Tech Refactored

S2E3 - Teaching Girls to Code: Tech Literacy for Underrepresented Groups at the Local Level

August 20, 2021 Nebraska Governance and Technology Center Season 2 Episode 3
Tech Refactored
S2E3 - Teaching Girls to Code: Tech Literacy for Underrepresented Groups at the Local Level
Show Notes Transcript

On this episode of Tech Refactored our Executive Producer Elsbeth Magilton interviews Justin Stark and Aakriti Agrawal, founders of local non-profit, Girls Code Lincoln. They discuss the need for tech instruction for young women, pivoting how we reach communities during a pandemic, and the lessons learned from forming their own non-profit.

Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and has not been thoroughly reviewed for completeness or accuracy.

[00:00:00] Gus Herwitz: This is Tech Refactored. I'm your host, Gus Herwitz, the Menard Director of the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center at the University of Nebraska. Today we're going to be discussing exciting work being done by Girls Code Lincoln, an organization that teaches girls about technology  through creativity, community collaboration, and confidence building.

To do that, we're joined by Aakriti Agrawal, a data governance analyst at Emeritus and Justin J. Stark, a senior software engineer at the A Day Foundation. Both of them are co-founders of Girls Code Lincoln. Also with us is our executive director, Elsbeth Magilton, who is the incoming board president of Girls Code Lincoln.

She interviewed our guests about the origin story of or Girls Code Lincoln its mission and how it managed to pivot to manage the challenges posed by the COVID 19 pandemic.[00:01:00] 

[00:01:04] Elsbeth Magilton: Hi listeners. I am so excited to be back on the show to highlight an organization and mission that is near and dear to my heart. I joined the Girls Code Lincoln Board in March of 2020 just as the workshops and classes were all grinding to a halt. Watching our founders and our leaders pivot and continue has been inspirational and I'm really par proud to be part of it at a strategic level and help support our mission.

And today I'm happy and proud to bring you the Girls Code Lincoln. Welcome, Aakriti  and Justin, to Tech Refactored. 

[00:01:32] Justin Stark: Thanks for having us. 

[00:01:33] Elsbeth Magilton: Well, to get started, can you just tell us a little bit about Girls Code Lincoln and how it came into being your origin story, if you will? Yeah, so 

[00:01:40] Justin Stark: our mission is all about teaching girls how to code, but not just code. We also teach them leadership skills. We teach STEM competence and a whole bunch of other things. This all started way back in 2015. I was at a uh, morning. I think it was called Copy and code conference and someone came up to me with a flyer and said, Hey, we're [00:02:00] looking for volunteers, uh, to teach girls how to code.

So I took the flyer and I thought, Hey, this would be something that I'm interested in doing. So this all started because there were a few people in town who wanted to start Girls Who Code Clubs and Girls Who Code as a national chain. Allows you to create local chapters easily, and they provide you a lot of resources like curriculum and the name and some marketing things to really help you get going so that even if you don't know how to code, um, you can still jump in and do it.

So originally these people created seven middle school clubs and I taught at one of them for three semesters. Before we kind of outgrew the middle school, just because, you know, middle school networking was always an issue. A middle school administration was always something that we'd have to fight with a little bit.

So we kind of decided, hey, let's, let's take this out of the middle school and find our own place. And then eventually that led into, hey, let's create our own non-profit organization to help us out with fundraising and, uh, be a little bit more local focused. 

[00:02:58] Aakriti Agrawal: Yeah, I stepped in somewhere in [00:03:00] between there.

So 2016, um, I was learning how to computer program. And saw the girls who code Lincoln's the local chapter of Girls Who Code Booth at, um, a TEDx Youth event and thought that I would start volunteering. And so that's when Justin and I met and, um, we both were volunteers at the time and then went through the formation process together.

[00:03:25] Elsbeth Magilton: So what were the objectives of Girls Code Lincoln? Or I guess more, kinda more specifically, did you see a need when you were doing, when you started all of this that was being unfulfill? And what was your goal in fulfilling that and and what were your initial objectives when you kind of broke out of um, both the middle school mold and then also the girls who cold mold 

[00:03:45] Aakriti Agrawal: to start Girls Code Lincoln?

