I remember the moment we met. We ran into each other and instantly, I loved him but knew I was too old to indulge. Instead, I circled about, taking notes, flirting gingerly. The breadth of possibility that lived there titillated me constantly and left me knowing that unless I jumped, I would live a life standing on the verge. I jumped. And am still waiting for Technology to catch me.

hack/change is the child of my relationship with technology. And yes, the baby is a bastard.

While hack/change trains underrepresented young people to be programmers and tech entrepreneurs, it’s more of an effort to create an organic system for problem-solving. Technological fluency is the literacy of the millennial moment. We have to put a system in place to train post-millennials the language of the millennium.

This is the boldest gesture of love I have proffered to date. In relationships, I think what people identify as love is romanticizing that ethereal feeling produced when we get our needs met. I’ve developed a relationship with hack/change. And it produces all sorts of feel-good, lollipop and rainbow feelings all while meeting my needs to serve myself while serving my community.

Bringing hack/change to fruition has been a pot-holed road. Nevertheless, as a member of the community I seek to serve, I will not be deterred.

To make this workshop series happen, this is what I need:

*an alternative venue uptown or in Harlem that can accommodate 30-50 people with their laptops

*a curriculum manager to break our lessons/exercises into discrete courses + exercises

*more lead teachers with the ability to teach HTML/CSS and Ruby on Rail

As a non-technologist spending an incredible amount of time within the tech startup ecosystem, I quickly came to understand that a failure to be technically proficient is a failure to be functionally literate. This is especially disconcerting when we consider the prospects for entrepreneurial vibrancy within marginalized populations.

hack/change kicks off this month. There is a lot of work to be done and a lot of details to be hammered out. We move forth knowing that we are solving a number of unaddressed problems. We enthusiastically avail ourselves to the help + support of the NYC tech community. Drop me a line directly at sekai.farai@gmail.com!

We decided that our inaugural workshop series will focus on training participants on Ruby on Rails because of its relative ease of acquisition. We begin the series with HTML/CSS training.

We have assembled a group of enthusiastic young people from Harlem who are titillated by the training that awaits them.

Yup. We are kicking it off. NY Tech is going to change. This is going to be big.