Project Alloy: 2017 Update
Project Alloy’s first year has been an exciting and rewarding one — we’re taking this moment at the end of the year to reflect on the milestones we’ve reached, and where we’re headed.
Some background — we began working on this in Spring of 2016 shortly after this essay and we have since then been executing on our mission:
Building a more inclusive technical community, one conference at a time, by offering financial grants and other resources to people who are early in their career and underrepresented in tech.
In order to do that this year we’ve set many goals for ourselves, and proceeded to accomplish each of them — we became an official 501(c)3. We decided on our name — Project Alloy — and launched our public-facing website, ProjectAlloy.org, in collaboration with volunteer Edward Loveall. We collaborated with volunteer Karina van Schaardenburg to create a template application form to help us get to know grant applicants, that we can use in the future across all conferences. We created relationships with sponsors and have fundraised in order to support our mission and goals. We partnered with a conference. And foremost, we served our first ever class of conference attendees.
This September, Project Alloy sent 123 grant recipients (we use the term ‘grantee’ for anyone who has received a grant from us) to attend the highly-regarded programming conference Strange Loop held annually in St. Louis, MO. Our grants covered travel by plane, train, and automobile, and also hotel costs for a combined 200+ nights. Strange Loop donated all the conference tickets. Our applicants traveled more than 65,000 miles and hailed from nearly 30 different cities.
The conference was fantastic. During the conference, we organized a series of Project Alloy-sponsored events. The first, and biggest of these, was an evening meet-up exclusively for our grantees atop the St. Louis Centene Center’s rooftop space. Grantees had the opportunity to gel over mocktails, enjoy the view from the balcony deck overlooking St. Louis, and build long-lasting community.
Our event was attended by very special guest speaker Aston Motes, who gave words on the importance of opening doors for others and encouraged us to reflect and discuss how to create space and to open even more doors.
In addition to these, Project Alloy sponsored two additional events. We held a networking lunch for grantees and sponsors to share potential job opportunities. This proved to be so popular that we ended with standing room only! Secondly, we rounded the event off with a special breakfast for our donors and sponsors to meet with us in person, as a chance for us to say thank you and to connect face-to-face. Meeting the people who support us was an incredible delight, and we look forward to continued growth in future.
In the end, we were thrilled to see how well everyone connected — before the event online in our Slack group and at the conference itself. Our cohort cheered on their peers who gave lightning talks and even interviewed each other about the impact Project Alloy had created. We were grateful to open up a space for these organic support structures to evolve and are excited to watch them grow as we continue including others in our community.
We’re looking forward to 2018 — increasing our impact and our reach, including even more conferences, and exploring new ways to build a lasting inclusive and welcoming tech community.
If you’d like to support Project Alloy, please donate on our website — ProjectAlloy.org
