Coding a Solution for Youth in Technology

On Tuesday at a special event held at Twilio’s San Francisco headquarters, Chopra
announced three tech-focused initiatives to support President Barack Obama’s Summer Jobs+ program, announced in early January.

“Hiring someone for the summer is not the only thing we can do,” Chopra said during at announcement at Twilio‘s headquarters in San Francisco. “We need to train, educate and support.”

New Summer Jobs+ Partners

Codecademy, a startup that provides hands-on tutorials for would-be software developers, pledged to create “Code Summer+”.  A condensed version of the recently launched Code Year, the Code Summer+ program aims to teach thousands of low-income youth the basics of programming in over a summer.

The Level Playing Field Institute, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, will expand its Summer Math and Science Honors (SMASH) Academy, which helps prepare low-income and under-represented high school students of color for college through a rigorous curriculum focused on science, technology, engineering and math. This year SMASH will be held on four college campuses: UC Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA and USC.

College Bound Brotherhood, an initiative of Mitchell Kapor Foundation that mentors African American men,  will launch a summer internship program to place African American youths in Bay Area tech companies with the goal of giving them experience and motivation to pursue tech-related careers.