20 Minute Takes
Engaging with social justice is complicated and messy, and yet it's the invitation for all Christians. 20 Minute Takes breaks down the big and complicated and brings it into everyday life. Whether through interviews with people on the frontlines or breaking down the concepts in the headlines, 20 Minute Takes helps Christians to stir the imagination for what faithfulness and living justly can look like. 20 Minute Takes is hosted by Nikki Toyama-Szeto, executive director of Christians for Social Action.
20 Minute Takes
Chi-En Yu: Good Business as Good Neighboring
Can a tech company be a good neighbor? In this final episode of Season 7, Nikki Toyama-Szeto talks with Chi-En Yu, Product Manager of Dayspring Technologies. They discuss how Dayspring has committed to think about compensation, their time, the clients they take on, and their responsibility to the Bayview neighborhood in San Francisco. Listen in to learn how they show up as a company that is seeking justice in its spheres of influence.
20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action
Hosted by Nikki Toyama-Szeto
Produced by David de Leon
Editing and Mixing by Wiloza Media
Music by Andre Henry
This episode was made in collaboration with Christian for Social Action's Storytellers Collective.
Hello, my name is Nikki Toyamasito, and I'm the executive director of Christians for Social Action and your host for today's episode of 20 Minute Takes. Today, we speak with Chian Yu. She works with Day Spring Partners, a tech company based in Northern California, and she talks to us about the different ways that their company has thought through how to be a good presence for the common good in their community. Join us for this episode of 20 Minute Takes. It's so good to see you. Can you tell us a little bit about the context in which Day Spring Partners exists? Whereabouts in the country are you located? And how would you describe some of the peer companies that are around you?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. So Day Spring Partners is a small technology business. We are in San Francisco, California, and in particular in a neighborhood called Bayview. It is in that sense, if you don't know the San Francisco Bay Area and Bayview in particular, San Francisco tends to be, you know, kind of an extension of Silicon Valley. There's a lot of the influence of big technology. And then on the other hand, Bayview is a neighborhood in San Francisco that tends to be historically underserved. In terms of metrics, it is a place where high school dropout rates are about double the rest of the city. So it's a it's not the kind of place that you would imagine that you would find as technology business. And even be the kind of place where people would say, don't go to technology business there.
SPEAKER_01:And one of the things I appreciate is that Dayspring is trying to be a good neighbor in the neighborhood. What are some of the ways that Dayspring Partners has, as a tech company, has decided this is how we're going to neighbor to our neighbors in Bayview?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's an interesting question because Dayspring actually was not always in Bayview. It was not always in a place that we would call a neighborhood that has homes and schools and community in that way. We actually used to be downtown in the financial district that's primarily companies and more like a workday type of weekday community, not with neighbors in the same kind of way. And so the reason that we're in Bayview actually was because of the welcome of both the Congregation Redeemer that we're very closely partnered with, and even more so because of the welcome of the Black Church in Bayview. Bayview is historically has been a black neighborhood. And so for us, a lot of what it means to be neighbors actually is to enter with a posture of assuming that good life and good neighboring has been happening before we arrived. Because we are relatively new. I guess not so new now we've been in Bayview for 13 years. So one concrete practice that has come out of our time in Bayview is getting to know other businesses and other small businesses in particular. On the one hand, you can think of Dayspring as like, oh, they're a technology business. And that might be kind of sparkly. But also we're a small business. We only have 24 staff. And so we've gotten to know some of the black and brown-owned businesses in the neighborhood that have really introduced us to the way that they interact with the community. And so we got to hear from some of those small businesses about the way that they engage with capital. And so typically a larger business may have an opportunity to take out the loan from a bank. But in this particular case, we were hearing about folks that were needing to, you know, take out a smaller loan in order to have an oven in their retail shop to be able to bake goods. And so that kind of was the beginning of an idea that became what's called a neighbor fund. And neighbor fund is a practice of lending as a piece, where borrowers and lenders actually meet one another more as peers and eat together as opposed to like having that transactional relationship of like, okay, I'm applying for a loan, and here's my numbers, here's my metrics, and that is how you as a lender will evaluate me. It's much more based on relationship.
