Ada Developers Academy

ADA DEVELOPERS ACADEMY'S MISSION IS TO PREPARE WOMEN AND GENDER EXPANSIVE ADULTS TO BE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS WHILE ADVOCATING FOR INCLUSIVE AND EQUITABLE WORK ENVIRONMENTS. ADA IS A NONPROFIT, TUITION-FREE CODING SCHOOL PRIMARILY SERVING THE NEEDS OF BLACK, LATINE, INDIGENOUS AMERICANS, NATIVE HAWAIIAN AND PACIFIC ISLANDER, LGBTQIA+, AND LOW-INCOME PEOPLE. AFTER SIX MONTHS IN CLASS AND A FIVE MONTH INTERNSHIP, STUDENTS ARE PREPARED TO BE JUNIOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS. OUR TUITION-FREE TRAINING PROGRAM INCLUDES A COLLABORATIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT, INDIVIDUALIZED SUPPORT, AND AN APPLIED LEARNING INTERNSHIP.

We envision a world in which Black and brown women & gender expansive people achieve economic power

Goal One: To increase the economic power and influence of women and gender expansive people through high-paying jobs in the most prosperous and influential sector of our time: technology.

Goal Two: To grow the pipeline of low-income and BIPOC women and gender expansive people in tech by training, resourcing, and supporting students to launch careers as software developers.

Goal Three: To expand and strengthen partnerships with tech companies to increase hiring, retention and leadership roles for Black and brown women and gender expansive people.

A critical part of Ada’s mission is advocating for equitable tech work environments. Our end goal is to create a self-perpetuating flywheel that invites women and gender minorities into tech, and retains and grows them into leadership roles, enabling them to hire and develop additional women and gender minorities. In 2021 we significantly increased the scope of our work to support our corporate partners in retaining and growing their increasingly diverse workforces. To do this we launched our Equity & Policy team, created and hired for a new VP role to lead the team, and began building out foundational training and best practices for our corporate partners, staff, and student communities in areas of gender and racial equity.

At the close of 2021, women were still down 2.1M jobs since before the pandemic. Those jobs span the workforce, but are concentrated in areas of hospitality and retail. Black and Latina women accounted for 46% of the total employment drop among women (but are less thab 1/3 of the female labor force), and 19% of transgender people became unemployed due to COVID-19 (compared to 12% of the general population). Meanwhile, tech continues to expand at a rate far outpacing our ability to meet the ever-growing demand for talent. As of September 2021, there were 1.2M unfilled software development jobs in the US. Ada gained national recognition in 2021 as a solution that dramatically shortens the talent development cycle, and increases representation in tech for women, gender expansive people, and people of color. We were selected as one of four winners of the Equality Can’t Wait Challenge, and received a $10M award to expand our programming to four new cities in the next five years. We also received a $1.25M grant from the Cognizant Foundation to support our program launch in our first new market - Atlanta. We grew substantially in 2021, from a staff headcount of 22 to 50, and we expect to reach a headcount of 70 by the end of 2022 as we continue to grow. Finally, we updated our mission statement, vision, and values in 2021 with a clearer focus and stronger commitment to racial equity.