GitHub + Hack Club: grants for your club, custom merch, & more.
Five years ago, in 2014, I dropped out of high school, moved out of my parents’ home to San Francisco, and started Hack Club, a network of student-led high school hacker clubs.
As a 16 year old high school dropout living on my own, my goal in starting Hack Club was simple: to create the community of high school hackers I always wished I could have been part of.
Hack Club has come a long way since our founding. Today, I’m proud to share a milestone partnership: GitHub is announcing Hack Club as their flagship K-12 partner for the 2019–2020 school year.
Hack Club leaders—GitHub will be giving your club 3 new superpowers this school year.
- GitHub is directly funding every Hack Club, with a one-time $50 grant for new clubs + an ongoing $50 kick-off grant each semester. If you’re a Hack Club leader, your club will receive this funding.
- GitHub is providing cash grants of up to $500 to every Hack Club hackathon, scaled with attendance. Club and hackathon grants will be distributed through Hack Club Bank.
- GitHub is producing special-edition Hack Club swag. Every Hack Club, high school hackathon, and high school classroom on GitHub Education will receive this swag in the mail over the next school year. Stickers, backpacks, hoodies… we can’t show you yet, but we’re over the moon.
We’ll launch each of these by the end of October. GitHub club grants will start going live next week, hackathon grants by the end of September, and the first swag will be distributed the first week of October.
GitHub’s investment into the Hack Club community goes beyond cash. Over the course of this school year, GitHub will release new workshops and training content for your clubs, blog posts featuring Hack Clubbers, and far more — we even have a few surprises in store.
If you have any questions about what this means for you, message us in #hq on the Hack Club Slack (or DM me directly @zrl).
High school hackers will go on to change the world. This partnership legitimizes the work Hack Club leaders, members, and the HQ staff have been doing — often on their own dime — for years.
The world may not have been built for ambitious teenagers, but they exist, and Hack Club’s mission has always been to make sure that they have the tools and support to fulfill that ambition.
We’re proud to have GitHub join us in this mission and look forward to working together in the years to come.
