Welcome back to LiveWorx 2020.
My name is Andia Winslow, and I'm your host
for today's livestream event.
This is our fifth session of the day.
But if you weren't able to catch any of our previous sessions
this morning, hey, we've got you covered.
Those sessions, plus over 100 additional sessions
of incredible content, are ready for replay on the LiveWorx
on-demand catalog.
This online library's available through June 19th,
so be sure to check it out.
Oh, and keep an eye out for an upcoming email
to gain access to our content archive for an entire year.
All right.
Let's get into our next session, Finding Opportunity
in Times of Uncertainty.
Kimberly Bryant is the founder and CEO of Black Girls Code.
This incredible nonprofit organization
was founded to create pathways to professions in computer
science for her daughter Kai and girls like her who
have been historically marginalized in STEM careers,
particularly in the field of technology.
With the advent of the coronavirus
pandemic, and on the eve of its 10th year in operation,
Bryant will share the Black Girls Code
story, from its founding to its current transformational
moment, as well as contemporary and historical case
studies of resilience and leadership
by women and people of color in times of crisis.
Bryant will ask how we can all navigate and learn
from today's challenges to find new opportunities,
new ways of thinking, and new ways
to create a hopeful future.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct honor
to introduce Kimberly Bryant.
Thank you, Andia, for that amazing introduction.
I really appreciate that.
Hello, everyone.
It's such an honor to be able to share a little bit with you
today.
So thank you for tuning in for my presentation.
Despite the current challenges of this global pandemic,
I see people rising each day to connect, to learn,
and to serve.
So even if we're all quarantining and maintaining
our physical distance, connecting with others
has never been more important.
And if there was ever a better time
to prioritize learning and growth, this is it.
Now more than ever we need the best, the brightest,
and the most creative minds to help us imagine our best
possible future.
And so with that, I'm really glad to connect with all of you
today and share some thoughts on how we can all find possibility
and opportunity, even during such a great time
of uncertainty.
The organization I founded, Black Girls Code,
was born with a purpose for creating a more equitable
digital landscape.
You could say that we're a digital native.
So it's a little bit of irony there
when we think that now, even we as an organization,
are forced to rely on tech more than we ever had to before.
As a CEO, I'm really striving to help my team thrive given
these almost unimaginable odds.
I'm learning a lot.
And I want to share just a few examples of what
we and a few other organizations and leaders who I both admire
and really respect, both past and present,
have done to turn this crisis into an opportunity.
So let me begin by sharing just a little bit of my own story,
beginning with the changes that we've made here at Black Girls
Code in response to COVID-19.
Black Girls Code as an organization
was founded here in the Bay Area in 2011.
We're a nonprofit that has over 15 chapters across the US
and in Johannesburg, South Africa.
We have workshops and events, enrichments
that we host throughout the year that are really
led by an army of volunteers who are distributed
across the world.
And we have staff operating in two offices, this one
here in Oakland and New York City.
By the first week of march, as we talked amongst ourselves
as our senior leaders, we really kind of figured out
that it was going to be abundantly clear that BGC
would need to create a new plan for 2020.
We turn 10 years old next year.
And over the past nine years, we've
reached over 20,000 students in these chapters that are
distributed around the world.
And to be honest, we've done all of that previous work
via in-person workshops and events
that are held from January through December,
and in classrooms filled with upwards of 100 students
each weekend.
Gathering these girls from underrepresented communities
together to learn about computer science and programming
is the cornerstone of our work.
Black women represent about 3% of graduates
from undergraduate universities with a bachelor's degree
in computer science.
Black women also represent less than 2% of the workforce
and most tech enabled companies.
As early stage entrepreneurs within the same industry,
black women receive less than 0.2%
of all early stage venture capital funding.
So as a founder and I look at these stark realities,
I realize that a major element of the BGC magic
is in creating safe spaces that are dominated
by young black women who are mastering these STEM
principles together.
We really strive to expose them to tech leaders and mentors
who look like them and maybe have similar backgrounds
and experiences as them and who provide them
not just skills in technology but who can give them
a new perspective that they can and, even more importantly,
that they should see themselves as tech and innovation
leaders for the future.
As educators, our first priority at BGC
has always been the health and safety of our communities.
But 2020 reminded us just how critical that core commitment
is.
I have to admit that myself, like many others,
I was really optimistic that things would get back to normal
by the summer, or even perhaps even the early spring.
But now my team and I are faced with the grim reality
that that's not going to happen.
In fact, we realize that normal is probably not
ever coming back.
And even as we learn new ways to keep
our teams, and our students, and our community
safe from COVID-19, we realize that we're also
in the midst of building a new world.
