Category: What’s Possible

Bye-Bye ‘Brogrammers.’ These Hackathons Are All About Inclusivity

Posted on by robbie

At her first hackathon, Grace Hu, now a senior at Wellesley College, scanned the room and noticed she was on the event’s only all-female team. She shrugged it off and returned to playing around with virtual reality headsets. But as the computer science and math double major signed up for more hackathons, the persistent gender divide she saw every weekend irked her. “It can be a really isolating experience when you’re the only girl on a team,” Hu says. “It can get to you at a certain point: ‘Why am I the only person doing this that looks like me?’”
To right that imbalance, Hu and a classmate put on a woman-centric hackathon in October, where two-thirds of the participants were female. “We made this our kind of hackathon,” says Hu. Hosted over 48 long hours at Wellesley in Massachusetts, WHACK (for Wellesley Hacks) brought together 80 undergrads, largely from Boston-area colleges, to build projects for three nonprofits: UpLift, which combats sexual harassment; Partners in Health, which ships medical supplies to developing countries; and Wellesley’s Office of Disability, which makes the campus more accessible to those with a physical handicap. Faced with real problems that technology might solve, the participants got right to work. Since the event, their projects have been integrated into the nonprofits’ operations, extending the weekend’s impact, adds co-organizer Amanda Foun.
Conferences like WHACK are possible because of the support they receive from Major League Hacking (MLH), the official collegiate association that sponsors the 30-hour programming sprees. Think of them as the NCAA of computer coding. Every year, MLH sponsors 220 events across the globe. (During the first weekend of October, while the girls at WHACK tapped at their keyboards in Massachusetts, MLH hosted five other hackathons simultaneously in cities from San Diego to Baltimore.) Unlike professional hackathons, where attendees show up with a broad skill set, the league places mentors at each of the college meetups to offer instruction. In total, MLH teaches computer science skills to 65,000 students annually. The goal is to broaden tech’s availability, opening participation to amateur developers and minority groups underrepresented in tech.
“We help create events where student programmers, designers and makers can develop their technical skills and passions,” says MLH’s CEO Mike Swift, who co-founded the association in 2013. “Whether that’s making websites and mobile apps or self-driving cars, we offer the venue and the community to learn how to do those things and reach those goals.”
Hackathons usually begin with a pitch session, where a handful of attendees float their ideas, attracting others to work on their teams. The events adopt a freeform, build-what-you-wish structure, a far cry from how most computer science classes are taught. And for many participants, that’s liberating. In university classrooms, students “get a lecture from a professor or a grad student. The curriculum is mostly out of books,” says Swift. Walking into an MLH event, on the other hand, you might see someone building an Android app to design carpool routes, while someone else is making a device to translate sign language.
MLH goes to extra lengths to welcome first-time hackers, making a special effort to reach out to female engineering societies, women-in-tech conferences and other minority groups. The organization also offers scholarships for people who can’t afford the travel costs on their own. Once there, attendees can dive into hour-long workshops about, say, Javascript or the principles of user design. As they’re laboring over their projects, mentors circle the room to help troubleshoot error messages or offer lessons in connecting to the hardware.
Without the league’s support, it would be a challenge to put on a hackathon alone, says Hu. To get ready for WHACK, for instance, MLH blasted the event details to their contacts, supplied technical hardware, lined up a squad of mentors and judges and handled logistics like food delivery. The MLH liaison on-site was like “having 10 extra hands,” she says.
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For women in the room at WHACK, the diversity was a welcome change, says Hu. “When you hear about ‘brogrammer’ culture, caffeine shots and not sleeping for a day, there’s a lot to be intimidated by. That can often scare away minorities in tech, which includes females,” she says. By targeting the conference to girls, WHACK sent a message that women belong at hackathons. “It puts more focus on the project itself, rather than the kind of environment that I’m working in,” she adds.
At this year’s WHACK, as twinkling Christmas lights dangled from a “W” at the front of the student center, teams of four and five hammered away, sometimes doing so as late as 4 a.m., to come up with tech-driven solutions for the nonprofits. One group built a social media plug-in, using IBM’s Sentiment Analysis, to detect whether a message would be considered online harassment. Another group linked vaccine delivery with texting, so an SMS would trigger a shipment. One team, all first-time rookies, used a Pebble Smartwatch to build a hack that would warn students with disabilities about any nearby hazards, such as a steep slope. They took home the top prize.
For Hu, that’s indicative of just how open MLH-sponsored hackathons truly are. “You don’t have to have advanced skills to attend and build really cool things in a few days,” she says. “As long believe in yourself, there’s always something cool that you can get out of one weekend.”

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.

Could New Orleans Become the Silicon Valley of the South?

