When programmer Tiffani Ashley Bell learned that thousands of people in Detroit were facing water shutoffs because they couldn't afford to pay their bills, she decided to take action -- in the simplest, most obvious way possible. It's an inspiring story of how one person with tenacity and an idea can create monumental change -- and a demonstration that each of us can find our own way to help the world, even if it means starting without all the answers.
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[00:00:00] TED Audio Collective.
[00:00:06] Every morning I get out of bed, do a quick stretch, and spend at least a few minutes
[00:00:18] scrolling on social media to see what's happening in the world.
[00:00:21] And like any active social media user, I sometimes find myself feeling bombarded by all this
[00:00:26] news.
[00:00:27] It feels like a series of emergencies are happening at any given time.
[00:00:32] When you're scrolling through all of this, it's easy to read an article, reshare a tweet,
[00:00:37] or like a post to demonstrate solidarity in outrage and concern.
[00:00:41] But for Tiffany Ashley Bell, a software engineer turned social entrepreneur, her doom-scrolling
[00:00:47] routine changed one morning after seeing reports about thousands of Detroit residents without
[00:00:51] water because of unpaid water bills.
[00:00:55] She decided to do more than read, click, and share.
[00:00:58] I'm Sherelle Dorsey, and this is TED Tech.
[00:01:04] Tiffany Ashley Bell takes to the TED stage to share her story about tackling a human
[00:01:09] rights issue and to share her ideas on how we, everyday citizens, can use technology
[00:01:15] to play our part in changing the world.
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[00:04:13] One Thursday morning several summers ago, I woke up and started scrolling through social
[00:04:17] media like so many of us do every morning.
[00:04:21] What caught my eye that morning though was an article about how 100,000 people in Detroit
[00:04:26] were about to have to live without running water because they couldn't afford their water
[00:04:30] bills.
[00:04:32] People had been living with this issue for a while.
[00:04:35] And as they get by, they were doing everything from collecting rainwater in barrels to walking
[00:04:40] to relatives' houses to take showers every few days.
[00:04:44] And much worse, sometime later I learned that a lot of people were actually losing custody
[00:04:49] of their kids because they couldn't afford to pay their water bills.
[00:04:53] Instead of someone helping them, they just lost their kids.
[00:04:59] For many of them, their greatest transgression you could argue was that they were either
[00:05:04] elderly, disabled, had just been laid off, or worked jobs that simply didn't pay enough.
[00:05:11] And yes, I said jobs.
[00:05:14] To me, how they were being treated and the level of contempt shown to them and how easy
[00:05:19] it was to simply deny them something that we all need to live was disgusting.
[00:05:25] It's disgusting.
[00:05:32] But to me this also felt personal even though I have no direct family ties to Detroit.
[00:05:38] But here's why.
[00:05:40] Many of the people who were facing shutoffs were black.
[00:05:44] Many were also, like myself, black women.
[00:05:48] And Lord knows it's not the first time in the United States that black people have been
[00:05:52] denied basic human rights like water.
[00:05:57] So to me that created an overwhelming urge to do something to help.
[00:06:03] I mean, I couldn't just read that and then go on about my day.
[00:06:08] Then it became a question of what can I, sitting in my pajamas as one person at home, actually do?
[00:06:14] Well, what?
[00:06:15] Oh, oh, but wait.
[00:06:18] I'm a programmer and a heavy, heavy social media user.
[00:06:24] So I decided to tweet, to tweet what I was reading about, what I was seeing, how I felt
[00:06:30] to my online community of activists, politicians, startup founders and investors, some like
[00:06:36] yourselves, and other programmers of course.
[00:06:39] And over the course of a few hours of back and forth about what to do, we resolved to
[00:06:44] do the simplest, most obvious thing that would help somebody in this situation.
[00:06:50] We decided to pay some water bills.
[00:06:53] To do that I skipped work that day.
[00:06:54] I did not go to work that day.
[00:06:57] And instead I spent a few hours digging around on the water company's website.
[00:07:02] And I found something interesting that sort of jump started what to do for people.