Yeah, so I think Justin and I both as people in technology working in the field, see that there's a gap, and that's something that I'm assuming a lot of your listeners are familiar with, but [00:04:00] one in four jobs in it are held by. But three and four girls express an interest in computer science and STEM in general.

So there's definitely this gap where, um, girls are really interested in these fields, but then are lost somewhere in the way before they enter the workforce. So the need is very apparent. There's a lot of work being done around the country, um, in this area, and both of us kind of saw that and so did the people that preceded us.

But the objectives of Girls Code Lincoln are to encourage girls in our community to learn more about technology and learn more about STEM in general. So STEM is pretty unavoidable in today's workforce, um, no matter what field they go into, and there aren't a lot of opportunities, um, for every kid in our community to learn more about these fields.

So that's where we see our sweet spot. Um, we want to show technology. Show opportunities in STEM to every kid in our community, um, particularly those that are underrepresented in the field. We do this in a few different ways, [00:05:00] so we've noticed that we need to teach kids STEM and technology more hands on.

So hands on activities are very important to children so that they learn and aren't interested in these fields. Girls in particular really enjoy seeing social impact and they want these activities to be. So one of the first activities that, um, Justin and I ran together, um, that Justin had been running for a long time actually is, um, using conductive thread to throw lights into clothes.

Um, and that was a really cool way for little, for younger girls to show their peers that tech can be fun and cool, um, give them something cool to wear, that lights up and they can change the colors. Um, we also really focus on confidence building, so it's important for girls to be able to talk about technology and talk about.

And share what they're learning with their peers as well as adults. And then the last part, um, else Beth, that you're pretty familiar with is representation. So we try to show our girls that STEM is for them, um, and that women [00:06:00] really did lead the way in technology. . And so this is a space that's welcoming to them.

[00:06:05] Justin Stark: Yeah, and getting girls involved is really important to us. I work on a development team that is seven people, and not a single, one of them is a woman. Uh, I also saw this at a summer camp that I used to teach at. We taught kids robotics and we'd have about 20 kids in each class, and usually it was about 18 boys and then about two girls.

Which was kind of crazy. But then once we created a club for girls only, so it was like girls in robotics, those clubs would fill up. So that really showed us that this wasn't just a problem that girls don't like this stuff, it's that so much of it does not seem like it would be something that they would be interested in.

So we wanna show girls that technology is something that can be fun for them, that they can enjoy it, and that they can pursue it in their lives. 

[00:06:53] Elsbeth Magilton: So I think that's really interesting, this idea that girls were more willing to or more interested in signing up for these classes when they [00:07:00] knew they were gonna be with other women or other young girls who were learning this.

And do you think that, is that part of the inspiration? I'm, I'm hoping and guessing for some of the confidence building that it, it is a confidence factor that they maybe are more intimidated or less likely to wanna be a part of it when it's a almost all male. , Um, but that it's a little bit less intimidating maybe if they're in a group with other girls.

[00:07:23] Justin Stark: Absolutely. And the research shows that girls really lose interest in technology around fourth or fifth grade, so that's really why we try to target this like fourth through ninth grade girls and get them involved in that way. We can kind of push them along, keep them interested in technology through high school and maybe encourage them to go into- to college, these things.

[00:07:38] Aakriti Agrawal: Yeah, and there's, I think, to be successful in areas of STEM, there's a lot of trial and error in the process.

Girls in general are, uh, societally taught to be perfect. We're taught that everything we do has to be perfect. It has to be right the first time. Um, something we notice in club really often as a girl will type in a line of code and then [00:08:00] delete the whole thing before raising her hand. Um, boys tend to be more risk takers.

They're taught to be more adventurous when they're younger. They're taught to climb to the top of the jungle gym instead of being told to be careful. And so, um, we really try to enforce in our girls that it's okay to be wrong and it's okay to ask for help. Um, and it's okay to try things. That's, that's how we get stuff done. When you, when you code. 

[00:08:22] Justin Stark: Yeah. And then there's this sort of negative feedback loop where if you're a girl and you go into a classroom and it's just full of boys, like you can immediately lose interest in that. Uh, we had an interesting occasion a couple years ago when we were holding a workshop and this workshop was designed for girls, but we let boys be involved and in the end we had something like 20 girls and one or two boys.

