BlackLivesMatter and #StopHateForProfit, it may next be appropriate to layer in a cadence of promotional messaging, especially if you have a sale or product launch to highlight. 

Pinterest Shoppable Ads

If you do advertise on Pinterest, try Shoppable Pins (only available on some product categories) and site Retargeting. From the upper-funnel recommendations, you should have built up a solid audience list to draw from. 

SEO Company

SEO Company is a long-game tactic and likely won’t offer immediate returns in July. But, the combination of tactics may create a lift in brand search volume, which will pay off over time. Make sure your site is fully SEO-optimized. Don’t miss out on valuable demand you’ve created with previous efforts. If you haven’t conducted an SEO Company audit in the past 6-12 months, now is a good time to do it, especially if you have unspent Facebook Ads budget to invest. 

Google Ads + RLSA/Remarketing agency

Having grown your audience list sizes from the upper-funnel tactics mentioned previously, give your search campaign a power boost. Pair Dynamic Search Ads with RLSA on top of your regular search campaigns. Run a Google Display Network campaign with remarketing agency lists. Make sure you’ve got strong coverage on brand terms with the additional brand search volume you’ve hopefully generated.

Google Shopping

Google recently started listing products for free in the Google Shopping tab, which opens up about 5% of available traffic without the cost-per-click. If you have not set up a Google Merchant Center account and a product feed for your online store, this is a great time to do so. If you’re looking for an alternative revenue stream to replace Facebook, you may want to start looking into paid Google Shopping ads. If you need to get up-and-running quickly, a Google Smart Shopping campaign is easy to set up.

Media planning for B2B advertisers

It may be easier for B2B brands to participate in the boycott, as they’re generally less dependent on Facebook Ads to begin with. 

For B2B, LinkedIn would be the obvious choice to shift dollars, especially with the recently released targeting functionality. Some of the above DTC tactics could be adapted to a B2B media plan. Other B2B platforms to evaluate would be podcast advertising, Twitter Ads, Quora Ads, sponsored content and, depending on who your audience is, you may want to test direct buys with more technical platforms like Stack Overflow.

If you want to contribute to the cause, but aren’t in a position to pause Facebook Ads, here are some other things you can do:

Improve the diversity pipeline in technology and digital media: It’s hard for teams with diverse perspectives to stray into discriminatory territory in the first place. One easy way to do this is to support organizations that foster a diverse talent pipeline like COOP Careers, which helps Black, LatinX and first-generation college graduates launch careers in digital marketing agency and analytics. Use this link to have your COOP Careers donation matched by my agency, Apiary Digital (up to $5K in total matching).

Hire a more diverse executive and leadership team: Take action on changes Black and minority professionals are asking for, outlined in this letter by 600 & Rising.

Donate to nonprofits that support critical #BlackLivesMatter initiatives. Consider reducing Facebook Ads spend by a small amount and donating the difference to a related cause.

With tactical adjustments during the month of July, your brand can help make a difference in supporting the #StopHateForProfit movement.   

Thank you to Apiary consultant, Lillian Barclay, for her contributions to this article. 

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/july-boycott-marketing-without-facebook-ads/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/622316276973486081

[douglassmiith]

July boycott: Marketing without Facebook Ads

Prominent brands and civil rights groups are leading the charge for a July 2020 boycott of Facebook Ads. They want to see changes implemented to the platform and are organizing under the hashtag #StopHateForProfit. 

Whatever your views on these issues, it’s important to make an informed decision about how your business will approach this boycott. We offer you inspiration for an alternative media plan if you do decide to divert funds from Facebook Ads. 

Here are some media planning ideas to help shift advertising dollars while continuing to drive momentum with marketing agency efforts in July. In general, keep in mind testing of new tactics and platforms can take time to build traction — allow for leeway on performance targets. Also, remember Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by Facebook and aren’t viable alternatives if you want to fully participate in the boycott. 

Example media plan: DTC beauty brand

The following hypothetical direct-to-consumer (DTC) beauty brand caters to a younger female demographic. 

Prospecting/awareness

The objective for this section of your media plan is to reach net-new customers.

Connect prospecting/awareness tactics to conversion tactics

Before you get started, make sure your prospecting tactics have a clear path toward supporting bottom-of-funnel conversions. Here are a few ways to do this: 

Ask an SEO Company professional to help optimize your PR and social content so that you retain lasting value from your PR efforts. They can also provide baseline brand search volume reporting. That way, you can anecdotally measure increased brand search volume — and thus brand awareness and conversion intent resulting from all these upper-funnel tactics. 

Coordinate with your paid media team to ensure you have the proper pixels on your site to reap the benefits of growing your site retargeting audience list and conversion campaigns. 

Sync with your email team to drive email sign-ups from site traffic generated by awareness tactics. This will fuel both your email marketing agency and custom audience lists to give conversion-focused paid media retargeting a boost.

PR and organic social

Share that you’re supporting the #StopHateForProfit movement and diverting some or all of your ad budget to supporting the cause. You may just wind up with the same (or better) reach than you otherwise would from Facebook Ads. 

Snapchat and TikTok

Because this example beauty brand is targeting Millennials and Gen Z, Snapchat and TikTok are good options. Both have self-serve platforms that are easy to use for those already familiar with Facebook Ads Manager. 

Snapchat users are primarily Millennials, and the experience is similar to Instagram Stories. Some advertisers have seen efficient CPMs on Snapchat Ads by utilizing trending hashtags. A newer option is Snapchat’s Dynamic Ads, which create personalized ads for either prospects or site visitors who have shown interest in specific products on your site. This is billed as a “direct response” tactic, but overall, we would consider Snapchat an upper-funnel tactic.

