Blair McAvoy: Building a foundation for the Charlottesville Tech Community
Blair McAvoy is the Clubhouse Coordinator for a local Charlottesville non-profit, Computers4Kids. C4K is an amazing organization that provides low-income youth with caring mentors, computers, and access to cutting edge technologies.
Blair worked with C4K while she was a student at UVA and continued with them full-time after she graduated in May 2018. Here’s her story.
Andy Page: Blair, could you introduce yourself?
Blair McAvoy: My name is Blair McAvoy. I work at Computers4Kids. I’m a recent UVA graduate from the Curry School, Degree in youth and social innovation.
AP: Tell me your story. How did you get to Charlottesville, Virginia.
Blair: I came to Charlottesville from Fauquier County to be a UVA student, as many people who grow up in Virginia do. I was originally interested in studying statistics and public policy. But, I took some education classes that were part of the Youth and Social Innovation program and really fell in love with those classes.
The Youth and Social Innovation program within UVA’s Curry School of Education is a good balance between research and policy which was what I was originally interested in but didn’t get out my statistics and public policy classes. So, I made the jump and declared as a YSI major at the end of my second year.
My third year is when I really started to get involved with the Charlottesville community. As part of a class, I had to volunteer at Computers4Kids and as soon as I started working with the kids, I was hooked. I took a semester off that year to work full-time with C4K through an Americorp fellowship.
After having worked at C4K for so long, when my fourth year started, it was kind of weird for me to become a college student again. I continued working with C4K full-time while doing classes part-time. It got to the point where I felt very much like a part of Charlottesville and very less a part of UVA. It felt weird, even as a part-time student, being back on Grounds.
AP: Now, tell me more about Computers4Kids. What do you all do?
Blair: C4K is an out-of-school learning environment. Picture it as a teen tech center and mentoring program. We run a one-on-one mentoring program and drop-in Clubhouse for middle and high schoolers. I manage the Clubhouse. We’re a part of The Clubhouse Network which is an international community of 100 clubhouses where youth explore their own interests and build technology skills.
AP: Why do you do what you do?
Blair: I think a lot of people assume that I’m at C4K mainly because I enjoy working with kids. While I certainly enjoy that part of it, I wouldn’t say I do what I do primarily because I love hanging out with teenagers.
The primary reason that I like working in education is because it is just such an important part of the future of society and it’s often done really poorly. Providing a good education for our youth is a systemic issue and I like to think about how to make education work the most effectively within the context of the greater Charlottesville community.
Charlottesville has a really big and growing tech scene but even still, there aren’t too many ways for our students to build the skills that would make them competitive. The schools are getting there slowly, but there are and always have been gaps and inequities in the pipeline from K-12 education to in-demand STEM careers.
What’s really frustrating is that the tech scene in Charlottesville pulls from UVA or brings in professionals from other tech hubs. But if we did a better job of training our own kids for those jobs, helping them understand what the opportunities are, connecting them to internships, etc., we could send more Cville kids to growing Cville companies.
I guess that’s why I’m so interested in the work that C4K is doing.
If you think about the Charlottesville community as one big system, we need to do a better job of making sure that Charlottesville natives can participate in the local tech industry. To do that, we need to make sure they’re getting technical skills training at an early age. I see accessible technical education programs as the way to build a strong foundation and pipeline for bright, young (and local) talent to go work for local Charlottesville jobs.
This is why I love partnering with HackCville, Kim Wilkens, and others in the space. When I picture all of our educational initiatives working together, it’s like we’re building a well-oiled machine, one that can support the growth of Charlottesville!
AP: Gosh that’s fascinating! Why do you think tech education is the key to this well oiled machine?
Blair: It’s not that I believe the answer is strictly tech education. I think that education should be rooted in skills that are in demand — and it just happens that right now, that’s tech. And when I say tech, that really means quite a bit. It covers everything from engineering and robotics, to data science, to media, and more. For kids from lower-income households, learning a skill that is in high demand and can get you hired can be your ticket to breaking the cycle of poverty. With the right set of skills, you could even skip college and go straight to a well paying job. It’s our goal to get them those skills so that they have independence in decided where their career takes them.
AP: For someone who is interested in doing similar work, where should they start?
Blair: Volunteering. That might be a cop out answer, since I work for an organization that always needs volunteers, but I started as a volunteer here at C4K and then just kept coming back. Our program director Chris started as volunteer here as well. A lot of nonprofits have volunteer opportunities so just go find one that is tackling a problem you care about and get involved.
I started as a volunteer with C4K, and then even worked for them as an AmeriCorps VISTA, and then they eventually hired me permanently. I never had to send my resume anywhere, make cold calls, or go through a ton of interviews trying to find a job after I graduated. I showed them what I was capable of when I was volunteering and that was enough.