Facing this new reality, we've realized one thing
very quickly.
BGC had to go virtual and possibly
for the foreseeable future, especially for now.
I have an incredible team.
When we began our transition right
around the middle of March, we really
first started by finding ways to stay connected and engage
with each other.
And we utilized some new and some familiar tools
like Slack, Zoom, Google, and many, many other tech
applications.
Staying connected to each other, although we were miles apart,
really brought our team closer together.
And it prepared us to weather the storm of uncertainty
about where our programs would eventually
land in the coming weeks.
Now, in the beginning, we initially
postponed all of our planned in-person workshops
to the late spring and early summer.
But as the weeks pass and the world literally
sheltered in place around us, we realized
that we were going to need a different plan
to meet the needs of our girls.
Our in-person workshops weren't coming back anytime soon,
and no one wanted to talk to us about when that time may be.
Our students and our parents were asking for help,
and they were asking for guidance
on how to keep our girls active, engaged, and learning.
So we did one very important thing at BGC.
We took a step back and we reassessed
what we knew we did really, really well.
We know how to teach our girls tech skills
and to provide them with enrichment opportunities that
support their self-confidence and also their self-awareness.
We were also very blessed to have numerous partners who
were both savvy with tech tools and also willing
to jump in and help us develop curriculum and share
their resources and knowledge with us.
And so we dived headfirst and we launched
our very first virtual event, which was called Tech; Me.
And it's a virtual learning series that teaches everything
from computer coding to virtual reality, the whole gamut
of tech skills.
We started this at the end of April
and we watched in awe as literally thousands
of registrants signed up in a matter of minutes.
Since that very first session in April,
our virtual offerings continue to grow in both frequency as
well as variety.
And we've taught hundreds and hundreds of students
how to build games, how to build websites.
We've collaborated with partners such as Microsoft and Tinkercad
to teach coding.
We've brought together virtual panels of STEM professionals
from all over the country to chat about their journeys
in tech.
And we've even given students behind-the-scenes look
at how innovative new companies such as Fitz Frames
uses 3D modeling and production to make eyeglasses for kids.
This is just a small sampling of the type of experiences
our team have delivered with this new virtual delivery
model.
I am amazed at how this list of opportunities
continues to grow.
And it's really exciting.
Now, that's where things stand currently with BGC.
All of the events that we had originally
planned to do in person have been transitioned
to either virtual programs and, in some cases,
optimistically, eventually maybe a hybrid virtual and in-person
model.
And this may be our reality for the foreseeable future.
But BGC, we consider ourselves extremely lucky.
BGC was built as a bridge to opportunity
in this digital era of transformation.
Many of our staff members, and our volunteers even,
our millennials and--
they're digital natives.
They're a generation who thrives in innovative environments
and who are both resilient and extremely adaptive.
And yet even those like myself who
were born into an era where a Mac, but not to mention
the internet, didn't even exist, I
realized that we experienced this age
of rapid transformation.
And in this next industrial revolution,
utilizing the tools which innovation and technology
provides is paramount to an organization
to be successful, but even more so,
for an organization to survive.
In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if the changes we made
to really thrive during a pandemic
are not just what we needed to scale our impact.
We now have a chance to widen our net
to even broaden our reach, to reach both girls and boys,
and even more communities that we may not have reached
with our in-person workshops.
This new virtual reality really allows us and even
forces us to expand our reach globally and create
even greater connectedness within our communities.
We had a recent version, a session of our Tech;
Me virtual series that was really
focused on teaching game design from students across the US.
Now, we didn't market it beyond the US,
but I was really surprised when I tuned in
and saw not only that we have students
from all across the states.
There were kids from the Netherlands.
There were kids from Jamaica.
There were kids from South Africa, Trinidad, the UK,
Canada.
We reached over 500 students from around the world that day
on a single feed.
I was stunned and I was really surprised.
And it opened my eyes up to the new opportunities
to expand our reach and connect our communities globally
in ways that I hadn't even imagined
before when I was looking for a solution to the pandemic.
Now I'm even more confident in our ability
as an organization to adapt in our ability to thrive,
to widen our net, and to deepen our impact in this new world
that awaits us.
At times I think that perhaps I'm
overly confident, because BGC has always, always been
born to face uphill battles.
20 years ago, I would have never imagined,
and I certainly perhaps wouldn't have
asked, to create a nonprofit organization with chapters
around the world.
Starting a nonprofit is hard.
Starting a nonprofit to literally change
the face of a major industry that had only just begun
to think about diversity as a problem when we started
is even more so.