TikTok skews toward Gen Z and the platform’s videos tend to be edited and lip-synced, aiming to provide lighthearted entertainment. Core features of both apps focus on user-generated content. Brands are seeing success garnering reach and awareness through hashtag challenges on TikTok.

In-app programmatic

In the world of programmatic advertising, mobile in-app advertising has been gaining traction due to higher engagement rates and more precise targeting, particularly with a growing mobile gaming audience among women. For this beauty brand example, we evaluated MoPub with its reach of 1.4 billion devices. It is good for promoting influencer-generated videos, as well as leveraging native ads to drive more awareness or even prospects to the site.

YouTube In-Stream Ads

With 2 billion users, YouTube is an excellent channel to drive awareness. Advertising on YouTube can be done through the Google Ads platform. For this beauty brand, we recommend affinity targeting, custom intent, in-market targeting, video remarketing agency, and similar audiences (lookalike) targeting. When testing out YouTube, it is important to note that the definitions for video metrics such as video views and impressions are drastically different between YouTube and Facebook, so it may not be as easy to draw a direct comparison.  

Nurture

The objective for this section of your media plan is to build intent among those who are familiar with your brand.

Email & organic social

Share messaging to convey you’re supporting the #StopHateForProfit movement, pausing Facebook Ads and if applicable, donating to important causes or taking other concrete actions like improving diversity on your board or leadership team. 

Influencer marketing agency

If your brand has not worked with influencers, now may be the time. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, 4 out of 5 brands surveyed intend to dedicate budget to influencer marketing agency in 2020. For this DTC beauty brand example, we recommend working with beauty influencers ranging from micro-influencers to mid-tier influencers to diversify target audience segments and experiment with different content formats to increase intent. Be sure to review reporting to avoid influencer fraud.

Pinterest (organic)

With Pinterest’s inspirational and trend-driven content, 73% of Pinners say they have purchased something after seeing it on Pinterest. Big beauty brands like L’Oréal Paris have been leveraging Pinterest since 2015 and have a steady 10M+ monthly followers. We recommend this example beauty brand establish an organic presence on Pinterest for increasing brand recall and driving intent. 

Direct media buys

Direct buying with highly relevant websites is a good way to establish a strong brand image. Direct buys can guarantee premium ad placements and allow creativity in terms of content formats. For this beauty example, we’ll test a takeover and submit sponsored content on HarpersBazaar.com and Elle.com. Remember to negotiate a bundle deal with cheaper rates and added value by choosing multiple publishers owned by the same holding company. 

Conversion/retargeting 

The objective for this section of your media plan is to drive sales and re-engage customers.

Email

Having first laid a strong foundation and rapport sharing messaging about your brand’s commitment to action with causes like #BlackLivesMatter and #StopHateForProfit, it may next be appropriate to layer in a cadence of promotional messaging, especially if you have a sale or product launch to highlight. 

Pinterest Shoppable Ads

If you do advertise on Pinterest, try Shoppable Pins (only available on some product categories) and site Retargeting. From the upper-funnel recommendations, you should have built up a solid audience list to draw from. 

SEO Company

SEO Company is a long-game tactic and likely won’t offer immediate returns in July. But, the combination of tactics may create a lift in brand search volume, which will pay off over time. Make sure your site is fully SEO-optimized. Don’t miss out on valuable demand you’ve created with previous efforts. If you haven’t conducted an SEO Company audit in the past 6-12 months, now is a good time to do it, especially if you have unspent Facebook Ads budget to invest. 

Google Ads + RLSA/Remarketing agency

Having grown your audience list sizes from the upper-funnel tactics mentioned previously, give your search campaign a power boost. Pair Dynamic Search Ads with RLSA on top of your regular search campaigns. Run a Google Display Network campaign with remarketing agency lists. Make sure you’ve got strong coverage on brand terms with the additional brand search volume you’ve hopefully generated.

Google Shopping

Google recently started listing products for free in the Google Shopping tab, which opens up about 5% of available traffic without the cost-per-click. If you have not set up a Google Merchant Center account and a product feed for your online store, this is a great time to do so. If you’re looking for an alternative revenue stream to replace Facebook, you may want to start looking into paid Google Shopping ads. If you need to get up-and-running quickly, a Google Smart Shopping campaign is easy to set up.

Media planning for B2B advertisers

It may be easier for B2B brands to participate in the boycott, as they’re generally less dependent on Facebook Ads to begin with. 

For B2B, LinkedIn would be the obvious choice to shift dollars, especially with the recently released targeting functionality. Some of the above DTC tactics could be adapted to a B2B media plan. Other B2B platforms to evaluate would be podcast advertising, Twitter Ads, Quora Ads, sponsored content and, depending on who your audience is, you may want to test direct buys with more technical platforms like Stack Overflow. 

If you want to contribute to the cause, but aren’t in a position to pause Facebook Ads, here are some other things you can do:

Improve the diversity pipeline in technology and digital media: It’s hard for teams with diverse perspectives to stray into discriminatory territory in the first place. One easy way to do this is to support organizations that foster a diverse talent pipeline like COOP Careers, which helps Black, LatinX and first-generation college graduates launch careers in digital marketing agency and analytics. Use this link to have your COOP Careers donation matched by my agency, Apiary Digital (up to $5K in total matching).