[00:07:07] For some reason there was a 400-page PDF of customers on the website that the water company
[00:07:13] couldn't deliver their bills to through the mail.
[00:07:16] And some of these were delinquent accounts.
[00:07:18] But one of the things that was interesting about this list is that it also included account
[00:07:22] numbers for people.
[00:07:23] So you could just take one of those account numbers and at that time plug it into the
[00:07:27] website and see everything about that account.
[00:07:30] So I did that.
[00:07:32] And one of the things that was interesting though there was that I saw a make a payment
[00:07:35] button.
[00:07:37] So the idea then became what if we got the account numbers of people that needed help
[00:07:44] and then made payments for them?
[00:07:47] So a few hours later I built a website to find those people and start connecting them
[00:07:52] to people that needed help.
[00:07:55] And then I tweeted that.
[00:07:57] And to keep things simple, people who wanted to help simply would get instructions on how
[00:08:03] to log onto the utility's website as if they were the account holder and just make payments.
[00:08:09] And then once they had done that, they would send us the receipts and we would send those
[00:08:14] to the families that had gotten the help.
[00:08:17] And empowered with those donations, with those payments, they were able to go to the water
[00:08:21] company and advocate for themselves and demand that their water be turned back on.
[00:08:26] And in doing that, that's how in the first 40 or so days of doing this, we paid over
[00:08:33] $100,000 in water bills by just simply...
[00:08:36] Thank you.
[00:08:37] Thank you.
[00:08:41] By just simply sending people directly to the utility company's website to pay $5,
[00:08:46] $10, whatever they could afford.
[00:08:49] And I don't say that to brag, but instead to encourage you all to notice problems and
[00:08:56] to think about what is the simplest, most obvious thing you can do to impact that problem.
[00:09:02] So first, what I'll also say that was true for us is that it should be abundantly clear
[00:09:08] that whatever you do doesn't actually have to be perfect.
[00:09:11] You don't have to do some big overarching thing like a nonprofit.
[00:09:15] Because you won't have all the answers when you start.
[00:09:18] What's beautiful about that is you don't actually need to have all the answers to get started.
[00:09:23] And I will confess that if we had had all the answers, if we had known too much, we
[00:09:28] might not have actually gotten started.
[00:09:32] So the next thing that's true is that when you put together and you start doing something
[00:09:37] that's imperfect, unfinished, it's not finished, people will see what you're doing and they'll
[00:09:42] want to join you.
[00:09:43] They'll want to get together with you to make what you're doing bigger, more impactful,
[00:09:47] more meaningful.
[00:09:48] But all in ways unique to themselves.
[00:09:52] For us, that was the city employees who answered our emails on weekends.
[00:09:58] And then during the week drove people to appointments to get their water turned back on.
[00:10:04] It was the people in mutual aid groups and nonprofits that partnered with us to completely
[00:10:09] pay off the water bills for some families.
[00:10:13] It was the people who actually really made this work possible by giving $5, $10, $20,
[00:10:20] some of whom had been in this situation themselves a few years prior where they couldn't afford
[00:10:25] their own bills but they now could so they were generous about it.
[00:10:29] It was the people who held bake sales to help people that they didn't know and would never
[00:10:35] meet.
[00:10:37] People will see you walking the walk and they'll understand that that compassion is contagious.
[00:10:45] So I'd ask you in this moment then, what is it that sends you down a rabbit hole of blog
[00:10:52] posts and news articles?
[00:10:54] What leaves you so disgusted and annoyed that you would rather skip work or class and work
[00:11:00] on that instead?
[00:11:01] What is that for you?
[00:11:03] So suppose, for example, you find out that the third graders at your old elementary school
[00:11:09] owe lunch money debt.
[00:11:10] What if the most obvious thing to do for them is to pay off that lunch money debt, sponsor
[00:11:15] some lunches and then later on go run for the local school board to push for systemic
[00:11:21] change around access to nutrition at school?
[00:11:24] That's just an idea.
[00:11:27] Now you might hear this and say that's nice, that's cute, but I don't really have time
[00:11:31] for that.
