CONNECTWomen@Home Networks
Give people* burdened with various forms of unpaid home, child, and elderly care a chance at local infrastructure network operator-ownership -- for better educational and remote work online access.
Please describe the activation your organization seeks to launch.
*Women are still disproportionately burdened with unpaid home, child, and elderly care. Local Sharing Network co-ops create an opportunity for all care workers to both co-own and get paid for operating their neighborhood sharing infrastructure including Internet access, renewable power generation, and storage. New sharing technologies enhance existing community social sharing with Internet communications, logistics, paid remote work, and free all-ages educational resources.
Which of the CONNECT metrics will your activation impact?
Access to free wifi
Adults getting sufficient social & emotional support
Travel time to work
Will your proposal impact any other LA2050 goal categories?
LA is the best place to LEARN
LA is the best place to CREATE
LA is the healthiest place to LIVE
In what areas of Los Angeles will you be directly working?
Central LA
East LA
County of Los Angeles
City of Los Angeles
LAUSD
How will your activation mobilize Angelenos?
Digital organizing or activism
Trainings and/or in-person engagements
Create new tools or technologies for greater civic/political engagement
Encourage businesses to change practices
Increase participation in political processes
Influence individual behavior
Connect Angelenos with impactful volunteer opportunities
Increase donations to organizations and causes
Fundamentally change home care economies.
Describe in greater detail how your activation will make LA the best place to CONNECT?
* Access to free WiFi will be part of any partner 501(c)(4) Local Shares Network community welfare mission.
* Adults, especially in unpaid care work, will get more social & emotional support in the co-ownership and operation of these networks.
* Government responsiveness to residents’ needs will increase with more ready access to online government resources.
* Travel time to work will be negligible for new hyperlocal and telecommuting jobs.
* Percentage of public transit riders will increase to networked coworking hubs in each neighborhood served, and as a result of more previous vehicle commuters now working from home.
* Participation in neighborhood councils and other local volunteerism will become more convenient as home care workers are allowed to stay nearby all day, with no long commutes between local functions.
* Total number of local social connections among Angelenos will increase with cooperative membership.
* Online resources and local coordination groups will allow political messages and voting process updates to be communicated more readily around each service neighborhood.
How will your activation engage Angelenos to make LA the best place to CONNECT
This will make connections more affordable for all Angelenos, and bring connectivity where currently none is affordable or readily available. Richer communities will be able to afford better access, complementary services, and local cache offsets to remote Internet and power services. Lower income communities will obtain subsidies for charitable class home installations, co-op membership, and increased access to local and remote jobs online or in local network maintenance. Home care providers in particular (who are still disproportionately women and mothers) will be recruited and trained in routine network maintenance for their local cooperative, in order to both provide them with better paying on-call jobs and prevent the high expenses of site visits and truck rolls from remote service centers. These home and hyperlocal work forces will also act as the front line of customer service and novel service studies for each neighborhood cooperative, to give them each a faster lead in customer innovation testing and scalable demand assessments.
Please explain how you will define and measure success for your activation.
We will count the number of neighborhoods adopting local cooperative sharing network organizing methods; total members per cooperative; and fraction of new local membership employed as in situ network infrastructure installers, maintainers, and on-call repair staff. We will specifically reach out to at-home care workers as existing neighborhood social leaders, with training opportunities as paid infrastructure installers and maintainers.
Where do you hope this activation or your organization will be in five years?
Every self-defined community or Neighborhood Council district within LA City, and major portions of LA County, will have member-owned Local Shares Network co-ops, operated in whole or part by neighborhood connected home care workers (who are no longer as disproportionately women). Thousands of new local and remote-online jobs will be created in these service areas, and millions more Angelenos will have the same or better bandwidth connections to the Internet at much lower aggregate service costs. About half these service areas will gain complementary online and local sharing logistics services in addition to greater Internet access capacity, and half of these regions will gain affordable Internet bandwidth where almost none was readily available previously.