original svg by jeff dahl on wikipedia, search "Maat"

“Don’t unstring the bow.

I am your four-feathered arrow

that has not been used yet.

I am a strong knifeblade word,

not some if or maybe,

dissolving in air.

I am sunlight slicing the dark.

Who made this night?

A forge deep in the earth-mud.

What is the body?

Endurance.

What is love?

Gratitude.

What is hidden

in our chests?

Laughter.

What else?

Compassion.”

–Rumi, “All Rivers At Once” (excerpt)

“Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”

“The Case for Reparations”, Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, June 2014

“Every culture- except the Culture of the Noble Ones– is a culture of slavery.”

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, evening Dhamma talk

“WAR IS PEACE”, “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY”, “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”.

–the Party’s three slogans, “1984”, George Orwell

United Programmers + Publishers For Radical Inclusion

If your business / non-profit is:

  • owned / lead / managed by BIPOC
  • staffed w/ 80%+ BIPOC

we can design + develop your digital presence, or provide support on your existing stack, for $0 / mo. Our services are pro bono.

If your non-profit is working for racial / LGBTQ+ justice in areas like:

  • food security / water protection
  • low-income education
  • police / ICE abolition
  • access to healthcare
  • etc.

we can work within your budget to accomplish whatever you need done on your website + social platforms.

Biochain Inc. eCommerce, biotech
Crunchbase marketing blog, finance
Berkeley Food Institute, education

Our base rate is $80 / hr

Estimate Intake Form

If you are:

  • unemployed and looking to get into web development, design, content marketing, project management, or
  • a student who wants to learn real-world code that can lead directly to contract work as an engineer

UPPFRI offers a free apprenticeship for:

  • BIPOC
  • LGBTQ+
  • women

Our director, Tyler Hill, is a freelance web developer who has been contracting 10 years for a range of local + national clients in Oakland, CA. You would be onboarded to the UPPFRI Slack channel and Jira board (at no cost, UPPFRI pays the bills) to shadow his development work in real-time.

  • He’ll break out the dev work into Jira tickets and create a staging environment where you can try doing them yourself.
  • Whenever you feel ready, he’ll add you to the Github repo and you can start submitting your own pull requests on real tickets.
  • UPPFRI will pay you for the work! We’re totally transparent on the total bill for the client, and will partner with you to find what you feel is a fair cut.
  • UPPFRI will take no margins, i.e. 100% of the billed $$$ for your work will be passed on to you.
  • The ultimate goal is for you to gain the confidence to take on a contract yourself, through companies on LinkedIn directly, or through staffing agencies such as Creative Circle.
  • UPPFRI will remain available to you in your future freelance work if you get stuck on code or need leads for contracts

apprenticeship:

dev work:

Jeff Bezos has built a $200B semi-government mafia which he uses to exploit black and brown americans for cheap labor. Millions of dollars are made every day by Silicon Valley startups leveraging his services, while he continues to sell facial-recognition AI to ICE and USA PD.

Thanks to Silicon Valley venture capital, the NASDAQ has sustained constant, record-breaking growth over the last decade. Meanwhile, just across the bridge:

Now Bezos is on Instagram, pretending to be a champion for black lives by “losing customers,” while he remains the wealthiest man in human history. He then fires Chris Smalls, a black man, for trying to unionize labor at an Amazon warehouse. Meanwhile, despite federal oversight, reform commitments at OPD have gone absolutely nowhere in 15 years. This is evidenced by the well-reported sexual abuse carried out by OPD and other Bay Area LEOs in 2016.

This is why, in solidarity with:

The members of UPPFRI:

  • Demand the defunding of the Oakland Police Department, SFPD, and the Alameda County Sheriff.
  • Denounce any startup, venture fund, or product associated with Jeff Bezos + Amazon Web Services. We refuse to do any kind of work for these platforms or brands, ever.
  • Dismiss the diversity PR campaign from Big Tech as tokenism, and insist the only real path forward for justice and equality is to force $B companies including:
    • Blue Origin
    • Andreessen Horowitz
    • Sequoia Capital
    • Axon Enterprise
    • Index Ventures
    • World Innovation Lab
    • Amazon
    • Netflix
    • Facebook
    • Microsoft
    • Apple
    • Google
    to divest from their many far-reaching subsidiaries and donate this capital, at 0% ROI, to black and brown communities.
  • Any further advertising from tech unicorns re: BLM, D&I, or Worker’s Rights will hereby be met with disdain. Only when community leaders in black and brown neighborhoods ( West Oakland, Fruitvale, Bayview/Hunter’s Point, etc. ) publicly confirm the receipt of impactful donations will any company be acknowledged or celebrated by UPPFRI.
  • Founders and investors that fail to protect our fellow Americans with urgent and radical restorative action will be relentlessly denounced on all social networks.

the United Programmers + Publishers For Radical Inclusion was founded in July 2020 by Tyler Hill. He is currently the only member. If you want to help force $B VC companies to fund our communities of color by committing to the demands above and joining the union, or otherwise want to help promote UPPFRI in the tech industry, please email: admin@tylerhillweb.dev