Posted on by robbie

At first glance, Louisiana’s river delta might seem like an unusual place to hold a coding boot camp. For starters, it’s 2,250 miles from Apple’s and Facebook’s campuses in Silicon Valley. But when John Fraboni, a video game designer and jazz musician from Canada, relocated to the area a few years ago, he began noticing untapped tech talent all around him. Knowing that the booming tech industry offers its engineers both high salaries and meaningful work, Fraboni mapped out an intensive training program for at-risk youth called Operation Spark. The goal: Within four and a half months, his students would know how to program a website’s front and back ends, becoming “full-stack” developers, as it’s known in the industry.
Fraboni’s plan worked: Every single graduate from the immersion program now has a full-time job.
Operation Spark offers programming lessons in three sessions. The first, a two-week aptitude test, exposes kids to coding. Since only one-tenth of American high schools offer computer science, tinkering with a computer’s insides is a first-time experience for many. It’s during this two-week trial where, very quickly, “you figure out whether you love it or not,” says Fraboni. For those who do, a monthlong boot camp covers programming fundamentals, as participants build web applications. In the final phase, students immerse themselves in a comprehensive, three-month training on everything from algorithmic thinking to APIs and mobile, for up to 11 hours a day, six days a week.
Initially, Fraboni and just one other employee trained about 40 youth, a little more than half of whom would continue through all three phases. The company, though, is growing, having hired eight more instructors. Their COO, Max Gaudin, who started as a volunteer, is now in charge of expanding the program’s reach. The aim, says Fraboni, is to eventually take the model statewide.
Operation Spark fills a dire need in the New Orleans area, where approximately one in every five young adults is neither working nor pursuing a degree, a category of 16- to 24-year-olds known as “opportunity youth.” The city has the dubious distinction of ranking third in the country for disconnected young people, behind Memphis, Tenn., and Las Vegas. Currently, those 26,000 teens and mid-twentysomethings largely rely on public support and entitlement programs, a 2015 report by Tulane University found.
“There are a lot of people struggling here,” says Fraboni. “The prospects for them are maybe not the same that you and I had. Just think about what it’s like for someone from a low-income situation to figure out what to do in life. Most of us didn’t know what we wanted to be as undergrads, and our parents or our community were able to help us figure it out. A lot of young people in New Orleans don’t have that privilege.”
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Fraboni was inspired to reach out to the city’s young people after moving back to the area three years ago. It was his second time living in the Bayou State. For five years in the late ’90s and early 2000s, he’d played drums in jazz clubs. In 2013, after quitting his job in Montreal designing video games, Fabroni returned to the South. He was grateful to New Orleans for welcoming him during his early concert gigs — “I was accepted despite my nationality, despite my race, and I was able to cross a lot of lines,” he says — and he wanted to give back to the city. After his most recent move, he connected with Tulane’s Center for Public Service and toured the city’s schools and community centers. Seeing kids using mobile apps, Fraboni wondered if he could tap into their curiosity about how the programs were made.
Video games became an entry point to get young adults’ attention. “That was the hook right there. If you have an Android phone, you can write an app with me right now and in two hours, you can show it off to your friends,” says Fraboni, who started teaching rudimentary classes at St. Anna’s Episcopal Church while applying for grants that could fund a more robust curriculum. He wanted kids to “really apply themselves in the way they need to jump from zero knowledge to a job,” Fraboni explains. Eventually, he paired up with Hack Reactor, a coding boot camp, to make that immersive experience happen.
During the last week of Operation Spark’s program, students refine their resumes and write cover letters to send to employers. Many of the newly minted software engineers now have jobs at big tech firms like Mumms Software and Susco, and their starting salaries range from $50,000 up to $120,000, Fraboni reports. Additionally, multinational corporations with offices in New Orleans have been snapping up Operation Spark grads; GE, for example, recently hired six at $70,000 a year. “We’ve had graduates who say, ‘I went from working in a coffee shop to billing $65 an hour.’ That’s not bad for four months of intensive training.”
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But before they get those high-paying positions, Operation Spark encourages its participants to use their new coding skills for social good by developing apps and programs that drive change — some of which have been launched as real initiatives post-graduation. To that end, one group built a mobile app called Backscratch, where neighbors can barter points: a free ride to the airport for help painting, for instance. Another student developed an online platform to help finance microloans, such as for the last bit of funds needed to buy a used car. Operation Spark’s most high-profile project was a collaboration with the White House’s Police Data Initiative and the New Orleans Police Department, a weeklong code academy that even the police chief took part in. Parsing the cops’ crime stats, the students were able to create a few apps, including one that could average the response time to a 911 call based on location, and another that analyzed crime trends during large events, like the Mardi Gras parade.
While it’s been tough for Operation Spark’s grads to find programming jobs in New Orleans that compare to the Bay Area’s prestigious tech positions, more students are finding a way to stay in their hometown. Now that Fraboni’s ready to expand statewide, there will be a surging pool of employees ready to change Louisiana’s startup scene. It’s probably time to begin planning for a Silicon Bayou to emerge.

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This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.

