We’ve been able to start building a $50 million venture capital fund to invest in underrepresented founders in the tech space. It’s been a year, so tell me some of the highlights. So a large part of the initial work was “how do we start raising awareness and start changing the conversation and the culture as we start to transition out of awareness to more programmatic things?” It’s “how do we build programs that are educating, that are engaging, that are getting people connected to help at every stage?” So ranging from youth education to technical education all the way up to adult technical and startup-focused commercial education this year.
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A lot of people that we work with don’t understand what the opportunities are in tech or how to get into tech. A lot of people who I talk to don’t actually understand they’re in careers that are currently being replaced by automation. And you know, a lot of what we’re doing right now is just raising awareness. A large part of what 1Philadelphia is, “How do we look at all of the different partners, all the different organizations that need to work together to address the issues we see with inequity as a result of not having enough underrepresented people in the second innovation space?” So, you can think of us almost as like the connective tissue.Īnd I remember when you guys launched, one of the big things was, you got corporate folks to give you like a million bucks. You have to be able to bring together partners from across the spectrum to all work together collectively to attack the issue. Well, a large part of it is how do we collectively as a city, 1.) recognize we need to move as many underrepresented people into tech as possible and 2.) how do we start connecting the dots? Often when we attack large systemic problems, we do it in silos. And so how does 1Philadelphia sort of seek to shift that narrative and change the stats? WHYY thanks our sponsors - become a WHYY sponsor So if you take a city where more than 40% of the population is Black, but only 2.5% of the people in tech are Black… that’s a huge disparity, especially when you look at where the jobs are. If you take the City of Philadelphia as an example… there was a report with a data point published in Technically Philly that showed that if you look at tech in Philly, only 2.5% of people in tech in Philly are Black. Where were people of color, Black folks specifically, in tech, and how is 1Philadelphia seeking to change that? The jobs in tech are the jobs that are going to survive that automation. If you look at all of the data in terms of what jobs are being automated, where careers are going right now, Black people are concentrated in jobs that have the highest likelihood of being replaced by automation, which means if we don’t start shifting the careers that we’re going into, at some point, we’re going to create a chronically either unemployed or underemployed class.