Seven years ago, I like to think of myself as really
just a nerdy mom who was raising a really geeky daughter who
was 12 at the time and was really interested in anything
tech related, and especially computer gaming.
I never expected my daughter, Kai, to follow in my footsteps.
Really, she told me she didn't want
to be like me, so it was somewhat
a surprise, an internal joke to me as a mom, now
that she is both a computer scientist
and an engineer herself.
When the seed for this idea, for this organization was planted,
it was because I recognized that, although my daughter,
Kai, had unparalleled access to technology, years ago
she was still just really a consumer of it
and not a creator.
We live right here in the heart of Silicon Valley.
And we're surrounded by this growing and thriving tech
industry.
And yet, even with that, there were very few opportunities
for Kai to learn these tech skills
for the future in environments with other girls that
were like her.
I knew that if I really wanted Kai to truly find her tribe,
I was going to have to clear the pathway myself
and to support her journey.
And so that's exactly what I did.
Since BGC began our journey seven years ago
as a small, small grassroots organization in a tiny basement
in San Francisco, Bayview- Hunters Point,
not too far from where I'm sitting today,
we only had about eight girls who were sharing six computers.
Since that time, BGC has grown into a literal movement.
We've reached, as I mentioned before, over 20,000 students
today with our 15 chapters across the US
and in South Africa.
And we love to say that our hefty goal,
our big, hairy, audacious vision is
to teach one million girls to code by the year 2040
and become the girl scouts of technology.
To do this, I really had to harness those skills
that I learned as an engineer despite an issue in the world
and then figure out how to solve it.
A friend of mine and a thought leader, Nilofer Merchant,
says that harnessing this skill set
is really tapping into your onlyness
to become an agent of change.
Nilofer describes onlyness as this unique trait
that we all possess.
So I'm not special.
Neither of us are.
But we do all have this unique individual super power,
if you will.
This super power that you and you alone possess
allows you to identify opportunities
in times of crisis or need and to use your unique talents,
your knowledge, and your gifts to create solutions and ideas
to problems from that distinct spot in the world
that only you stand in.
It's that piece of us, that onlyness that helps
us to actually find our tribe.
And in finding our tribe, we become
the truest of change agents.
And that is all of the story of Black Girls Code.
After nearly a decade of operation,
we've learned a lot about what works for our students
and how to stay relevant as the pace of technological change
consistently grows.
For us, it really starts with cultural efficacy
and prioritizing the development of both the confident mindset
in our students and as they consistently upskill and grow
their skills and talents.
We integrate these relevant cultural practices
into the heart of every programmatic design decision.
BGC's program team chooses technology projects, not just
for their pedagogical value.
But frequently, those projects focus
on how the students experience life and express themselves
culturally.
And it's that that helps them solve challenges that they see
in their communities every day.
Now, recently I participated in a webinar,
in a meeting with several other digital equity
leaders that was convened by the Obama foundation.
And in that meeting, I was asked to articulate,
in my very brief minute to talk, what
my team and I had learned and had
to rethink as we went through this global pandemic.
And before I tell you what happened there,
can I just say that change management is a huge challenge
under the normal circumstances.
And here we are, all are now, forced
into managing change for ourselves,
our households, our communities, and also
in our organizations underneath the shadow of a pandemic.
I just wanted to pause on that thought
because it's important to recognize
that this is really hard.
And so we also have to give ourselves
and each other a little bit of space
to breathe and to gain perspective
and then to lean in and start over.
So back to the call.
I'm on this call with a lot of people
that I really respect and I look to for support.
And I shared, though, one of the most challenging pieces for BGC
as we kind of really navigate it,
how we can utilize these virtual skill sets,
was to break down how we thought before, especially
about geography.
When I mentioned before the history of BGC,
it's a really important point that we
were built on local chapters.
We support and we guide them through the curriculum that we
create, the cultural expectations that we set,
supplies, logistics, training.
But if you look at BGC before, the DC chapter
is very different from the Dallas chapter.
And then the South African chapter
is in a world of its own.
We got really, really good at that chapter-based model,
and we've grown our organization by adding chapters.
But getting good at supporting chapters and organizing
local events for our students for almost a decade means
that--
I talked to my team.
It was really hard, really hard for me
to get them to stop thinking from that frame of reference.
When I tuned into the Tech; Me event series a few weeks ago,
I started to look at the pictures
of the kids on the screen from all over the world, little
black and brown kids sitting in front of the laptops
at their homes, learning about coding.
And I thought, my gosh, we could literally
reach kids from throughout the African diaspora in ways
that were not possible before.
And even when things get back to some kind of normal,
how could we not continue some or maybe most
of our programming in this way?
Now, I've thought as a CEO for many, many years
about adding some type of virtual element to our work.