In Miami, Veterans Are Lawyering Up

Posted on by robbie

When Guillermo Rose, 70, a retired Vietnam veteran, returned from a four-month trip in Panama, he expected to find his car where he’d left it: in a handicapped spot at the Miami International Airport parking garage, where disabled veterans were promised free parking. But the car had been moved elsewhere in the garage — and Rose had been slammed with a $1,600 bill for the space, far more than he could afford on his disability checks. He made the charge on his credit card and drove home, panicked.
Through his contacts at the American Legion and the VA, Rose heard about Mission United Veterans Pro Bono Project, which offers free legal assistance to South Florida vets. Housed within the Legal Aid Service and the charity United Way, a team of two staff lawyers and 380 volunteer attorneys help 1,500 former warriors, pilots, sailors and marines in Broward County annually with any legal questions they may have. Whether it’s fighting evictions, navigating family court, negotiating with creditors, changing discharge status or contesting parking tickets, the volunteer lawyers will take on any case. Within three weeks, Mission United had persuaded the Miami airport to reverse the charge — a small but important victory to a veteran who once felt ignored by American society.
“When I came back from Vietnam in 1971, they didn’t do anything for us: no jobs, no nothing. As soon as you’d tell employers you’re back from Vietnam, they weren’t interested,” says Rose, a disabled vet. “We’re treated better today than when I was a young guy. It makes me feel good that, finally, they’re helping out the veterans.”
Compared to half a century ago, veterans’ transition back into civilian society has been relatively smooth. While far from perfect, more medical options are available, the GI Bill still guarantees free college, housing authorities expedite applications from homeless vets, and job training can follow a tour of duty. Missing from that list, though, is legal help, which can affect everything else, note the attorneys who started Mission United three years ago. An improper discharge, for example, could limit a vet from receiving valuable benefits, or it might be misinterpreted by prospective landlords and employers as being found guilty before a court-martial.
This extra bit of know-how can be essential as veterans try to get their affairs back in order after years at sea or fighting abroad, adds Melissa Malone, a spokeswoman for Mission United. “These young men and women left their homes, their bank accounts, their family and kids. They left their lives here, and oftentimes, they put someone else in charge of it,” she says. “When they come home, it’s been a length of time and things might not be the same as before. Perhaps they have PTSD or some other war zone–induced challenges.” Seeing off-the-charts suicide rates for post-combat veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, Malone wonders how many took their own lives because they felt mired in a situation where a lawyer could have intervened.
While some critics take issue with the program offering help only to veterans, its volunteers see an underserved population with a unique set of circumstances. Repeated experience working with the Department of Defense or a VA hospital allows the project’s attorneys to develop an expertise, says James Heaton, Mission United’s lead lawyer. The situation often necessitates “some specialty,” and that only comes from “dealing day-to-day with the issues facing veterans,” he adds.
Heaton says the project developed from a long-seated desire to work in public service. After graduating law school and moving back home to Broward County, he contacted several veterans groups to volunteer his time. When Mission United asked him to take a full-time position developing legal assistance for former military, Heaton says he couldn’t refuse. “I went all in, and I haven’t had any regrets since.”
These days, Heaton is working on expanding the model nationally. He presented the idea to other United Way chapters earlier this year at a conference, and he discussed building a national network at a recent summit hosted by the American Bar Association. While nothing is officially on the books, Heaton says he’s already seen a glimmer of what a national network could accomplish when he calls colleagues across the country to ask if similar legal developments are popping up in their communities. “It’s not only a network for veterans, but also a network for professionals.”
That’s good news to Rose’s ears. He never expected to need legal help, but he recognizes that only an expert could have helped him reverse the airport’s steep bill. “I’m just happy Mission United helped me out,” he says. “And I’m glad to let other veterans who might need legal help know where they can find it.”
Heaton emphasizes that former service members helped civilians by honorably serving our country. Mission United’s legal aid, to him, is simply paying back what we owe in return.
The Mission United Veterans Pro Bono Project is a recipient of the 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media and technology.
Homepage photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

This Innovative Library Program Is Helping Underserved Kids Tap Into Their Creative Potential

Posted on by robbie

Walk into a North Philadelphia library, and you’ll be greeted by an unusual sight. While adult patrons surf the Web and whisper in hushed voices, adolescents giddily piece together sticks and balls to make structures that snake across the room. Grownups leave with books under their arms; kids carry out hand-sewn wallets, colorful birdhouses and wands tipped with glowing LED lights.
Maker Jawn, a year-round Free Library of Philadelphia initiative funded by an NBCUniversal 21st Century Solutions grant, opens branches’ underutilized spaces to middle school students to experiment with hands-on creation. The program began in 2011 as a way to fill a gap in the city’s public school education. Noticing that arts and music classes were being slashed in favor of test-prep memorization, the library stepped in to supplement project-based creative arts learning. The term maker jawn comes from the learning environments known as Makerspaces, in which participants experiment with creative technology, and from the slang word jawn, which originated in Philly’s hip-hop scene and can take on the meaning of any noun in a sentence. The Free Library of Philadelphia chose it for the program’s title to suggest the range of work that youngsters could create, where nothing is off-limits.
Supplied with iPads, power tools, a 3-D printer, hot-glue guns, paint and buckets of marbles, buttons and other knick-knacks, the preteen participants are given free rein to build what they please. To an outsider, it might seem the kids are just messing around, making arts and crafts from leftover junk. But for many of its young devotees, the program is a welcome change from the confines of a school day shaped by strict, rote learning and a respite from some of the hardships of life in an impoverished neighborhood. The mentors who run Maker Jawn’s daily lessons see that the kids are tapping into their creativity, maybe for the first time, and building up diminished self-confidence.
“People who are always told what to do can be overwhelmed at first when you say, ‘Here’s the material. Go for it,’” says Sarah Winchowsky, the project coordinator, of working with the kids. “But by giving them avenues to branch out, they flourish.”
Case in point: Musa Andrews, who wanted to make a sci-fi gangster film in the library’s back room. Andrews was just 13 years old when he began scripting “Godbrothers, Part I,” a time-warped flick with scenes set in prison, space, heaven and hell. Two years later, after crafting props and costumes, recording an original song, shooting in front of a green screen and a belabored editing process, Andrews presented a 22-minute film. Sixty people gathered for the premiere. Andrews has since taken video-production classes and gotten involved with filmmaking groups downtown.
“This is a place to assert some agency over the physical world,” says Goda Trakumaite, a Lithuanian artist who’s been a Maker Mentor for nearly three years. “Self-esteem comes with that. ‘I never used a hammer before, and today I built a bird-house. Tomorrow I want to learn more.’ That feeling of being capable and powerful is the coolest thing that I think kids gain over time in the program.”
To that end, all ideas are encouraged, says Trakumaite. “It’s rare for these kids to be in a place where they’re in charge, and where an adult functions more as support rather than an authority figure,” she says, adding that in the library, you rarely hear a “no” or “don’t do that.”
The freedom to tinker with new materials, to try things out and to fail, is particularly important in low-income neighborhoods. For the primarily black and Hispanic population in North Philadelphia, students who don’t perform well in school often believe they’ve been written off. “There is a cycle that perpetuates itself, of violence and poverty, that leads to self-deprecation,” says Winchowsky. “The kids will say, ‘I’m a failure,’ and then they’re then unlikely to try again.” Every child has inherent talent, she adds, and it would be a shame if a kid never discovered it simply because he or she was too scared to try.
Beyond personal development, Maker Jawn also squeezes in academic enrichment. “Our goal is to have them learning without realizing it,” explains Winchowsky. That can happen when a mentor, for example, subtly schools the kids in thermodynamics while demonstrating how to make a lava lamp from old soda bottles, water, oil and dye. Or when building a self-moving robot — in one instance, a rudimentary, solar-powered motor attached to four wheels became a lesson in circuitry and photovoltaic cells.
And sometimes the education is behavioral too. One 10-year-old troublemaker who poked her classmates and cursed under her breath for her first 18 months of visits did an about-face when one library branch put on a fashion show. “She was in her element,” Winchowsky recalls. “She was engaged and had a purpose.” Mentors stopped reprimanding her; instead, they applauded her suggestions during the four months of prep for the big night.
On the whole, the program offers a different vision for what role libraries might serve in the future. Upending its traditional role as warehouses for printed books, the Free Library of Philadelphia is pushing a broader definition of knowledge that includes artistic experimentation and digital literacy. To some adults, “the library is supposed to be a quiet place for studying or reading a book. But that’s not just what it is about anymore,” notes Winchowsky. While physical pages might be disappearing into the cloud, the library’s physical space is more important than ever as the site for interactions, making it akin to a community center. “I feel that Maker Jawn has a place in this new library model because it’s a space to share ideas,” she says. “That’s what I see libraries moving toward: They’re becoming less about the books and more about hands-on information sharing.”
Maker Jawn is transforming libraries into more freewheeling, open spaces. The kids leaving with kites, cereal-box castles and solar-powered robots aren’t just walking away with cool new toys. Over the course of a couple hours, they’ve been tinkering with a new, stronger sense of self.
Maker Jawn is a recipient of the 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. 

