The Los Angeles Standard Newspaper kindly shone a spotlight on our collaboration with iD Tech to provide weeklong tech camps at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University to South L.A. students.
With a desire to increase opportunities for underserved youth in technology spaces, iD Tech and the Annenberg Foundation, whose initiative “AnnenbergTech” has been focused on providing access to tech opportunities for all Angelenos, are among the organizations that are providing free technology programs for children of color. They created “Coding Our Future LA,” a free week-long STEM camp for 200 students from South Los Angeles communities. L.A. Promise Fund recruited the students to participate in the program, which was held at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University.
“The purpose of the program is to reach students who would not be able to attend this type of program, and to really engage with underrepresented communities,” said Ylka van Bemmel Reiss, director of social impact for Coding Her Future, an iD Tech initiative. “About 80 percent of the L.A. vicinity is African American and Latinx, but only about 12 percent of engineers nationally are diverse. We’re trying to change that. We’re trying to open the opportunity and pipeline for this potential career track.”
Read the article in full at lastandardnewspaper.com.