SPEAKER_01:Relationship and if I understand correctly, character.
unknown:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Is that right? So it's not like, can you prove to us you've handled this kind of money, but you're looking at folks who are connected relationally. But what does it mean to like also vet somebody by like character?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, it's things like getting to know who the other people they work with are, um, getting to know the other um folks in the community, whether they are uh fellow small business owners or whether they are people in schools or churches that can speak to that person's reliability and character and follow through. Um, which again, as you were saying, it's not about, okay, how how many loans have you paid back in the past? Yes. Which is the way that banks tend to do their lending.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, I love it. I um I appreciate the way that Daespring hasn't um like abdicated the responsibility to vet people for reliability. They just use different metrics um for some of that. Um, so if somebody was to just come in off the straight and say, Oh, Dayspring partners, I want to hire you, what is it that you all do in simple terms? Sure.
SPEAKER_00:Um, we talk about um helping good organizations do better. And so our primary uh line of business is brand, web, and custom software consulting. Um so we have clients that are businesses and we also have clients that are nonprofit organizations like Christians for Social Action. Um and then we also run our own app-based business that helps households get on the same page with each other about money.
SPEAKER_01:That's fantastic.
SPEAKER_00:So I love for individual households.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I love that. I love that. Um so on the outside, you may look like any one of a number of other tech or development companies that do this for profit. Um, but if you enter into the community, that is Day Spring Partners, there's a couple of practices that you have. There's a couple of policies that you've adopted that are really informed by your Christian faith. Can you unpack for me a bit about how some of the ways that you've tried to be followers of Jesus have resulted in some business practices or human um human resources policies that might be a little bit unusual?
SPEAKER_00:Sure. Um and I'll give a little bit of framing. Lately I've been musing on these practices as something that could be considered a rule of life. Um interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Within kind of a broader framing of um uh monastic engagement um with faith. So, but down in the practices that you're talking about, um, if you imagine them as rule of life, um, I'm thinking about those not just as like policies, but really as putting together a structure, a trellis that kind of supports life in a way that a rule of life does uh for an individual or a community of faith. Um so getting to our practices, there's three particular arenas that we think of ourselves as practicing faith expressions in their workplace, marketplace, and community. Um and in the workplace, one example that we talk about um for a key policy that we use is around how we set salaries. Um, we call it a smooth curve. Um other folks call it Isaiah 40, um, which the idea is that um as we hear, prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight, every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill shall be made low. Um that's been followed by these economic practices, right? And so that's the inspiration for the way we set salaries. Um, there's a couple things that we do. One of them is that um we actually kind of shift the curve of salaries. So if the market would uh say that the person doing job A gets this salary and a person doing job B gets this salary and the low and high end, we actually bring the high end down a little bit and then the low end up a little bit. Um, we have a formula for how we do that that's then related to living wages. Um but the idea is that it is meant to be a prophetic weakness uh that stands against the norm of uh in like very large companies, CEO salaries being like maybe 300 times the average worker's salary. Um we actually are using a ratio of three to one from the highest salary to the lowest salary. Wow. And even at a time we don't currently have janitorial staff on our team, but there was a time when we did. Um, and that three to one ratio we applied, even from a range of like a you know, software engineering CEO to a janitorial with a still doing three to one ratio.
SPEAKER_01:That's amazing. So that means your founders, your principals, usually kind of what we're talking about, like the tech millionaires and billionaires, they are tied to making no more than three times the lowest waged employee at Dayswing Partners. That is the practice that we've been doing. Because you're committed to a living wage and a full flourishing of everyone.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, I think the idea is that like, yes, people did make different kinds of contributions, um, and there's different training that's required to do the different roles, but also um this kind of extreme mountains and extreme gorges is really not right. It's not just. And so we're trying to practice something different from that.
