Volunteers power up Hack the Hood's next phase

YCore fellows kicked back with Hack the Hood youth for a little video game action before doing a listening session to chart out their career interests. This informed the design of the job bank.

Last July we got an email from Zara Fernandez and Adam Bossy-Mendoza, ​Project Leads at YCore, a social impact fellowship for young professionals that works on four-month capacity-building volunteer projects for local nonprofits.  

"This year my team has chosen to focus on providing access to tech for low income youth. Hack the Hood has an incredible mission to provide low income youth the resources and skills to pursue a career in tech. We have been inspired by your organization and hope we might be able to work with you this coming year. "

Their outreach came at just the right moment.  Hack the Hood has been on a trajectory to provide more direct support to help young alumni from our programs connect with "next step" education and job opportunities.  We were raising money for job coaches and case managers who would be able to provide that support. But even as we were growing our team, we still needed to prepare the systems to help those people succeed in matching youth with jobs that fit their interests.  We jumped at the opportunity to work with a talented team of volunteers who could help us develop a job bank and match those jobs to specific youth based on their interests.

And so started a four month journey with an awesome team of Millennials to help Hack the Hood develop an opportunity bank in the Salesforce database we use to track our program data.  The YCore team met with staff members and youth for empathy interviews to deeply understand our organization and our needs. We met with the project lead weekly, making steady progress. They built the system, documented the workflow, and just this week they demoed the project to an audience of others interested in volunteering their time to a great cause during the next round of YCore projects

The YCore team demoed their project to prospective volunteers at a recruitment event last night.

We're so grateful for working with such a standout team of volunteers who were willing to dedicate significant time and energy to ensure that Hack the Hood has strong customized tools we can use to make sure youth get connected to the best opportunities for them.  We hope we'll have another opportunity to work with this great organization again.

Consider getting involved!

If you're interested in lending your particular skills to build the capacity of an awesome organization through YCore, consider applying for the next round of projects.  

YCORE application

If you'd like to get more involved at Hack the Hood, please head over to our volunteer page to learn more and get in touch.  

volunteer at hack the hood