When I founded Black Girls CODE in 2011, I had no idea that it would grow beyond a small grassroots organization in the Bay Area into an international movement reaching over 30,000 students across 15 cities in the US and in Johannesburg,South Africa.
I started my organization with the small seed of an idea to teach 6 girls to code and discovered a need to teach so many more. So I expanded my vision and recalibrated my goal to teach 1 million girls to code by the year 2040.
Pretty soon I realized our work was about SO much more than just coding. While it was our fundamental mission to teach our scholars technical skills in computer science, our true calling was to provide these girls with self-confidence and self-efficacy and to show them how to embrace their power especially in these challenging times when many would seek to diminish it.
I believe undoubtedly that there is no force more formidable than a woman or girl who couples her inner belief in self with the innate power she inherits by right at birth be that in the field of sports, technology, business, or life we have the power to achieve and to succeed at whatever we put our minds to.
This unwavering belief in my own potential was deeply ingrained within me from a young age by the powerful influences of my mother, grandmother, aunts/uncles, teachers, and the countless ancestors who guided and nurtured me as a young, nerdy girl navigating the vibrant inner city of Memphis, Tennessee. My mother told me that education was my pathway to the future and I heeded her advice and focused on excelling academically in math and science which eventually led me to pursue a degree in engineering when I headed off to college. I began my college career at the peak moment for women receiving degrees in computer science. When I graduated from Vanderbilt in the late 1980s with a degree in electrical engineering, women earned about 30 percent of computer science degrees. Unfortunately to my dismay this was a tipping point for women in computer science and that number has declined significantly in the succeeding decades with women currently receiving less than 12% of the bachelors degrees in CS and women of color receiving less than 3%. These dire statistics started me on my path as what I like to call an “accidental social entrepreneur” and inspired me to create Black Girls CODE. But now my mission is even GREATER.
I love this quote by the great American painter and artist—Kerry James Marshall:
“We must come to a certain peace with the past and then be singularly focused on the future”.
After working in the tech industry for over two decades, I am excited to expand my reach and impact with the launch of the Black Innovation Lab. As a native Memphian, my return home is not just a detour on my professional journey, it is both a homecoming and a calling. A chance to help ignite change and give back to the place that raised me and to the people who made me. It is through building that real change is born, and by empowering individuals who sit at the margins to become the creators and practitioners for these new innovations, the future is infinitely brighter.
