codebar and FT go gold!
What is codebar?
It’s long been a part of my focus to support initiatives that help under-represented groups find pathways into technology roles. codebar is one of the first organisations that I had an opportunity to work with, way back in 2017, and from the off I was really impressed with what they were aiming to do.
From codebars website, they are “…a charity that facilitates the growth of a diverse tech community by running free regular programming workshops for minority groups in tech.” Back when I worked with them in 2017 they were entirely run by volunteers and didn’t yet have charity status, yet were still able to get “sold out” workshops happening almost every evening in the week around different venues in London. I felt really privileged to be able to work with my colleagues back then to not only provide a venue for the workshops to happen (along with sustenance for the attendees) but also to try my hand at coaching. I really enjoyed that first experience of showing a student what they could do with HTML (although my coding skills were that rusty that languages like javascript were a little more challenging for me!).
I was happy to see on joining the FT that codebar is something that they too have previously supported and along with some passionate colleagues (Andy Mead, Katie Koschland, Jamie Brown) we have been able to run two workshops at Bracken House this year (with more to come). In addition, I’m really pleased to announce in this blog that the FT is now a gold sponsor for codebar!
FT & codebar unite
One of the reasons that I elected to join the FT in February 2022 was their commitment to Diversity & Inclusion - including sharing publicly their statistics and goals for each year. Along with the FT values (most notably for me, Ambition, Curiosity and Inclusion) and the culture I’ve observed while working here it really makes sense for us to directly partner and support codebar in the form of a sponsorship.
As a disclaimer — I was also directly responsible for achieving the first ever gold sponsorship of codebar with Compare the Market — the organisation I previously worked at. This is one of the reasons I’m so pleased that the FT has shared my thinking around the value this relationship could bring with codebar and to continue that support between two different organisations. While at Compare the Market this sponsorship helped us run many different supportive workshops (including one around deploying into Amazon Web Services) and taking part in a virtual job fair which resulted in us identifying some excellent candidates to join the company.
How are we planning to support?
As already mentioned, we’re committed to continue our workshops at Bracken House with another two this year to add to the two that we’ve already completed. There is also going to be an opportunity for us to run four separate events with codebar — more details on these to come. Likely they will be opportunities for our engineers to share interesting and exciting developments and experiences with technology, ideally in a hands-on way.
The workshops that we ran in January and earlier this month in April have already had great support from our internal engineers (Aprils workshop had seven coaches from the FT!) and all have enjoyed collaborating with codebars organisers to help make the workshops a success.
Given codebars global impact across the world (you can see some cool statistics here), with 30+ chapters across the globe it is a great opportunity for the FT to partner as a sponsor to show our investment in creating learning opportunities in technology for minority groups in technology and I’m excited to see how this engagement progresses over 2023 and beyond.
What’s next?
Our next workshop is going to be hosted at Bracken House on the 5th July so if you are a codebar coach or student, keep an eye on codebars site for that announcement. If you work at the FT, get in touch with me or join the conversation on our internal Slack channels to hear about other opportunities too!
We’re ideally going to be running the first of our partnered events in the next couple of months and will share news of that through codebar and our own social channels. We will also be part of codebars job fair on 12th June so hope to see some of you there!
It’s a real pleasure to partner with codebar in this way, it’s important to me to support charities like codebar and I know it’s also important to the FT. Here’s to many years of success and partnership together!
Finally a big thanks to my co-organisers at the FT, Andrew Mead, Jamie Brown and Katie Koschland.
