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San Francisco Mayor London Breed, Airbnb and Twilio Inc. have announced a $2.7 million commitment to helping the city’s homeless. The funding will support the Rising Up campaign, which provides housing and job placement services to more than 500 young people in San Francisco. Rising Up plans to cut the homeless population in the city in half within the next four years. The donation from Airbnb and Twilio will be used for expanding Rising Up’s capacity. According to a county and city report almost 7,000 homeless residents lived in San Francisco in 2017 — an increase of over 4 percent since the 2015 count. “Shelter is a basic need, yet on any given night, nearly 1,200 young people sleep on San Francisco streets. This is our hometown, and we have a responsibility to help those young people in need of housing and job opportunities,” Airbnb Co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky said in a press release. Homelessness and income inequality are ongoing problems in cities with booming tech sectors...
Behind the scenes at Twilio, the company is working towards building a diverse workforce and fostering an inclusive environment. By 2023, Twilio wants its workforce to be 50 percent female and 30 percent underrepresented populations. The company, by this time, also aims to have 100 percent of their employees report feeling included and like they belong on the company’s employee engagement survey. “It’s more about accommodations or having an environment where they feel included, feel like they belong and feel supported” said LaFawn Davis, Twilio’s Global Head of Culture & Inclusion to TechCrunch . “What we’ve been working on is more exposure, programs, more understanding of what their needs are before asking for demographics from that population.” Twilio’s workforce is currently 31 percent women and 68 percent men. Underrepresented populations—Black, Latinx, two or more races, Pacific Islander, Native, Other and LGBTQ— make up 17 percent of employees. Only 1 percent of Twilio...
By Freada Kapor Klein, Founding Partner of Kapor Capital and Allison Scott, CEO of Kapor Foundation The Supreme Court’s decision banning affirmative action in higher education on June 29, 2023, is part of a larger series of organized attacks on momentum and progress towards racial equity, particularly in the tech industry–including the lawsuit and recent injunction against Fearless Fund, for alleging racial discrimination and temporarily halting the VC firm from awarding its grants exclusively to Black female entrepreneurs; lawsuits against Perkins Coie and Morrison Foerster for their diversity law fellowship programs; the overturning of the Small Business Association’s focus on minority businesses; 13 State Attorneys General threatening Fortune 100 companies regarding their DEI programs and initiatives; legislation in Texas and Florida banning DEI offices in higher education and restricting related courses; backlash against organizational diversity statements; and tech diversity...
Venus Williams is fighting a new battle off the courts to shed light on pay inequity. In an interview with E! News on Equal Pay Day, Williams gets candid about her experience at the Grand Slams, which is where the tennis star realized she was under-compensated in comparison to male athletes. The reality was hard to grapple with, leading Venus Williams to use her influence in hopes of a more hopeful future for young women. To do so, Venus William’s company EleVen, is spearheading the #PrivilegeTax movement, and Credit Karma, Twilio and A&E have hopped on board, Vanity Fair reports. “The #PrivilegeTax movement is what we’ve coined as this real data that shows that women only make 82 cents for every dollar that men make and it’s a serious problem,” Venus Williams told E! News. “I’m very passionate about it because this happened to me.” She continued: “I’m very excited to be partnering with many companies to close this gap, to raise awareness, to raise money at a grassroots level and...
Many are looking for creative ways to help as COVID-19 has been devastating for certain businesses and people. Overflow, which began operations in late 2019 , has seized the opportunity to double-down on its mission, which is to “make generosity frictionless,” Head of Technology, Kyle Woumn said. If you attended AfroTech 2019, you might remember that Woumn was one of AfroTech’s speakers and a former Twilio software engineer. Like all great products, Overflow was born out of a deep necessity. Vance Roush, an executive pastor at Vive Church in The Bay Area, founded Overflow in November 2019 because he saw that many people wanted to donate stock to the church but either didn’t know how to or found the process difficult. He launched Overflow and used it to raise over $1.1 million in stock for Vive. Woumn, who also attends Vive Church, recalled his own unpleasant experiences when he tried to donate stock to other organizations, so he joined Overflow’s founding team to help them with...
