 This is no ordinary classroom, and this is no ordinary teacher. David Delmar, an artist and web designer, teaches urban youth how to code through his after-school program called Resilient Coders. Resilient Coders is an initiative to get in front of communities that are underrepresented in technology and teach those young people how to code. Expose them to the sort of technology that they don't have access to currently and treat it as a trade, not so much as a school subject, but rather as a trade. The idea came to him a few years ago after attending a technology conference in Texas where he had a major realization. I started looking around me, and I started listening. I started listening for people speaking Spanish, and I started looking around me for people of color, and I started counting. So I was there for four days, and I counted 14 people. That's a problem. It's a problem that has been a national trend. A 2013 report by the National Science Foundation showed that 51% of employed scientists and engineers were white, 12% were Asian, 4% were Hispanic, and 3% were black, demonstrating that minorities, especially women of color, are still largely underrepresented in the STEM fields. And so that's what got me thinking. How can they use my skill set and my experience to try to fix this problem? Bill Maher taught his first class to a group of incarcerated youth from Roslindale. Seeing the movement's potential, he quit his job at PayPal and devoted himself to the program full-time. We absolutely do not teach coding the way teaching is done at school. There are really no assignments. There are really no questions that we ask and expect them to answer. Rather, the first time I sit down with a new group of students, the first thing we do is we go over the word meritocracy. Meritocracy is ruled by those who can. Get good at this thing and you can rule the field. Following this principle is what helped Freddie Mello and ex-Velen become one of the most advanced and talented students in the program. He's very easygoing, very understanding, very caring. I feel like he actually really cares not only about this mission, but he cares about the people involved in it. And I feel like that's extremely rare. There's a myth pervasive amongst some of these communities that the way out is hip hop or basketball or drug dealing. That's the way a lot of these students see their opportunities. And we try to present technology as another option. There's an entire field out there that many of these students feel that they have no access to. And I just want to demonstrate the fact that they absolutely do if they just put in work. David hopes to spread the movement locally and nationally so that minorities can work and lead technology. All it takes is resilience. For Be A New Service, I'm Noelia Valero.