This Mover and Shaker Is Changing How Californians Use Technology

Posted on by robbie

Managing the technology that undergirds a $171-billion, 228,000-employee operation is no easy task. And it’s even harder when working under laws that sometimes limit your capabilities. Yet that’s the job for which Amy Tong, a longtime California public employee who has overseen technology for the state lottery, retirement system, taxes and water, was sworn in to earlier this summer. As the new chief information officer for the Golden State and recent speaker at NBCU’s Millennial Tech & Change Summit, Tong must keep all the existing technology systems operational, while trying to make them more adaptable to current usage. In an interview with NationSwell, Tong explained her formula for making state government more streamlined and the lessons she’s learned from Silicon Valley.
Let’s start with the challenges you’re up against. What are the unique barriers state government faces when updating its technology?
One is just the sheer size of state government. When it comes to the utilization of technology, it’s serving the public in a much bigger volume than a lot of cities and counties would normally face. One could say, “Well, the private sector — places like Google — might serve even more.” But the type of information that we collect as a public sector demands the best protection. When it comes to health and human services, law enforcement or governmental affairs, there’s a huge amount of information security and checks and balances that needs to happen. This public data is probably the most sensitive [that exists], so government-run technology systems tend to be more complicated and large. Second, because they’re so large and complex, it’s very costly to update them. I’ll give an example: For our 30-year-old child-welfare system, our regional estimate is half a billion dollars.
As an alternative to costly upgrades, government seems to be moving toward breaking down its massive IT projects into bite-size pieces. Do you have an example of how you’re doing that in California?
We’re taking an alternative approach to upgrading the child-welfare system. Our intent with a more bite-size approach is that each smaller module can be delivered to the end user a lot sooner. For social workers, who are our end users, that means focusing initially on the intake process — which is the first step they take when assessing a child-welfare case — and moving it to a more mobile-based technology. Now, the rest of the steps — let’s say there are five more before a child can be placed into a safe environment — will continue to use the existing system to tie them together, which means we can roll out each of the upgrades one by one, as opposed to waiting until the entire system is upgraded.
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How do you get other state agencies to participate in that innovation? Do you need to convince them to join you?
We are very fortunate that there are a lot of innovators and change agents in the state of California. When we talk about innovation, we’re not necessarily talking about new tools or something you can go play with. It’s really about addressing the barriers people have in moving innovation forward. With this renewed effort and engagement, I often hear the comment, “Yeah, let’s do this!” In the past, people [were less enthusiastic] and they’d say, “We’d like to do things more innovatively, but because of this policy or this regulation or this statute, we can’t.”
What I’ve shared from my experience is the idea that rather than seeing what we can tweak, let’s look at what we can do that’s fundamentally different. I ask the question, “When was the last time you actually read the statute? When was the last time you read the policy that gives you the perception you couldn’t do things differently?” Nine out of 10 times, they say they hadn’t read it; it was just what somebody once said. After you show them the language a couple of times, they see it’s not as constrained as they think. That’s when the ideas start coming out. In some ways, it’s fairly liberating for me to see that it doesn’t take a lot to spark people’s desire to innovate. Once that door’s open, oh my gosh, the ideas will wow you.
You recently created a new Office of Digital Innovation and Technology Engagement. What do you hope that will accomplish?
Number one: By simply using the term “digital innovation,” we’re already setting the tone of what we’re trying to accomplish, which is fresh ideas and innovative ways to solve problems. We understand that, in this day and age, many businesses are looking for technology solutions. We’re hoping to set a tone that the state Department of Technology is not only here to keep the lights on and make sure the existing system is operating well, but also that we’re very much into innovation.
Number two: Our biggest goal is to help individual programs achieve what they need to achieve. The Office of Digital Innovation is providing them infrastructure support, such as the Innovation Lab that we recently launched, so that program agencies, like the California Environmental Protection Agency or Health and Human Services, can say, “Hey, I’ve got this problem. I want to develop some solutions. I just need a sandbox to do it in.” They could come to our lab, which is part of this office, to try out new things without having to invest a lot.
Silicon Valley obviously looms large in people’s perception of California. What can the state government learn from what those techies are doing?
For both the public and private sector, entities get bigger and bigger every year, with process on top of process on top of process. It can bog down an organization. By talking with a lot of the entrepreneurial firms, we get down to the basics. Instead of somebody taking 10 steps to get from A to B, have we ever looked at the minimum number of steps to achieve the same results? Maybe it’s minus the bells and whistles, but you get what you need. A lot of these entrepreneurs will say to keep it simple and streamlined. Don’t overcomplicate things. That’s my motto as well, and it’s what’s helping the state look at things differently.
You’ve been overseeing technology for California’s government for 22 years. What are you most proud of?
I’ve been fortunate that my career has led me to where I am today, and I have surrounded myself with a lot of good people, mentors and others I can learn from. But the greatest accomplishment, I would have to say, is yet to come. We’ll see how much more we can do in the next few years of the administration.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Homepage photo courtesy of NBC/Universal.

