Each youth participant receives an accelerated education in computer-based career training, tailored to their interests, with individualized coaching. Our goal is to empower them to become financially self-sustaining technology professionals.
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Techie Youth is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit registered charity of NYC focused on helping teens in foster care as well as at-risk youth by providing technology-driven career-training, education and related resources that result in long-term sustainable solutions to help youth grow into financially self-sufficient professionals.
Our focus is on training and empowering youth with the skills to be able to help themselves.
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Techie Youth focuses on at-risk youth populations who are facing extreme life-challenges, those who are in dire-need of guidance and assistance to learn how to become financially self-sufficient. Most of our students are statistically-likely to become homeless or incarcerated in the near-future; our goal is to pivot their life-paths towards a positive professional track.
Our students include:
You probably know of some of our students already. Many have been featured on the news, sometimes for stories of severe parental-neglect such as when the neighbors find abandoned young children living for weeks alone and unsupervised; some of our students have been on the news for committing unthinkable criminal acts that we want to ensure does not repeat. When you see a New York City youth on the news for some extreme situation, they may very well end up in our Techie Youth classroom. We strive to ensure that each student graduates Techie Youth and becomes financially self-sufficient to ensure that they have incentive to proceed on a positive life path that contributes to their own well-being and to society as a whole.
Techie Youth Plus+ (TY++) is our adult-focused program for "beyond youth" demographics of substantial-need. We have TY++ programs for battered woman and formerly-incarcerated females who are seeking to re-enter the workforce. TY++ helps them begin careers as technology professionals.
We are open to collaborating with other organizations to help additional demographics, if you represent one then please contact us to discuss.
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Over 3,000+ Techie Youth students are located in New York City and Long Island.
We have many-hundreds of Techie Youth students worldwide, with youth enrolled from nearly every country in the world.
Our Techie Youth headquarters is in Long Island City (Queens, NY.) We have outgrown the facility-capacities of our former locations in Manhattan, Long Island & Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Our Techie Youth locations represent a high-tech or modern trendy (i.e. hipster, urban-chic, etc.) workspace. We do this to create a professional environment that is both exciting and luxurious to encourage the participants to take pride in their professional careers. This ideology was established at the onset of Techie Youth based on guidance from our early-advisors, Jeremy Kohomban, CEO of The Children's Village (one of New York's largest foster agencies and providers of youth services) as well as Pat O'Brien, Founder & Executive Director of You Gotta Believe, along with his successor, Susan Grundberg, former-CEO of YGB, the primary NYC agency focused on finding permanent families for older foster kids.
Our current Long Island City location is strategically located 8-blocks from the formerly-proposed Amazon NY executive office and 2-blocks from the Queensbridge Houses, the largest housing project in Queens, New York- and the former home of famous musicians Nas, Mob Depp, Marley Marl and many others.
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With founding-support provided by Microsoft, Gilt Groupe and Aerospike, Techie Youth held its first class in Nov. 2015 with a dozen students whom we recruited individually from foster agencies and group-homes around New York City.
In 2016 we moved into our first dedicated Techie Youth space in Bushwick Brooklyn supported by the generous contribution of EnterpriseDB, along with additional support from NuoDB, Greystone, 2ndQuadrant, AgilData, Vizzuality, SYSTAP, MarkLogic and other organizations.
Thanks to our generous benefactors, the Craig Newmark Foundation (Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist) and Joanne & Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), in 2018 we doubled our capacity by moving to a larger space in Long Island City, Queens. We also expanded the services that we provide for our students through support from Microsoft, Trapeze Group and the NY Rotary Club.
Through the generous ongoing continuous support of the Craig Newmark Foundation and the executives at Jane Street Capital, in 2019 we were able to further-expand by moving to a yet-larger space in Long Island City that is just down the street from our prior location.
Though collaborations with various agencies of the City of New York, over 800+ youth have participated in our in-person training programs and over 3,000+ youth have enrolled in our 150-hour computer-based technology training programs.
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Foster kids were born into their life-situations, to no fault of their own. When parents are deemed to be unfit to care for their kids, and no family member agrees to take the kids, then they are placed in foster care, ideally with a foster family but frequently older teens are placed into group homes and institutional settings.
When foster kids reach their age of emancipation (18 or 21 in most states,) they will lose their foster care housing.
Many become homeless on their birthday.
The original mission of Techie Youth was to help foster kids prepare for independent living by becoming financially self-sufficient. After graduating a few classes, New York City asked us if we would also permit homeless teens to join our program; we could not say no. Then they asked us to help justice-involved youth learn career skills to reduce recidivism; we felt that this was a very important cause too, and invited them with open-arms. Eventually we expanded scope to help many other forms of at-risk youth demographics, and adopted the ideology that Techie Youth helps every youth who needs us.
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We provide every student with opportunity & attention, two critical facets of youth development that many of our students have confided in us that they have never before received. We supply each student with the tools of knowledge to empower them to become career professionals earning substantial income, and enabling them to help themselves.
Our Techie Youth Learn to E-Earn online learning program is focused on teaching students how to earn income online, from wherever they are, with options for:
Career-paths include:
Techie Youth is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit registered charity of NYC
