What motivates a person to take on a challenge like this of creating the next generation of black women coders and technology experts? Motherhood, that’s more than enough.

Kimberly Bryant is the founder of Black Girls CODE, the premier nonprofit organization focused on teaching little black girls how to become giants in the future technology sector. However, this monstrous organization started with the love of this mom for her daughter and grew from there.

Bryant was motivated to start Black Girls CODE because of her daughter, who wasn’t a girly girl as she put it, but loved to play video games, build things and create. She would find herself a bit isolated in school because there were not many people that looked like her, of color, that wanted to learn, grow and create in the tech space.

One day Bryant’s daughter said she wanted to be a video game tester and Bryant thought that was great, but suggested she consider being a developer, a creator of video games, instead.

The isolation in the tech field is something Bryant could relate to with her daughter. She was a freshmen in college studying electrical engineering when Fortran and Pascal were the popular computer languages. She felt the isolation of no one looking like you or being from your neighborhoods in those classes.

Being able to relate to her daughter’s feelings in this manner encourage Bryant to do something about. That something was to create a group of young, black girls that was interested in learning to design, code, and build technology innovations via the web and mobile devices together.
Black Girls CODE was born in April of 2011.

From BlackGirlsCODE.com

Black Girls CODE is devoted to showing the world that black girls can code, and do so much more. By reaching out to the community through workshops and after school programs, Black Girls CODE introduces computer coding lessons to young girls from underrepresented communities in programming languages such as Scratch or Ruby on Rails. Black Girls CODE has set out to prove to the world that girls of every color have the skills to become the programmers of tomorrow. By promoting classes and programs we hope to grow the number of women of color working in technology and give underprivileged girls a chance to become the masters of their technological worlds.

What about black boys?

We know this question is coming, so let me give you the good news….so did Bryant. They are coming out with Black Boys CODE in the near future. You can see their announcement here: BlackBoysCode

Source: BlackGirlsCODE.com