But now that that's the only option,
my eyes have truly opened to all of the new possibilities that
are available to us.
Making this change to a virtual platform
is definitely going to be a long road.
And we're still in very much of a learning process.
For one thing, we were really good at infusing
these cultural practices and cultural relevancy
in our in-person workshops and event.
BGC is an organization.
But BGC is also an experience.
Everybody knows that when they are in a BGC space
that it's something special.
So when I was looking at this workshop on Zoom,
I was trying to, I guess, imagine,
how could we translate the specialness of a BGC workshop
on a platform like a Zoom or webinar?
And then it dawned on me.
In essence, we have to show the kids,
and those kids have to see each other.
We have to reenvision our programs
and get the tech right, yes.
But those kids all across the world need to see each other.
BGC educates its students, yes.
But we also transform self-image.
And in those safe spaces, we create these group identities
that are built on mutual support and a shared strength
and a pride in who they are.
We can't lose the BGC magic.
We can't lose that culture of connectedness.
So that's how BGC is adapting.
And it's been a long road, but we're learning a lot.
And we get better each and every day.
But I also wanted to share the stories of a few other leaders
that have pivoted and created positive change also
in their lines of work under the same level of uncertainty
that I have experienced myself.
I wanted to start with an example that's
pretty close to home.
The East Oakland Collective is a nonprofit organization
that was founded by Oakland native Candice Elder in 2016.
It was a response to what she saw as gentrification
and disenfranchisement creeping into this very
close-knit community in which she was born and raised.
EOC uses an army of volunteers, many of them
millennial professionals, to catalyze efforts focused
on providing economic empowerment, civic engagement,
and homelessness services for longtime residents in Oakland,
California and surrounding counties.
Before the pandemic, their most popular program
was called Feed the Hood.
And it was responsible for distributing meals and hygiene
kits across Oakland and Berkeley,
utilizing their team of 200 to 400 volunteers per week.
Now, all of that changed when COVID-19
erupted in early march.
EOC was forced to adjust everything
about how they did their work.
Large gatherings here in the Bay Area were suspended.
The catering company that they worked with closed.
And the critical supplies that Candace and her team
needed for the hygiene kits was extremely hard to come by.
And yet they quickly adapted.
Candice and her team built relationships
with restaurants that were now not operating.
They created other partnerships that
allowed them to increase their source of supply.
And they pivoted to delivering meals
every few days to delivering and distributing
meals almost daily, but now to seniors, to disabled residents,
to low income families who are now struggling in addition
to the homeless populations they served before.
And in that one little change, they quickly
went from distributing about 400 meals per week to over 1,000.
EOC saw an opportunity.
And in the midst of a crisis, they
harnessed the uniqueness and the skills and capabilities
of their tribe to fill the needs of an expanded community.
So much of what EOC is doing is analogous to our work right
here at BGC.
And when I learned of their story it truly, truly moved me.
Founder Candice said in a recent article in which she
was profiled that all of the food that is distributed
by her organization is carefully curated
and is made in commercial kitchens and food service
facilities across the Bay Area.
She even personally taste tests every single meal
to ensure its quality before it's
given to the EOC community.
She said, and I quote, "We pride ourselves in quality."
EOC and her team has a goal to give everyone
a full and nutritious meal.
And sometimes they even deny and turn down certain donations
if they don't meet their criteria.
She said in the same article, "If you're
going to hand somebody a loaf of bread,
at least give them some peanut butter and jelly or sandwich
meat."
Like EOC who's feeding the body, BGC and our work
are really focused on feeding minds,
which is why we should do everything
that we do with quality.
And it's also why we are also prudent with how we partner.
We're just not looking to hand out a loaf of bread
or teach our girls a few lines of coding skills.
We want our kids to have all the fixings, including
the career and the life skills they
need to survive in this new digitally connected world.
But this is not really the first time in history
that leaders, and women leaders in particular,
have faced extraordinary challenges,
made tough decisions, and ultimately
made huge strides for their causes.
I recently learned by another powerful sister.
Emmeline Pankhurst was a leader of the movement for women's
suffrage in Great Britain.
Now, when World War I broke out in 1914,
Emmeline made a decision that I can hardly imagine.
She deferred all of her work that she
had been spending on the equal voting rights campaign
and redirected and organized her supporters
to back the war effort.
Now, this is important because it radically
shifted the perceptions in Great Britain of women's roles
in societies.
And as they took up these jobs that were traditionally
held by men and their male counterparts,
they changed the perception of a woman's equal worth
in the workplace.
So now, while the war ravaged towards its conclusion in 1918,
the first suffrage law was passed,
bringing 8.4 million women into the voting ranks.
