The following is a conversation between Christina Lewis, Founder and President of All Star Code, and Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving on AM 970 The Answer WNYM in New York City.
Denver: My next guest has the uncanny ability to look around the corner and see issues before they become widely disseminated in the press and discussed by the public. One example of that would be the lack of people of color in the tech sector and the consequences of that – something she identified well before most others did. It was that realization that inspired her to start All Star Code in 2013, providing boys and young men of color the mindset and tools they need to succeed in a technological world. And it’s a pleasure to have with us this evening, the Founder and President of All Star Code, Christina Lewis.
Good evening, Christina, and welcome to The Business of Giving!
Christina Lewis
Christina: Good evening, Denver. Thank you so much for having me here on The Business of Giving.
Denver: Take us to the moment where the inspiration for All Star Code was first formed. Where and when did it appear?
Christina: It was 2011, and I was on a cruise ship.
Denver: Best thinking happens on cruise ships.
Christina: Well, this was an unusual cruise. It was a conference, a summit – a multi-day summit – billed as “Davos for millennials,” if you can believe that. I ended up there very randomly. It was full of tech startup people, tech entrepreneurs. I was a journalist at the time and had gotten invited through friends, and I had never been to a tech conference and was stunned at how few black and Latino people were participating in startups. There were a thousand people at this conference, and I could barely find any who were black and Latino, who were really successfully participating in startups.
As soon as I saw that, I knew that this was a huge problem. As I had been a reporter at the Wall Street Journal covering various industries, including real estate, I knew that tech was driving industry, not just tech itself, but it was driving every industry. I also knew that this was where innovation was happening, where the jobs were, but where there was so much impact.
Denver: Yes. All the cool stuff.
Christina: All the cool stuff. It’s the ticket into the 21st century, and that if black and Latino people weren’t participating in the startup scene, that they were absent from a sector, even from a conversation, and from a whole societal area that would leave these disadvantaged groups even further behind.
And that is the challenge of innovation – that the people who benefit most from innovation are often the most affluent. The people who are most positioned, when you are already ahead of the curve, they are able to catch the wave and get even more ahead of the curve.
So that was the moment.
Denver: That was the genesis!
Christina: That was the genesis of realizing that this was a problem.
Denver: Well, taking this off the cruise ship and looking at it from a macro point of view, give us a snapshot of the representation of blacks and Latinos in the tech sector today.
Christina: Only 1% of VC-backed startups have a black or Latino on the founding team.
Denver: Wow.
Christina: And many companies will probably be only 9% black and Latino, many technology companies. Now, if you were to look at engineering or computer science, I’ll give you another statistic. The number of engineers, say, at a major company, that number who are black and Latino is far lower, far below the representation in the population.
Let’s take a statistic about computer science focused on boys, young men of color, which is the focus of All Star Code. Only 4,000 black and Latino boys passed the AP Computer Science exam last year in the entire country, so that’s in 2018. Of that, only 600, roughly, were black boys. In the entire country in 2018, only 600 black boys took and passed the AP Computer Science A exam.
Now, that exam is essentially – that’s the number of boys who are at least involved enough in computer science to have done it in high school and, unfortunately, that matches really closely to who ends up in engineering. And that’s not to say that you can’t learn it in college, and absolutely there are many paths into it, but 600 is such a tiny number.
Denver: It’s a pretty good indicator.
Christina: It is. It’s a good indicator on the millions of black and Latino students who are in this country.
All Star Code was founded to increase the pipeline of blacks and Latinos who are majoring in computer science in college and getting jobs in tech, but we do that by focusing on boys of color, starting in high school.
What we do and why we’re successful is that we don’t just think about how to code and getting good at coding. We think about the whole suite of holistic skills that students will need if they want to study computer science in college or get a job in tech
Denver: So you started All Star Code back in 2013. What exactly is the program? What, do these young men go through?
Christina: All Star Code was founded to increase the pipeline of Blacks and Latinos who are majoring in computer science in college and getting jobs in tech, but we do that by focusing on boys of color, starting in high school. That’s because there were already a number of programs helping girls succeed in STEM, including Girls Who Code. I know the founder quite well.
So that’s our lens. With that, we recruit interested students who are in high school, who are at least interested in the concept of computer science, but then we expose them to coding, but also to the industry. We do that through a six-week Summer Intensive as well as year-round lighter touch engagement events.