The Journey of an Idea: This Entrepreneur Took a Cross-Country Trip to Fine-Tune His Higher Education Gamechanger

Posted on by robbie

Seated in a 1930s Pullman train car, Phillip Ellison carved a broad arc across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Milwaukee, Detroit. Ellison had no final endpoint toward which his locomotive was rushing: he was simply riding the rails, as part of the Millennial Trains Project (MTP), a nonprofit venture with Comcast NBCUniversal, a lead partner of the journey. Along with 25 other young adults, he was making a nine-day, transcontinental trek this August to open himself to new ideas for ULink, his new startup that’s in the works. “[MTP is promoting] American innovation, entrepreneurship and trans-regional understanding of the United States, by allowing people doing social impact to come together,” Ellison says.
In the early stages of developing a tech platform to assist community college students, Ellison wanted to spend the 3,100-mile journey homing in on his product’s capabilities and its growth potential, while discovering what other young people were doing in their hometowns. As the American West rushed by his window, he engaged the other social entrepreneurs and rising nonprofit leaders in conversation: Where were they all headed, and how could they help each other get there?
Onboard MTP, Ellison hammered out ideas for ULink, a website that will help community college students engage with on-campus resources (such as advising sessions to map out the credits that four-year colleges require or counseling to help deal with tough emotional situations) and successfully transfer to a four-year university. Ellison, a one-time dropout wrapping up his bachelor’s degree at Tufts University in Massachusetts, wanted to hear what had helped his peers navigate their undergraduate experience and whether community college counselors and transfer advisors, faculty members, students and IT programmers in each of MTP’s five stops would be open to using the platform. Aided by their insights, he’s planning to launch a beta pilot of the website within the next year at a community college in the Boston area.
“Community college is often a head-down experience. Students do not know what’s happening on campus, and they’re not accessing resources until it’s too late,” Ellison explains to NationSwell. On the administrative side, counseling “processes are not quite modernized, digital or up to date. You see the limitations of a human being in terms of resources.” ULink is still in beta development, but once launched, it will help counselors manage their students, see who’s coming in and who’s been out of touch and send text message check-ins through a mobile app — allowing them to reach more students all at once.
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Ellison knows about the necessity of college advising more acutely than most. He was forced to leave Penn State University prematurely due to a lack of financial aid. “That was one of the darkest times in my life, to be frank,” he says. Like many students arriving at four-year institutions, he says he didn’t fully comprehend higher education’s blockbuster price tag, even at a public school. Looking back, he wishes he had known more about the financial aspects of college. (For instance, public schools charge more to out-of-state residents, and with rare exception, student loans stick with most people even after a declaration of bankruptcy.) Constantly worrying about his bank accounts, Ellison’s grades fell precipitously. He dropped out and returned home to East Harlem.
That’s not to say Ellison was giving up. “I decided to go home and spend some time thinking about what I was going to do, to right the ship basically,” he explains. Almost immediately, he went to work as a manual laborer. Alongside middle-aged underrepresented workers, the teenager manned demolition projects in Brooklyn and moved corporate furniture in Manhattan. No boss seemed to value worker contributions at those temp jobs, he noticed. They didn’t provide healthcare benefits, and they offered no job security — a daily reality for millions of Americans who never obtained a college degree, he saw.
Eventually, Ellison was accepted to serve as an AmeriCorps member with City Year, assisting a green energy startup. (There, he met one of ULink’s current co-founders, Parisa Esmaili.) He leveraged that into a job at Citizen Schools, a nonprofit that provides extra hours of instruction at public middle schools. He also worked on campaigns for Obama’s reelection and a failed primary bid by Reshma Saujani (the founder of Girls Who Code) to be New York City’s public advocate. In retrospect, he says the series of jobs taught him leadership: by watching how a founder made tough decisions, by practicing at the front of a classroom and by trying to elect principled leaders.
In his off-hours, Ellison started attending classes at Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, one of the City University of New York schools near the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. Once again, working families surrounded him. He saw many of his classmates pulled away from their education by the need to get a job to pay for their kids. Others, closer to him in age, didn’t seem to know how to navigate the school’s bureaucracy. On his second attempt at higher education, Ellison realized that community college students don’t know what four-year universities are looking for in applicants and understaffed counseling departments couldn’t provide all the help needed. “I saw folks stopping sometimes, because they didn’t know what their end goal could be or how to get to that point,” he says. “The mentors were not checking in on them. It’s not a seamless transition.”
After a long hiatus from a four-year college, Ellison returned to school at Tufts last year. At times, he feels out of place, coming from the South Bronx to a bucolic research institution with a billion-dollar endowment that predates the Civil War. There, he lived with Jubril Lawal (a former classmate at Hostos and current co-founder of ULink), and together they translated their own experience negotiating educational barriers into ULink’s platform. ”By merging tech and human interactions in a strategic way,” says Ellison, who regularly folds business school lingo into ULink’s sales pitch, “our premise is that closing some of the advising and engagement gaps will promote completion and persistence and improve the overall student experience.” Where Ellison once felt disconnected, he hopes the app will provide clarity and direction, those touch points that tie a person to a larger institution.
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Through conversations with other train ride participants and with people at various city stops, Ellison deepened his understanding of the community college system. He asked why certain schools have off-the-charts transfer rates, while others are dropout factories. How can his platform make a student feel at home on a two-year commuter campus, in the same way that a student living in the dorms at a four-year institution participates in the school’s history and traditions? Will a few text messages be enough?
His cross-country sojourn confirmed that he’s asking the right questions. At a City College of San Francisco, he showed the school’s chief technology officer his beta product, and the administrator shared insights about the inadequacies of older education planning software and his decision-making calculus for new technology. Ellison speculated ULink may have just gained “a key adviser.” Back on the train, he discussed his ideas with his mentors and other social entrepreneurs. Fauzia Musa, from the design firm IDEO, reminded him that if students found some real value in the product and used it to solve their challenges, then colleges would quickly fall into line. Those “new understandings and unique opportunities for growth” proved vital to understanding what ULink could be.
Now it’s a matter of Ellison putting his answers into practice. The steaming train may have pulled into the final station, but his real journey is just beginning.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.
Homepage photo courtesy of Millennial Trains Project.
 