Hire a more diverse executive and leadership team: Take action on changes Black and minority professionals are asking for, outlined in this letter by 600 & Rising.

Donate to nonprofits that support critical #BlackLivesMatter initiatives. Consider reducing Facebook Ads spend by a small amount and donating the difference to a related cause.

With tactical adjustments during the month of July, your brand can help make a difference in supporting the #StopHateForProfit movement.   

Thank you to Apiary consultant, Lillian Barclay, for her contributions to this article. 

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

Via http://www.scpie.org/july-boycott-marketing-without-facebook-ads/

source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/july-boycott-marketing-without-facebook-ads

[laurelkrugerr]

July boycott: Marketing without Facebook Ads

Prominent brands and civil rights groups are leading the charge for a July 2020 boycott of Facebook Ads. They want to see changes implemented to the platform and are organizing under the hashtag #StopHateForProfit. 

Whatever your views on these issues, it’s important to make an informed decision about how your business will approach this boycott. We offer you inspiration for an alternative media plan if you do decide to divert funds from Facebook Ads. 

Here are some media planning ideas to help shift advertising dollars while continuing to drive momentum with marketing agency efforts in July. In general, keep in mind testing of new tactics and platforms can take time to build traction — allow for leeway on performance targets. Also, remember Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by Facebook and aren’t viable alternatives if you want to fully participate in the boycott. 

Example media plan: DTC beauty brand

The following hypothetical direct-to-consumer (DTC) beauty brand caters to a younger female demographic. 

Prospecting/awareness

The objective for this section of your media plan is to reach net-new customers.

Connect prospecting/awareness tactics to conversion tactics

Before you get started, make sure your prospecting tactics have a clear path toward supporting bottom-of-funnel conversions. Here are a few ways to do this: 

Ask an SEO Company professional to help optimize your PR and social content so that you retain lasting value from your PR efforts. They can also provide baseline brand search volume reporting. That way, you can anecdotally measure increased brand search volume — and thus brand awareness and conversion intent resulting from all these upper-funnel tactics. 

Coordinate with your paid media team to ensure you have the proper pixels on your site to reap the benefits of growing your site retargeting audience list and conversion campaigns. 

Sync with your email team to drive email sign-ups from site traffic generated by awareness tactics. This will fuel both your email marketing agency and custom audience lists to give conversion-focused paid media retargeting a boost.

PR and organic social

Share that you’re supporting the #StopHateForProfit movement and diverting some or all of your ad budget to supporting the cause. You may just wind up with the same (or better) reach than you otherwise would from Facebook Ads. 

Snapchat and TikTok

Because this example beauty brand is targeting Millennials and Gen Z, Snapchat and TikTok are good options. Both have self-serve platforms that are easy to use for those already familiar with Facebook Ads Manager. 

Snapchat users are primarily Millennials, and the experience is similar to Instagram Stories. Some advertisers have seen efficient CPMs on Snapchat Ads by utilizing trending hashtags. A newer option is Snapchat’s Dynamic Ads, which create personalized ads for either prospects or site visitors who have shown interest in specific products on your site. This is billed as a “direct response” tactic, but overall, we would consider Snapchat an upper-funnel tactic.

TikTok skews toward Gen Z and the platform’s videos tend to be edited and lip-synced, aiming to provide lighthearted entertainment. Core features of both apps focus on user-generated content. Brands are seeing success garnering reach and awareness through hashtag challenges on TikTok.

In-app programmatic

In the world of programmatic advertising, mobile in-app advertising has been gaining traction due to higher engagement rates and more precise targeting, particularly with a growing mobile gaming audience among women. For this beauty brand example, we evaluated MoPub with its reach of 1.4 billion devices. It is good for promoting influencer-generated videos, as well as leveraging native ads to drive more awareness or even prospects to the site.

YouTube In-Stream Ads

With 2 billion users, YouTube is an excellent channel to drive awareness. Advertising on YouTube can be done through the Google Ads platform. For this beauty brand, we recommend affinity targeting, custom intent, in-market targeting, video remarketing agency, and similar audiences (lookalike) targeting. When testing out YouTube, it is important to note that the definitions for video metrics such as video views and impressions are drastically different between YouTube and Facebook, so it may not be as easy to draw a direct comparison.  

Nurture

The objective for this section of your media plan is to build intent among those who are familiar with your brand.

Email & organic social

Share messaging to convey you’re supporting the #StopHateForProfit movement, pausing Facebook Ads and if applicable, donating to important causes or taking other concrete actions like improving diversity on your board or leadership team. 

Influencer marketing agency

If your brand has not worked with influencers, now may be the time. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, 4 out of 5 brands surveyed intend to dedicate budget to influencer marketing agency in 2020. For this DTC beauty brand example, we recommend working with beauty influencers ranging from micro-influencers to mid-tier influencers to diversify target audience segments and experiment with different content formats to increase intent. Be sure to review reporting to avoid influencer fraud.

Pinterest (organic)

With Pinterest’s inspirational and trend-driven content, 73% of Pinners say they have purchased something after seeing it on Pinterest. Big beauty brands like L’Oréal Paris have been leveraging Pinterest since 2015 and have a steady 10M+ monthly followers. We recommend this example beauty brand establish an organic presence on Pinterest for increasing brand recall and driving intent. 

Direct media buys

Direct buying with highly relevant websites is a good way to establish a strong brand image. Direct buys can guarantee premium ad placements and allow creativity in terms of content formats. For this beauty example, we’ll test a takeover and submit sponsored content on HarpersBazaar.com and Elle.com. Remember to negotiate a bundle deal with cheaper rates and added value by choosing multiple publishers owned by the same holding company. 