And I got feedback from the mother who said, Oh, my son was really uncomfortable being in this class with all these girls. And my thought was, Oh, that's really interesting. That's probably how all the girls feel when in these classes with all these boys. 

[00:08:56] Elsbeth Magilton: ...and never bring it up and never mention it, because they're probably [00:09:00] expecting to go into a room of ex- competition being the only girl. That's interesting, right. 

[00:09:05] Elsbeth Magilton: So kind of pivoting back a little bit on what you were mentioning earlier about certain communities and underrepresented communities, so it's not just about girls. It sounds like you're also interested in reaching out to communities where those kids might not have had access to really unique or specialized extracurricular activities like Girls Code.

So what were some of your, or what are some of the strategies and methods for reaching out to some of those communities and what kind of barriers do you hit when you're doing that? 

[00:09:32] Justin Stark: So our programs, we try to hold them in areas where we think they'll be beneficial. So, Our clubs have always been held in the downtown area, in underrepresented areas.

We've had workshops at the Bay, which is a local community organization. We've had workshops at the Malone Center, which is really like a diverse youth center, so we, we try to meet the girls where they are. Also, all of our clubs are completely free for girls, so [00:10:00] anybody can come and, and learn. When we do have workshops that cost money, we offer scholarships to the girls.

So we really don't want money to be a barrier for anything that we 

[00:10:10] Aakriti Agrawal: do. I think one of the big barriers with access in our city is we're the only club doing what we're doing, and we have a lot of resource constraints in terms of volunteers and space, and so we can only take a certain number of students a year, and that makes it really hard.

There's a lot of kids in our community that want to learn how to code A lot of girls. But also just there's a lot of boys as well that want to learn and we are not able to provide enough resources or enough spots in our clubs to cater to the Lincoln community. And that's a really difficult barrier for us because we've actually, So Justin mentioned, we, when we first started out doing our clubs in Turine Flats in the Haymarket, we had seven girls that we were teaching, and that's when I started volunteering.

We've grown to 50 pre pandemic, so when we shut down for the pandemic, we were [00:11:00] teaching 50 girls. And a lot of that growth was because we received application from our girl, from girls in the community, and it's really hard to say no to a fourth grader. One of our biggest barriers is just resource constraints.

How do we teach enough kids fast enough? 

[00:11:14] Justin Stark: Yeah. We really went from how do we get people to know about us single girls in our clubs, which was a problem originally to now of a sudden, how do we get enough resources to teach all these girls, which is a totally different problem. 

[00:11:29] Elsbeth Magilton: Thinking about resources, but I know we were, or girls Code Lincoln was initially part of Girls Who Code in the national organization, which arguably maybe has different resources, if not necessarily more, but different resources. And I know there was still a local fundraising uh, portion to that. You can talk a little bit about why it was important to you all to be more local than that and to be a little bit more specific to Lincoln and, and what that means from a fundraising perspective and a services perspective. 

[00:11:57] Justin Stark: Yeah, Girls Who Code is a wonderful [00:12:00] organization and all the work that they're doing is amazing and we are really happy to start out with them.

Girls Who Code is a very broad. Kind of shallow organization where they, they wanna spread across the country and get as many chapters started as they can. Our focus really is on, we want to be very narrow and very deep. We wanna be a part of the Lincoln community and teach girls in Lincoln how to code.

So we really wanted to kind of. Break away from them. It also helped us with our fundraising. We have a lot of companies in Lincoln that wanted to give to nonprofit organizations, so becoming our own 5 0 1 C3 organization has helped us. Fundraise has helped us partner with, uh, community organizations and companies in Lincoln to put on workshops.

We've created our own curriculum so we can kind of build that however we want to cater to the girls that are in our clubs and what they're interested 

[00:12:51] Aakriti Agrawal: in. I think one of our biggest successes has been the Lincoln community. We're a hundred percent locally funded. We're a hundred percent volunteer run.[00:13:00] 

We have zero employees that work for us, and so we really are the blood, sweat, and tears of Lincoln, and I think that gives a lot back to our students. So our students see that this community inve is investing in them both monetarily as well as with time and skills. I think that creates a really cool environment for us to be in.

