ABOUT TECHIE YOUTH

What is Techie Youth?

Techie Youth is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit registered charity of NYC focused on helping teens in foster care as well as at-risk youth by providing technology-driven career-training, education and related resources that result in long-term sustainable solutions to help youth grow into financially self-sufficient professionals.

Our focus is on training and empowering youth with the skills to be able to help themselves.×

When was Techie Youth founded?

With founding-support provided by Microsoft, Gilt Groupe and Aerospike, Techie Youth held its first class in Nov. 2015 with a dozen students whom we recruited individually from foster agencies and group-homes around New York City.

In 2016 we moved into our first dedicated Techie Youth space in Bushwick Brooklyn supported by the generous contribution of EnterpriseDB, along with additional support from NuoDB, Greystone, 2ndQuadrant, AgilData, Vizzuality, SYSTAP, MarkLogic and other organizations.

Thanks to our generous benefactors, the Craig Newmark Foundation (Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist) and Joanne & Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), in 2018 we doubled our capacity by moving to a larger space in Long Island City, Queens. We also expanded the services that we provide for our students through support from Microsoft, Trapeze Group and the NY Rotary Club.

Through the generous ongoing continuous support of the Craig Newmark Foundation and the executives at Jane Street Capital, in 2019 we were able to further-expand by moving to a yet-larger space in Long Island City that is just down the street from our prior location.

Though collaborations with various agencies of the City of New York, over 800+ youth have participated in our in-person training programs and over 3,000+ youth have enrolled in our 150-hour computer-based technology training programs.×

Why do we focus on foster-kids and at-risk youth?

Foster kids were born into their life-situations, to no fault of their own. When parents are deemed to be unfit to care for their kids, and no family member agrees to take the kids, then they are placed in foster care, ideally with a foster family but frequently older teens are placed into group homes and institutional settings.

When foster kids reach their age of emancipation (18 or 21 in most states,) they will lose their foster care housing.

Many become homeless on their birthday.

The original mission of Techie Youth was to help foster kids prepare for independent living by becoming financially self-sufficient. After graduating a few classes, New York City asked us if we would also permit homeless teens to join our program; we could not say no. Then they asked us to help justice-involved youth learn career skills to reduce recidivism; we felt that this was a very important cause too, and invited them with open-arms. Eventually we expanded scope to help many other forms of at-risk youth demographics, and adopted the ideology that Techie Youth helps every youth who needs us. For more information visit: https://www.techieyouth.org/