Today, millions of people are unemployed, suffer from self-doubt, and have built walls of “what-ifs” around them. The underrepresented community has been hit especially hard by the Coronavirus lockdown, which is why there’s no better time to start learning new skills and improving your career prospects. In 2016, Ruben Harris and Timur and Artur Meyster set out with a mission to demonstrate the possibility of breaking into tech, regardless of background. The trio wanted to break existing stereotypes around hiring individuals from non-traditional backgrounds through education, mentorship, and other resources. They created the Breaking Into Startups Podcast to feature inspiring stories of those who turned their perceived disadvantages into advantages, and their limitations to strength. The podcast today has over one million downloads and has helped thousands of people from non-traditional backgrounds embark on various opportunities and paths in tech and land jobs at some of the best...
It’s no secret that harassment and discrimination continue to live in the workplace. Thankfully movements like “me too” were started to bring awareness and help survivors. Then there are also companies like tEQuitable that preceded those movements while utilizing technology. “Before Weinstein and when ‘me too’ went viral, we started before that, and it really was a moment in time where enough is enough,” CEO and co-founder of tEQuitable, Lisa Gelobter, said. The technologist and computer scientist has an impressive resume, including companies like Hulu, Shockwave, BET and more, according to the company’s website. Her list of accomplishments also includes having served as the Chief Digital Officer for the U.S. Department of Education during the Obama administration. It was during her time at the White House that further expanded her view on the capabilities of technology and ultimately led her to develop tEQuitable. “It was really there that I came to understand that we truly could...
Kyle Woumn — a speaker at AfroTech 2019 and a software engineer at Twilio — is no stranger to technology or the culture. If you take a look at the engineer’s LinkedIn, his tagline says it all. “I came up with that tagline, ‘Creating Dope Technology For The Culture,’ earlier this year because I was trying to think about who I am and the kind of work I wanted to do and put out into the world,” Woumn said. The world of technology is not new to Woumn. As an only child, born and raised in a traditional nuclear family in Atlanta, GA, he has always been a creator. His intense passion for learning and technology prompted his mother to enroll him in STEM summer camps in the Atlanta area at a young age. He attended youth programs at Spelman College and Georgia Institute of Technology. His enthusiasm for engineering persisted through high school and he eventually enrolled at the prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology to study computer engineering. However, he quickly found that his real...
The company’s Black Inclusion Group and Vice President of Inclusion are dedicated to serving underrepresented communities. Deemed the world’s #1 job site 1 , Indeed is a platform that prioritizes diversity and inclusion by giving candidates all over the world a chance to be connected with new opportunities. The site welcomes over 250 million unique visitors each month, catering to a diverse group of people not only worldwide — but also within the corporation itself. ( 1 comScore Total Visits, March 2018, 2 Google Analytics, Unique Visitors, September 2018) The company proudly supports an inclusive work environment where all employees feel empowered to positively contribute because they believe diversity and inclusion ultimately impacts the success of the business. That’s why Indeed celebrates its employees’ unique experiences and backgrounds with Inclusion Resource Groups (IRGs). Each of their nine IRGs is provided an executive sponsor and an annual budget to achieve their mission....
DoorDash has announced a pilot program with mRelief, the startup helping families across the nation sign up for food stamps through voice, digital and text applications. There are a few hurdles when it comes to applying for food stamps. From wait times, paperwork and being approved, families risk going through weeks of not securing the funding necessary to help buy groceries. DoorDash and mRelief’s partnership is providing emergency food vouchers to assist families while they wait for food stamp approval in San Francisco. Families who sign up for CaliFresh—California’s food stamp program—in San Francisco are given $35 in DoorDash credit for their next meal. The partnership is set to run from February until September, according to a post from DoorDash’s blog. “Our work at mRelief is about bringing the simplicity of technology typically used to provide on-demand services, to things that are critical needs” mRelief co-founder Rose Afriyie told Techcrunch. The partnership is big news...
This article was originally published on 01/23/2019 A picture can be worth a thousand words or…a Drake lyric. All Drizzy fans have been there. You’ve got that perfect selfie or beach photo with your friends that you’ve got to pair with a line from a song on “Take Care” or “So Far Gone” as a caption, but you can’t pinpoint where it came from. Finding the perfect caption for Instagram posts has become somewhat of an art form and one software engineer wants to make it easier for Drake fans to pair their pictures with lines from his songs. Kyle Woumn, an engineer for Twilio, combined his coding skills and love for Drake to create Drakestagram after a vacation with friends in Vancouver. Drake and Migos were set to perform in the city during Woumn’s visit, which inspired him to create Drakestagram, a platform that provides search results of keywords in Drake’s lyrics. Here’s how it works: Users search for a keyword within Drakestagram and the platform returns a list of Drake lyrics that...