What we do and why we’re successful is that we don’t just think about how to code and getting good at coding. We think about the whole suite of holistic skills that students will need if they want to study computer science in college or get a job in tech. That includes: presentation; knowing how to communicate and speak to people; networking; knowing how to develop a relationship and introduce yourself. It includes understanding how these companies work and what the different roles are… and career pathways.
So, we have an emphasis on mentorship and networking. We work very closely with a number of major technology companies, including Google, AT&T, as well as financial companies and other major Fortune 500 companies that partner with us to expose students to these skills.
We’re in New York City and Pittsburgh, and have graduated 600 students in our Scholars Community.
Denver: Fantastic.
Christina: Of those, 85% are majoring or minoring in computer science when they get into college, which 95% are our college-age scholars.
Celebrating failure is a key part of our methodology for preparing the students for lifelong learning.
…the single greatest skill that anyone can have to thrive in the 21st century is the ability to continue learning on your own, taking charge of your own learning…
Denver: And another soft skill, if you can call it that, that you try to impart is how to face, even celebrate failure. Talk about that.
Christina: Yes. Celebrating failure is a key part of our methodology for preparing the students for lifelong learning. And I should have said: the single greatest skill that anyone can have to thrive in the 21st century is the ability to continue learning on your own, taking charge of your own learning…because coding itself, programming, might end up being automated by robots. You can’t count on one skill to succeed for the entirety of your 30-, 40-, and 50-year career today.
We do that by teaching the students this concept of celebrating failure. People, our boys perhaps in particular, they hate making mistakes. In fact, some of them, many of them, and many people in general have been taught that they can’t make mistakes. The second they make a mistake or that they show any weakness, they’ll be attacked. The problem is that computer science is incredibly difficult, and you will make mistakes.
…by teaching the students that actually, if you’re making a mistake, it means that you’re trying to do something difficult; and actually that’s something that you should celebrate, and so stick with it. And each time you fail, that means that you’re doing something really hard, which means you’re in a position to learn.
Denver: I would think so. I know very little about coding, but if you don’t want to fail, don’t go into coding.
Christina: That’s true.
Denver: You could fail all day long.
Christina: Yes. Exactly. And that’s part of it. A joke we say is, “My program doesn’t work, and I have no idea why. Oh, my program works and I still have no idea why.” The importance is continuing to work at it in what’s often called a “growth mindset.”
So, by teaching the students that actually, if you’re making a mistake, it means that you’re trying to do something difficult; and actually that’s something that you should celebrate, and so stick with it. And each time you fail, that means that you’re doing something really hard, which means you’re in a position to learn.
So in the classroom, we teach students to… when they make a mistake… to yell out, “I have failed!” when something doesn’t work that they’d been working on, “I have failed!” And everyone claps to celebrate that. They’ll even start logging it on the walls, tracking it. And, of course, it doesn’t mean that we don’t all want to be successful, but it’s a way of encouraging the students to learn from their failures and also to speak about them.
What’s happened, which is great – which shows that this isn’t about ability, it’s about knowledge – is that when we, at the high school level, expose the students to not all the skills, but to the fact that these skills are important, they’re able to chart their own paths into tech and are proving so successful.
Denver: I had GiveWell on the show recently, and they were telling me that they have a Slack channel where everybody catalogs the mistakes they’ve made. So if you make a mistake, you go right to that Slack and you put down “I made a mistake doing this,” and everybody in the organization does it. Because if you can normalize mistakes or failure, boy, that is such a big piece of the pie!
Christina: Yes, it is. And this is an area that companies, that tech companies have been attuned to for a long time. My insight and our insight was that this really crucial shift in priorities was not making its way into black and Latino communities at a point where they really needed it.
And so we are allowing for that connection with our partnerships with companies, with this curriculum that we’re developing, of taking these really high-level insights that companies like GiveWell, for example, which is a technology company – it’s a tech-enabled platform – are attuned to, but taking them into spaces. 70% of our students are on free, reduced lunch or financial aid; 85% are black and Latino. This is information that they don’t know; people in their network don’t know because there are so few black and Latino people in tech. Their parents don’t know it. Their teachers don’t know it. So, we’re providing that connection.
What’s happened, which is great – which shows that this isn’t about ability, it’s about knowledge – is that when we, at the high school level, expose the students to not all the skills, but to the fact that these skills are important, they’re able to chart their own paths into tech and are proving so successful.
We have two students now who have accepted full-time offers from major technology companies as software engineers, including one at Google. These are some of our earliest students because we only have a handful, perhaps five graduated seniors.
Christina Lewis and Denver Frederick inside the studio
Denver: Yes. Your first class.