The Art of Using Film to Transform the Lives of Formerly-Incarcerated Youth

Posted on by robbie

Comics, with their rowdy action boxed within firm, familiar lines and violence reduced to harmless bams, thwacks and kapows, give Mario Rivera the ability to escape from reality. “When you’re reading the comic book, you’re no longer thinking about your problems,” says Rivera, a 24-year-old New Yorker who served time in prison for a violent crime he committed at age 15. The same goes for Rivera’s younger brother Shawn King, 21, who lived in 37 foster homes between the ages of 7 and 18 and was jailed for a few months earlier this year. Comics gave him a “way of keeping in touch with my brother and my dad…[a feeling] like they were there next to me,” he says.
The two brothers — lanky guys with the same curly, orangish hair and dozens of tattoos between them — barely saw each other during their formative years, but they recently reunited at the Community Producers program at New York City’s Maysles Documentary Center (MDC) and discovered their shared interest in not only comics, but filmmaking as well. At MDC, the siblings, along with two dozen court-involved youth, created documentary shorts about their lives. After six months of production (all at no cost to participants), the films capture day-to-day life of someone who came into contact with the law and compel audience members to change the way they view these adolescents: not as convicts, but as creatives.
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“If you hear from a young person who’s been incarcerated and listen to his story, you’ll leave different somehow, based on what you learned,” says Christine Peng, MDC’s education director who founded and oversees Community Producers. “Serving the communities and neighborhoods of the tri-state region is important to NBC 4 New York and Telemundo 47,” says John Durso, Jr., vice president of community and communications for NBC 4 New York and Telemundo 47.  “Maysles Documentary Center provides an important service to the community in which it’s located and through 21st Century Solutions, our stations work together to support new programs and initiatives, generating positive change within our region.
APPLY: Maysles Documentary Center is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
MDC founder Albert Maysles and his brother, David, were revered documentarians known for “direct cinema,” an approach where the cameraman simply observes without intrusion and edits the clips together without narration. By letting characters in films such as “Grey Gardens” and “Salesman” speak for themselves, the brothers (now both deceased) believed, “you really get to know the world, not the philosophy or point-of-view of the narrator.” Albert’s creed was that “you can listen to someone else’s story and truly hear them out, without jumping to assumptions,” Peng explains.
Similarly, Community Producers gives participants (all racial minorities with a criminal history) the opportunity to share their real-life experiences of growing up — a chance many haven’t been afforded by the social service bureaucracy or criminal justice system. After just a few minutes onscreen, the filmmakers break through misconceptions and reveal their vulnerabilities to moviegoers. For instance, a viewer will discover that the roughly 46 tattoos crowding King and Rivera’s arms aren’t the typical jailhouse variety: they’re actually Pokémon and X-Men cartoons.
The process of breaking down stereotypes starts with the filmmakers themselves, as the adolescent New Yorkers, ever protective of their own turf and judgmental about other neighborhoods, had to learn to trust their peers at MDC. When the program first began in March, King was silent, and Rivera would only pipe up if spoken to one-on-one. They didn’t discuss life at home. “Is this a safe space for me? Are these people going to judge me?” Peng says the kids wondered. “Part of what eventually built that trust was either realizing you were totally wrong about somebody or realizing that you shared a lot in common, as people who lost parents or siblings or who had traumatic experiences growing up.”
Emulating the Maysles brothers by working in a pair, Rivera and King kept the cameras rolling nonstop, finding details from their lives that would resonate with an audience. As they debated artistic vision, their collaboration forced them to learn more about each other. While the brothers describe the experience as “fun,” Peng says she witnessed them learn “to be accountable to each other, emotionally and physically.” Often, the siblings pointed the lens toward their own family members, including a sister with whom they’d lost contact, and sometimes themselves. “The process of making the film gave them an excuse to be around people,” she noticed. “They could be involved and also be a little outside,” retreating behind the viewfinder. One afternoon, on MDC’s rooftop, Rivera and King asked each other about their relationship with their dad, the first time they’d ever discussed him together.
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When NationSwell visited MDC in late June, King had been temporarily kicked out of the MDC space. Despite his brother’s absence, Rivera said he planned to finish the film, even if he was doing it alone. “I’ve already started it, and I’m not the type who’s into starting something and not finishing it,” he told his peers after previewing a two-minute rough cut. King returned after a brief hiatus, and together, the siblings put together “Back to Reality,” a film that shows the their tangible love for each other and, as Rivera puts it, their “daily escapades.” The short movie also tackles weightier issues: learning how to parent while coping with their mother’s recent death and grappling with the lifelong appreciation of comic books their dad instilled in them even though they now hate the man for skipping out on their childhood.
Unlike most arts programs that tout the cathartic value of transforming one’s life into art, the Maysles Documentary Center Community Producers program impacts youth through alternative means. King and Rivera received something that had largely been missing from their childhood: a new way to connect with their family members and each other. With a camera in hand, they could rekindle any relationship and ask questions that previously might have been awkward. After filming her, King and Rivera’s sister arrived at the showcase to watch their finished movie. Sitting together in the back row of MDC’s theater, the siblings once again looked like a family. After years of separation, spent reading comic books alone, this reunion looked better than any caped crusader’s rescue.
Maysles Documentary Center is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!

