Why do we bother bagging?

[EricWilliams]

Originally Posted by Racer26

Every team has equal abilities to fundraise.

There are many teams in poor areas of the country with big sponsors, and many teams in wealthy areas with very limited sponsorship.

Sponsorship dollars on most teams generally has little to do with the wealthiness of the team's location.

Disregarding everything else about this discussion, (I'll leave that to much smarter people) I just can't let this go without comment. Socioeconomic and demographic disparities between groups is something that will always exist - that's just the way it is. And while no plan/solution/method is going to make things "fair" for the (wonderfully) diverse teams that compete in FIRST or anything else, everyone certainly has a responsibility to understand how those disparities affect all groups to facilitate the greatest amount of opportunity available to everyone.

My personal observations after having lived in vastly different areas of the US: the biggest difference between (and I'll focus here on STEM extracurricular activities, but it's a fairly universal concept) affluent areas and struggling areas is community/parent engagement. Please keep in mind this a generalization required to investigate and solve problems, so counter-examples remain exactly what they are: exceptions to rules.

Things like lack of reliable transportation, inability to take time from work, and household responsibilities are not mitigated simply by "hard work" and "working in the off-season". They are real, persistent problems, and they directly relate to a team's ability to fundraise and prepare for success. When your parent base can't mobilize around and in support of your team, when you don't have the community connections to potential corporate sponsors, and when schools are more worried about simply keeping classrooms running instead of providing resources for extracurriculars, "hard work" becomes a fairly moot point.

FIRST has been smart in promoting lower-bar-for-entry programs (Jr.FLL -> FTC), but even at those levels the differences are clear. Not that there aren't a ton of examples of great teams from poorer areas or struggling teams from wealthy areas (Chicago FTC Qualifier and SBPLI FRC Regional are my personal examples), but simply identifying exceptions is not good enough. We need to find out what makes these exceptions possible and evangelize it.

If it's culture change and opportunities to succeed we (as the FIRST community) seek, sweeping these disparities under the rug of "you get what you put in" is not only unhelpful, it's downright damaging.

We're all passionate about great STEM education and enabling young people to be successful in life, but that passion has to be extended to all corners. And if there are problems in delivering those opportunities, everyone should be aware of them and work to overcome them.