We Stand For Justice
To our alumni, all future All Stars, their families, friends, teachers, and supporters.
All of us at All Star Code are hurting from the results of last week’s election. We know this affects you, the most important part of our organization, in so many different ways. We have lived through a divisive and openly bigoted campaign in which we have watched Americans spew hatred against people of color, Muslims, immigrants, women, people with disabilities, and the LGBT community.
Partisanship is irrelevant here. This rhetoric is counter to American values and is certainly not reflective of All Star Code’s values.
To our students in particular: we want you to know that we’re here for you. We’ve promised you that All Star Code will support you for the rest of your lives, and this is no exception. It is more important and true now than ever before. We want to be a support system for you and we want to hear from you, both your feelings and your ideas for what resources would be helpful to our community. Please reach out to us. Send us an email, a text, a Facebook message. Stop by the office, our doors are open. We are reeling as well and we will process this together.
There are more questions than answers right now. Over the coming weeks we will be reaching out to our partner organizations to make sense of this new landscape, discuss the challenges that are facing us and how we can work together to surmount them.
Finally, we are going to keep working our hardest to do good, and you can too, and no vote can change that.
With love and support,
All Star Code
A Note from Christina Lewis Halpern
The following is an excerpt from a message sent to the ASC team:
“Now is not the time to hide. Now is not the time to retreat into what we think we know. Now is not the time to hope for the best. There is a war going on and it’s a war for hearts and minds.
And here’s the ammunition we need. Leaders. Capable, informed, 21st century leaders who have empathy for the people and bring ideas that can solve the real challenges we face; leaders who can build things; leaders who can take those ideas and make them manifest; leaders who can tell their story and weave a larger narrative about what’s important; leaders who can represent a new paradigm.
And that is exactly what we are doing. Never before has it been clearer that our work is vitally important. We are building a new generation of leaders who can speak the language of the world’s most powerful field. Politicians use Twitter but our students could build Twitter.
We need to foster these leaders. And from the bottom of my heart, I believe that we are the only ones doing this the way it needs to be done because we aren’t just preparing our students to graduate high school. We aren’t just preparing them to go to good colleges. We aren’t just preparing them to get a job as an engineer. We are preparing them to be able to change the world.
Every company we engage with is an entity we enlist in tolerance, every new student website is a narrative that contradicts racism, every free pass to an invite-only hackathon is a tool our students can use to win the future. And every person who is inculcated into our culture is one more whose heart is opened to the power of diversity.”
Sincerely,
Christina Lewis Halpern
