 Live from Houston, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference in Houston, Texas. I am your host, Rebecca Knight. Our guest today is Marissa Elena-Yanez. She is the founder and CEO of Empoder, which means Empower in Spanish. This is a nonprofit that promotes technology in communities of color. Marissa, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. So, just to clarify a little bit, we do, I wouldn't necessarily consider us as a nonprofit that promotes technology in communities of color. More so, we promote computer science and engineering and education. That will allow, yeah, it's really the educational component that will allow. So we don't want our kids just to be fascinated with technology. They're already fascinated with technology, but they don't see themselves as the innovators of this technology. And what they're really missing is the educational component. And so our tagline is Empowering communities of color through computer science and engineering education. And it's really that educational component, which isn't necessarily as sexy as like, oh, look at this app and create kind of a silly app, but it's really like creating the skills so that they can be the next Mark Zuckerberg or all of these founders and CEOs in the tech world. And they were basically coding from the time they were 10 years old. And that's what we're trying to do with our girls. So you grew up in Silicon Valley. And I had assumed, oh, she must have had access to robotics classes and coding clubs as a kid. And you said, absolutely not. That was not my experience. So what was your, tell me your story. So a couple things. I grew up in Silicon Valley. I was really fortunate. My family were first generation immigrants to this country and they worked very, very hard. And by the time my father was in his early 30s, he bought a piece of land in Los Altos Hills and we were born there. I was the only girl of color in the schools. I was born and raised in Los Altos Hills. The majority of my family lived either in East San Jose or in East Palo Alto. And that's where I spent a lot of my time. And so I really was very, very familiar and had a unique insight on kind of like the two sides of Silicon Valley, the, you know, where all the minorities hang out in Mountain View, which at that time was very, very low income. Google hadn't gotten there yet. And it was really like, it was the kind of place where you walk down the street and it's like, don't walk after six o'clock at night because there's gangs on the streets. And I mean, it was very, very much a different, this is in the 90s, it was a very, very different landscape. And so, and that's kind of like where I grew up, but yet I grew up in Los Altos Hills seeing what the benefits of growing up with my father as an engineer. I know that was a school teacher. And most of the kids that I went to school with their parents were lawyers and doctors and really appreciating how that influence in the house shapes what you see for yourself and seeing how the kids of color and the communities of color, despite the fact that as Silicon Valley has continued to progress in the last 20 years, there's this huge conglomerate of power in tech. And yet that tech community is very, very separate from this low income communities that are all throughout Silicon Valley, that although they're surrounded by the epicenter of tech, they're completely disconnected from it because it doesn't exist in their household. Their parents aren't engineers. They aren't computer scientists. And so while they may go to school in schools that have robotics clubs and have computer science classes, they don't see it as being something that's for them. So unless you actively go out into those communities and engage them and show them really how they too can be part of this process and how they too can gain the skills to code their own app or to create their own computer programs, their own algorithms, there really is a disconnect. They just, they see that it's all around them, but they don't think that it's for them. So you have this unique perspective on the digital divide in Silicon Valley, which is amazing because this was a 90s, as you said, a burgeoning community. Facebook, Google of course didn't exist then, but yet there was, there were people still working in technology of course in a burgeoning community and yet on the other side of town, really a different story. Or really in the same side of town. Or in the same side of town. It's a different one straight over, two straights over. A really different story. So what can be done, so you said, you need to change the experience. How do you do that? So there really needs to be a significant effort to create not just opportunities, but opportunities that specifically engage low income communities. So what we have created is a summer boot camp where for seven weeks, it's a seven week boot camp and then it's four weeks for middle school students. For seven weeks we train high school students who have already taken AP computer science to teach middle school students, middle school girls, computer science. And we teach low income middle school girls material from advanced placement computer science classes. So they're learning Java. They aren't doing this drag and drop stuff that in my experience, I've seen that kids who learn the drag and drop, it's fun and it's engaging. But as soon as they encounter real syntax in computer science classes, which is really the frustrating part, they're like, this is so different than what I learned. This is not for me and they run out of class and they don't learn to work through that frustrating period of time that it takes to really learn how to code and syntax. And so we challenge them with what I call the real deal, like real Java programming. And yet we have them create games or create programs that are fun for them. And so we tailor the curriculum to engage these girls, but we create our boot camps so that they're only open to low income students. You have to qualify for free reduced lunch in order to be able to take it. And so because of that, 95% of the girls in our programs we're working primarily in Mountain View and East Palo Alto and the community there is Hispanic. And so they think that we're only open for Latino students, but we have really, it's an economic cutoff for who's available. And then we go and we go into the community and we go into churches and we go into parent meetings where the Latino parents come and we talk to them about the program