Conversion/retargeting 

The objective for this section of your media plan is to drive sales and re-engage customers.

Email

Having first laid a strong foundation and rapport sharing messaging about your brand’s commitment to action with causes like #BlackLivesMatter and #StopHateForProfit, it may next be appropriate to layer in a cadence of promotional messaging, especially if you have a sale or product launch to highlight. 

Pinterest Shoppable Ads

If you do advertise on Pinterest, try Shoppable Pins (only available on some product categories) and site Retargeting. From the upper-funnel recommendations, you should have built up a solid audience list to draw from. 

SEO Company

SEO Company is a long-game tactic and likely won’t offer immediate returns in July. But, the combination of tactics may create a lift in brand search volume, which will pay off over time. Make sure your site is fully SEO-optimized. Don’t miss out on valuable demand you’ve created with previous efforts. If you haven’t conducted an SEO Company audit in the past 6-12 months, now is a good time to do it, especially if you have unspent Facebook Ads budget to invest. 

Google Ads + RLSA/Remarketing agency

Having grown your audience list sizes from the upper-funnel tactics mentioned previously, give your search campaign a power boost. Pair Dynamic Search Ads with RLSA on top of your regular search campaigns. Run a Google Display Network campaign with remarketing agency lists. Make sure you’ve got strong coverage on brand terms with the additional brand search volume you’ve hopefully generated.

Google Shopping

Google recently started listing products for free in the Google Shopping tab, which opens up about 5% of available traffic without the cost-per-click. If you have not set up a Google Merchant Center account and a product feed for your online store, this is a great time to do so. If you’re looking for an alternative revenue stream to replace Facebook, you may want to start looking into paid Google Shopping ads. If you need to get up-and-running quickly, a Google Smart Shopping campaign is easy to set up.

Media planning for B2B advertisers

It may be easier for B2B brands to participate in the boycott, as they’re generally less dependent on Facebook Ads to begin with. 

For B2B, LinkedIn would be the obvious choice to shift dollars, especially with the recently released targeting functionality. Some of the above DTC tactics could be adapted to a B2B media plan. Other B2B platforms to evaluate would be podcast advertising, Twitter Ads, Quora Ads, sponsored content and, depending on who your audience is, you may want to test direct buys with more technical platforms like Stack Overflow. 

If you want to contribute to the cause, but aren’t in a position to pause Facebook Ads, here are some other things you can do:

Improve the diversity pipeline in technology and digital media: It’s hard for teams with diverse perspectives to stray into discriminatory territory in the first place. One easy way to do this is to support organizations that foster a diverse talent pipeline like COOP Careers, which helps Black, LatinX and first-generation college graduates launch careers in digital marketing agency and analytics. Use this link to have your COOP Careers donation matched by my agency, Apiary Digital (up to $5K in total matching).

Hire a more diverse executive and leadership team: Take action on changes Black and minority professionals are asking for, outlined in this letter by 600 & Rising.

Donate to nonprofits that support critical #BlackLivesMatter initiatives. Consider reducing Facebook Ads spend by a small amount and donating the difference to a related cause.

With tactical adjustments during the month of July, your brand can help make a difference in supporting the #StopHateForProfit movement.   

Thank you to Apiary consultant, Lillian Barclay, for her contributions to this article. 

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/july-boycott-marketing-without-facebook-ads/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/06/july-boycott-marketing-without-facebook.html

[scpie]

July boycott: Marketing without Facebook Ads

Prominent brands and civil rights groups are leading the charge for a July 2020 boycott of Facebook Ads. They want to see changes implemented to the platform and are organizing under the hashtag #StopHateForProfit. 

Whatever your views on these issues, it’s important to make an informed decision about how your business will approach this boycott. We offer you inspiration for an alternative media plan if you do decide to divert funds from Facebook Ads. 

Here are some media planning ideas to help shift advertising dollars while continuing to drive momentum with marketing agency efforts in July. In general, keep in mind testing of new tactics and platforms can take time to build traction — allow for leeway on performance targets. Also, remember Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by Facebook and aren’t viable alternatives if you want to fully participate in the boycott. 

Example media plan: DTC beauty brand

The following hypothetical direct-to-consumer (DTC) beauty brand caters to a younger female demographic. 

Prospecting/awareness

The objective for this section of your media plan is to reach net-new customers.

Connect prospecting/awareness tactics to conversion tactics

Before you get started, make sure your prospecting tactics have a clear path toward supporting bottom-of-funnel conversions. Here are a few ways to do this: 

Ask an SEO Company professional to help optimize your PR and social content so that you retain lasting value from your PR efforts. They can also provide baseline brand search volume reporting. That way, you can anecdotally measure increased brand search volume — and thus brand awareness and conversion intent resulting from all these upper-funnel tactics. 

Coordinate with your paid media team to ensure you have the proper pixels on your site to reap the benefits of growing your site retargeting audience list and conversion campaigns. 

Sync with your email team to drive email sign-ups from site traffic generated by awareness tactics. This will fuel both your email marketing agency and custom audience lists to give conversion-focused paid media retargeting a boost.

PR and organic social

Share that you’re supporting the #StopHateForProfit movement and diverting some or all of your ad budget to supporting the cause. You may just wind up with the same (or better) reach than you otherwise would from Facebook Ads. 

Snapchat and TikTok

Because this example beauty brand is targeting Millennials and Gen Z, Snapchat and TikTok are good options. Both have self-serve platforms that are easy to use for those already familiar with Facebook Ads Manager. 

