Editor’s note: Black Girls Code has reached its goal, but you still have until midnight to support the Summer of Code campaign. San Francisco-based Black Girls Code is within a few thousand dollars of funding a campaign that will teach programming to more than 300 kids from underrepresented areas around the U.S. over the next three months.
Black Girls Code is “dedicated to teaching girls… from underrepresented communities about computer programming and digital technology.” The nonprofit is using the momentum from a sold-out June workshop at DeVry University in Oakland, California, to hold workshops in various cities across the United States – Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco and St. Louis, to be exact – in 90 days.
Classes range from “Build a Webpage in a Day,” to Ruby on Rails tutorials.
When retelling how she got her start in computer programming, BGC founder Kimberly Bryant wrote of “feeling culturally isolated.”
“Much has changed since my college days, but there’s still a dearth of African-American women in science, technology, engineering and math professions, an absence that cannot be explained by, say, a lack of interest in these fields. Lack of access and lack of exposure to STEM topics are the likelier culprits,” wrote Bryant on the About page of Black Girls Code.
“By launching Black Girls Code, I hope to provide young and pre-teen girls of color opportunities to learn in-demand skills at a time when they are naturally thinking about what they want to be when they grow up.”
At press time, Black Girls Code had raised $12,477 out of their goal of $18,500, with only 33 hours left to go. Some of the funding will go to the creation of a “mobile computer lab” encompassing 15-20 laptops, “which will allow Black Girls Code to take their workshops to students in their communities and schools.”
