About Frank Romo, CEO of RomoGIS
This month, Scholar-Intern Anna Xie spoke with Mr. Frank Romo, founder of RomoGIS, a geospatial company with a social activism and community focus. Romo is an activist and community advocate with a GIS and urban planning background. His passion for community activism started in Los Angeles, where he organized food and labor justice campaigns. He went from being a community organizer to a geospatial professional with his own business that’s rooted in his commitment to social justice. For him, GIS mapping can help people empower themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods. He has dedicated time to working with youth throughout his career, particularly through mentorship programs to support first-generation, international and English as Second Language students.
His community organizing roots are part of a longer family legacy, where it’s emphasized using the power that you have to stand up and do the right thing. His passion for community activism began in Los Angeles but quickly expanded as he began to work on food justice, disaster recovery and labor justice campaigns in places like San Francisco, New Orleans, and Chicago. Romo used these skills to successfully lead various campaigns including a project to deliver fresh produce to liquor stores, as well as multiple labor campaigns earning living wages for workers across the country. He did home visits as part of his work, and he noticed a pattern of community concerns with access to food and pollution. It became clear that a holistic model was needed in order to address these issues. By leading community organizing with a holistic perspective, social issues are seen as interconnected, and his work has a deeper and more sustainable impact.
After years of being a community organizer, Romo went on to study Urban Planning at Columbia University, where he learned to address issues like poverty through entrepreneurship and utilize his organizing skills once again for disaster recovery. While at Columbia, he worked on youth development efforts with an urban farm in Red Hook in Brookly. As an urban planner, he was seeking to utilize the urban farming economy to support local entrepreneurs and businesses to combat the rapid gentrification. Unfortunately, Hurricane Sandy struck the area and wiped out a lot of crops overnight, leaving residents without accessible food and now in need of additional emergency services. During this time Frank put on his “community organizing hat” and started figuring out people’s needs. Handling the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy was the first time he realized the power of using the GPS, community mapping and technology to advance community activism work and to better meet the immediate needs of community members.
By working through this response to a natural disaster, Romo saw an opportunity to utilize his geospatial knowledge to expand education around the subject to community organizations and schools. Romo saw a niche business model which could bring community activism and technology together to tell a story about communities in need, to support community advocacy and empower through building trusting relationships with community leaders. For him, the power of GIS mapping can help communities use this power to benefit themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods. He has dedicated time to working with youth throughout his career, particularly through mentorship programs to support first-generation college students, a legacy he’s continued through his work with RomoGIS.
Day-to-day at RomoGIS
RomoGIS is a company that brings change to the table. Community activists at heart and resourceful technologists at implementation, they believe that when you invest in technology, you also invest in the community to implement it. The mission for RomoGIS is personal, the company carries his family name, and he has involved his brother and sister, who are currently in college, doing RomoGIS trainings out in the field. His model focuses on empowering people and seeing where he can supplement their work and how he can apply geospatial tools to address their needs. The most important thing about his model is that they train, mobilize, and help people find their passions so they can take initiative in their own communities, and make the change they want to see. It’s this snowball effect that inspires him about his work.
RomoGIS is an extension of his work as a community organizer, where he worked in a wide range of locations and listened to and addressed their needs. Frank does a lot of traveling, and typically travels to a different city each week, which reminds him of his national community organizer days. Romo likes to be a resource to others and meet them where they are to better understand how he can best serve them. He often works personally with others to ensure they have the tools, strategies, skills and confidence they need to develop as leaders and give back to their communities.
Projects with RomoGIS
RomoGIS does a lot of community mapping projects, such as going to rural areas such as Monterey, and Salinas, California and holding 1-2 day workshops for students to talk about what they see in their community, what they like, what they want to change, and possible solutions. In this process, they found out that the students didn’t want to hang out at the park because of drug and firearm-related activities. From there, the students mapped out where they liked to hang out. The students’ maps highlighted that most places that students felt safe required money. With this data, they applied to the school district for an approved grant that will allow them to build an after-school lounge where students can have a safe place to relax. This effectively shows how GIS goes beyond just mapping; it becomes something real and tangible and a key to social change.
