There are many ways to celebrate Black History Month, and while it’s important to look back at our history from Martin Luther King to those that paved the way in regards to racial justice – it’s equally important to celebrate Black joy and Black excellence in other areas too. One area where the community is really making moves in tech. It’s no secret that diversity is a challenge in the tech world, with the industry lagging behind the rest of the economy on almost every diversity metric, but it’s important
Cynthia is an innovative scientist, an advocate for Black girls and women. Through her organization, Black Girls Do STEM, she has been able to help dozens of middle and high school students by exposing them to career pathways and empowering them to become STEM professionals. Black Girls Do STEM has impacted over 60 girls locally and worked across seven school districts, 13 community partners and secured three grant funders in two years. Unfortunately, being a Black woman in a majority white male industry comes with challenges. Speaking to Megha Mohan
Rebundle, a hair-focused startup based in St. Louis creating and selling hair extensions made from plant-based materials, has announced that it has raised $1.4 million in a pre-seed round. The idea came from Ciara Imani May’s passion for living more sustainably, which she had been trying to do even before she launched the startup with co-founder Danielle Washington. Speaking to media, she explained that in 2019 she wanted to look for a solution to the itchiness on her scalp as well as the waste associated with hair extensions. Rebundle launched
You should probably know what NFTs are by now since these three-letter words have been floating around our headlines, Twitter timelines, and TV screens for the past few weeks now. But for those of you who are behind on this latest trend – we’ll let you off and give you a little reminder. What is an NFT? NFT means a Non-fungible token. The best explanation I’ve seen for it is “Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is
Deloitte Digital has announced a new initiative with The Stepladder Foundation to provide laptops, software, and study materials to UK students enrolling in Stepladder courses. The Stepladder Foundation is a charity offering flexible approaches to learning for Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic young people identified as disadvantaged. They’ve previously run programs across London, Birmingham, and the West of England- and are now focusing again on Greater London. They take referrals from schools to recruit, but some participants ‘step up’ and enroll themselves when they hear about the initiative. Their flagship programs last
Black people produce and share substantially more content than other groups on Facebook. While Facebook Stories has low usage in most of the U.S., it has “clusters of intense production” in places with a high concentration of African Americans, such as the arc in the Southeast known as the Black Belt, Facebook research found. But increasingly, the community seems to be turning away from the app. The number of Black monthly users on Facebook declined 2.7% in a single month to 17.3 million adults, according to a research report, “Industry Update on
There have been dozens of stories written this year about people that used lockdown as a way to better themselves or to learn a new and beneficial skill but I don’t think many have had the privilege of hearing Asia Sharif’s story. The proudly Black and Muslim woman is inspiring for many reasons – one being that she is a self-taught ‘Junior Software Engineer and Blockchain Developer’ that used the pandemic as an opportunity to change career paths and teach herself how to code. The second reason is that she
Seventh-grader Serenity Marie and her mother Quyionah Wingfield recently launched Gen Connect Game, a platform to spark more family engagement through a curated list of questions and in-app activities. With the help of Carleton College’s Hack4Impact, a program of engineers that provide nonprofits with software, Wingfield and Serenity took what started as a brainstormed idea into an app that aims to tackle emotional isolation that comes with a loss in families for all generations. Gen Connect also comes with a specific Parent Guide, designed in tandem with Emory University, and provides tips on various topics
The Black community has long played a profound role in shaping the world as we know it today and although they haven’t always been rewarded for it – they have been in this business for a long time. For example – did you know that more than 90 percent of the microphones used today, including those in phones and cameras, use technology co-invented by Dr. James E. West? Microphones Mr. West, a Black man who was also was appointed president-elect of the Acoustical Society of America in 1997, started his long
To succeed – you need the right tools, and people of color trailblazing in the tech and engineering space are giving back to their communities by creating initiatives to help further propel those looking to step foot into the sector. One such techie is Asia Sharif, a self-taught Junior Software Engineer, Blockchain Developer, and Co-Founder of TechNewbies, an educational technology platform. From a non-technical background, she went into technology in January 2021 as she’s always been fascinated by the world, particularly technology and its implications for the future. Ms. Sharif
