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Changing the world one hackathon at a time

Jessica Guynn
USA TODAY
George Hofstetter, 14, took part in My Brother's Keeper hackathon in Oakland, creating an app to help African-American teens feel less nervous around police officers.

OAKLAND, Calif. — George Hofstetter stands on stage in a black hoodie, a confident 14-year-old with a wiry frame and bright brown eyes.

He's handed a microphone and 60 seconds to pitch his idea: a mobile app to help African-American teens like himself feel less nervous around police officers.

The app will have tips — the digital equivalent of "the talk" Hofstetter hears regularly at home, the one that reminds him to keep his hands in sight at all times and to be polite and respectful.

His mom took him to meet the police chief in his hometown of San Leandro, Calif., but this ninth-grader who dreams of studying computer science at UCLA and one day running his own technology company still gets "extremely nervous." He doesn't want any more kids ending up like Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen shot and killed in Ferguson, Mo., by a white police officer.

"It's happened so much where kids like me have died because they've been shot by police officers," Hofstetter says.

Teens in the audience at the My Brother's Keeper Hackathon soberly nod their heads in agreement.

Now Hofstetter and his team have two days to program and present the app.

Sixty-six kids are taking part in a group coding competition called a hackathon. This one is the brainchild of Kalimah Priforce, the 34-year-old CEO of Qeyno Labs.

It's similar to those that pop up all the time in Silicon Valley in which programmers, designers and other tech workers spend a night or a few days pounding keyboards to develop a new app or feature. That's how the popular Facebook "Like" button came to be, for example.

But the hackathons that Priforce puts on are very different.

Kalimah Priforce, CEO of Qeyno Labs, puts on hackathons for minority youth.

Instead of a sea of mostly white and Asian men, this auditorium is brimming with mostly African-American teens.

Priforce calls them "trailblazers" and they are here on a sunny winter weekend in Oakland to address very real problems they see in the world around them, from helping kids make healthy food choices to encouraging them to read more books.

"Why not put Dr. King, Amelia Earhart and Steve Jobs in one room and see what is it they can do," Priforce told the crowd as he paced the stage at last weekend's hackathon. "But hackathons right now are comprised of Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and maybe one Asian guy."

He pauses as the audience laughs and then says: "That's a problem."

For years, Silicon Valley has seemed out of reach to African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities pushed to the margins of the tech industry. They make up a tiny percentage of the Silicon Valley workforce. But passionate entrepreneurs such as Priforce and Black Girls Code founder Kimberly Bryant are trying to change that.

"I want to make hackathon a household world in every community," Priforce says.

Priforce's first hackathon celebrated black male achievement after neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman was acquitted of shooting and killing an African-American teen who was walking home from a convenience store. Priforce's thought-provoking concept: Could an app have saved Trayvon Martin?

Hackathons, Priforce said, can collapse the walls that have isolated high-potential kids with too few opportunities. These kids can learn the fundamentals of coding and follow a promising pathway to one of the nation's highest-paying, fastest-growing careers.

While building apps, kids learn that they can be creators, not just consumers of, technology, he says. And, in the process, they change how the world sees them and how these kids see themselves.

"We use our phones every day. Why not make something useful?" said Ahmara Boutte-Johnson, 13.

"We use our phones every day. Why not make something useful?" said Ahmara Boutte-Johnson, 13, who was taking part in her first hackathon.

Priforce is planning 10 more hackathons this year. These include one in St. Louis to "hack the walls" and bring about reconciliation and healing after Brown's shooting. Another in New York City is modeled after the Ubuntu humanist tradition of Nelson Mandela, and will bring together kids and police officers.

"Kids deserve advocates," says Priforce, who describes himself as a cross between a Doctor Who techie and a Buddhist Malcolm X. "And I have pledged my life to be just that."

Priforce was fortunate to have found advocates as a child.

He was eight 8 years old, and his brother was 6 six, when they were removed from a troubled home and placed in a group home in Brooklyn.

His intellectual curiosity was already in overdrive, but Priforce was not allowed to leave the group home except to go to school or doctor's appointments. He devoured the dog-eared pages of donated books in the group home's library several times over until, in frustration, he staged a three-day hunger strike. He was granted special privileges to go read in the local library. There he met a Buddhist nun who was so moved by his story that she convinced her order to take Priforce under their collective wing.

As a Buddhist, Priforce says he came to understand that the world he lives in is the world he creates every day. So he started creating. He launched his first company when he was 16.

Four years later, his younger brother was shot and killed behind their old elementary school.

Kalimah Priforce opens the hackathon on Feb. 20, 2015.

That heartbreak only reinforced Priforce's commitment to kids — and to the belief that technology can be inclusive. Qeyno, the name of his company that puts on the hackathons, was his brother's nickname.

"Every kid deserves to have their lives transformed," Priforce says.

In 2010, Priforce moved to Oakland, a city that is just across the San Francisco Bay from Silicon Valley but exists mostly in the shadows of the tech industry. He set out to reach young people.

Fellow entrepreneur Kurt Collins says he wondered when he met Priforce "what kind of name is Priforce?"

"Who Kalimah turned out to be was in his name," Collins said. "He forced change upon an environment that sorely needed it."

Oakland is one of the nation's most diverse cities: 28% of the population is African-American, 25% Hispanic and 17% Asian. Priforce said he believes it can become the Silicon Valley of the 21st century by harnessing the untapped brain power and hustle of the city's youth.

My Brother's Keeper hackathon in Oakland

If he's right, some of the kids in this room may recast the face of the tech industry.

Storm White, a 19-year-old community college student and graphic designer and producer at Youth Radio, said she is now thinking about switching to computer science from graphic design.

"I just recently got into coding to see where I could take my graphic design skills and I discovered that I really like to code," White said.

She says she's driven by the desire to "figure out how computers work and how I can artistically manipulate technology."

These are skills that are sought after in Silicon Valley which is trying to build products and services that appeal to a broad cross section of people.

White says she will probably start her own company rather than go to work for Facebook or Google, underscoring the stiff challenges facing Silicon Valley as it works to attract more African Americans and other underrepresented minorities.

"A lot of tech companies, and companies in general, don't include people of color, or if they do, they are a small percentage," she said.

On Sunday night, White's team won first place in the hackathon with a mobile app called Study Buddy, which helps college students in the same majors and at the same schools connect with each other.

Hofstetter's app won two awards: best impact and "outstanding trailblazer" which comes with a summer technology internship in Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf's office.

His app may not save the next Trayvon Martin, but Hofstetter says he's hopeful it will help African-American teens stay safe.

"I think we can start to fix (this problem) with technology," Hofstetter said.

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