Sent on Wednesday, June 17, 2020, at 3:50 PM Eastern Time.
Hi friends,
Christina here, COO of Hack Club. I’m writing this week’s newsletter while Zach gets ready to launch Hack Club’s Summer of Making tomorrow.
Here’s your 2-minute read on how we’re building Hack Club—sent to 87 recipients, including our major donors & friends. Thanks for this time together.
Last Thursday, Hack Club students chatted for an hour with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. Thank you Ron Conway for connecting Patrick to Hack Club.
(see the thread & Patrick’s reply on Twitter)
How you can help:
Hack Club has always and will always work to make tech education available to young people of all backgrounds. We are currently distributing over 80 MacBook Airs and iPads to Black teens and students in need, thanks to donors on this list.
- Read & comment on Hack Club’s 2.5-page strategy to get student-led computer science clubs in majority-Black high schools
- Introduce Hack Club to donors supporting equity in education and tech
- Read this 2016 article I wrote in The Atlantic on how more women officers can reduce police brutality or my book on what I learned as a 6th grade teacher in Philadelphia’s poorest school
**Hack Club thanks: **
- Miles & Elizabeth Lasater for donating $10k to Hack Club in honor of Miles’ grandmother, Mildred Hanson, a computer programmer trained by the US Air Force
- David Cramer of Sentry for donating $15k for 10 MacBook Airs to students in need
- Taylor Otwell, the creator of PHP framework Laravel, for donating $10k for MacBook Airs to students in need
- .XYZ for committing to give every Hack Club student an .XYZ domain free for 2 years
- Quinn Slack, founder of Sourcegraph (and Hack Club board member), for increasing his annual giving to $36k
Thank you all. You keep Hack Club going!
Hack Club updates:
53 years ago, 100,000 people gathered in San Francisco for what was later called the Summer of Love.
Tomorrow begins the Hack Club Summer of Making. It’s not an event, or a program. It’s a theme for this summer and a challenge to every teenager: What will you make? What will you learn? It has 3 components:
- $50k in hardware grants from GitHub to fund electronics projects, for both beginners & advanced hackers.
- Every day this summer, Hack Clubbers will be sharing short video & photo updates with a new Slack tool & “Scrapbook” we’ve built.
- Slack + weekly Zoom events: All summer, we’ll be running weekly live events, including coding workshops, office hours, show & tells, and more.
We’ve already had 500 students pre-register, and we expect GitHub’s email announcement tomorrow morning to drive another 1,000 signups.
Students sent over 250,000 messages in the last month on our Slack—asking for coding help, working with their peers on projects, and using it as a social space. We had an enormous bump in activity after Elon, yet our growth continues. In the last week, 151 students have applied to join our Slack and applications will likely increase this week with GitHub’s announcement tomorrow.
New Hack Club staff members:
This week, we’re excited to welcome two new members to the team:
- Melody (they/them), 22, of Philadelphia began thirteen of the first Hack Clubs back in 2014 and is now joining us as our first full-time hire focusing on making the Hack Club community the best it can be.
- Dina (she/her), 16, of Toronto-area founded one of the first Hack Clubs in Canada and is now joining us as our “vibes influencer” intern. She'll be focusing on making Hack Club a place where technical young women & students of color see themselves.
As always, check out some impressive student ships:
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David L. (Canada) + some friends built Donations Exposed, a website showcasing the percentage of profits large corporations are donating to Black justice charities. He launched it today & drove 16 donations from visitors in the first hour.
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Auden Y. (LA) + Lavi S. (LA) built SupportBLM, a site to inform people about the Black Lives Matter movement.
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Dominik I. (Poland) used React.js to create a website to find open source code tasks for beginnners.
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Sam P. (Singapore) built a board game on the command line using Python & Repl.it.
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Claire W. (Los Angeles, CA) drew three incredible drawings on her iPad (just finger, no pencil!)
Looking ahead, on June 25, Limor Fried from Adafruit will be our AMA guest speaker.
And lastly, see below, students listening to Patrick answer a question about living in 500 BCE and winning a war between 3 worlds:
Thanks for this time together.
- Christina
COO, Hack Club | christina@hackclub.com | Donate
—Lachlan Campbell, Theo Bleier, & Zach Latta co-authored this update.
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