SPEAKER_01:Wow, I love that. Are there other examples of the ways that your Christian faith has shaped and informed these rules or practices for your company?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so in that second arena of marketplace, we understand marketplace to be um the clients and customers we serve as well as the vendors that serve us. Um and I think Ephesians 6, 7, 8 is very informative to us, this notion of rendering service with enthusiasm. Um, so we render service to clients and customers, not primarily because they pay us. Obviously, they do pay us and that helps pay the bills, um, but really because we are we are aiming to serve them as unto the Lord. Um and we also have a practice of not using leverage against clients, right? So this comes from Old Testament practices um that you know, if uh clients do not pay us for long periods of time, we go through conversation with them and try to work things out and uh have not sent um any of those bills to collections because we experience or we interpret the practice of debt collections as leverage, um as more forceful. Yeah. So what was the third arena that you were talking about? The third arena is community. Um and for that, um we have some practices that basically structurally commit us to the common good, um, which are that we give 5% of our time, 10% of our profit, and 100% of our equity are dedicated to the common good. So 5% of our time, because our business is one where our primary resource, or you would could consider inventory, is essentially the time, the hours of the staff that work it. Um 5% of our time is committed to the common good. So that goes towards activities like um supporting our school partner, RISE Prep, um in their development efforts, um, doing professional services, whether that's branding work or custom websites and software for organizations that serve the common good. So that's that category. And then we also do other things that you might um look a little bit more what people imagine as volunteerism, right? So tutoring students in the neighborhood kind of thing. Um, we're starting a robotics club for some high school students across the I love it. With our partner RIS. Um so that's the 5% time. Um, 10% profit um is so every quarter we look at our profit um uh for the quarter and then tile is 10% of that towards um partner organizations. Um and actually, even in quarters where we don't make a profit, we do um commit to still making a modest gift uh as a practice of dependence on God, um, a practice of mana, right? Like the trust that like God will provide more mana, more money for next quarter. Um and then what did I not cover yet? 100%, 100% of equity. Um so the typical structure for a business is a corporation that has share owners and their uh the structures are meant to enrich the owners, right? It's held by the owners, and so um the assets go to them and the earnings go to them. Um in our case, uh all of our shares are held by nonprofits, um, and nonprofits in particular in our neighborhood Bayview, uh, because our understanding at this time in history is that um the assets of Day Spring are intended for the common good of this neighborhood in particular.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. Wow. So it doesn't sound like um this was part of the original plan, but as I hear you talking about it, it sounds like there's sort of this ebb and flow of um journeying towards God or a deeper conviction about something and applying about how how much of this existed in the beginning?
SPEAKER_00:That's a great question. Some of what you're hearing me say now about Day Spring, we would not have articulated in the same way. We didn't have all of these practices when we started. Um, I think that what we had when we started was this idea of an experiment. I say we as Dayspring, but I wasn't actually there. Um Dayspring as an experiment about, you know, what might a faithful expression of the gospel, a faithful expression of kingdom of the reign of God look like in the form of the technology business.
SPEAKER_01:Um and I think that really was the core question. Do you identify the work that you all are doing as justice work?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think that's an interesting question to ask, and particularly in the context of your podcast, um, because I think oftentimes people think of justice work as like the work that organizations who might have the the word justice in their name would do, right? That might have an activist or political or legal role of some sort. Legal role or or maybe, maybe um kind of like um social organizations. Compassion, yeah, that alleviate some of the alleviate poverty or what. But I think if justice at the core is about right relationships, um then that happens everywhere, right? That needs to happen in every sphere, including business. Um, and further, if justice is about right economics, about right economic relationships, then certainly that needs to happen in a business context. Um because business is, I think, understood too narrowly if it's seen as just about numbers and just about making money. Um, that actually business is about um the way that people relate to one another as people and the way that people relate to one another in an economic kind of arrangement.
