Posts from hacking philanthropy

Ten years ago, a small group of folks in the K12 Computer Science Education community in NYC decided to put on a “mock job fair” for high school students who were taking computer science classes in the NYC public schools. That was the start of an annual day of engagement and learning for high schoolers considering a career in tech.

Yesterday we got the Fair back in person after three years of not doing it or doing it remotely. And it was so great to be there. This is a picture of all of the students making their way around the various booths learning about careers in tech.

Most everyone in the tech sector would like to have more diverse companies but there are no easy ways to accomplish that. Ultimately we need to get young people interested in careers in tech much earlier in their schooling and show them what those pathways look like.

This photo is of a team from Justworks doing exactly that.

I want to thank all of the sponsors who made this event possible:

And most of all I would like to thank Jennifer Klopp, Executive Director of Gotham Gives, who led the effort to get the Fair back in person this year and the team at the NYC Public School System, TEALS, and Tech:NYC who helped get the students and the tech companies there.

Yesterday was one of those days for me where a lot of the work I do across different areas of interest comes together in a single place and time. And those are great days for me.

Mike Zamansky is the person who got me interested in K12 Computer Science Education in NYC, a cause I have now contributed almost fifteen years of my life to.

Our family’s public charity, Gotham Gives, has been funding the work we do in K12 Computer Science Education in NYC for the last decade and a month or so ago, the Gotham Gal recorded a podcast with Mike talking about the early days of our journey into K12 Computer Science, how we met, and what transpired.

That podcast is up on YouTube and I’ve embedded it here. It’s about ten minutes long.

I’ve previously written about The $1k Project for Ukraine, which was launched by my friend, Alex Iskold, five days into the Russian aggression. 

Since its inception, the project raised more than $10M and helped 10,000 families and 35,000 children. The AVC community has generously participated.

Last week, Russia announced its withdrawal from Kherson and The $1k Project crew is racing to help the next 1,000 families specifically focusing on the liberated territories. 

This coming winter is going to be absolutely brutal in Ukraine because of the energy crisis.

The Gotham Gal and I have previously made a donation to the project and we received this thank you page from the families we supported.

This past weekend we made another donation to support these families in the newly liberated territories.

If you are able to give and support a family please do so here.

Gotham Gives is a public charity that the Gotham Gal and I started one year ago to complement the family foundation that we have been using to make philanthropic gifts for over two decades.

A public charity allows us to raise capital from others in addition to our family’s philanthropic gifts. We use this public charity to put together syndicates of donors and raise more capital for our projects than would be possible on our own. It reminds me very much of the way early-stage venture capital works.

We started raising funds in addition to making gifts over a decade ago when we started our computer science education work in New York City and Gotham Gives takes that approach to philanthropy and allows us to use it in other areas.

This page shows the projects we have supported in our first year and who we have partnered with on them.

This page hosts videos we have recorded with some of the founders and operators of these projects and we plan to produce more videos in the coming months. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more videos as they come out.

You can also follow Gotham Gives on Twitter if you want to follow our activities on social media.

Gotham Gives is run by Jennifer Klopp and we are joined on the board by our long-time friend and philanthropic partner Sarah Holloway. The entire team is shown on this page.

Philanthropy is an incredibly rewarding way to invest in the change you want to see in the world. In our case, that is change we want to see in our home, New York City, and we are committed to investing in programs that leverage community, knowledge, and culture to drive positive change for New York City.

I blogged about the $1k Project For Ukraine a couple of months ago. Since then over 5,000 families in Ukraine have gotten a $1k gift, no strings attached, to help them survive during this crisis. That is $5mm of direct aid to families in Ukraine.

Yesterday, Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack, tweeted that he and Jen Rubio will be matching another $2.5mm of $1k donations over the next 48 hours, starting at mid-day yesterday.

I just supported another five families and with this generous match, that is ten families.

You can join me in supporting a family, or five, or however many you’d like here.

I saw this tweet in my feed yesterday and I sent some ETH to India this morning.

Sandeep followed with a bunch more wallet addresses to use if you want to send other crypto assets:

With the pandemic easing in the US, thanks to vaccines, we cannot turn a blind eye to what is happening elsewhere, particularly India.

I appreciate the crypto community, which is global, stepping up to do this and I encourage anyone with some crypto to participate.

And we finally found something useful to do with DOGE coins.

I’m not much for the shopping mania that happens on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but I do like the idea of taking a day at this time of year to give back. Today is that day.

This year is a particularly hard year for so many and so giving back, if you can, is even more important. The Giving Tuesday website suggests things like offering help to your neighbors, supporting a virtual classroom, reaching out to the elderly, and many more ideas that don’t require a financial donation.

If you do want to make a financial gift, there are many places to go online, including our portfolio company GoFundMe.

For those of us who have even more to give, I strongly encourage creating a family foundation and making giving back something you institutionalize in your life. Many of us in tech, startups, and venture capital find ourselves with large stock positions with very low cost basis. One of the very best things one can do with highly appreciated stock is to donate it to a family foundation and use those funds to support causes that matter to you and your family. We were encouraged to do that over twenty years ago and we did it and it has been a source of great joy and discovery and learning for us.

So no matter what level of giving you are able to do today, I encourage you to do something. It will help others and it will also do some good for you too. We are in a very difficult moment and giving back is a great way to lighten your load just a little bit.

Food Bank For New York City is NYC’s leading hunger-relief organization.

During this crisis, the number of people turning to their emergency food network has increased by 50%.

Here are some interesting stats from their website:

$1 helps provide 5 meals

OR

$1/day helps provide 150 meals every month

I just donated some money to help feed people in need in NYC. If you want to join me, you can do so here.

Yesterday, Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef/owner/creator of Prune, a tiny twenty-year-old restaurant in the east village that The Gotham Gal and I and our family have always loved, wrote a piece in the New York Times that really captures the sense of loss we all feel around our favorite local places, particularly for the people who made them what they are every day, day after day, year after year.

I can’t get her words and the images and emotions they convey out of my head.

So I want this Funding Friday to be for people like her, who have given a large part of who they are to serving us.

And the cause I’ve selected is ROAR, Relief Opportunities for All Restaurants. You can follow them here:

ROAR’s Twitter

ROAR’s Instagram

ROAR and Robin Hood, one of NYC’s leading charitable organizations, are partnering with the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation (NRAEF) to provide direct cash assistance to restaurant workers in New York City facing unprecedented economic hardship as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We made a donation today and if you’d like to join us, you can do that here.