MentorDash

Traditional schools cannot keep up with changing industry standards in the tech sector. Mentorship has proven to fill that gap, however, COVID-19  revealed the need for its democratization and digitization. We have built MentorDash to implement virtual mentorship so that students from at-risk communities can have a more equitable pathway for obtaining basic tech job training, interview prep for tech jobs, and access to 1:1 mentorship throughout their student and professional career. 

Quality mentorship is not equitable in the digital workforce at this time and the problem has grown to the following scale: 

• People of color represent less than 10% of employees at technology companies. 
• There is one female to every two males in the U.S. tech industry. 

Tech companies are not working fast enough to implement internal mentorship programs meanwhile schools are lacking in the industry network connections to facilitate a proper S.T.E.M. career pathways for their students. These factors have contributed to the problem. We have identified the need for a mentorship service provider and are now prototyping a web application solution that can be scaled globally and virtually. 

MentorDash is a web application built in javascript. Mentees and mentors login to the dashboard to engage in the following: 

• hackathon office hours
• 1:1 discussions
• career panels 
• workshops re: intro to coding, intro to design, intro to data science, etc. 
• job board & hiring fairs 

Schools are given accounts so that they can enroll their students in the program as mentees. 

MentorDash is preparing those entering the workforce for the future of work with affordable and equitable digital skills, training, and employment opportunities. MentorDash democratizes access to mentorship in professional S.T.E.M. fields, making the digital workforce more accessible for historically underrepresented populations in tech, especially women and people of color. 

We are addressing the diversity issue in the tech industry and the lack of available equitable solutions which aligns with the purpose of the Digital Workforce Challenge. 

Throughout it's almost seven-year lifespan, Hacker Fund has grown to operate the largest nonprofit network of S.T.E.M. mentors in the United States with 100+ participating companies, including Apple, Google, and Microsoft. When COVID-19 shutdowns first started, we began working on a prototype that would digitize our mentorship services and help us scale our National Mentor Chapter Program. We currently work with school districts around the country including the LAUSD, Compton Unified, and many others via our mentorship program and plan to launch the application in Q4.