The Big Idea That’s Growing Green Business in America

Posted on by robbie

After a lifetime of eating with disposable knives and forks, Michael Caballero, a 25-year-old industrial engineer at FedEx, looked the plastic cutlery in his workplace cafeteria in a new way. “I think in terms of process,” he says, tallying the environmental upheaval required to manufacture each fork — the extraction of oil from the ground, the overseas shipping, the refining and molding in a factory, the waste created by its packaging — a massive amount of pollution created for just a few minutes of usage before being tossed in a landfill.
Today, thanks to EcoTech Visions, a Miami incubator for green enterprises, Caballero’s 18-month-old company, Earthware, Inc., is building better disposable silverware. At EcoTech Visions’s current headquarters in Liberty City, Fla., Caballero is a member of a class of 26 “ecopreneurs” who receive 15 months of support and have access to office space, manufacturing equipment and other environmentally-minded folks. In the co-working space, architects and designers chat with electricians and engineers — a technical collaboration that’s rare but vital to successfully manufacture products, from battery-run motorcycles and aquaponics systems to plastic-based handbags and aloe salves.
APPLY: EcoTech Visions is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
The buzzing incubator is the vision of Dr. Pandwe Gibson, an African-American businesswoman who wanted to spark a sea change in commerce by supporting green jobs, particularly manufacturing ones. Because the consequences of environmental harm are so visible in southern Florida (as atmospheric temperatures rise, the sea levels follow, causing the Atlantic’s high tides to annually creep nearly one inch closer to the art deco real estate along Miami’s coastline), city residents are eager to embrace products that won’t further damage the Earth in the process. When Gibson first came up with EcoTech Visions three years ago, she used her iPad to share the idea with anyone who had time to listen to her elevator pitch. Since its launch, the incubator has created 15 new jobs, won grants for nine of its companies to work on prototypes and helped three other businesses obtain seed funding to kick start operations.
Last year, EcoTech was one of NBCUniversal Foundation’s 21st Century Solutions grant challenge winners, supporting progressive community solutions. “What we love is that it has the four Cs — it’s a catalyst for out-of-the-box solutions, it offers a destination for collaboration, it’s building a community for idea-creators and problem solvers and it’s driving local change by expanding small businesses and jobs,” says Beth Colleton, senior vice president of corporate social responsibility at NBCUniversal.
EcoTech Visions played a vital role in helping Earthware produce a durable alternative to the 16 billion pieces of plasticware thrown away in America each year (its cutlery is made with a corn-based resin that decomposes in just six months) and grow to its current state. Perhaps most importantly, the incubator covers the entry-level costs that can prohibit a business from entering the market — office space and manufacturing equipment — while Caballero still works at Fed-Ex to make a living. Without the support, he would have needed to front the money for Earthware’s first injection molding machine (which spits out products in the shape of pre-made molds) and a consultant to help him pick the right one; instead, Caballero pays a small rental fee to EcoTech in order to use the machine they purchased on his behalf.
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Additionally, the incubator introduced Caballero to other locals that could bolster his burgeoning enterprise, including sustainability advocates and potential customers, like the local school board, which recently put out a request for compostable cutlery bids. “The whole goal is to become a leading provider of compostable, sustainable products, using Miami as a hub into Latin America and the Caribbean,” footholds to an international expansion, Caballero says.
Clean tech and green manufacturing, as sectors, could provide the biggest hope of restoring jobs that have been lost due to the historic decline in American manufacturing (nationwide, about 5 million have disappeared since the millennium). Unlike other compostable products, which ship foreign-made cutlery to the U.S., Caballero’s eco-friendly business aims to create high-paying, manufacturing jobs right here in America; the two dozen other companies at EcoTech Visions will only add to this green wave of business. Caballero believes green industries will be most successful if others join the movement. The demand for sustainable products is already there, he notes, but supply will only match those levels if more entrepreneurs and manufacturers arrive on the scene. Even though they’ll technically be his competitors, there will be enough supply that prices will fall and consumers generally will see planet-friendly products as the new standard.
EcoTech Visions is looking to expand nationally, starting with Los Angeles next. If it achieves its goals, not only will Caballero be just one of countless American manufacturers producing environmentally-conscious items and providing jobs around the country, but the incubator could find itself leading the United States into the green industrial revolution.
EcoTech Visions is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!