We're able to create more networking opportunities for our volunteers, and we're able to bring people together within our community and the corporations and individuals that donate to us are able to help support what we do. But that 

[00:13:31] Elsbeth Magilton: gives me chills. Like I love our community and I love this really community centric approach.

And I think the really important thing you said there was is that the girls. And that the students see that their community specifically is investing in them. People who live and work right by their schools, their homes, where they go shopping are part of that. And I think that's, that's really cool. I am curious a little bit more about some of the volunteers.

So it sounds like, you know, as we're looking at a all [00:14:00] volunteer run organization, that's a ton of coordination, but that's also a ton of people that you just need to both write curriculum and then teach the cu. Can you talk a little bit more about where you find your volunteers, who they normally are and what kind of roles they have in in the organization and in the community?

[00:14:16] Aakriti Agrawal: Yeah, I think, I think when you're called Girls Code Lincoln, people assume that all your volunteers are female and coders and in Lincoln, and those first two aren't necessarily true. So we have volunteers of all ages, every gender, every part of town. We have a few volunteers that were from Lincoln and have moved away and continue to volunteer.

And then all of our volunteers are actually not computer programmers, so all of our marketing is done through volunteers. Our finance, our board members are all volunteers. Justin and I are both volunteers, and so every single aspect of running a nonprofit, very similar to running a corporation and we run that all of that through volunteers.

We've been pretty fortunate, I would say, where we do have a lot of people reach out to [00:15:00] us. Elizabeth, how you got involved with us is you reached out and thought what we were working on was cool and wanted to be involved. That's how we've done a lot of, a lot of this. We do recruit quite heavily from the university, so the rakes program provides a lot of volunteers to us that are students, and they've been a huge asset to us.

And then a lot of the corporations in town actually spend volunteers as well. So we've been pretty lucky to recruit from those two 

[00:15:24] Justin Stark: ways. One of the biggest challenges, I think, is that we are a hundred percent volunteer run. So we're not paying anybody to do any of this work, and there's so much work to be done.

So a big challenge for us has been how do we motivate people to be involved and to stay accountable to the things that that need to get done in order to, for us to have a successful organization and have all these programs. I mean, we need teachers. We need, uh, facilitators, We need people to write curriculum.

We need people to help us with our finances, to be on our board and all of this. That's just been a learning process for me personally, is, is [00:16:00] how do we meet, how do we motivate people and keep them engaged? And we always need to get more peoples, How do we recruit new people as other people kind of move away?

Because a lot of our volunteers are from UNL and they graduate and they move on. So we need to continually get more people involved. I think that's really 

[00:16:17] Elsbeth Magilton: interesting. You know, I, I worked with another nonprofit where our community base was largely new. . And one of the big challenges that we had as the board was once people's kids got older, they lost interest in the mission.

One thing I think is really special about Girls' Code is that your volunteers can stay passionate about this mission, even as their life circumstances change. And I think it says a lot about the impact in the community that you have so many people reach out who wanna be involved, you know, whether it ends up being a really long term relationship or short term.

I think that's a pretty special thing to be really proud of. We're gonna take a break here in just a minute and talk a little bit about how we pivoted to Covid 19. But before we do that, I'm wondering if there are any stories that [00:17:00] you can share in terms of cool outcomes that you've had, uh, for empowering young women, whether that was a volunteer who's got on to do something, um, or one of your first few classes of young women who are doing things out in the community.

[00:17:14] Justin Stark: Yeah, we've had a number of girls that have done things outside of Girls Code Lincoln that we're super proud of. Um, the girls in our clubs help us in so many other ways to start with, so when we've held workshops in the community, they've step up and volunteered and actually taught other girls how to code, which is really awesome.

We've had girls who presented it 1 million Cups, which is a, a presentation. Usually for businesses and they can talk about their startup and how things are going. Well. These girls created a project and they were able to show it to the whole community at one of these events, and they all spoke and it was really, really cute.

We've had some of our girls who've been on TV representing girls called Lincoln on tv, so that's been really amazing. Um, we had one of our students who. Was in Destination Imagination, which I [00:18:00] guess is like a, I think it's a high school program for technology, a competition, and did really well there using some of the things that she learned at Girls Code Lincoln.

