Hi everyone, my name is Hermann, Benji, I come from Venezuela and I'm the founder of
Code Your Future.
Code Your Future is a non-profit organization that trains refugees, asylum seekers, forced
migrants and people of low income backgrounds in programming skills and help them start
a career in tech.
Today I'm going to tell you a little bit our story and what we're doing with open source
and creating one of the most inclusive platforms to contribute to curriculum development.
But before that I want to show you a video, but you know we're small groups so we're going
to try to do this session interactive.
So we're going to talk.
Are you ready for that?
Yeah?
So I'm going to start with a video that we normally share with our COFers when they join
to start the training program.
It's a video that we created with the community and the voice is from our students.
We don't know if the sound's going to work, but let's give it a go.
Code Your Future, in this video we will learn how Code Your Future works, how it is different
and how you might want to change your expectations.
Code Your Future is a majority minority community of adults and together we are powerful.
Everyone has some kind of struggle in our community and everyone also has help they
can get to others.
Everyone is wanted and needed.
Together we can solve many problems.
We are not a school of students and teachers.
We are professionals collaborating to achieve realistic practical goals.
CYF is not an accredited institution.
We can't use our certificate to get a job without actually learning coding.
All we can do is learn to build great software and we can do this to employ our client by
actually building that great software.
At CYF we don't tell you what you can do.
You're not here to judge your potential.
We only look at what you have done.
We make decisions based on evidence.
You have to rebuild things and you have to show us.
Nobody will allow you to do your coursework or tell you off for not coming to class.
If you don't do your work your reward will be your own failure.
So you're free to make bad decisions.
You are an adult in charge of it all.
And so is everyone else.
Everyone at CYF is a volunteer and we are all choosing to work together.
Everything has been created by a volunteer.
We sort of problem and try to solve it.
There's nobody coming to save us.
We are here and we are saving ourselves.
CYF grads come from many different businesses and go to many different jobs.
We are here to support you to get a job you want and a life you want.
We know that with hard work, honesty, kindness and challenge you can get there.
Don't sit around waiting to be taught things or complaining that you haven't been taught enough.
Build your own projects.
Find ideas that motivate you.
Fall in groups and work together.
Don't wait around. Try things.
At Culture Feature the only failure is the failure to try it.
You have this year to change your life with a huge hope for two forwards.
Seize the opportunity.
It's your life and you can change it at Culture Feature.
Okay, that's it. Thank you very much.
This is an intro to our organization.
I get a little bit emotional when I see it because it really puts together a lot of who we are,
what we do and how we do it, what we have been doing over the last seven years.
I'm going to start by telling you a little bit of my background.
If you're interested in knowing, is this sounds interesting like you want to keep hearing about it?
Thank you.
It's good to know.
No, no.
Okay, so as I said, I'm from Venezuela.
The back story, sometimes when people hear about Culture Feature and they come to me,
you know, you found the Culture Feature, tell me what is the story, how did it come, how did you do it,
what was your inspiration, what is the inspiration?
I think I summarized everything in these two areas, migration and on fairness.
I spent pretty much more than half of my life abroad traveling in different places.
And I started in the tech industry, had a great, you know, a good job,
and had a wonderful experience learning and growing,
but I was always a little bit touched by the on fairness, the inequality, the inequity in this world,
how, why some people have access to so much opportunities and others,
not just because they happen to be born in a different place and in the wrong country,
by the wrong autocrats, and that was something that just kept nagging me for a very long time.
And at some point it was just unbearable to kind of just keep doing the same thing.
And above all is that when I was a child, you know, my country was a pretty stable, relatively safe place.
This is my home country, it's in the mountains in Latin America, in the Andes,
and it wasn't the richest place, but it was okay.
I had a great childhood, I was playing in the streets with children,
and I never thought that the country was going to change so dramatically.
No one ever, when I was a child, imagined that the country was going to become this.
Mass migration in Venezuela is one, had one of the biggest immigrants from any country.
It's like millions of people have left the country over the last 10, 15 years.
