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10 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
Some people are upset about the resource guide. They are saying it is a replica of some amazing work that was done at Atlanta Youth Count by students. That is false. These are completely different guides, for different purposes. We first reached out to AYC in December. 
For over 5 months we have been working tirelessly on a different guide. We did, after reaching out to AYC continue using the same icons which seemed very in line with our conversation with them. Again, their guide is wonderful and can be found here: atlantayouthcount.weebly.com
We use their guide in our office for our case workers and front desk to be able to point people to researchers. It only made more clear the need for a different book. Not to take away from theirs but to supplement it for a different group, different needs, and a different purpose
They did amazing work and deserve credit for what it took to compile that. If it weren’t for their initial research, this project would have been a lot harder since many of the resources were already consolidated.
They deserved to go viral. They deserve promotion of their guide. They deserve thousands of retweets. But I don’t get to decide what takes off. I want to do better to make sure to uplift their very different guide in the time before our comes out.
But we spent five months making a very different guide; with countless hours and dollars. Researching, partnering with businesses, designing, having a completely different way of organizing resources, working with printers, etc.
I don’t think anyone does this for credit, at least I hope not. But I don’t need any credit. I’m just not going to pretend we haven’t been working our asses off to create something very different tailored for our clients.
We need to be doing this work in the most fair and equitable ways and we have a page in our guide that credits all of the organizations who have helped us do this. I did not expect the initial tweet to go viral.
But this isn’t for credit. This is literally my job. And we’ve been working hard on this. I’m saddened people are even bringing this up. They haven’t even seen our book. But I should be doing more to promote their guide. I’m not going to pretend they are the same.
We also created a template for other cities to use and instructions to make a guide in your own city. We didn’t put in any of this that we wanted credit because we weren’t doing this for credit. We had a one track mind on helping the houseless community.
