community service a core part of the company culture. It’s even a recruiting tactic to attract civic-minded talent...
think about the $25,000 to $40,000 that tech companies routinely pay to recruiters as a percentage of a successful hire’s first-year salary. Could some of that be put to work in educational or training programs that level up local residents who have the drive and ambition instead?...
Brown’s bootcamp graduates its first class tomorrow, with 15 students that range from a Special Forces veteran to a former non-technical Google employee. Brown, who never graduated college, started Telegraph Academy after finishing at Hack Reactor. He said he felt an obligation to bring what he had learned to his own community. So he partnered with Hack Reactor to create a specialized set of curriculum.
“I had spent three months going through a rigorous course, from making zero dollars to having the potential to make $100,000. I didn’t see anyone around me that had that opportunity. Nobody knew what I was doing. In fact, they thought it was a pyramid scheme,” he said. “I wanted to build something that would expose people to opportunities in tech right in their backyard in San Francisco.”
In addition to Telegraph, there are scores of other non-profit groups like Hack the Hood, Qeyno Labs and Black Girls Code, which are focused on training people of color on how to get into tech.
These are the human, intangible advantages that Oakland has that the Latino community of the San Francisco Mission District lacks — a unique mixture of local leaders of color who work in and really get the tech industry and successful entrepreneurs like Mitch Kapor, who sold Lotus to IBM for $3.5 billion in 1995 and has spent years thinking about inclusion and social justice....
Only last year did Ron Conway’s sf.Citi open a “Circle The Schools” program to get technology startups to a “adopt” a local public school. Likewise, the big non-profit that has been serving the Mission’s Latino community since 1960s, MEDA, has a small “Mission Techies” program connects local Latino youth to neighborhood startups like Double Dutch for visits.
Another fast-growing program called MissionBit puts dozens of volunteer programming instructors in the San Francisco Unified School District’s after school programs. Last year, they had too many volunteers and too few kids. Now the reverse is true and they need more coding instructors.
All of these are good ideas. It’s just that they should have been started years ago....
Now a decade later, Mission Housing is finally back in the game and is competing against MEDA, with each gunning to acquire land for affordable housing. But now land is selling for more than $250,000 per buildable unit before construction and permitting. That’s why both are supporting a November ballot initiative for a moratorium on market-rate development in the Mission, so they can affect land values and crowd out for-profit developers from getting the remaining parcels first....
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