Blackbook co-founder, project director, and recent grad, Ibrahim Baldé helped create Blackbook, a university app that improves Black student connectedness. Baldé’s founding team featured in the photo left to right, are Nahom Solomon, Chase Ali-Watkins, Nicholas Brathwaite, Ibrahim Baldé, and (not pictured) Kyle Parkman. The team has partnered with a Berkley group coined Mobile Developers to ready the app for Android and iOS.

“Racial inequity has maintained itself as one of the biggest institutional problems in both education and employment and a lot of the times this is due to a lack of access and support,” Baldé said in an email. “However, this wasn’t always the case.”

In summary, the African American Student Handbook or “Black Book” was a 1980s guide to Berkeley’s Black faculty, organizations, and campus resources. It was an important “peer-to-peer connections” reference for Black students.

The new Blackbook app therefore serves as a digital revival of its ’80s counterpart and is meeting the needs of today’s students. It acts as an ecosystem for diversity, equity and inclusion on college campuses.

“With over 30 Black-led student organizations on Berkeley’s campus and the rich legacy of student activism, we see tremendous opportunity in creating a platform for the Black student experience,” says Baldé. “And that’s starting here in our community.”

Baldé says, “We believe that Black students deserve a technology created for them! We really want to work to challenge the perceptions of innovation and fundamentally design something with the sole purpose of promoting Black student success.”

So, join us for a roundtable with Blackbook’s founding team, as they discuss the broad applications for this revived idea and its new foundation in modern tech.

Don’t miss out! Click to see more DPWC author/poet events scheduled this school year, 2021-22.