Catching up with Sylvester Mobley: Coded by Kids’ Founder & the Brains Behind 1Philadelphia
As Coded by Kids finalized the launch of Philadelphia’s first–ever tech education ecosystem, I sat down with its founder to find out what it means to tackle inequity head on — and as a team.
Sylvester Mobley is no stranger to turning a formerly sacrosanct industry upside down. His nonprofit Coded by Kids is working towards an equitable tech and innovation sector, where high–growth job opportunities are only limited by talent and determination, not along arbitrary racial lines. The program provides young people from underrepresented backgrounds with core skills in coding, software development, and entrepreneurship to make tech and startup culture more accessible. With more than 20 program locations and an alumni network of over 900 current and former students, Coded by Kids is going through a growth spurt.
Now, the nonprofit is expanding its reach with 1Philadelphia, the city’s first–ever tech and education ecosystem that creates a pipeline from kindergarten to career that sets students on the path towards becoming the next CEO that takes Philly by storm. What does this mean? Some of the city’s boldest thinkers in education, venture capital, entrepreneurship, and technology are banding together to create a unified Philly, shifting the concentration of Black people from underpaid industries to ones with limited upward mobility.
I sat down with founder and 1Philadelphia lead Sylvester Mobley to discuss what building an equitable education ecosystem looks like from the ground up — and how community engagement is essential to forging a better Philly.
(Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Beatrice Forman: How did you settle on Coded by Kids’ mission?
Sylvester Mobley: Coming from tech and personally seeing the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion, I felt like there was an issue that needed to be addressed. I didn’t really know what the solution was or how I could address it. I was kicking around a few different ideas and ended up landing on Coded by Kids because I felt like if we could start with young people and prepare them for, not just roles in tech, but leadership positions, [that was a start]. We should approach tech and innovation the way sports are approached. In sports, no one says to someone their junior year of college, ‘Do you want to play in the NFL or NBA?’ That person who goes onto the NFL or NBA has been training, preparing, being mentored and developed since they were a child for that ultimate goal of playing at the highest level. If we could do the same thing with tech and innovation, we could produce high–level young people who are able to not just get jobs. Sometimes, when we talk about Black kids the bar is just set at jobs. I wanted to figure out how to do more than that. I wanted to figure out a way not just for our kids to get jobs, but for our kids to be starting companies and leading companies.
BF: One Coded by Kids’ truism is that the system isn’t broken; it’s functioning how it should be. What does that really mean?
SM: So there’s an interesting conversation I’ve had with friends who are immigrants or come from immigrant families. They always say that when their families came to the United States, they had nothing but were able to build wealth. They say, ‘Black people have been in this country for hundreds of years. Why can’t they do the same thing?’ One of the things I have to remind people of is that Black people are one of the only groups outside of Native Americans where the laws and structures were intentionally designed to keep them from moving forward. So it’s one thing to say immigrants face discrimination, but it’s something very different when the laws created were meant to prevent you from finding success.
Sometimes, doing nothing is okay. Because if you do nothing to someone, at least nothing is pushing against them as they try to move forward. Everything in the United States has been structured to push against Black Americans. Even before the United States was even a country, you see laws being passed by the Virginia legislature to create this unequal system. Then, you get to slavery. And after slavery, you get to reconstruction and Jim Crow laws. Today, you still have discrimination in lending and employment. The system has been designed so that Black people are unable to attain what people talk about as the American dream.
Take Philadelphia, for example. Not many people know why Philadelphia has the funding model it does today for the public school system. People blame the school district, but the funding model we have in the state of Pennsylvania was created during white flight in the ’70s and ’80s. As white families were leaving predominantly Black populated cities for the suburbs, the state legislature wanted the funding to follow them. So, they intentionally defunded Black school districts to move the funding into the suburbs so that white families had the money coming to them. They never fixed that system. White politicians intentionally did that, and no one’s ever changed that. So the system isn’t broken. It’s functioning the way people intended it to.