Snapchat users are primarily Millennials, and the experience is similar to Instagram Stories. Some advertisers have seen efficient CPMs on Snapchat Ads by utilizing trending hashtags. A newer option is Snapchat’s Dynamic Ads, which create personalized ads for either prospects or site visitors who have shown interest in specific products on your site. This is billed as a “direct response” tactic, but overall, we would consider Snapchat an upper-funnel tactic.

TikTok skews toward Gen Z and the platform’s videos tend to be edited and lip-synced, aiming to provide lighthearted entertainment. Core features of both apps focus on user-generated content. Brands are seeing success garnering reach and awareness through hashtag challenges on TikTok.

In-app programmatic

In the world of programmatic advertising, mobile in-app advertising has been gaining traction due to higher engagement rates and more precise targeting, particularly with a growing mobile gaming audience among women. For this beauty brand example, we evaluated MoPub with its reach of 1.4 billion devices. It is good for promoting influencer-generated videos, as well as leveraging native ads to drive more awareness or even prospects to the site.

YouTube In-Stream Ads

With 2 billion users, YouTube is an excellent channel to drive awareness. Advertising on YouTube can be done through the Google Ads platform. For this beauty brand, we recommend affinity targeting, custom intent, in-market targeting, video remarketing agency, and similar audiences (lookalike) targeting. When testing out YouTube, it is important to note that the definitions for video metrics such as video views and impressions are drastically different between YouTube and Facebook, so it may not be as easy to draw a direct comparison.  

Nurture

The objective for this section of your media plan is to build intent among those who are familiar with your brand.

Email & organic social

Share messaging to convey you’re supporting the #StopHateForProfit movement, pausing Facebook Ads and if applicable, donating to important causes or taking other concrete actions like improving diversity on your board or leadership team. 

Influencer marketing agency

If your brand has not worked with influencers, now may be the time. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, 4 out of 5 brands surveyed intend to dedicate budget to influencer marketing agency in 2020. For this DTC beauty brand example, we recommend working with beauty influencers ranging from micro-influencers to mid-tier influencers to diversify target audience segments and experiment with different content formats to increase intent. Be sure to review reporting to avoid influencer fraud.

Pinterest (organic)

With Pinterest’s inspirational and trend-driven content, 73% of Pinners say they have purchased something after seeing it on Pinterest. Big beauty brands like L’Oréal Paris have been leveraging Pinterest since 2015 and have a steady 10M+ monthly followers. We recommend this example beauty brand establish an organic presence on Pinterest for increasing brand recall and driving intent. 

Direct media buys

Direct buying with highly relevant websites is a good way to establish a strong brand image. Direct buys can guarantee premium ad placements and allow creativity in terms of content formats. For this beauty example, we’ll test a takeover and submit sponsored content on HarpersBazaar.com and Elle.com. Remember to negotiate a bundle deal with cheaper rates and added value by choosing multiple publishers owned by the same holding company. 

Conversion/retargeting 

The objective for this section of your media plan is to drive sales and re-engage customers.

Email

Having first laid a strong foundation and rapport sharing messaging about your brand’s commitment to action with causes like #BlackLivesMatter and #StopHateForProfit, it may next be appropriate to layer in a cadence of promotional messaging, especially if you have a sale or product launch to highlight. 

Pinterest Shoppable Ads

If you do advertise on Pinterest, try Shoppable Pins (only available on some product categories) and site Retargeting. From the upper-funnel recommendations, you should have built up a solid audience list to draw from. 

SEO Company

SEO Company is a long-game tactic and likely won’t offer immediate returns in July. But, the combination of tactics may create a lift in brand search volume, which will pay off over time. Make sure your site is fully SEO-optimized. Don’t miss out on valuable demand you’ve created with previous efforts. If you haven’t conducted an SEO Company audit in the past 6-12 months, now is a good time to do it, especially if you have unspent Facebook Ads budget to invest. 

Google Ads + RLSA/Remarketing agency

Having grown your audience list sizes from the upper-funnel tactics mentioned previously, give your search campaign a power boost. Pair Dynamic Search Ads with RLSA on top of your regular search campaigns. Run a Google Display Network campaign with remarketing agency lists. Make sure you’ve got strong coverage on brand terms with the additional brand search volume you’ve hopefully generated.

Google Shopping

Google recently started listing products for free in the Google Shopping tab, which opens up about 5% of available traffic without the cost-per-click. If you have not set up a Google Merchant Center account and a product feed for your online store, this is a great time to do so. If you’re looking for an alternative revenue stream to replace Facebook, you may want to start looking into paid Google Shopping ads. If you need to get up-and-running quickly, a Google Smart Shopping campaign is easy to set up.

Media planning for B2B advertisers

It may be easier for B2B brands to participate in the boycott, as they’re generally less dependent on Facebook Ads to begin with. 

For B2B, LinkedIn would be the obvious choice to shift dollars, especially with the recently released targeting functionality. Some of the above DTC tactics could be adapted to a B2B media plan. Other B2B platforms to evaluate would be podcast advertising, Twitter Ads, Quora Ads, sponsored content and, depending on who your audience is, you may want to test direct buys with more technical platforms like Stack Overflow. 