This GIS work extends across the country. In the Midwest, RomoGIS helps lead a high school program in Detroit, where they teach students how to fly drones, code, and use geospatial technology for impact. Recently, in Nashville, Tennessee, he has been working on a GIS for Good program. On the West coast, in his hometown of Los Angeles, he has worked on reducing gun violence and community safety, through collaborative mapping projects with local schools. On the East coast, RomoGIS is working in the Bronx through its holistic model to collaborate with businesses, high schools, and the YMCA to build community free from gun violence. These collaborative projects with a holistic focus aim to build power, community, and peace through bringing local stakeholders together around common goals.
As a GIS Educator
When people start learning new technologies, it can be a terrifying process. There are a lot of nerves when it comes to learning something unfamiliar. Frank takes a very human-centered approach. He believes that it’s not about the technology they use but about the person themselves. It’s about seeing where they’re coming from, their strengths, their weaknesses and most importantly, building people’s confidence. To build someone’s confidence, you have to have a good rapport with somebody, know how to create that, and know how to maintain that kind of relationship. Whether going back to community organizing, mentorship programs, working with nonprofits, it’s about relationships.
When these communities start to work together, this collaborative spirit creates a snowball effect. Students in the community are empowered by the work they do.
One example of successful use of community building was when at one of the schools he worked at, the school moved to a different building and students couldn’t find the bus and were getting lost on the way to school. His student interns at the time came up with the idea to create an app to help their peers track bus routes. The app used students’ data from their starting point to destination point to get to school. By collaborating with their peers and community leaders and working with new technologies, the student interns gained the empowerment to use their skills to create a solution in their community. They also helped their peers by creating a tool that was needed to achieve success academically and personally too.
Reflections of his work
Frank mentions that the most rewarding aspects of his work at RomoGIS are seeing the growth of the students, their teamwork, and confidence building. In his view, learning GIS is very communal; you lean on peers and mentors to help support you. It leads to personal and professional growth, helping develop future leaders who will make an impact. When people are empowered through these community events and collaborations, they lead in their own homes, communities, and organizations, creating a ripple effect.
He also finds it rewarding to enhance resources in communities, for example, by training 30 nonprofit organizations in California on how to map out gun violence, they can use the data to advocate for better policies to protect the people in their neighborhoods. He likes to teach people to fish for themselves. It gives them the power to learn for themselves as well as share their knowledge with others to grow collective power. Usually, when he goes to cities to work with them, he is the technical expert with the geospatial software. However, he doesn’t have all the answers related to those communities and their needs. So, it’s necessary that leaders in the community use their social capital to drive change at a local level, enhanced by the new layers of training they can apply to look at their communities in different lenses.
Advice for Students and Professionals
Frank’s advice to students and people learning geography is to find something they’re passionate about and apply a geospatial lens to it. For example, a community with many urban gardens might want to provide more residents with access to fresh food from these gardens. To support this effort, they could create a map highlighting areas of food insecurity within the community and strategically bring fresh food to residents in these areas. Learners can reach out to their community and the geospatial community if they run into any issues because it’s a collaborative space and people are willing to help each other.
Within our geo-community, there are a diverse array of backgrounds, however, as a professional community we haven’t yet fully tapped into how to make a tangible impact on the world around us. It’s so easy to be caught up in technological advances to forget that we have a responsibility to our communities to make a positive impact. Geography and GIS touch on so many people’s lives from where a tree gets planted to where a water fountain goes in. Geospatial data and technology help inform policy and community decisions, shaping people’s interactions with the world around them; geo-professionals have a responsibility to positively contribute in this sphere. Romo’s work at empowering and teaching future leaders shows that anyone can get into GIS and that we are the driving force behind changing our world.
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