BF: So, how does knowing that the system works the way it does intentionally change the way we approach solutions to racial and gender inequity? How does that frame of mind shape everything Coded by Kids does?
SM: It means we have to build new systems. I think where a lot of organizations are not as successful as they could be is in trying to work within systems that were designed to create inequities. There’s only so much you can do, and there’s only so much you can change about a system that was designed to oppress people. At some point, we have to recognize what the systems we currently have intended to do and build new systems. We have to start from the beginning and ask: What does it look like to build a truly equitable education system? What does it look like to build truly equitable systems of hiring? We have to start there and then move forward.
With Coded by Kids, we take an approach different from that of other nonprofits because we feel like the approaches other nonprofits have taken are a part of the problem. They are a part of what perpetuates the systems that we have. If we want to address the issues that matter to us, we have to build new systems and look at new ways of thinking.
BF: Well, you are building that new system right now. It’s called OnE Philadelphia, and it’s a tech education ecosystem that brings together a bunch of nonprofits in the tech, education, and equity spaces to follow young people from kindergarten through college as they develop an interest in tech. Can you tell me more about that?
SM: So, you have a lot of organizations that work in similar spaces and reach similar populations, but rarely do those organizations work together to accomplish a common goal. It’s hard to make the argument that we can be successful as a city if only some of us are working together to move towards a common goal — and that includes funders, nonprofits, schools, and employers. We all have to share a vision for this new Philadelphia and be willing to move towards that vision together.
OnE Philadelphia is about pulling together everyone. We want to consider all of the stakeholders, from people at the grassroots level all the way up to large corporations, and say, ‘What does it look like for us to have a unified vision of the future of Philadelphia and work together to move in that direction?’ Admittedly, I’m saying that shared direction should center around underrepresented people in the tech and innovation space. I’m saying that because the data is fairly clear about the direction society is going in terms of jobs and economic opportunity. People need to be in tech.
The data is also clear that if you take Black people as an example, they are already concentrated in jobs. They’re just concentrated in the wrong ones, which have the highest likelihood of being replaced by automation. Black and Latinx students are concentrated in the lowest–paying college majors. We’re already concentrated in certain fields, so why don’t we shift that concentration someplace else?
BF: First and foremost, how does a tech education ecosystem like OnE Philadelphia target educational inequity at the root?
SM: By bringing together people who play different roles in education. We need funders because it takes money to provide Black and Brown people a high–quality education. We need organizations that deliver education in different areas. It’s not just about tech. You need literacy and math education, too. By bringing all of these different stakeholders together, we’re saying, ‘We’re going to make sure that we’re working towards the outcomes we know are meaningful.’
I say this because often when you talk to a principal about what their target outcome is, they’ll say graduation rates. I push back and say graduation rates are output, not outcomes. If you’re working towards output, you’ve basically turned your school into a factory. We have the inequity we have because our current systems are built towards output. They’re not designed to consider that Black and brown kids can do more than graduate and get a job. If we’re able to bring people together and build outcome–driven education, everyone is working towards a set of outcomes that enable Black and brown students to do more than graduate.
BF: Finally, how does OnE Philadelphia plan to measure impact, and what are its goals going into the pilot?
SM: One of the outcomes that we’re working towards is our ability to increase Philadelphia residents’ interests in opportunities in tech and innovation. In order to get more underrepresented people into tech and innovation, we have to first increase their interest. We have to educate them on what the space is and what they can do in it. We also have to measure the level of engagement people have with tech and innovation in their own community. Are people in Philadelphia going to more meet-up groups centered in tech? Are they going to more tech-related events?
Next, we’re launching Community Innovation Coaches. They’re like block captains in a sense, but they’re the people in the community who are able to talk about tech and innovation and explain the pathways toward opportunities. We’re measuring how many people in the community they’re reaching and if those people are seeing an increase in tech understanding because of those interactions.
Finally, we’re going to be taking our competitive coding competition, Ctrl+Shift, and making it a team-based, league based sport that happens throughout the city. The Community Innovation Coaches will coach these teams, which will compete against each other.