If you want to contribute to the cause, but aren’t in a position to pause Facebook Ads, here are some other things you can do:

Improve the diversity pipeline in technology and digital media: It’s hard for teams with diverse perspectives to stray into discriminatory territory in the first place. One easy way to do this is to support organizations that foster a diverse talent pipeline like COOP Careers, which helps Black, LatinX and first-generation college graduates launch careers in digital marketing agency and analytics. Use this link to have your COOP Careers donation matched by my agency, Apiary Digital (up to $5K in total matching).

Hire a more diverse executive and leadership team: Take action on changes Black and minority professionals are asking for, outlined in this letter by 600 & Rising.

Donate to nonprofits that support critical #BlackLivesMatter initiatives. Consider reducing Facebook Ads spend by a small amount and donating the difference to a related cause.

With tactical adjustments during the month of July, your brand can help make a difference in supporting the #StopHateForProfit movement.   

Thank you to Apiary consultant, Lillian Barclay, for her contributions to this article. 

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/july-boycott-marketing-without-facebook-ads/

[andrewdburton]

Scared of money? (Why & how to overcome your fear today)

The more I see people talk about money, the more I see how SCARED we are of it.

How we let others poison our views of money.

And how easily we use negative words to describe it.

Here’s an email I got from someone who read my book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. What do you notice?

“Frick it, I guess I’ll write the email…

Money stresses me out. My parents didn’t teach me anything about it and I’m very dependent right now. I did a year of nonprofit and made about 10k after taxes and it was miserable, so I figured if I can pull that off for one year then I can make it work. And I did! But I don’t know if I’ll hit it this year (it’s a bit depressing and a big source of anxiety). I think time is the name of the game though, the career is moving forward, hopefully, game sales will kick in passive income.

For the “rich life” I’m a simple person. I want enough money to be able to travel. I want to own a dog. I want a kitchen with an island. I want to have a nice desktop and a nice coffee table. My partner doesn’t want to own a house but I kind of do. Since I don’t have a full-time job outside of my freelancing which is currently in a drought period, I don’t have really ANY money, averaging about $250 a week.”

My response:

“Good stuff. Great to meet you

Now I want you to look at your email and count the number of times you use negative words to describe your life/money. How many do you count?”

His response (notice the skepticism):

“Ha, I can’t tell if this was an automated message or not but you got me there!

Depending on your definition, about 6-10.”

6-10 IN A SHORT-ASS EMAIL. (Well, compared to the kinds I write…like the one you’re reading. LOL.) Finally, my response:

It’s not automated.

Good!

Now, can you rewrite that entire email to be POSITIVE instead of negative? Send it over my way.

This guy didn’t even notice his reflexive negativity with money. It’s become like a dull toothache, something he gets used to. And since negativity is his worldview — the “lens” through which he views everything — I guarantee it’s an invisible “drag” on his entire life.

I asked him to rewrite his email to be POSITIVE instead of negative because sometimes, it takes someone pointing out your pattern to shake you out of it.

When I talk to people about money, here are the most common words they use to describe it:

“Anxious”

“Stressed”

“Is it too late”

(What words come to mind for you?)

But it’s even more revealing when you listen to the ways they talk about money.

What they say: “What’s my Rich Life? Well, I just want to go on vacation with my kids a couple times a year, nothing fancy…” What they really mean: Notice those last two words — “nothing fancy.” When people talk about their Rich Lives, they almost always minimize their own dreams. When you’ve spent your entire life worrying about what can go wrong with money, it’s almost impossible to dream.

What they say: “How do I KNOW your programs will work?” OR “Will this book work for me if I live in Bolivia and I have a lazy left eye and I only eat mussels on Mondays?”

What they really mean: “I have a finite amount of money. If I spend it here, I need to know it will absolutely work, otherwise, I will have wasted my money…and there’s no way for me to ever earn more”

Are you about to say what I think you’re about to say?

What they say: “Even if I made $250,000/year, I wouldn’t eat out at a nice restaurant like that. What a waste!”

What they really mean: “I have never eaten at a place like that and I don’t want to be the kind of person who “has” to go there to enjoy food. I’m simple.” (One level deeper: “I’m nervous that if I ate there, I might actually like it. I don’t trust myself to avoid going there every single week and spending all of my money”)

What they say: “I shouldn’t get a credit card.”

What they actually mean: “I don’t trust myself to control my spending, therefore I need to restrict myself”

What they say: “I went to [ANY FOREIGN COUNTRY] and they tried to rip me off because I was an American”

What they really mean: “Well, yeah, I could have afforded an extra $5 for those postcards…but I HATE BEING RIPPED OFF. If someone else is winning and I am losing, I HATE IT”

So many of us make day-to-day money decisions, never understanding the “invisible scripts” that actually guide these decisions. And in America, money is driven by FEAR.

FEAR that we’ll never have enough.

FEAR that we can’t make more of it.

And FEAR that someone will judge us for our spending — or even what we want to spend on.

I hate this. That’s why I show you how to identify your Money Dials, the things you LOVE spending on, then I show you how to spend MORE on it.

Talking to a small group about money psychology. On book tour, I hosted private events in NYC event at Thompson Square Studios (NYC) and our Hills Penthouse (West Hollywood). As a reader of IWT, you can get your first month free at either of these locations. Please reach out directly to chelsea@thompsonhousegroup.com

I also show you how to get psychologically comfortable with the idea of changing your identity. People say “Money changes people,” in disgust, as if it’s a bad thing. Money should change you! It should let you dream bigger, it should let you live an easier or more adventurous life, and it should let you bring others with you (learn about the psychology of the wealthy).

But you can’t do that if you’re stuck thinking about money as a source of anxiety and fear.

