Laura Weidman Powers, co-founder of a fast-growing nonprofit aimed at getting more black and Hispanic people into technology jobs, doesn’t know much about coding.
“I’m not technical,” she says, with an apologetic laugh. “I learned just enough to get by, to have smart conversations with engineers.”
But that doesn’t matter. The brainchild she created four years ago with a college friend, Code2040, has won support from Apple, Google, and the Knight Foundation, for starters. It also won her a fellowship from Echoing Green and a designation by Goldman Sachs as one of America’s 100 “most intriguing entrepreneurs.”
Her organization’s mission, she says, is a matter not only of representation in a particular industry but of broad economic justice. With many demographers now pointing to 2040 as the year when people of color will become the majority in America, the need for minorities to make gains is urgent.
“What we are excited about is ending structural racism in America,” she says. The technology sector provides some of the “most stable, highest paid jobs in America, she notes. The average tech worker’s salary is greater than the median household income of a black family and a Latino family combined.”
The tech world, she says, is an ideal starting point for greater workplace inclusion. It’s “risk tolerant” and open to experimentation.
Also, technology is going to be an essential part of every business in the future, Ms. Power says. If Code2040 can succeed in diversifying the likes of Apple and Google, she suggests, “that’s our foothold into the rest of the economy.”
A 2014 Google survey helped generate a greater interest in diversity in Silicon Valley, she says. The study showed that African-Americans make up only 1 percent of the company’s U.S. tech work force and Hispanics only 2 percent.
A collection of profiles of leaders who stand out from the pack with an innovative approach to tackling major issues facing society. New articles are added monthly.
Before the study’s release, she says, she spent a lot of time educating tech companies about the problem. Afterward, because Google is considered a leader in the field — and because data on diversity at such companies had been rare — more corporations began expressing interest in making their staffs more inclusive.
Since then, she says, Code2040 has had to contend with “sorting the wheat from the chaff.”
She sums up the challenge: “Which companies were really interested in working on this and making change and which were just looking at this as a PR opportunity?”
Ms. Powers, 33, grew up in New York in a family steeped in the arts. Her father, John Weidman, wrote the book for Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins and is a longtime writer for Sesame Street. Her paternal grandfather wrote the book for I Can Get It for You Wholesale, the Broadway musical based on his novel.
But an interest in service and justice was “core to me,” Ms. Power says. After Harvard, she headed to Stanford for a law degree and an MBA.
She opted for the business degree in part so she could learn how to generate more money for charities. She had felt an affinity for the social-change work of nonprofits but noticed they often lacked sustainable revenue.
She started an arts-education nonprofit, a for-profit tutoring company, and jobs as a product manager at two tech startups.
Code2040 came out of a discussion with a friend from Stanford, Tristan Walker, an entrepreneur who chairs the group’s board. The pair launched a fellows program that placed black and Latino computer-science students in summer internships with tech companies.
The first fellows class reported to their internships in the summer of 2014. But Ms. Powers and her colleagues quickly learned that simply funneling college students into internships wasn’t enough.
While companies may be willing to host interns, they weren’t necessarily equipped to recruit and retain them as employees. Also, students needed help building professional networks and navigating the peculiar traditions of tech-job interviews, such as the “whiteboard test,” in which applicants are asked to sketch out solutions to coding problems using felt-tip pens instead of keyboards.
Code2040 began offering human-resource services and workshops to its corporate partners and created the Technical Applicant Program, aimed at coaching tech job seekers of color. The group will serve 1,000 people this year. The nonprofit’s flagship fellows program placed 87 interns this year, more than double 2015’s head count.
Tech companies, she says, reflect many of the problems and inequities in America itself. “What we’ve learned is that a lot of them are really interested in this but have never put in the time, effort, and resources. This is the first time they’ve really dedicated the resources, building the muscle and competencies, to becoming inclusive.”
John Bracken, vice president for media innovation at the Knight Foundation, met Ms. Powers at South by Southwest Interactive a couple of years ago. The grant maker has given Code2040 a gift of $1.6 million to date, including $400,000 two years ago as part of the Knight News Challenge.
“Laura and her co-founder were very timely on putting their finger on a very core American problem: As we shift into a digital world, how do we ensure that the people building the platforms and tools that we’re living under are representative of American society?” says Mr. Bracken.
Ms. Powers’s group has not only put a spotlight on the problem but given people of color practical help in building professional networks in the tech world, the kind that lead to jobs. “They’ve been unique in that space, as far as I can see,” Mr. Bracken says.
Code2040 has created a program that could scale up easily, the grant maker says, but “one part of their success that is not replicable is Laura.” Ms. Powers, he says, has been an effective leader for her cause and an empathic one who has been skilled at building relationships, including with Silicon Valley businesses. “That combination of operations and public acumen is rare.”
To scale up, the $4 million organization is focused on bringing in resources — money, talent, and partners — to help it implement an ambitious new strategic plan.
“We’ve sketched out the next 25 years,” she says. The first three years will be about figuring about how to make Code2040 a resource for all 35,000 African-American and Latino college students who are studying computer science. The next five will be about implementing those plans.
Among the goals: Creating a business-incubator program to support Code2040 alumni who want to create their own companies. A pilot program, the yearlong Code2040 Residency, is sponsored by Google for Entrepreneurs. Started in three cities last year, it’s expanded to four more in 2016.
Meanwhile, Ms. Powers is advocating fiercely for her mission of increasing opportunities for tech’s diverse talent pool. “I do think there needs to be more urgency in solving this,” she says. “As the tech industry becomes more prominent and this skill set more necessary, this problem is only going to accelerate — and become more difficult to solve than it is right now.”