Shortly after the war concluded, the government
passed a law allowing women to be elected to parliament.
Now, I often thought about, would
that movement have seen such a rapid shift
without the onslaught of the war?
That's impossible to say.
But one thing for sure is Emmeline's strategic savvy
in the face of crises and really being flexible in how she
redirected her work cannot be denied.
It was that critical decision that
changed the whole narrative for women in Great Britain
and have ripples across the pond.
How can we all pivot in this time to serve communities
and also to advance our organizational missions?
Luckily, here at Black Girls Code,
we aren't faced with a call to defer.
In fact, we believe that the COVID-19 pandemic really
highlighted the needs of black and brown communities
that we serve.
And that just reinforces our purpose
to diversify the tech workforce and tech leadership
ranks so that our future is defined by a technology sector
that serves everyone equitably.
When I think about the examples of these women
that I mentioned that are leading through crises,
I'm reminded that we can't get those kind of solutions
without diverse teams and diverse thinking.
For me and for BGC, this has made
me think about two frontiers.
One is internal and one global.
It's really great.
And we're lucky that here at BGC we
have both Gen X and millennial perspectives on the team.
But there's still a gap.
We engage Gen z.
We serve them.
And we all know that when each generation emerges,
they embrace different technologies
and adopt the whole suite of available technology
quite differently.
But if we were to be blind to the platforms and spaces
that Gen Z adopts, would our organization be as successful?
What about those generations of learners
that haven't even been born?
With this thought, I'm now challenging myself
and even challenging my team to learn about more youth web
models for organizations.
How can we include even the youngest kids in our target age
range as leaders who inform our decisions and, even better,
inform the designs of the programs that we deliver.
Now, this is going to take a big rethink of everything
we do and all of our history up to date.
And I will be honest and say, it's a little scary.
But it's also very exciting.
We've also discovered in this time
that, during this digital shift, the digital divide is still
alive and thriving.
And who has access to technology isn't as clear
as we once thought it was before.
There is definitely an unlevel playing field.
This unlevel playing field could prevent us
from reaching the communities who would
benefit from our work the most.
And as a result, our commitment at BGC
is really about speaking out about these policies,
or the lack thereof, in the corporate sector
and governments that really lead to creating this unequal access
to technology and education.
We built a movement to confront the global tech industry's
urgent need for global diversity and inclusion.
And I'm committed to reaching a million girls by 2040.
But to reach our goals, I will be asking our movement
to step up even more, to use their voices,
to use their knowledge and their savvy, their access
to decision makers to say we need
to invest in every community.
Because a digital transformation that
isn't accessible to everyone may not be a transformation at all
but simply reproduces or even worsens historical divides.
I hope the stories and the thoughts
that I've shared with you today helped
to inspire you to look for and to create hope
and clear-headed thinking that we really
need now in order to survive and support our communities.
I hope that you come away curious
about how you can ask of each challenge,
is there an opportunity hiding in here?
The answer may not always be a yes.
I'll tell you that.
But if you keep looking, if you keep refreshing
the way you look at the world around you,
if you stay curious, flexible, nimble,
and take the long-term view when solving a problem,
I'm confident, so confident, that you'll find something
inside with your onlyness as your superpower
to make the changes you need to survive personally
and in your professional lives.
And it might just be the transformation
you need to thrive once we all return to whatever normal
will look like after this time.
I also hope you take it upon yourself
to prioritize finding and supporting diverse leadership.
Now, what does that look like?
On a personal level, perhaps you have an opportunity
to mentor a young woman or a person of color in your work
or through your community service in your neighborhood,
in your community.
If you do, I hope you listen as much if not more
than you advise.
If you are a leader in your organization or a decision
maker, a hiring manager for your team,
I hope that you tap into this growing pool of resources
for creating, maintaining, and evolving your diversity
and inclusion strategy.
Now, I know all of these things and everything that I've shared
is asking a lot.
But the world is asking for us to give
everything we have right now, and then maybe even some.
And I'm going to ask for one more thing.
And this is something especially for you.
I ask that you navigate this moment with empathy.
And as a parting thought, I want to tell
you to be kind to first yourself and then to others.
We have the tools, digital and otherwise,
to make it through this transformational moment one
step at a time with our eyes on building a better
future together that's more equitable and fair
for each and every one of us.
Thank you, and be well.
Thank you, Kimberly, for sharing the inspirational story
and impact of Black Girls Code.
So glad you could join us today.
Next up at the top of the hour, we
will turn our focus to The Augmented Human
with insights from Dr. Helen Papagiannis.
We'll be right back after a short break.