Christina: Yes, our first class. And so, it shows that the impact is really working.
Denver: Yes. In fact, some of them are even turning down jobs. They’re getting so many offers, which is great.
Christina: That is true.
Denver: At the end of this Summer Intensive, they have to do a capstone project. Tell us a little bit about that
Christina: Yes. Learning by doing and project-based learning is a huge part of our curriculum because that’s how it works in tech. You have to build something and have a portfolio. So that’s something that you can demonstrate, and our students will post their projects to their GitHub accounts.
Second, it’s also important, this concept of a demo, which is where you build something… you build it with other people – a team where everyone has roles.
Denver: Collaboration.
Christina: Collaboration. Exactly. And then you actually present it, meaning you show it to everyone and talk about it. This is a classic practice for engineers, and so we do it in our program at the end.
Some of the projects are…there was a video game that was actually about the stages of grief. Many of our students… being from having a high-poverty concentration also experience many adverse health challenges. We’ve had two students actually already pass away: one from a long-term illness, and one, unfortunately, from gun violence. So these issues are much more prevalent; so that’s one final project that we had.
We’ve also had translators; news apps; a lovely Twitter app that was a Twitter… sort of API app that was about cleaning up garbage in your community; an app called “Held” that was about forming an instant study group when you’re in the library, doing things within your social network; a number of sneaker shopping platforms. I’ll be honest. This kicks thing: Kicks On Fire, it’s huge.
Denver: You’re over my head now.
Christina: Yes. Streetwear is…a Yelp for streetwear selling
…the impact on our society and civilization of having a more diverse group of people with the superpower of being able to start and build new technologies will be good for everyone.
Denver: So many of these things you’re talking about, too, are real life things. As people said, sometimes in Silicon Valley, it’s how to order a pizza with one click instead of two. This is grief, and this is study groups, and these are things that they’re experiencing. So, the apps really have so much more resonance and meaning than some of the junk that we get.
Christina: They do. And the impact on our society and civilization of having a more diverse group of people with the superpower of being able to start and build new technologies will be good for everyone.
Denver: Yes, it will.
Christina: Because the people who’ve had these problems are the best ones, in the best position, to be able to solve them.
Denver: They’re closest to the solution.
Christina: Exactly. But wealth inequality is bad for everyone. The lack of strong software in government, in schools, in education, in poverty alleviation– these things are challenges for everyone.
So that’s what really excites me and why we’re so committed to growing All Star Code that we feel we are a leading, if not the leading learn-to-code organization focused on young men of color.
Denver: I know you believe in measuring impact right from the get-go. How do you go about doing that? What has your impact been?
Christina: How do we measure our impact? In so many, many, many different ways. There’s a framework; there’s a logic model with setting a clear goal for what the program is supposed to do. And as you know, our end result is that our students get jobs in technology within a year of graduation. So having a clear metric.
Denver: That’s nice and simple. That’s good.
Christina: It is. But then there are a number of intermediary steps.
So, for example, out of our six-week Summer Intensive program, we measure: How much more confident do you feel about majoring in computer science? Ironically, sometimes the number goes down, and this is actually a positive thing. Sometimes it goes way down because they have a more accurate sense of what it involves. But overall, for the majority, it goes up. That’s one thing that we measure.
In most recent years, around 70% of our students report deciding to work harder in school because they’ve done our summer programs. These are some of the things that are evidence of our impact. But broadly speaking, our students are persisting in four-year colleges and in computer science at a much higher rate than typical black and Latino boys of their income background. So that’s what we look at.
Denver: Speaking of celebrating failure, you’ve addressed one of your failures as a founder, and that was maybe not paying as much attention to branding as you wished you had. Talk a little bit about that, and tell me what you’re doing to brand the organization now.
Christina: Yes. I failed to do branding because it seemed like a waste of money, and who cares about branding? I failed to realize that today, in the technological world, how to come forward on digital platforms is a specific expertise that is very expensive, but that’s very worthwhile. So, I backed into it, and I spent a lot to create branding for the organization that we feel now is really good. And we’re looking to grow and invest in our marketing and communications.
But actually, there’s a lesson that I’ve learned from starting and growing this organization. We’re now roughly an organization with about 25… 30 full-time equivalents. As far as how large we are in two cities. It started from just an idea when it was only me working on it, and of course, I was unpaid. It’s the importance of talent and people, and culture and hiring, and how to really build an organization… with people. And that’s something that I definitely had to learn and am still learning as a leader.
