Our story with Goodwill of the SF Bay starts in 1995 when our Executive Director, Leo Sosa, was an instructor for their tech programs. During his time there, he founded tech programs and saw a need for accessible and reliable tech training for young adults, something still present today. Fast forward to the present, Leo has now founded our wonderful organization Dev/Mission, with the same goal in mind. Our story comes full circle with our new collaboration with Goodwill of the San Francisco Bay! We have now expanded our pre-apprenticeship program to young adults ages 18-29, and one step closer to closing the digital divide.
Back in 2019, Goodwill generously received a grant from Salesforce to offer a program for transitional-aged youth to learn technology. After reaching out to several networks, Goodwill heard about Dev Mission and our thriving Pre-apprenticeship program and began reaching out to Leo. On our end, Leo, encouraged by the Office of Economic Workforce and Development was catching word about this opportunity Goodwill wanted to offer. Unfortunately, this collaboration was delayed by the Covid-19 lockdowns back in 2020. Until recently! Back in January, the entire Dev MIssion crew headed over to Goodwill to meet with CEO William Rogers. We introduced our pre-apprenticeship program as well as our free tech support, and suddenly, we began to build a bridge between our two organizations.
Rachel Herrmann, the Director of Learning and Development at Goodwill began to hear about Dev/Mission through various networks such as TechSF and the Office of Economic Workforce and Development. She saw a vision and, later in March, reached out to Leo to propose an opportunity. To continue to explore their collaboration and work on ways Dev/Mission could support their goals. Rachel saw a glimpse of what our programs offer young adults and was inspired to expand to a larger group. Just as she put it, “Partnering with Dev/Mission this summer has been an exciting journey. Not only have they generously shared their best practices, time, and expertise, they have shared in our mission to work together to maximize our collective impact on the communities we serve.” The reality is, that there is a large population of young adults in San Francisco eager to dive into the tech industry and need reliable, free education. Our goal as a collaborative was to target older young adults ages 18-29 and introduce them to the essentials of IT and computer programming, and that is exactly what we did. In April, we began to meet about how we could provide a larger population in San Francisco with our services. This summer, on June 5th the energy was radiating at the Google Community Space with 30 young adults ready to learn and begin their journey with us.
Students kicked off our break and build on July 11th, they took apart computers piece by piece and put them back together at the Goodwill site this past Tuesday! Our students, guided by our lead instructors, Ivan Hurtado, and Patrick James Porcuna, watched short videos to review the components and steps they’ve been learning. Our CTA interns also joined us during the jam-packed session to assist and help our students through this intense process. Thank you to the Goodwill staff for providing the space to join us at our first break and build collaboration!
The need for reliable and accessible education is still present today, and we are grateful to our partners to be able to provide just that. This summer, we affected the lives of 30 young adults in San Francisco with the effort of this wonderful collaboration that has finally come full circle. Thank you to Goodwill of the San Francisco Bay for seeing this opportunity, we look forward to continuing this beautiful collaboration. If you are inspired by this collaboration, don’t hesitate to reach out to us! Who knows what could be next for Dev Mission… Stay tuned to learn more about our programs and how we create the next generation of tech talent.
