Our Core Programs
Our 2021 plans included moving Hack the Hood beyond an organization that simply exposes learners of color to tech, to an organization that creates true pathways for learners of color into high-opportunity tech careers. Our commitment to our learners is that they will graduate with tech skills and be prepared for the next steps in their career pathways. We therefore had to rebuild a structure that supported these goals, which included:
Updating Our Curriculum
Updating our technical curriculum to focus on teaching Python and data analytics foundations in order to better prepare learners for the most in-demand tech and data analytics careers.
Evaluation
Strengthening our evaluation approach to better understand the impact we are having on learners. We engaged an evaluation consultant to better define our outcomes and impact metrics, design survey instruments mapped to these, and refine our approach to analyzing learner data to more accurately understand our impact to guide program iteration.
Emphasis on Skill Demonstration
Increasing our emphasis on practical skill demonstration via project-based learning that encourages learners to explore problems that they care about while building a technical portfolio with work samples.
Refined Recruitment
Refining our recruitment approach to better reach learners who might not have access to tech learning. This included deepening partnerships with other values-aligned community-based organizations, adjusting our recruitment messaging and content to be more engaging and relatable to youth, getting out in the streets to physically flyer in our communities, and updating the demographic information we ask for in applications so we can make more equity-based acceptance decisions.
Spotlighting Tech for Justice
Developing a new tech justice curriculum that highlights how technology can be used to help or harm communities of color. This curriculum contextualizes technical skills in the lived experience of our learners, centers the experiences and contributions of communities of color in technical learning, and empowers learners to advocate for more inclusive and just tech design.
“It's a great course! The free laptops and DoorDash credits are a nice bonus, but ultimately, the teachers and the program in general are the real deal. I struggled to get the hang of coding in general when I first started, but over time it started to click in a little more.”
— 2021 participant
Our 2021 goal was to reach 200 learners via our core programs. We received more applications than ever before (500 to be exact) and accepted 240 learners. These were exciting numbers, but we struggled with retention. Despite providing free laptops and offering daily DoorDash meal credits - we saw a 50% attrition rate. The mental health impacts of the pandemic, continued zoom fatigue, and the increased technical rigor of our curriculum caused a drop off. The learners we serve already experience the greatest barriers to accessing tech learning, and the pandemic along with the virtual learning environment have only magnified them. We’ve taken these tough lessons into account as we restructure programs in 2022.
One of the shining lights of the summer, however, was our partnership with Oakland Public Education Fund and Intel. Together, we recruited and served 50 students from Oakland Tech and McClymonds High School – two public high schools in Oakland Unified School District. Unlike our other summer programs, Intel’s support allowed us to pay stipends to all 50 students for attending classes. The ‘earn to learn’ model worked, resulting in a 98% graduation rate for this program and has led to our decision to provide learning stipends to learners in all of our programs in 2022.
The impact was significant for the 106 learners who persisted. Qualitative feedback and the pre and post surveys showed that our new curriculum successfully helped learners feel an increased sense of belonging in tech, feel motivated and inspired to continue pursuing tech learning, increase their technical skills, build their confidence as technologists, and increase their awareness of tech career paths.