Today we’d like to introduce you to Jen Kamins.
Jen, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Brave Initiatives was founded in summer of 2015 by Emily Harburg, Anna Bethune and myself (Jen Kamins). Though we come from different backgrounds, we are each passionate about changing the trajectory of the tech field by increasing the amount of women in the industry while simultaneously training them to be socially-minded.
I was working as a recruiter in the tech industry, most recently Motorola, when I realized the gender gap in the engineering pipeline, specifically software engineering. As a volunteer at an after school program on the south side of Chicago, we taught junior high students the basics of coding and web development, and in the time I saw the girls thrive in the process and became very curious about the drop-off that takes place for high school girls in the computer sciences. Emily was working at Disney after graduating from Harvard and realized that the tech team around her was male dominated, and returned to school for her PhD at Northwestern to study Technology and Human Behavior. Anna was born and raised in Jamaica and after completing her degree at Stanford returned to Jamaica and worked on the staff for the former prime minister. In her time there she worked on the education structure and realized a need for the country’s development in Technology Education, and therefore moved to Chicago to also attend Northwestern in pursuit of her PhD in Education and Youth Social Development.
The three of us became friends in the Chicago area and decided to build our own program using our educations, resources and connections, we believed we could be the change makers in the tech pipeline and in the trajectory of social innovation in the tech sector.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Is starting a business ever a journey which takes place on a simple road?
When we started this mission we really had no idea what obstacles were to come, in fact the things that we thought were going to be the more difficult struggles (creating a community, getting volunteers and getting girls excited about tech) actually came fairly easy to us. On the other hand the struggles have come more in getting some of the physical items we have needed to run our camps (computers, space and of course funding).
How many computers we have limits the number of girls we can accept to each program, which is difficult because we are teaching girls to code, which requires stronger, more current devices (i.e.: Chromebooks cannot hold the software we need). We also did not expect it to be so difficult to rent/borrow devices for the length of our programs, which created a problem when girls were signing up for camp quickly and we did not know how many we would actually be able to accept. Because we had not raised enough money to buy our own computers we decided to get resourceful and reach out to anyone and everyone who may have an abundance of computers. We probably sent out 500-600 emails and before we knew it we had a computer donation come in for Facebook totaling 40 MacBook Pros and completely changing how we could run our programs.
Picking a space has also proven difficult as we are intentional about making the experience of camp a diverse experience for our campers. In result we searched for spaces where our students would feel comfortable to travel to and stay at camp, and being in Chicago that is not always the easiest as the girls travel from the far South, West and North side. This being said, we knew we would need a location either downtown or in River North, for public transportation purposes and its central location, yet, as we all know, rent is not the cheapest in these locations, so we brainstormed and searched for months and months until we finally were able to establish a partnership with GCE Lab school near North and Clybourn to use their space for our programs at a discounted price.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Brave Initiatives story. Tell us more about the business.
BraveCamps are about self- and community-empowerment through technical skills training. We encourage our girls to view themselves as agents of change in the world and arm them with a variety of technical and social skills including coding, prototyping, public speaking, and team management. Currently, our BraveCamps cater to high school girls with little to no coding experience. We ask them to reflect on their dreams and passions and articulate their visions for their lives. We then challenge them to think about the social issues they see in their communities as problems they can tackle. Our curriculum includes fun team building games, design-thinking activities, public-speaking exercises, coding tutorials, and reflection sessions. At each stage of the process, mentors with varying talents and skills support our camp participants. Some of our mentors are female tech leaders at companies like Motorola, some are university students, and some work on youth activism and socio-political development in community organizations.
A number of organizations have risen up to help address this issue. Girls Who Code, Girl Develop It, Chick Tech, and Black Girls Code are a number of organizations addressing this challenge. While these organizations excel in helping to teach young women how to code, they focus less on the psychological experience of coding and what keeps women away. Our program is unique in that it: 1) focuses on building self-efficacy of women in coding, and 2) positions coding as an opportunity to solve a community issue they care about.
We view coding as a means to an end. We care more about whether or not our participants end the camp with a deeper sense of purpose and ability. It is that mindset that will encourage them to deepen their understanding of and engagement with these complex community issues. Our founding team is composed of two researchers who are passionate about building impactful communities and developing effective curricula. As a result, research done on technical self-efficacy and civic engagement provide strong foundation for the BraveCamp activities our girls do. BraveCamp is where girls learn how to code and wield their code as reconstructive tools for societal upliftment.
As the leaders of the organization, we are most proud that we are not only working on the “leaky tech pipeline” for women but we are simultaneously training tomorrow’s tech innovators to be mindful of the technology that they write and how they impact the end user and the communities which they were made for.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
The first major grant we received felt like it was really out of luck. Our programs had been running just under a year and we had yet to collect enough data to prove what we were doing what working and influential in our girls’ lives in a longitudinal way. In May of 2016 much church decided to create a 4 minute video about my story of leaving my job to do something impactful in our city, in hopes to encourage others to do the same. This video was posted on the internet and shared by many people in the church. From there, someone who say the video was recently asked by Sage (a financial software company) if they knew any good non-profits in Chicago that would be worth supporting. That person reached out to Sage and game them our name! Without knowing this, I received a call in June saying that we were going to receive $50,000 and we were going to be on stage at the Sage Summit (in front of 30,000 people) accepting the award.
This award was given as un-designated funds, meaning we could spend them however we saw as a good fit for the organization, which we put about 75% towards programs but were able to increase our marketing budget to help get the word out about our programs and what we are trying to do. That grant changed the trajectory of Brave and it was all by “luck”.
Pricing:
- 1 Camp (20 girls @ 52 hours of program) = $13,200 ($660 per camper)
- 1 Workshop (30 girls @ 7 hours of program) = $3,000 ($100 per camper)
- 1 Year Scholarship = $2,525 (2 Camps/8 Workshops/1 mentor)
Contact Info:
- Address: Brave Initiatives
1535 N Dayton St
Chicago IL - Website: www.braveinitaitives.com
- Phone: 8478486686
- Email: jen@braveinitiatives.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bravecamps/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/braveinitiatives/?ref=br_rs
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/bravecamps?lang=en
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/brave-initiatives-chicago
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