[00:18:08] Aakriti Agrawal: Something that we really try to focus on is how we're impacting both our volunteers and our students. So from a student perspective, one of our students, we had just taught her how to create websites, and she went back home and negotiated a price with her parents to create a website for their vacation.

So firstly, she was confident enough to pitch her skills, but secondly knew that it was worth the price and she created a, a website for their vacation home that they used. So that was pretty cool. She knew to negotiate that and she actually went back and made a second contract with them for updates to the website, which I thought was really cool.

A very cool thing for middle schoolers to be doing. And then we've had a few volunteers that have wanted to do career pivot. And we've tried to help out with that. So, uh, we have one that was an accountant and wanted to move into project management, and we had her lead project management for our organization [00:19:00] and kind of helped her get some of those skills.

So that's something that's really important to us as well, where our volunteers gain skills and gain expertise from our non-profit as well, which is, 

[00:19:10] Justin Stark: And one of our students is now on our board too, so that's really cool. 

[00:19:15] Elsbeth Magilton: So I am a web developer turned-legal researcher and administrator, and I have to admit, the person who went home and created and negotiated out a contract, create a website with her parents, sounds like she might be a great candidate for another programmer who goes to law school,

[00:19:33] Aakriti Agrawal: Oh, definitely. We'll have to.

[00:19:38] Elsbeth Magilton: All right. Well, we will be right back to talk more about Girls Code Lincoln.

[00:19:49] Neil Rutledge: Hi, my name is Neil Rutledge and I'm the research associate at the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, and I'm also the author of our episode reviews, if you'd like to share this or [00:20:00] any other episodes with your friends, but can never get them to listen to podcast. Send them our five minute reviews available on our website at tc.unl.edu/blog.

Now back to this episode of Tanker Factor. 

[00:20:17] Elsbeth Magilton: We are back with the founders of Girls Code Lincoln and Justin, thanks for being with us here today. I kind of wanna talk a little bit about what everyone is talking about, which is the Covid 19. And how that changed our lives in 2020, how it's still changing our lives in 2021.

But if we take ourselves back to 2019, Oh, what were your plans in terms of programs and events before the pandemic in, in that moment, maybe that you realized that those weren't going to happen?

[00:20:47] Aakriti Agrawal: happen? Uh, the, the most terrifying moment to talk about. Right. So pre-pandemic, we were running weekend clubs, so every Sunday we would have 50.

Come into a co-working [00:21:00] space in the haymarket and learn how to code. These girls are fourth to ninth grade and so they really like to run around and there's a lot of physical contact because they like to hug each other and play games and, yeah, not, not the best thing when, you know, March, 2020 hits. So we were running our clubs, and clubs were going great and we started to notice what's happening, what was happening around the country, and decided that it was.

Gross Code Girls Code Lincoln's best interest, but also in the best interest of our students and our volunteers to just stop. So we canceled our clubs fairly abruptly. If I remember correctly, our students were on spring break, and so we just decided to not, uh, restart clubs after spring break. And we canceled e- every in-person meeting.

So if our volunteers were meeting in person, we had just onboarded a brand new board of directors and we had to cancel our in-person meetings for that as well. And we also had a very large, our first ever fundraising event that was supposed to take place in May of [00:22:00] 2020. It was a amazing race style event where people would be running around town and visiting different businesses in different locations, which also seemed like a terrible idea in the pandemic.

So we ended up canceling that as well. So very abrupt canceling, and, uh, went back to, to the drawing board and tried to decide what this would look like with minimal information. We really didn't know what was gonna happen with this age group. We didn't know how long this was gonna last. We didn't imagine that it would last as long as it has.

And our main priority was the safety of our volunteers and students. So 

[00:22:34] Elsbeth Magilton: how did you approach coming up with an alternative strategy for Girls Code? Cause I, I mean, I know from being a, a minor part of some of the conversations that were happening around that. That the safety was paramount, so it was important to cancel and that was the right thing to do.

But then also that there was this fear of the loss of connection of these young women you've spent so much time with and who deeply cared about what they were doing with your organization. And so coming up with alternative [00:23:00] ideas, what ideas did you come up with and how did you come up with those ideas?

