Page 75 - Innovation Delaware 2019

SOLOMON ADOTE SANDRA ENNIS-ALEXANDER GARRY JOHNSON III
MELANIE AUGUSTIN
recruitment pipeline is Zip Code Wilmington. “Zip Code Wilmington was created without the intent of
serving any particular demographic, but we wanted to make sure that it was accessible to everybody,” says Executive Director Melanie Augustin. “Part of
that is because we know that there is a diversity issue in tech, and wanted to just get the best-qualified people in the door, regardless of their race, religion, gender, any of that — and that included regard- less of their ability to pay the exorbitant cost at a lot of the coding schools in
the region.” Zip Code offers unlimited scholarships to low-income students.
“We’re really able to reach a broad group of people with various backgrounds through this program,” Augustin says. “They’re all here not because they’re diverse but because they were the smart- est, most capable folks we found.”
Zip Code’s current cohort is 58% female, while 30% identify as belonging to races underrepresented in technology (i.e. African-American or Latinx). An outcomes report covering April 2017 through April 2018 showed 93% of enrolled students graduated. Within one year, graduates received an average salary of $74,134.
Zip Code has been working well for sponsoring employers like BlackRock and JP Morgan. “I think when people step outside of the Ivy League box, or even
of the college-education requirement box, and just say, I want people who are going to be driven, who are going to be here because they want to do the work, and they’re going to work hard — I think when people start to see that successfully
working in their work environment, then they will open their minds to hiring more people like that,” says Augustin. “And that’s what we’ve seen, because our part- ners have seen that succeed and so they keep coming back and hiring more.”
Garry Johnson III is a UD graduate and the entrepreneur behind KnowCapp, a financial services startup that helps small business owners gain access to capital. But as he went through the Summer Founders program at UD last year, Johnson honed in on the lack of diversity in the tech industry in general.
“One of the problems that I found was that there aren’t necessarily oppor- tunities for all types of entrepreneurs to get the resources and education and mentorship that they need,” Johnson says, adding that, at a tech conference,
“I walked into an event where I wanted to interview people about diversity with the technology and entrepreneurship space and, basically, I was the diversity that was in the room.”
After talking to lots of minority entre- preneurs and to investors, Johnson conceived the First Founders accelera- tor, which he launched in February
with support from New Castle County and 1313 Innovation. “I launched this accelerator specifically focused on ed- ucating underrepresented founders in understanding how to develop scalable businesses,” he says. The first cohort of 10 enrollees is working its way through First Founders’ 12-week program now.
Johnson has also left his mark on
Delaware’s innovation economy by launching the “I Have a Dream” Pitch Competition, which is open to African- American boys ages 8 to 18. It is part of the One Village Alliance’s Raising Kings, an annual monthlong event to honor the legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Our mission is to connect young adults in the Wilmington area who don’t have access to opportunity — either because of their finances or because of the neighborhoods they live in — and provide them with the skills that our cor- porate partners need,” says Peter Lonie, site director for Year Up Wilmington.
Year Up takes students with little or no job experience through a six-month training program that instills both hard skills and soft ones. Students learn Java programming through a partnership with Zip Code Wilmington, and take class-
es in business or computer science at Wilmington University. After those initial six months, students spend another six months interning with a participating em- ployer, with a view to being hired full-time.
After 2 1/2 years in Wilmington, Year Up is working with its fifth cohort of
EDUCATING UNDER-REPRESENTED
PETER LONIE
DAN YOUNG
FOUNDERS
CLOSING THE OPPORTUNITY
DIVIDE
INNOVATION DELAWARE 73
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