This Training Program Teaches the Skills You Really Need to Know to Land a Job in Tech

Posted on by robbie

With a year’s worth of college credits and no degrees or certificates to show for it, Miguel Ponce, 28, was in a rut: living with his mom and siblings in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx and working hourly jobs that he didn’t enjoy. “I bounced from retail job to retail job. I was making barely anything,” he says. “It always felt like it was just a gateway to something better…I was working retail until I became a computer technician or a doctor — always something else.” While employed with a delivery company, Ponce used Craigslist to find a job that would allow him to work with computers — his favorite way to spend time. One poster told him he was under-qualified for a tech job, but linked him to a website for Per Scholas, a New York City-based nonprofit that provides free, intensive I.T. job training to low-income adults in five other U.S. cities.
Along with 800 other aspiring employees who sign up every year for Per Scholas’s classes (in IT support, network engineering and cyber security, among other subject matters), Ponce enrolled in an eight-week class on software testing. The rigorous sessions, which lasted from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, taught him how software works and why it might fail, then asked him to practice spotting errors in real time. After receiving additional training in “soft skills,” like communication, collaboration and problem solving in the workplace, Ponce had the skills he needed to start a career in a booming part of the tech industry. His chances were good: 80 percent of Per Scholas graduates find a job in less than a year, and most see their wages rise five-fold to more than $36,000 a year — offering a pathway to the middle class, complete with a living wage, fulfilling tasks and the prospect of career advancement.
APPLY: Per Scholas is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
Perhaps surprisingly, many tech jobs require only a high school diploma. Per Scholas, which is supported by numerous partners and organizations, including NBCUniversal Foundation, the Center for Economic Opportunity and JPMorgan Chase, among others, aims to fill those positions. Employers in the tech sector give Per Scholas direct input on the curriculum, sharpening the organization’s training beyond a generic computer science class. By doing this, participants receive skills for jobs that are available now, instead of abstract roles that might never exist. The results of the collaboration? A strong track record of placements at big firms like Bloomberg, ConEdison and TimeWarner Cable. Wayne Kunow, global head of information risk management at Barclays’s investment banking arm, says he’s “truly been impressed with the caliber and quality of talent coming from Per Scholas,” rare praise for a program located in the South Bronx.
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The organization’s impact, however, exceeds successful placement statistics. Tech companies often hire college graduates who are overqualified for entry-level jobs because other streams of talent haven’t been identified. By proving that its workers (of which 90 percent are minorities) from poor communities can competently fill these jobs, Per Scholas could change the face of the sector and open job pipelines to forgotten communities. No longer do tech titans need to think they must sacrifice quality to add diversity. Hiring a Per Scholas graduate — an asset with appropriate talent that can quickly fill a role — is a win-win.
These trailblazers who will transform the tech industry come from neighborhoods consistently left behind by economic development. Per Scholas is headquartered in the South Bronx, an area notorious for being the poorest congressional district in the country (38 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line). Plinio Ayala, Per Scholas’s president and CEO grew up in the neighborhood and says that while the physical decay may be better than it was during 1980s, the people still feel left behind. “The borough has always lacked opportunities, and the people have lacked opportunities.” Better jobs, he believes, are the only way to foment a change.
“The success of programs such as Per Scholas is vital to the future of our economy,” says Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. “We want to be the next tech hub of the world and in order to fulfill that goal, we will need qualified talent to step into those job opportunities. Per Scholas helps teach and build up our future tech geniuses that will help take our great borough to the next level.”
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A life-changing career can’t come soon enough. Poverty dogs many: A male student reported not having eaten for three days; a female student couldn’t do her homework in the homeless shelter where she lives. To solve these challenges, Per Scholas regularly signs people up for government assistance and offers advice from an in-house financial planner whose services are particularly valuable since three out of every five participants carry an average of $20,000 in outstanding debt (from prior schooling, cars, mortgages, credit cards, child support arrears or tax liens). The advisor advocates for those who are in default, helps students qualify for tax breaks and teaches them how to start saving. Thanks to regular group workshops and one-on-one counseling sessions, students collectively socked away more than $100,000 during the first three months of this year.
This financial planning is vital, especially since those enrolled are trying to leave behind retail and fast-food gigs — low-wage work with limited possibilities — to climb the career ladder. “If a crisis comes up, you can fix it,” explains Ayala. “But if you’re not making enough money at all, those problems are almost insurmountable. It creates this very yucky situation for people that don’t know how to get out.”
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Ponce, once stuck in an endless cycle of dead-end jobs, now works at a top-tier Silicon Valley firm. “Back then, [Per Scholas] was the only thing that I had going for me,” he says by phone from San Francisco. Today, he’s using his computer skills to provide recommendations on how to improve software functionality, a job that gives him immense satisfaction.
The joy of the position, he says, is that testing is like a puzzle: There’s so many ways humans might use a computer tool that he needs to consider to make sure it works. In a way, his job mirrors the role Per Scholas plays for tech companies. Without the organization, no one would give thought to how poor communities might participate in the online revolution, but thanks to its rigorous testing and training, a whole new functionality is deployed.
Per Scholas is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!