Denver: Share some thoughts on that. There’s nothing more important than a corporate culture and having a magnet that attracts people and then retains people. What have been some of the things you’ve done at All Star Code to make it that irresistible workplace?
Christina: One thing that we’ve always had from the get-go is a very clear mission and vision for what we’re doing. From the beginning, I felt so lucky to have attracted amazing people. I think that’s why, in a way, it also became a weakness because I was always able to attract great people, even from my first job descriptions. I was amazed that they wanted to come work for me. So that’s something that we always did well.
Now, on the retention and autonomy, I wasn’t attuned to the difference between driving to a short-term outcome, versus what could sometimes hurt your long-term outcomes… what was happening.
Denver: I know exactly what you’re saying.
Christina: And so, the work environment was more chaotic, and it made people less productive and not as fun a place to work.
But I will say that, still, from the beginning, the corporate culture of All Star Code has always had a really high degree of talent, has also a really high level of professionalism, of mission alignment. I’m so proud that everyone in our organization really cares about what they’re doing and feels that their work is contributing. Because it is. We are a startup. Everyone is at capacity in feeling aligned to the impact of their work, which is vital for nonprofits.
As we’ve evolved and grown and matured, we’ve articulated some elements of our corporate culture. One is competency, community, and lifelong learning. Having thought about these things from the get-go is something that makes us distinctive, particularly this emphasis on learning. We encourage professional development, the taking of classes. Employees who are eligible… only after a certain time… are encouraged to take classes, are also encouraged to just learn tools, learn new things. Just because someone doesn’t know a particular tool or skill set, that doesn’t mean that they can’t get that job. They just need to demonstrate that they’re willing and able to learn it.
Denver: That’s a smart investment because I think one of the reasons that most people leave nonprofit organizations – and they tell me all the time – is that they stopped learning. And once you’ve stopped learning, you move on. So that is so critical.
Christina: Yes, especially now as donors have become more demanding of nonprofits in a way, expecting nonprofits to behave in ways that are similar to how for-profits behave. You have to pay people more. You have to hire people who are big thinkers. And that’s the challenge. When you have someone who just wants to do their job and stick with their job, they’re happy to stay there 25 years.
Denver: Yes. I think you even said that was one of your challenges – to be a big thinker and to dare, because you’re such a perfectionist.
Christina: Yes.
Denver: It should be noted that you come from a very high-achieving family. Your father was Reginald Lewis who operated the largest black-owned business in the United States back in the day, that being TLC Beatrice. And when he passed away, suddenly your mom took over the enterprise. Tell us a little bit about your parents and your upbringing.
Christina: Thank you. Both my parents are an inspiration to me, but are inspirations in their respective communities. My father, who died in 1993, remains a very powerful presence in the business community, particularly in the black business community and in finance, as a result of his book called Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun? which is a posthumous autobiography; that’s a classic of the genre that remains very popular.
So when I was born, he was a lawyer, but then he bought TLC Beatrice through a large acquisition when I was eight, and we moved to Paris. So I had a very global lifestyle. My mother is an immigrant from the Philippines, so I’m also an immigrant as well as being a black American. So I went to an international school. I learned French, and I also learned Spanish. I had friends from all over the world. So I was able to have a very varied upbringing, but also there was a lot of pressure.
My parents were classic strivers; they’re born to technically…the Greatest Generation, born during the war, and were asked to work hard and achieve, go to good schools. They both became lawyers. They both moved to New York City in 1968, met there, decided to get married and kind of took on the city.
And so striving, goal-oriented, achievement, grades…the expectations. There was a family talent show that my father insisted that we hold, with myself, but then also all my cousins. The other kids are just there being normal, and I choreographed this elaborate gymnastics performance. It’s choreographed to the music where my mother is playing. I took these things very seriously because that’s how I was raised. So it’s a lot of pressure as well.
Denver: Yes. Well, when your dad hires you as a stockbroker at seven, and you’re visiting factories in Thailand and writing reports at about maybe a year or two older, that’s a challenging household. Some really good things come from it, but also there’s other things, too. As you said, you’re a recovering striver.
Christina: Yes, I am. I’m a recovering striver from some of that pressure because the problem with your being so focused on just achievement and goals is: one, you sometimes may not develop self-awareness and time for self-exploration, and really understanding what you’re good at because you have to go and do some experimentation.
