This weekend, over 200 people gathered at Fullscreen Media in Playa Vista for #HackFosterCareLA – Los Angeles’ iteration of the hackathon events that have been taking place across the country since last May at the White House.
After months of planning, #HackFosterCareLA initiated two-days’ (and one long night’s) worth of active coding and intense dialogue between a cohort of 25 current and former foster youth, tech companies, county and city government officials, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and nonprofit service agencies. Snap, Binti and Salesforce were among the more than fifteen tech companies who sent teams to hack.
“I was asked by a reporter outside, ‘What’s the connection between tech and foster care?’” Garcetti shared with the crowd of 250 on Friday. “And I said, ‘well, one is about connecting people and the other’s about … connecting people. It’s about finding connections for disconnected people.’”
Participants spent daytime hours convening in workshops about topics such as L.A. County’s open data for foster care, employment opportunities for foster youth in the tech space, and tools that already exist for youth in the system, such as the Think of Us platform, and apps like Persistence Plus and KnowB4UGo. The youth were especially equipped to join these discussions, as the cohort had received a crash course in coding two weeks earlier, thanks to TXT: Teens Exploring Technology, in preparation for the hackathon.
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