 Phyllis was founded in 1992 to be a peer-to-peer support group for Black and Latino students who were interested in tech but didn't have the support or the specific kind of resources that met certain challenges that they had. And 29 years later, it's still continuing that mission and continuing to grow. Hey everyone! Hey man! Hello everyone! The purpose of the organization was to have a support group for students who were coming in brand new, who were fresh out of high school and not really very familiar with the IT field. We noticed that a lot of underrepresented students, Black, Latino, Latinx, were leaving the major because they just didn't understand the connection between the course content and what they would effectively do in the world. There wasn't a lot of people, individuals, minority students especially, who really understood the power of information. A lot of us, quite frankly, felt lost, but we were lost together. We're like, hey, how can we put our collective brains together to figure this out? Let's get together and let's help each other study. Let's try to get in groups together so that we can work together and help each other out. Once we saw that this was growing, we decided to put together a formal proposal and it just launched from there. We've seen just the evolution go from four to now over 3,000 students that have graduated and have participated to some degree on campus of Bliss and then to some degree post-graduation have come back and have done a variety of things for Bliss. Anyone who was a part of the organization would return to the university, would help students find summer internships, would come and speak at conferences and show them what we were able to accomplish and what they could accomplish once they were done with their degrees as well. Hearing people in the field who they've experienced certain kind of adversity, certain challenges and they know what it's like to be in my shoes was really inspiring for me and it's part of why I wanted to be on the e-board and to be able to give back. I think Bliss is in superb hands. Those young people knocked my socks off. They still got our initial vision and taking it to a whole new level. Taking our founders now much later in their careers, still having that fire to give back and empower other students to do that on their campuses, it's really just an honor. And now because of them we have this infrastructure where we can develop new ideas, we can go work with other campuses, we can bring in companies that typically don't recruit from Syracuse all because of the chance that they took at pursuing an idea. So thank you for being brave and taking a risk and laying the foundation for us to continue.