An interviewer recently asked me what I would change from my 20s. I said, “I would have more FUN. I was too rigid. But the times where I had the most fun and I was the most successful was I just loosened up and tried a bunch of new things”

With money, try these different approaches.

Know that you can trust yourself. Know that you can eat at a really nice restaurant once for the experience — and truly enjoy it — but trust that I’m not going to trip and fall and end up going there every single week. You can also use credit cards without overspending (follow the systems in my book). You can pay off your debt and stay out of debt. You can become Rich and do good. Trust yourself.

Know that you can create more money. You can negotiate your salary — or find an entirely new job. You can start a business, even if you don’t have an idea. You can build your network to sidestep people with 10 years’ more experience than you — and get perks you’ve never dreamed of. All of those things can dramatically increase your income. Above all, your money is not a fixed pie that you have to exhaustively guard and protect. You can also expand the size of your pie.

Stop being afraid of waste. In puritanical America, one of the biggest no-nos is WASTE. Oh no! Ramit, if I start spending more on the things I love, I might “waste” some of my money!

How do I “KNOW” that your book will solve my exact, highly specific problem that I worry about every fucking day of my life? If it doesn’t, I’ve wasted $10!!!! Scammer!!!

Oh no! Ramit, what if I hire someone and they don’t handle my SEO, my WordPress uploads, design all my graphics, triple my conversion rates, write my entire email funnel, and create a new webinar system? I might have WaSTed the $13/hour I tried to pay them!!

Oh no, there’s so much government waste! We should ONLY focus on cutting government waste. Especially that one thing I really hate. What? It only represents 0.03% of total spend? No, that can’t be right. Anyway, we need to handle WaSTe. Also, don’t talk about raising my historically low taxes, you socialist.

If you spend your entire life worrying about waste, you miss a simple fact of life: In any system of sufficient complexity, there will always be waste. Yes, you should take measures to control it, but you should also accept that there will be a certain amount of waste — and move on!

I know that I’m going to buy courses and attend conferences that won’t be perfect for me. I know I’m going to eat at a restaurant that’s unmemorable. I know I’m going to make bad hires.

SO WHAT?

I’d rather try new experiences and learn with each one…than to sit back and let the bogeyman of “waste” scare me from doing anything at all.

So much of personal finance advice take your latent fears and heightens them.

NO! Don’t use a credit card, you might overspend a little!

NO! Don’t eat out at that restaurant, what a waste!

NO! Don’t try to negotiate your salary, you should just be happy you have a job!

If you spent the last ten years worrying about your waste and all the bad things you might do, you’ve accepted the message that you should be SCARED. That you’re an organism that simply reacts to whatever’s around you — that you have no agency or control.

Meanwhile, the people who have gone on offense have taken control of their own finances, their own psychology, started to earn more, and happily spend on the things they love. No anxiety. Just confidence and the systems to back it up.

You listen to these fears and end up frightened and anxious, sitting around worrying about all the things that can go wrong with money.

Or you can go on offense. You can take control of your money.

You can build a plan to spend extravagantly on the things you love.

You can EMBRACE making mistakes, knowing you’ll waste a little money, but it’s fine, because over the long term, those mistakes are minor, and you can create more wealth for yourselves.

You choose.

In my book, I wrote this:

Play offense, not defense. Too many of us play defense with our finances. We wait until the end of the month, then look at our spending and shrug: “I guess I spent that much.” We accept onerous fees. We don’t question complicated advice because it’s given to us in a language we don’t understand. In this book, I’ll teach you to go on offense with your credit cards, your banks, your investments, and even your own money psychology. My goal is for you to craft your own Rich Life by the end of Chapter 9. Get aggressive! No one’s going to do it for you.

My dream is for you to remove the shackles of negativity around money. To decide what you LOVE spending on, and spend more on it, so money goes from a source of anxiety and doubts to a source of joy and possibility and purpose.

Get my book here

And comment here if this resonates with you. I want to hear from you.

Scared of money? (Why & how to overcome your fear today) is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

from Finance https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/scared-of-money-why-how-to-overcome-your-fear-today/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[go-redgirl]

Minority-owned businesses are among the worst-hit targets of looters and rioters who rampaged in Minneapolis and then other cities after a black man died in police custody, according to news reports.

“Expressing grievances to our elected officials in the form of protest is a time-honored tradition,” Stacy Washington, co-chairwoman of the board of Project 21, a black conservative group, said in a public statement Monday.

“But what we are watching unfold across the country is a coordinated effort to destroy the rule of law and order in our communities and to gin up racial tension,” Washington said. “In video after video, we see masked white protesters dressed all in black destroying property in black neighborhoods. And it’s blacks who are trying to stop the Antifa protesters from defacing small businesses.”

During remarks Monday evening in the Rose Garden, President Donald Trump noted: “The biggest victims of the rioting are peace-loving citizens in our poorest communities, and as their president, I will fight to keep them safe.”  

The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more >>

Prosecutors charged Derek Chauvin, 44, with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd, 46, who was being arrested Memorial Day evening on suspicion of passing a counterfeit 20-dollar bill.

Cellphone video showed Chauvin, at the time a Minneapolis police officer, with a knee pressing into the neck of Floyd, prone and handcuffed on the pavement, for nearly nine minutes.

Floyd, who was black, could be heard begging Chauvin, who is white, to allow him to stand and saying “I can’t breathe” before he fell silent.

A medical examiner determined Monday that Floyd’s death was a homicide. Outrage over his death has united Americans across political divides, as well as police chiefs and police unions.