[00:11:32] Or most problems are too big to work on, so why bother?
[00:11:36] I'll say you're not unique in thinking that at all.
[00:11:42] But if we just stick with the idea of doing the smallest at first, the most obvious thing,
[00:11:47] and just think about for a second what do you have the time, what do you have the resources,
[00:11:54] what do you have the skills and the influence even to do?
[00:12:00] To make happen?
[00:12:02] For me, I was a programmer with a whole day job, so I didn't actually initially have time
[00:12:06] to work on this all day either.
[00:12:08] But using the skills and the resources and the network that I did have, we built out
[00:12:13] the original website and then grew it from there.
[00:12:17] So the next somewhat obvious but I think hasty criticism that we sometimes hear is that
[00:12:21] what we did was just a band aid, that whatever you end up doing is not going to be significant
[00:12:28] enough, it's not going to make a difference, it's too fleeting of a thing to try to do
[00:12:32] to make a difference.
[00:12:34] But is it not that the purpose of a band aid is to give an injury, a place where something
[00:12:39] has gone wrong, the opportunity to heal?
[00:12:42] And I'll say no, initially we weren't going to solve the root of why people couldn't afford
[00:12:49] their water bills.
[00:12:52] And I'm not here to tell you either that benevolent strangers sitting at home in their pajamas
[00:12:58] are a proper substitute for systemic structural changes to issues.
[00:13:03] But what I will tell you, though, is that also our solution didn't attack the poverty, it
[00:13:10] didn't attack the unemployment, it didn't attack the bad public policy, yes, bad public
[00:13:15] policy that enthusiastically punishes people who are poor, especially when they are black
[00:13:21] or brown.
[00:13:22] But what we did give people, yes, what we did give people in that moment is relief.
[00:13:30] So again, whatever you do, if it's small and if it's an obvious thing, it doesn't mean
[00:13:36] that your impact can't actually be durable.
[00:13:40] And that you shouldn't try to do something.
[00:13:43] And I say that because today we have helped over 5,000 people with water bill payments
[00:13:49] just from people again giving $5, $10, $50, whatever they can afford to contribute.
[00:14:03] And our ripples of compassion have actually gone even further.
[00:14:06] We got a major American city to start offering more compassionate assistance.
[00:14:11] We had a U.S. member of Congress in their office reach out to get help for their constituents.
[00:14:16] We've had policy makers in three different states that we were able to help using our
[00:14:21] data, our knowledge, our experience to understand what's happening around water affordability
[00:14:26] in their districts.
[00:14:28] We've also been able to partner with other nonprofits and mutual aid groups to keep
[00:14:33] families from facing eviction and homelessness over their water bills.
[00:14:37] We've also been able to help families avoid facing the threat of losing their kids.
[00:14:43] I also now do this work full time with the goal of helping utilities understand how to
[00:14:48] make water more affordable, make water more of a human right so that people also don't
[00:14:54] fall behind on their bills in the first place.
[00:14:58] Legendary comedian Lily Tomlin once said, I always wondered why somebody wouldn't do something
[00:15:05] about that.
[00:15:06] And then I realized I was somebody.
[00:15:10] So you don't even actually have to be a programmer to make a difference or even do what I did.
[00:15:17] You just have to be like Lily said, to be somebody, somebody who sees a thing that can
[00:15:23] be fixed, can be impacted and do that, do something.
[00:15:28] Thank you.
[00:15:36] All right, that's our show.
[00:15:41] Thanks for listening.
[00:15:43] TED Tech is part of the TED Audio Collective.
[00:15:46] This episode was produced by Nina Lawrence, who also wrote it with me, Sherelle Dorsey.
[00:15:51] Our editor is Alejandra Salazar and the show is fact-checked by Julia Dickerson.
[00:15:57] Special thanks to Farrah DeGrunge.
[00:15:59] If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe and leave us a review so other people
[00:16:03] can find this too.
[00:16:06] I'm Sherelle Dorsey.
[00:16:07] Let's keep digging into the future.
[00:16:09] Join me next week for more.