It's completely different to my childhood.
These are people that a few years ago literally started walking, leaving the country,
because that was the only chance.
So this is the concept of a forced migrant.
You don't want to leave, but you feel you have to.
If you want to look for safety, if you look for other opportunities,
because it's just so bad going on there.
And then later on over the years, I started realizing that this story is actually overlapping
with many other stories of what was happening.
I'm sure all of you have heard about the war in Syria from a few years ago,
and the migratory crisis that emerged from there.
Well, people in Syria, they will tell you that when they were children,
they also never imagined that the country was going to end up being like this.
That they were going to start migrating and walking across,
but they actually also hosting refugees from other places.
It was a completely different story.
And it's this change of reality that made me think a lot about the world.
And when I decided to quit my safe job in tech and start looking for funding something else,
well, at the beginning it was living on an overlap,
but I entered this other world.
The world of refugees and asylum seekers, the world of long-term unemployment,
the world of unsafety, where you don't know where people have homes,
or if you're going to keep the same place for a while.
It felt that it was literally a parallel universe,
that we live in certain reality and then the others are living in another one,
and we rarely overlap.
We rarely know what's the reality in that other place.
We hear about it, we see it in the news, we see some statistics here and there,
but do we really know that many people that live in those circumstances?
And all of that is in contrast with this wonderful world that we live in tech,
with so many advances, so many developments, so sophisticated technologies like this one.
Can anyone recognize where this comes from?
What device took this image?
Sorry?
Yes.
The web space telescope, you know, a state of the art.
This is capturing a constellation from one of the oldest pieces of light that exist in the universe.
It's more than 13 billion years old.
This is a time machine.
It's looking back to the origins of the universe.
It's only between 200 or 400 million years after the Big Bang.
And we have this technology, and we can enjoy this beauty, this wonderful images
that tell you this immensity that is out there.
And we have these beautiful things happening,
and I want us to just like see it for a little bit.
Isn't that beautiful?
They call this the nursery of stars,
because it's a constellation of the formation of the stars over hundreds of millions of years.
But all this beauty is contrasted with another reality.
And I want someone that is brave enough or two people to start explaining what it is.
What are these numbers?
Anyone guesses?
You can try this.
No, it's okay. We can just try.
A person out of 78 has to migrate from his own country.
That's correct.
One in 78 people in the world is a forced migrant.
And that number keeps, the ratio keeps getting worse and worse.
One in 78, forced migrant.
10% of the worldwide wealth is detained by, no, sorry,
detains 7600 of the wealth.
I'm not sure if I was right.
Yeah, that's correct.
10% of the population in the world owns 76% of the wealth.
And I checked this million times, and I just couldn't believe it.
What else? Any other one?
Sorry?
Is it too low? Do you want it to be?
Well, it's bad enough.
What else?
Yeah, the 10% produced nearly half of all the CO2 emissions.
And then on the flip side,
How are 50% keeping 2% of the income?
Thank you.
And are responsible for 12% of the CO2 consumption.
Yeah, exactly.
So these to me was the best representation of inequality in the world.
When we're talking about wealth and pollution,
these are the two extremes you have also, like, you know,
very huge numbers when we're talking just about 1%.
It's a big, big challenge.
Do you think you can change something with your project?
I mean, a bit of a tree bud in my opinion.
Okay, tell me about it.
A lot of companies already talk about inclusion,
and they have like websites, and like, there's a lot of discrimination.
But I'm not sure you're going to change that.
How can you have impact on that?
Thank you very much for the prompt.
That's very good.
We're going to talk about this.
Yeah, we're going to talk exactly about that.
So I want to know from the audience if you would be interested
in helping changing people's lives.
Raise your hand if you are.
Great, thank you.
That's great.
And you don't have to say, I don't want to.
The vast majority of people, they're like, you know, it's okay.
My life is complicated enough, and that's okay.
Come in, welcome.
No, no, don't worry.
Come, welcome, welcome, welcome.
Welcome.
The question is how, right?
You were saying, is it realistic?