“I understand the anger, but I do not understand destroying your own neighborhood to protest an innocent man’s murder,” Marie Fischer, an information technology specialist and Maryland political consultant who is black, said of those looting and setting fires.

“I do not understand many who are bailing out these ‘protesters’ as a sign of support. How about you fund the minority business owners whose stores and businesses have been destroyed by rioters?” said Fischer, who also is a member of Project 21. “They should fund those who were and are building these communities instead of the ones tearing them down under the guise of social justice—which in this case is neither social nor just.”

Here are six examples of minority-owned businesses across the country that were vandalized, desecrated, or destroyed by rioters.

1. Minneapolis: Where Unrest Began

Luis Tamay, an immigrant, reportedly saved for more than 10 years to open his Ecuadorian restaurant, El Sabor Chuchi, in Minneapolis seven years ago.

After guarding his restaurant during the first couple of nights of unrest,  Tamay obeyed the city’s curfew Friday night and went home, believing the Minnesota National Guard would keep order.

When Tamay arrived at his restaurant Saturday morning, it was burned to the ground, the Minneapolis StarTribune reported.

“Seventeen years of work is gone,” he told the newspaper.

Nearby, a Spanish-language radio station, La Raza, also burned down. Station owner Maya Santamaria wrote on her GoFundMe page: “Small, minority business owners found themselves with the businesses that they worked their fingers to the bone building destroyed, looted, vandalized and burned down. Some had no insurance. Others have no resources.”

Jeff Lusuer, a Minneapolis barber who is black, had two shops. One was burned down; someone broke into the other and stole supplies.

Still, Lusuer expressed empathy for the looters after what had occurred in Floyd’s killing, saying he is fed up with police.

“Even though it hurt my businesses, I understand,” Lusuer told the StarTribune.

Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, and peaceful protests began there before others turned to violence, looting, and arson.

The StarTribune reported: “The riots and arson that followed protests of George Floyd’s death have devastated organizations and businesses that serve communities of color.”

The newspaper reported Monday that looters burned a nonprofit center for American Indian youth.

La Michoacana Purepecha ice cream shop lost power as a result of the riots, and employees tried to give popsicles away.

“People right now are going to want to stay away from Lake Street, and that is understandable,” business owner Ricardo Hernandez told the newspaper, referring to the location of his ice cream shop.

“It’s very hard to see your whole life savings go down like this,” Hernandez said. “We used up all our money to build something nice for … not just the Latino community, but everybody.”

2. Atlanta: ‘A Very Sad Day for Us’

Atlanta has a strong legacy in the civil rights movement as the one-time home of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who promoted peaceful resistance to injustice in the 1960s.  

Still, the city erupted in riots as badly as any other in the nation over the weekend. Some of the stores that were broken into and damaged were black-owned businesses, Fox 5 Atlanta reported.

The TV station highlighted Attom, the first black-owned business to operate in an outdoor mall called The Shops at Buckhead, known for high-end retail stores.

“I don’t know if people know we’re owned by a black man because we don’t put it on the front of the business,” Attom owner Zola Dias told the station. “But this is a very sad day for us.”

The store is boarded up, like most of the other shops in the outdoor mall, Fox 5 reported.

“I’m a black man, I’m young, but there is another way to go and protest,” Dias added.

A group of black women set up a fundraising effort to assist black-owned businesses that were destroyed or vandalized, the station  reported.  

3. Looting in Texas Capital

Looters targeted a black-owned salon over the weekend in Austin, Texas, NBC affiliate KXAN reported.

The owner of Private Stock Premium Boutique set up a GoFundMe page and as of Monday had raised more than $60,000 to help rebuild.

Another black-owned business, World Liquor & Tobacco, was looted twice Sunday, KXAN reported.

4. ‘Frustrating’ Vandalism in Denver

A Denver restaurant called Buffalo Bills Wings and Things, owned by Zac Gabani, was a target of vandalism.

“It is frustrating,” Gabani told CBS4 in Denver, adding that breaking things “is pretty counterintuitive.”

Gabani’s eatery reportedly was one of the few businesses that tried to remain open during both the riots and peaceful protests in Denver.

“We were the only place open to feed them,” Gabani said. “We like to support the community; we just wish they would help support us as well.”

5. Milwaukee: ‘Not a Way of Finding Justice’

Dozens of minority-owned businesses in Milwaukee were ransacked by looters, Fox6 Milwaukee reported.

Sam Rahami, owner of the store Trend Benderz, smashed over the weekend, told the TV station:  “Destroying somebody’s business, somebody’s livelihood, is not a way of finding justice for anyone.”

Another store owner, not identified by name in the news story, complained to the station that the destruction was counterproductive.

“What they’re doing is against their benefit. We are here to be part of this community,” the owner of a Cricket Wireless store that was looted and damaged said.

6. Philadelphia: ‘For My Own Community to Do It to My Business’

Black leaders in Philadelphia held a forum calling for peace and in part highlighting that many black businesses were being destroyed, ABC-6 reported.

The forum included black clergy in Philadelphia as well as Human Rights Coalition 215 and Philadelphia Community Stakeholders.

Among those speaking at the event this week were Elliott Broaster, owner of Smoke N Things, a shop that was burned down.

“When I got home alone, I shed a few tears. I saw my business burn down and it hurt me a lot. And especially for my own community to do it to my business, that’s what really [hurt],” Broaster told ABC-6.

The news station reported: “What took years for this Temple grad to build was destroyed in a matter of minutes.”

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.