[00:23:03] Justin Stark: Oh, well, it definitely started as a, we just need to cancel everything and then we'll figure it out from here. But like you said, at the same time, we needed to keep these people connected. Not only our students, because they're involved in our programs and they have friends in our programs, and they've built this community around our clubs, but also with our volunteers because we wanna keep them involved as well, so that when things do come back, we still have them to lean on.

So we started thinking immediately, of course, well, what can we do virtually? So a couple things that came up with. Where one was a speaker series, so we got women in Tech who came in about once a week and they talked to our girls on Zoom about what they do in tech and answered a bunch of the questions.

Those were super fun, and we started a reading challenge with the Lincoln City Library so girls could read books about tech and then they would win prizes if they completed the challenges. We also took a step back and really started focusing on our organization, thought about what do we need to do to make sure that Girls Code Lincoln continues in the.[00:24:00] 

One of those, of course, was really developing our board, so getting our board meetings established, getting our board filled out so that awkward and I could step off and handle more of the operations, and then let the people who are more knowledgeable about the advisory advisory roles and tackle the advisory pieces of girls good Lincoln.

So it required a lot of our volunteers to sort of step up and help us plan these virtual events and our board members too. 

[00:24:29] Aakriti Agrawal: I think as a, as a nonprofit, based on the community, the way that we are, we have a responsibility to our students and our volunteers. So we also, we communicate with our volunteers through Slack, and we tried to do frequent check-ins to make sure our volunteers didn't need anything.

And we have a leadership team that was fairly involved and. Numerous members of our volunteer base had a lot of different issues that they were dealing with in the past year and a half, so we tried to create more of a community around our volunteer base, make sure that people knew that they were cared for and they could come to us if they [00:25:00] needed anything.

We tried to do the same thing with our students, so. Offering laptops if they needed them, trying to understand what issues the families are facing so that we could try to bridge gaps with our connections in the community as a non-profit. We found those things to be really important, but first and foremost, we decided to completely cancel everything in person and, you know, really focus on that safety.

We do plan on being back in September and that, um, we're, we're continuing to watch guidelines and, and see what that might look. So kinda, you touched on this just 

[00:25:32] Elsbeth Magilton: a little bit right there, but having participants from this variety of economic backgrounds, which I think presumably means they might have different levels of access to technology at home, whether that be internet access, whether that be the actual devices themselves, probably posed a major challenge in terms of coming up with programs during the.

I'd love to hear more about, I, I think that maybe that's a little bit of where the library challenge came out of. We're thinking about other ways to access that, but could you talk a little bit [00:26:00] about your thought process and how to make sure that there was still a way for those girls to connect when they couldn't come and be in person and, and use your laptops and use, um, the internet Connect and that was 

[00:26:09] Aakriti Agrawal: available at the co-working space?

Yeah, absolutely. So we do own all of our own laptops and so when the pandemic first hit, we offered all of our students to borrow a laptop if they. There were, um, through Lincoln Public Schools, there were opportunities for families to get internet if they didn't have it. So we didn't feel like we needed to provide that service since that was already being taken care of by LPs.

But you're right, the, the Reading challenge as well as the speaker series both came out of this pandemic. So we had, we for a long time wanted to show our girls how important representation is in this field. There's a lot of amazing women doing really amazing things in. But they're not necessarily in Lincoln, and so we were trying to find ways to show these opportunities to our girls and to other children in our community.

I think one big aspect of representation [00:27:00] that's forgotten is boys are not shown how girls are impactful, how women are impactful in stem, and so that was also part of it. We decided to do this speaker series online and ask women from around the country to speak to our girls, and we were extremely for.

That a lot of women agreed and were excited about this opportunity, and we recorded the speaker series so that our girls could watch it whenever they wanted to and posted it publicly for anyone in the community. So any child anywhere in the world can go on YouTube and watch the speaker series. It's called the Empower Speaker Series and will link it in the bio.

And I think that's a great way for kids to learn about what's being done in these fields. The other side of it was the library challenge. We noticed that there are a lot of children in our community that don't see STEM as for them. So we put together a list of books that teach, um, children about the impact women have had in stem.

And Lincoln [00:28:00] Libraries is an amazing partner and they actually just all of the books and put them in their libraries. And we encourage children in our community to go into libraries, borrow these. And learn more about what's happening and how women have impacted stem. And so that was a really great way to give access to every child in our community, give every child in our community access to these books, and so they can read further about our impact in STEM.