and we engage them and we talk to them. So instead of just like kind of creating the opportunity and hoping that people come to us, we go out into the community and engage the community and say, these are the reasons, you know, look at the tech industry around us. Your kids, to me, I look at it as the way out of poverty. You know, your kids become the next innovators in this tech industry and in one generation. And are the parents open to this or is there some resistance? You speak to them in Spanish. You speak their language kind of. You talk to them about how apps and technology and websites are changing the world and their community. But the thing that they, that really gets them is I say, look, if everybody in the tech industry right now, if the majority of them are male, if they're largely white and Asian population, they're creating technology based on their experiences. So much technology is needed in the Latino community and the African American community and the, you know, there's so many advances that could be made just to deal with, you know, the unemployment issues or the health issues or all the different issues that affect low income community. But if people from our community are not the ones creating that technology, then who's going to create the technology that actually addresses the problems that affect our lives? If we're not there being part of that, then who's actually solving the problems that exist for us, you know? So you show them why this is such a big problem. Why it's so necessary. And then they realize like, oh, like, you know, and so for me, Empor-Dead is not, it's not about kind of like the rich empowering the poor. It's empowering from within, you know, like you learn to solve the problems that affect your community and then you create the technology that addresses problems that impact your life, your community, you know? But it starts with them recognizing there is a problem and why it's important to change. What about the girls who start out with you and you were talking a little bit about the differences that you've observed in the sense of how they come into the program and what is needed for success? So when I started Empor-Dead, it's our tagline is empowering communities through computer science and engineering education. Kind of our, it's really communities of color only because we look at low income communities. But I didn't have a discrepancy between boys and girls. The first after school programs that I started offering at these palliants were both boys and girls. And this was for what age? This was elementary and middle school because I was still experimenting with what is really the sweet spot, you know? Like where is really the ideal age? I'm an engineer, so I'll start with something and that's kind of why, you know, a lot of organizations start, they decide what their model for their program's going to be and then they just do it and then they scale it and it grows up. I'm kind of like identifying what is the way we can make the most, the biggest impact. You took an agile approach. Yeah, and we're kind of tweaking it before we really try to get it everywhere. But so I worked first with elementary and middle school students and I worked with both boys and girls. And I found that the girls, especially in middle school, just would not speak up. So what I started doing, they wouldn't speak up. They wouldn't participate. They were a lot less engaged. So what I started doing is, because I couldn't just change the program midway, I put them in all girl groups and all board groups because I found when they were in co-ed groups, the boys were doing everything and the girls weren't doing anything, you know? So suddenly when it's an all girl, it's groups of three or four. So we did a lot of stuff with robotics in the first year. And when suddenly with these groups, everything from the assembly to the coding to figuring out what kind of, how the algorithm's going to work. Girls, how to take the lead because we only had groups of girls and I realized how much they flourished when it was only there, when it was only them. So when we did our first summer program in 2015 last year, I was like, you know, I need to get girls away. I need to get them separate, especially in middle school. I find that once they gain that confidence that when it comes to high school, we can kind of reintegrate them with boys and they've developed a sense of like, wow, I'm so good at this, you know? I'm kind of like, this is for me, but that has to, they have to be able to go through that period of empowerment and building confidence and realizing that they themselves can do it. And you just, you separate girls and especially Latino girls who are really taught to kind of like stay quiet in the home, that the boy takes the lead. It's a very machismo society still very much. They are, they just flourish when they're on their own. And so I realized, you know, they are the most vulnerable, like young, low-income girls of color in Silicon Valley and everywhere really. But the reason why I focus on Silicon Valley is because we have such an opportunity there. We have such a lack of diversity in the tech force. And yet at the doorstep of all these tech companies are communities full of talent of color that are not being tapped into it. And in one generation, that pool can become the next generation. And you're tapping into it. And so that's what I'm working on doing. And I see that all of the resources and all of the expertise and everything is right there. It just needs to kind of be connected. The tech industry really needs to connect with these communities. They need to get more involved in supporting programs in local communities that bring kids to their companies where their tech employees go out to the schools. Like I have a vision that it would be an expectation that all tech employees in Silicon Valley did like, I don't know, five hours a month or something like that. Like just some kind of like social community service where they visit a school, even if it's once a month. Can you imagine how many employees there are in Silicon Valley if they were all doing once a month? Well this is your public service announcement to Silicon Valley. Get out here, volunteer at Empoderre. Marissa, Elena Guiness, thank you so much for joining us. You've been a real treat to talk to you. Yes. We will be right back with the cubes coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference, live in Houston, Texas after this short break. Was there a moment?