And so, it leads to a fear of failure, which lead you to not take risks, which leads you to just a host of being stuck or not having pursued your passions, becoming unhappy, and also can cause you to miss out on opportunities because they seem too weird to you, but in fact, would be great opportunities if you were willing to take a chance.
Denver: Well, I find it to be so interesting because of your fear of failure, you have been celebrating failure. So you have really learned your lessons. And looking back at your dad’s history, he had a helping hand to get into Harvard Law School, and probably, if he were alive today at that age, the All Star Code would be the 21st century equivalent of that helping hand that he had to get into Harvard Law School. Would that be a fair statement?
Christina: That is absolutely true. The model for All Star Code was inspired by my dad’s life and story. He was essentially the Jackie Robinson of Wall Street and of business in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the first African American to break into the white boys club of Wall Street and business and leveraged buyouts, “Masters of the Universe,” et cetera.
Denver: He wanted some of the fun.
Christina: He did. Exactly. Because that’s where the action was. And his start was through becoming a lawyer. He became a corporate lawyer and was one of the first African Americans from a black college – because he grew up in segregation in Baltimore – to go to Harvard Law School, which recruited him through a special program designed for African Americans. This was back in the ‘60s.
As I looked around to go back to 2011, as I looked around at that conference, what immediately occurred to me was: There are so few blacks and Latinos here in the space; this is about more than just income barriers. Because even though there are more well-off black people than this – a thousand people, and virtually none. I said, “This is about sort of a barrier where the gatekeepers themselves aren’t recruiting well.” I’ve seen this before, but it’s happened in the law and on Wall Street, “Could I take a look at this and help create an environment that opens up access, but this time instead of for the law and for Wall Street, do it with computer science and tech?”
Denver: Well, let me close with this, Christina, and what you just said, I think, leads to the final question.
And it could be argued that the most significant impact that you’ve had is helping bring race to the forefront in the tech sector and getting people at least conscious and aware of who is not there, which would certainly include boys and men of color. Are you optimistic that with this realization, things will actually change? Or are you concerned that they’re really not going to change all that much after all?
Christina: Well, Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation says, “The enemy is hopelessness.” So, yes, I am hopeful that things can change.
Since 2013, when I founded All Star Code, the conversation about the lack of racial diversity in tech and in engineering has gone 10X, if not 100X, because there was so little awareness before, and that’s only a positive. Is it enough? No. The numbers, as far as number of blacks and Latinos studying computer science, persisting in it, and then also getting jobs, they haven’t moved as much as we need. In fact, in some ways, because so many groups of so many people are going into computer science, the share of blacks and Latinos in computer science, in some ways, is declining.
Denver: I hear you. The absolute number of people go up, but the percentage goes down.
Christina: Yes. Exactly. So failing the growth isn’t even failing to keep pace with the growth from everyone else. But still, the change in at least awareness and knowing that this is a problem has been really positive. It’s very positive.
For instance, what some people have started to do is to start gathering data by race and gender together. So that means that you would look at women who are white, as well as men who are white, not just lump them all together. And then, say, like white people and Asians. And so, you can compare Asian men, Asian women, black men, black women, Latino, and be able to look at these things independently, as well as together.
That makes a huge difference because you could have a company that’s 50% male, female, and have the number of Latinos or African Americans that’s proportional to the population. But if all of them are of one gender, that disparity can hide in the numbers. So that’s a really positive data move that’s happening in tech and, more broadly, in the social sciences.
Denver: And that will help move it all forward… to get that kind of data.
Well, Christina Lewis, the Founder and President of All Star Code, I want to thank you so much for being here this evening. Tell us about your website and how people can help if they’re inspired to do so.
Christina: All Star Code recently completed the five-year strategic plan that calls for growth in five cities in five years to 5,000 students, which would be a huge growth in the numbers of black and Latino students studying computer science in high school.
We’re looking for help. You can go to our website allstarcode.org to learn more about what we’re doing. We are looking for education partners across the country, as well as companies interested in funding us here in New York and Pittsburgh, but also across the country, as well as just general support.
Finally, we do have applications open for our summer program. You can go to our website again, allstarcode.org and figure out how to apply.
Denver: Well, thanks, Christina. It was a real pleasure to have you on the show.
Christina: Thank you, Denver.
Denver: I’ll be back with more of The Business of Giving right after this.
Christina Lewis and Denver Frederick
The Business of Giving can be heard every Sunday evening between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. Eastern on AM 970 The Answer in New York and on iHeartRadio. You can follow us @bizofgive on Twitter, @bizofgive on Instagram and at www.facebook.com/businessofgiving.