[00:28:27] Elsbeth Magilton: So are there any lessons that you can take away from the pandemic? I am kind of smirking to my thoughts. I'm thinking about just this podcast. One of the things that our center did to continue our research and to continue. Sharing the, the stories of that come out of our research from our faculty and from people in the community that we work with was creating this podcast because we couldn't do some of the traditional things we had done, like our big conferences and things like this.

I mean, we're gonna keep doing it. I think this is a great way to share that and doesn't have to be something that was just this temporary thing during the pandemic. So is there anything that you think you might retain even when, maybe [00:29:00] someday. Someday soon, Maybe the pandemic is comfortably in the rear view.

[00:29:05] Justin Stark: Yeah, I think the pandemic has changed a lot of how everybody does their work and feels about their work. So it might not be as important to come into the office anymore all the time. I think it's the same way with Girls Code Lincoln. Once we started to do things virtually, we started thinking how can we do more things virtually so that we can include people who can't always be there?

The Empower Speaker Series is a really good example of that. That's something that we can always do. It might be a really good summer activity that we can do when we're not doing clubs. We started having virtual meetings with our leadership team more often every other week now, and then we started thinking, Why weren't we doing this before?

Why were. Why weren't we meeting every other week? Just to talk about what everybody's doing and make a plan for the coming weeks. So that's something that we'll continue just to do over Zoom so we don't have to meet in person and we don't have to all find one place we can meet and, and travel there. We can just do it virtually.

[00:29:57] Aakriti Agrawal: Yeah, I think adding to that, uh, we've also [00:30:00] decided that our board of directors meetings will be virtual. Um, going forward. Our board of directors is majority female and having a lot of really awesome women on our. Means that they're juggling lots of things. And so allowing them to meet virtually gives them the opportunity to spend time with their children and their family and take care of a lot of different things that maybe meeting in person wouldn't have allowed.

So this gives us more flexibility. We can also record our meetings, and so if our board members do need to miss, they can catch up. 

[00:30:32] Elsbeth Magilton: Full disclosure, both of my children have attended, I think multiple girls code board meetings. So I, I can't, can confirm that those sorts of things make, I think a difference in representation and a difference in supporting different segments of the population and, and that awesome piece of we don't have to travel there, you don't have to necessarily have childcare when it's on Zoom, I think makes a big difference.

And that's something that we're thinking about a lot here as. So pivoting again, I, I kinda wanna think more about tech [00:31:00] literacy at a more base level. And not just bringing curriculum like this to a community, but also how you engage with the crust of the community to enhance the curriculum, um, and to have sort of a presence in the community and support maybe other groups that are, have similar missions or  different resources.

[00:31:19] Justin Stark: Yeah, well we have a very narrow focus. We are the club in Lincoln that teaches girls specifically how to code, and that is very important for us. There are many other technical organizations in Lincoln. There's many other like summer camps, things that teach girls in Lincoln, different technology skills.

But we really want to take on how do we get girls, specifically young girls involved in code and kind of usher them through this. We know that Lincoln Public Schools, they have been really building up their tech programs, their tech classes. They have coding in schools more than they ever have, and I think that's great, but.

LPs is also pretty limited about what they can offer and [00:32:00] who they can offer it to. I don't even know if it's possible for them to have like a girls only club, but we found this really, really important to do, uh, because like we said before, having things tailored to girls shows them that they can get involved in it and that this is actually built for them.

So we really, really wanna be complimentary to LPs. And when we get girls involved in our clubs, we want to encourage them to continue to take computer classes at LPs. 

[00:32:27] Aakriti Agrawal: I think another really cool opportunity for us is being able to plug into a lot of different nonprofits in our community. And so we've been able to partner with makeshift who actually used to run our organization before us, before we became our own 501C3.

Um, our girls would pre pandemic come to us for three hours at a time. The first hour would be confidence building. With launch leadership, we've also been able to do workshops in places like the Bay and use their creative space. So there's a lot of really great collaboration that can happen with us being our own nonprofit [00:33:00] and us helping teach tech to our community in this way.