SPEAKER_01:That's that's so interesting. I I appreciate the way that you are pressing, like um the end goal of justice is right relationships and flourishing for all in many spheres, and and how you see the work that you're doing at Day Spring as part and parcel of all of that. How does that work? Because I know you're clientless, and I don't know if you're allowed to say this, um, but I know that some of some of the clients that you work with are names we would recognize. And they're not necessarily coming from a faith background or something. What does that mean to pursue right relationship through this, these business partnerships when one side is kind of pursuing a Christian idea of right relationship and the other is playing by the rules that might be pretty recognizable in the rest of kind of a not necessarily faith-informed society? Does it ever have tension or like what do you find is both the opportunity and the limitations? Have you all ever been caught, you know, kind of with Christian good intentions? And then to be confronted with the big, big, bad, you know, economics of greed. Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00:Um, it does happen. I think I would say actually that you would be surprised um how often um we encounter people of good intention who are also wanting to build a world that is flourishing, even if that does not come from a faith background. Um, so that's not to minimize the tension points that we have encountered and that we have just needed to think about like, okay, we're actually not going to work with this client because what the world that they are trying to build is so vastly different than the one that we're trying to build. Um, but actually, more often than not, I think we are finding that there are uh folks that are wanting to see um, for example, human health and planetary health um become better across the board for everyone, right? Which that kind of thing is an expression, in my understanding, right, that is an expression of justice. Um, that if people around the world have access to healthier food, um, that actually causes the flourishing of everyone, and in particular the flourishing of those who are most vulnerable who would then tend who would otherwise tend to have least access to healthy food, right? Um so I think that it's actually, I would say that Dayspring's experience has been much more often than not that we are encountering people uh of good character and good intention. And getting to work with them.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I wonder if, in some ways, how you all show up in the world creates a little bit of space for people to be transparent about that. Um, it's not perceived as a weakness, for example, or something. Um, Tian, what are some of the things that you and uh Day Spring partners are looking at or playing around as you look towards the next season for your community?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I think part of what we're working on is trying to find metaphors that describe the kind of place that we are and the kind of thing that we're trying to do. Um, and one of the metaphors that has captured my imagination is um the image of a monastic town where there is a monastery with church life that is thriving in the center of it. Um, and there's also you know a monastic brewery where there are maybe both monks as well as regular townspeople that are engaged in the work of um of brewing beer as well as like a parish school. Um and I think for me, part of what's interesting about that um for Day Spring, in that picture, I imagine Day Spring has the brewery, um, where there is an there is a productive arrangement, right? There's something that we're trying to do, um, but it is informed by the rhythms of life of the monks in the monastery, um, and it also engages relating people from the town. Um I think that that then uh in parallel with you know the parish school that uh we have a school partner and then parish church, uh we have a church partner called Redeemer. Um it helps me imagine and understand what we are doing as um broader and deeper than just the day-to-day of the tasks that are on our task list and the emails or phone calls or code that we need to write for the day and we go.
SPEAKER_01:In what ways is it broader?
SPEAKER_00:Um we imagine it is broader because it helps to both make our part smaller. So, you know, we're just a little business, we're 24 people. Um, so it makes our part smaller, but then it situates it in this larger life of the monastic town or the larger life of a parish, um where what we are doing assumes that um it's not just about us, it's not just about the product that we make and the profit that we make, um, but really we belong to the rest of the community, and that the rest of the community actually has a claim on us as well, and that the rest of the community kind of informs our imagination of uh what we think and understand to be true and wet and beautiful, right? That's the function in my imagination of the monastery, right? They are really focusing on what is true and wet and beautiful and preaching and teaching back to the others, and then forming kind of a word-shaped living um in all these different arenas.
SPEAKER_01:Chian, thank you so much. I think there is a way that you and the community at Day Spring Partners have led the way in a clear application of responding to Jesus in these new different spaces that to me just really stirs my imagination. Like, I think um as you as you talk about things and as you talk about them very matter-of factly, on the other hand, there's a part of me that is like my brain is exploding because of how prophetic, how countercultural it is, but how you're not just doing that to stir things, but it's a testimony to both the interdependency that you all have with the community and your dependence upon God. So I just thank you so much for the way that you through your community sort of testify to the goodness, the provision, and um, and the character of God.
SPEAKER_00:That's so encouraging, Nikki. I appreciate it. I think um one of the things for me and for us is that oftentimes in our day-to-day, it just looks like regular everyday work. Uh-huh. You know, we show up to work on Monday and do what we need to do for the day, coordinate with our teammates, um, serve our customers and clients. Um, and there is an ordinaryness to it. Um, and so it is helpful to be encouraged and reminded that there's also something sacred that's happening.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us on this episode of 20 Minute Takes. 20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action. Our music was created by Andre Henry, and this episode was mixed and engineered by Waloza Media. If you like this episode, spread the word by subscribing, reviewing, or sharing. I'm your host, Nikki Toyama Sito. If you want to find out more about our work, visit the website at Christians for Social Action.org.
