A Trip to Debug
This week, our group took a trip to Debug, a “community organizing, advocacy, and a multimedia storytelling organization based out of San José, California.” We had read their book, Debug: Voices from the Underside of Silicon Valley, during the winter quarter, learning about the lives of the others that surround this area that don’t live the glamourized lifestyle that Silicon Valley tends to depict. Two people from the business had visited our class and led us in a discussion about the inequality and initiatives that must be made for a better future. This time, we got to visit their location and meet most of their entire staff, tour their neatly organized workspace, and hear about their personal stories of how they all ended up working there. They were comprised of such a unique and diverse group of proactive people from the area; from recent college students to mothers, they formed this collective in the hopes of promoting community-based justice through their three actions: storytelling, organizing, and advocacy. Debug has grown rapidly from its small beginning, and is now officially registered as a non-profit organization. They aspire to continue their work based on the ever-changing inequalities that surround us and hope to make differences in areas as small as one person’s life to community mindsets.