[00:33:03] Elsbeth Magilton: For our listeners–just to give for who might not be in Lincoln are familiar– uh, Launch Lincoln is a, I think actually a national organization or a semi regional organization, uh, that teaches leadership skills to I think elementary, junior high, and high school students primarily through camps and classes.

It's a really amazing group. I know I have lots of contacts who send their children to launch leadership every summer, and they have been a huge resource in our community as well as the Bay, which is launched. I love this as a skateboard, uh, skate park. And a wonderful place for kids to be able to go after school and have a safe place to skate and learn to skate.

And they have continued to expand into their digital offerings from my kids. Went to a DJ camp there this summer, um, in digital art and other services that they offer there both after school and on the weekend so that kids have a safe space to go and skate and create and be a part of a really cool [00:34:00] community of mis.

I love that, that they have that big on their wall, that the future is for the misfits, and I think they're a really awesome organization. So if someone's wanting to set up a cool organization like some of those and let Girls Code Lincoln in their own city, what advice do you have in terms of putting an organization like this together?

[00:34:20] Justin Stark: Yeah, I think first I would say start small. So maybe find one or two other people that can really help you. Build a club and really get them involved with it. Uh, we started as a girls who code, basically subsidiary a chapter and we were spread across seven middle schools. It turned out that was probably too many to start with.

Uh, so we didn't have the most success there. So I'd say start small, Start with one club and you can always grow it out from there. So if you are, you have a kid who's involved in school or some technology club and you wanna. A, uh, coding club for girls. Maybe the best place to start is just go to [00:35:00] girls who code the national organization and see what they have available for you.

Because they do have resources, they do have curriculum. They're really meant to be, Hey, if you are not a coder, if you're not a technical person at all, you can pick the stuff up and teach it to, to kids. 

[00:35:17] Aakriti Agrawal: Yeah. And then I'd say if you wanna start a coding non-profit, or really any non-profit or anything in your community, just get started.

Justin and I had no idea what we were doing, and I feel like that's common with a lot of non-profits. A lot of non-profit founders don't really know what they're doing. We pulled in three other people who were very involved, volunteers at the time, and the five of us found solutions. So we would hit a barrier and we would ask the people around us and we would find answers.

And so lean on your community, try to ask questions to the people around. Invite people out to coffee, they will usually say yes and ask for help, and that's how we built this. So it doesn't need to [00:36:00] start as something very large or very official. You can really start small and be unsure of what's going on.

And. Kind of hit those, hit those speed bumps and overcome them as they come. 

[00:36:11] Justin Stark: Yeah. And it can start out with not even a, I don't, it can start out as a, uh, not an I want to start an organization, but I just want to start a club. I want to get some kids together and teach 'em how to code. And I think everything can build off of that.

You don't need a formal structure, you don't need an organization. You just need a few people who are really dedicated and who can get, take those resources and provide those to the kids. Thank 

[00:36:36] Elsbeth Magilton: you both so much, both for being with us here today on Tech Refactor, but also for that message about starting something in your community and that it's really about dedication and about passion for your, your mission and your subject and starting small and building it up.

I think that's a really important mission or a really important lesson, Excuse me, for folks who are excited and interested in [00:37:00] starting in something in their community. And so sharing that story is really, I. And it's an honor to be on the board at Girls Code Lincoln and to be a small part of this really cool story and part of the community here at Lincoln who gets to benefit from everything you do to teach these young women these skills.

So thank you so much for being with us today. 

[00:37:18] Aakriti Agrawal: Thank you for inviting us on. It's- it was so good chatting with you. 

[00:37:20] Justin Stark: Yeah, it's been great. Thank you so much. Thank 

[00:37:24] Gus Herwitz: Thank you all for listening. I'm Gus Herwitz, and I've been your host today along with Elsbeth Magilton. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Tech Refactored.

If you want to learn more about what we're doing here at the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, or submit an idea for a future episode, you can go to our website at N gtc dot un l.edu, or you can follow us on Twitter at UNL underscore NGTC. If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcasts.

This show is produced and co-hosted by Elsbeth Magilton. Our associate producer is Lysandra Marquez and Colin McCarthy created and recorded our theme music. [00:38:00] Our research associate Neil Rutledge, provided topic and substance development. This podcast is part of the Menard Governance and Technology Program series.

Until next time, keep asking yourself what would add a lovely stew.