Is it possible, right?
Come in, come in.
How?
Come in, please.
Do you want to sit?
Don't worry, don't worry about it.
How?
So let's explore that idea, that concern a little bit.
How?
How could that be?
What could we do?
Any ideas?
We want to change a little bit.
We want to do something, small, tiny contribution.
What can we do?
Someone that hasn't said anything?
No?
Small steps, just teach one and one teach another, and another teach another.
Like small things.
Training.
Yeah.
Thank you.
One person training another one.
Information.
If the media can talk about all of these problems, it would just be a huge step.
Okay.
Awareness.
We want to keep talking about these things.
Uh-huh.
Maybe as a response to your comment, I don't know if it is, well, probably, well, at least
if I'm considering how the world in, from my point of view has developed, I do know
not believe that there will be one change, one technology, what I don't know,
fusion, for instance, which solves all energy crisis problems.
And this will also serve to, um, to ensure that we, that there won't be poor people
anymore because we are living in a highly inequity, uh, in equal world.
But, um, maybe it helps at least to, uh, like you said, with small steps in your
own environment where you can make impact.
So what you're saying, if I can summarize this, there's no one solution that feeds
all.
There's no one magic wand that is going to solve all of this.
Absolutely, right?
And you know, you're, you're good to say, hey, is this, is this a thing?
Is this possible?
Now I would like us to spend one or two more minutes doing something that is extremely
unusual in these conferences, which is let's talk to each other.
So let's look at your neighbors and then just talk for one to a minute.
What other ideas would you have to actually bring some tangible?
Are you, do you, do you feel comfortable?
Is that okay?
Let's explore that.
Let's, let's talk, you know, we're a small audience.
Let's talk and they say, how else can we do these things?
What can we do?
Okay.
Do, do you guys want to, do you want to share?
Well, just ideas, just to spark ideas.
No?
Just think.
We're like brainstorming.
OK.
Brilliant.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much for being so kind and speaking
to each other and sharing.
We have 10 minutes left, so let's carry on.
So as you were saying, there is like,
it's a complex topic, but we've been involved for seven years
working in this area.
So we have maybe a little contribution to make here.
One thing that I just want to highlight,
hell is paved with good intentions.
This is something that I learned, and I saw.
There's a lot of people that we want to do good,
but it's really hard to actually do it,
not only just to action it, but actually to have the impact
that we're trying to do.
A lot of the times, the good intentions
can lead to really bad consequences.
And that's something that is very important to analyze
in every single aspect.
In a decent case scenario, you actually don't manage to help.
But in a really bad scenario, you actually cost more harm.
One of the areas that for me has been a really good framework
to understand is the mesoherarchy of needs,
to understand, OK, when we're trying to make impact
in a person's life, we kind of look at what it is
that we're trying to do.
And in the first level, we have the physiological needs.
When people need food, air, water, for example,
when there's like big emergencies like earthquakes,
and there's this horrible words that are happening,
like we know that, OK, we need to help people in these areas.
It's very clear.
It's very, you know, people really understand that intuitively.
But then when we try to do something else,
it becomes a little bit more complex, yeah, more difficult.
It's like, OK, people need more than that.
It's not enough to just like have the food and the air
and the water, we need more.
And one of those areas is we need to feel secure.
We need to feel, you know, that, for example,
when we have a job and we have employment,
we feel like a little bit safer.
We feel like, you know, and also when we start connecting
with others, when we have a sense of belonging,
when we also believe in ourselves and we have self-esteem,
and finally, when we actually keep learning
and keep growing, we actualize ourselves.
All these are important, and all of these are interventions
that we can do.
When we think on a project, we think we're more or less
in which area we're trying to make a difference.
And what we decided in Code Your Future was that our goal
was to launch careers, was to going to help people
start a career in tech.
We're not going to help anyone.
We're going to help those that need it the most,
those that you saw in those statistics,
people that were forced migrants,
that suddenly arrived in a new country
and had no connections and no jobs and no way to know
how it was working.
