Hack the Hood bootcamp: Onramp to 21st century careers

Hack the Hood is an award-winning non-profit that introduces low-income youth of color to careers in tech by hiring and training them to build websites for real small businesses in their own communities.

Hack the Hood is an award-winning non-profit that introduces low-income youth of color to careers in tech by hiring and training them to build websites for real small businesses in their own communities. During 6-week "Bootcamps," young people gain valuable hands-on experience, build a portfolio, and  learn about opportunities in the tech industry, as well as building critical technical, leadership, entrepreneurship, and life skills with mentorship from staff and tech professionals working in the field. 

After Bootcamp’s success serving its first 18-person cohort, HTH’s model was recognized by Google’s 2014 Impact Challenge and awarded $500,000 over two years to deepen and expand our work. As part of this expansion, HTH partners with 8 organizations across the region, and reaches LIYOC in East Palo Alto, San Jose, Gilroy, Merced, Modesto, Oakland and San Francisco. HTH identifies nonprofit and education partners who are interested in bringing Bootcamp to their own communities, and supports them through our Train-the-Trainer model. We offer our partners Bootcamp curriculum, instructor training, marketing funding, mentor recruitment and training, field trip coordination, evaluation services, a community of practitioners, and more. We use our model as a starting point and work with partners throughout the year to adapt the program to their own community’s needs.   

The technology industry represents one of the fastest growing and highest-paid sectors in our economy, and technology skills and literacy are fundamental to professional success in the 21st century. Yet, our school system has failed to equip young low-income youth of color (LIYOC) with the skills and knowledge they’ll need to enter today’s professional careers in tech. The fastest growing segment of our future workforce is being systematically denied the fundamental education they need to succeed. 

We believe that unlocking the potential of Low-income youth of color requires interventions that are holistic, culturally relevant, hands on, real-world and practical, and community- and relationship-based.

Our program creates strong pathways to careers and higher education for the youth who go through our programs, leading to young people who are connected, committed and both working and enrolled in higher education or training. 

Hack the Hood delivered the bootcamp to more than 250 youth in the Bay area (and Central California) in the past 2 years. We now seek to scale by building a licensing and consulting model to support the community-based youth organizations, community colleges, workforce development boards and local education systems who have expressed strong interest to implement our boot camp program as part of their lifelong learning, tech inclusion, 21st century skills future of work offering to low-income youth ages 16-25. We will deliver this through a train the trainer model, online portal for resources and consulting/technical support and evaluation.

Pre and post assessment of participants - 95% Young people in HtH bootcamp report increased sense of efficacy and control

SMART goals, participation in strong pathways, longitudinal studies and reportinf - 95% Young people in HtH bootcamp identify tech-informed careers they want to train for/pursue

Pre and post assessment of participants; and assessment skills survey tool (Virgil). - 95% of young people in bootcamp report strong increase in tech skills, including basic coding and web development

Hack the Hood approaches low-income youth of color from a community wealth/assets based approach. Youth learn tech skills by building mobile-friendly web sites for local small businesses, then learn about careers in tech and setting goals for further training, work and entrepreneurship. By acknowledging that our youth are skilled problem-solvers and innovators, we build on program successes so they become self-motivated, persistent learners who understand how to learn harder and harder things and have the skills and confidence to do so. Technology is a core part of everything we do, both as a platform and as a set of skills.

We use existing technologies and help the young people ages 16-25 in underserved communities understand how they can move from being consumers of tech to being producers of tech. This is a critical path to avoid the displacement and isolation that people in so many low-income communities are experiencing as the tech economy changes their ecosystem. Our organization is centered on principles of together with those we serve, and our 20% of our staff are former youth in our programs. We use design research and stakeholder approaches for all our work.

Hack the Hood bootcamp programs can scale through a licensing and training model so they can be deployed world-wide. As agile users of video, webinars and digital training tools, we know real life/real time is not the only way to support partners. As a non-profit we can price our offerings on a sliding scale that makes our work sustainable but also dials back barriers for entry with communities seeking to launch the program. We have already launched the program in 9 diverse communities successfully and seek to build on that here.

Hack the Hood has been developing our model for the past three years with a blend of funding from corporate donors and investors (Google, Adobe, others), foundations, individual donors, government contracts and crowd-funding campaigns. The SOLVE work will help us evolve a licensing/consulting/earned-income model we have started to research but need to grow and evolve.

We will need to build a new team to develop a licensing and consulting model, identify customer segments and recruitment, execute and evaluate a pilot and then scale broadly. We do not know what level of effect it will take to offer customer support across a wider region, and we are dependent on partners maintaining program fidelity to deliver impact to the participants.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPcJsOOHQ6A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwapQ_-pdyA&t=1s

http://twitter.com/hackthehood

We are trying to solve a hard problem--how to make sure low income youth of color, already affected by systemic racism, poor education and trauma, can engage their substantial strengths with the future of work around tech careers, innovation and entrepreneurship. We believe that a collective impact, collaborative model is the way to implement the best solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges and we'd love to work with the Solve community to build out and further scale what we do.

We have over 70 partners including: Google, Adobe, EBay, Black Rock, The Peralta Colleges, San Francisco City College, California State Workforce Investment Board, Oakland Workforce Development Board, Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula, Silicon Valley Children's Fund,  Merced Department of Education, Bayview/Hunter's Point YMCA (SF), Kiva?Zip, City of Oakland.

Hidden Genius project, Black Girls Code, All Star Code, Code4queens, YesWeCode, queyno Labs