And then we saw that tech was a great place to be
because it's pretty democratizing.
If you know the skills, if you have the skills,
then you can actually get a job.
And that's what we started working on.
But then later we realized, well,
it's actually not just about this.
Because actually, yes, you can, you know,
you say, I'm going to try someone get a job.
But actually, in order to get a job, people have to be
skilled.
But in order to be skilled, people need to also feel safe
and a sense of connection.
So our community of professionals, the old volunteers,
and they're all coming to share, give their skills,
the old people like yourselves, normal people,
they come and they created that sense, that community
and that growth.
And then it goes back to the question, does this work?
Does it actually make a difference?
And we did measure it because we said we're going to do
a training, let's organize a training that's all very nice,
very exciting.
We started like doing web development,
the full stack JavaScript.
But then that's not enough.
Like that is something interesting,
but there's much more than this.
The real part that mattered was getting people to get jobs.
And we were lucky to see from the very first class,
people getting jobs, like Centaur, refugee from Ethiopia,
was unemployed long term for many, many years,
went through the program, and now he's working at the
Financial Times.
Or Ahmed, a refugee from Syria, his dream was to go to
university, but the war interrupted all of that.
Come, please, come in, come in.
The war interrupted it, and he was completely lost.
He never went to university, but he always wanted to be
a developer.
He joined Code of Future, and a year later,
he was having his first job as a developer.
And finally, Ansi, who is from India, had given birth
just four months before the program started,
had a tiny, tiny baby with her.
She had not done any employment for five years,
was completely alone, feel disconnected, very shy,
very low self-esteem, and went through the program.
Please join us.
And then, and she's a developer five years later.
Now, is this going to change the huge numbers that we saw there?
No, of course not.
But it's just basically one person at the time,
because every single person matters.
Every single person makes a difference,
and is like connecting and knowing that you see that journey
of people getting into employment.
It's a dream.
These are some of the numbers that we have.
Mass majority of people we work with are living below poverty
line, mass majority are ethnic minorities.
We have a huge range of ages.
We have a great gender split,
and above all, people are getting jobs.
This is our ultimate measure of success.
And over years, we have been diversifying.
We have an open source curriculum development
that Daniel that is here has helped organize for many years.
We've been diversifying, getting into new areas of development.
And we started like here, but then we just been growing.
One of the last ones was an SRE program that we created together
with Slack to help people pay them all the way from like no programming
all the way to getting a system engineering job at Slack.
We are doing this.
And because we wanted to talk a little bit about our syllabus development,
at the very beginning of the early years, we were very excited.
We started developing our own curriculum and creating content.
And we had this really long, long list of content.
It was very good. We're very excited.
But over the years, it became really hard to change, really hard to adapt.
It was a little bit like at the beginning was, you know,
we had these little blocks and they started growing.
So at the beginning was like, okay, well, we have a block and we put another block.
And then if we wanted to do a change, it was easier because there wasn't much content.
We had to change one and then we put another one.
But over time, we had like bigger, higher towers of content and information.
It was really, really hard to change.
And then at some point it was like this.
We had this big thing.
I was like, oh, Daniel would say, I think we need to change this part
because it's not working.
It's like, oh, well, but if we have to change this, we need to change so, so many things.
So it become really, really difficult.
And then we had to design a new curriculum paradigm and we just went in the open source mindset.
How can we make as inclusive as possible?
How can we allow as many people as possible to come and contribute?
And we basically completely changed the way that we had the curriculum and we decided we're not going to have content.
What we're going to do is basically point out to whatever content is out there.
And then we have basically bits of information that can't live anywhere.
And the content basically is just those pointers that say where those bits of information are.
So if we want to change something, we just rearrange it.
And if we want to move from one to the other, what we have to do is just point it out the direction.
So our curriculum, instead of these pages and pages, longs of text that becomes really updated,
and it looks like this, this is our curriculum.
So if you're interested in knowing more, join our open source curriculum development.
Thank you very much for your time. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
This is Code Your Future. And we're here in the sun.
Thank you. Thank you so much.