Grant Recipient: BDPA Bay Area ($67)

BDPA Education and Technology Foundation (BETF) agreed to provide a small grant of $67 to support BDPA Bay Area chapter. The chapter plans to use the funds to create and broadcast a webinar that promotes STEM education programs from the perspective of a strong chapter sponsor.

The chapter also provided BETF with a copy of their 2010 Student IT Education & Scholarship (SITES) budget. BETF will continue to work with the chapter leadership to identify potential funding sources that will provide grants to implement the budgeted programs.

BDPA chapters are encouraged to engage in dialogue with BETF about funding.

Letter of Inquiry * Franklin and Catherine Johnson Foundation

BDPA Education and Technology Foundation (BETF) partnered with BDPA Bay Area chapter on a letter of inquiry to the Franklin and Charles Johnson Foundation. We asked for permission to submit a $2,500 grant proposal for their funding consideration.

Tarah Evans is the executive director of the Johnson Foundation. Our request was forwarded to her via LinkedIn Network. She responded,

"I am happy to review some information about the program, but want to let you know that we do not accept unsolicited proposals. We are a very small family foundation, and do the majority of our grant-making in the local (East Palo Alto) area. But saying that, I am happy to read an executive summary of the program and look into whether or not it might be a fit for us."

We are hopeful that our Student Information Technology Education & Scholarship (SITES) program in northern California will be a fit for them! For that matter, we hope that our SITES program is a fit for you ... please consider making a secure online donation in support of our SITES Endowment Fund.

Letter of Inquiry * Charles Lafitte Foundation

BDPA Education and Technology Foundation (BETF) partnered with BDPA Bay Area chapter to submit a letter of inquiry to the Charles Lafitte Foundation. We asked for permission to submit a full grant proposal in the amount of $5,000 to support the Student Information Technology Education and Scholarship (SITES) program in northern California.

The mission of the Charles Lafitte Foundation is to provide for and support inventive and effective ways of helping people help themselves and others around them to lead healthy, satisfying and enriched lives. To fulfill this mission, the Foundation acts as grantmaker, innovator and volunteer for four main programs: Education, Children's Advocacy, Medical Research & Issues, and The Arts.

Please wish us luck in our continuing efforts to provide funding to support the SITES program around the nation. In fact, you can support us with your own secure online donation if you think we are doing good works!

Grant Award: Wells Fargo

UPDATE: Wells Fargo requested a change in the distribution of this donation. The funding now includes support for BDPA Charlotte chapter as well.

[Original posting: Jan 6, 2009]

We are pleased to announce successful completion of $10,000 grant award from Wells Fargo.

Dwight Handon (National BDPA corporate sales department director) was instrumental in securing these funds. This funding from Wells Fargo will support National BDPA, BDPA Bay Area chapter and BDPA Twin Cities chapter.

Our hope is that other corporate foundations will be receptive to our discussions about funding BDPA programs and services in 2009. Please let us know if YOUR company's foundation might be interested in working with us.

In the meantime, I encourage you to use the COMMENTS section below to share some love with the men and women of Wells Fargo!

Grant Recipient: BDPA Bay Area ($1,350)

BDPA Education & Technology Foundation (BETF) is proud to announce funding approval for BDPA Bay Area chapter in the amount of $1,350.

BDPA Bay Area chapter president Patricia Glover plans to use the funding to purchase text books ('Design Fundamentals for New Media') for a web development training course being co-sponsored by DeVry University.

Did you know that this is the 10th BDPA chapter to receive financial support from BETF so far this year? The total financial support from BETF to BDPA chapters is now over $161,289 so far in this calendar year. We can do more if we can convince you to make a secure online donation today.

What say u?

Letter of Inquiry: Computers for Learning (Bay Area)

BETF and BDPA Bay Area chapter combined on a request for in-kind donation of 11 computers, 1 server and 1 tape drive unit from the folks at Computers for Learning.

The CFL program exists to transfer computers and related peripheral equipment excess to their needs directly to schools and some educational nonprofit organizations. The CFL program specifically matches the computer needs of schools and educational nonprofit organization with excess equipment in Federal agencies.

The CFL program's ambitious goal is to make modern computer technology an integral part of every classroom so that every child has the opportunity to be educated to his or her full potential.

I encourage all BDPA chapters to take a close look at this program.

Message from Bay Area Chapter President

I have been a BDPA member for over 20 years. Back in the day I was a keynote speaker for our BDPA chapter in northern California. The late James Banks was chapter president at the time. The chapter had a wonderful high school computer competition team (Edward Dorsey, Terralyn Renfo, Lameana Sumpter, Lena Thomas and Aisha Wright) back then. BDPA Bay Area chapter has a powerful legacy ... however, the lights have been out over the past few years.

As such, it is with great pleasure that I introduce BETF-Blog readers to the new president of the rejuvenating BDPA Bay Area chapter. Her name is Patricia Glover. Patricia is a partner at Pacific Mesa. More importantly, she is a sister with vision for advancing he careers of African Americans in the Bay Area's IT industry from the classroom to the boardroom.

Here is the message she sent to her chapter stakeholders:

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Martin Luther King was a great orator, but I read that he spent a lot of time developing this skill. He wasn’t a natural in the beginning, but he worked at it until he mastered it. He became a powerful and mesmerizing speaker. Many of his most famous speeches dared a generation to dream of a life full of possibilities, courage and shared potential.

An important thing about courage is that it will help you think and act in the right way. It will help you focus on the opportunities in front of you instead of fixating on the problems. Problems are often opportunities coming at us in packaging that isn't what we expect or want.

So when you say I welcome problems, there's a reason for it. They keep your mind flexible and open to creative solutions. As you know, technology is built on finding creative solutions to widespread problems.

Whenever there is science, technology follows. While science is academic and benign, technolgoy unleashes the potential for discovery. This is the underlying princlple that makes membership in BDPA so atractive -- everyone's participation is needed and valuable. BDPA Bay Area is looking to become a catalyst for change. We need creative thinkers and doers to lead the organization to the next level.

Rebuilding the Bay Area Chapter solves a problem by allowing under-represented groups in technology to re-focus on education and finding opportunites through networking, forecasting, and planniing. Einstein said, "You can't solve a problem with the same thinking that created the problem" so we are looking for new ideas:

• Senior executives in business and technology who share their perspectives with professionals at BDPA mixers and mini-tech events.
  
• Membership Benefit Package offering a 10% to 15% finders fee to both members and non-members who bring in corporate sponsorships.
  
• Discounted fees to service providers who partner with us and generous gifts-in-kind to create exciting venues.
  
• The Bay Area Chapter’s High School Competition with a focus on business and web development skills for teens through alliances with entrepreneurial and financial education programs introducing future technologists to science, technical training, negotiation, pricing, forecasting, and marketing.

Our organization aspires to provide business and technology training coupled with mentorship from the classroom to the boardroom. BDPA is a national organization consisting of 51 chapters committed to improving the Information Technology literacy and advancement of its members.

If you are interested in a leadership position, please send your inquiry to info@bdpabayarea.org or call (510) 894-2058.

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Please use the COMMENTS option below to share some BDPA-Love with Patricia!

America's Techiest Cities

Hat-Tip to BDPA Philadelphia for pointing us to this ComputerWorld article. I imagine that it is easy to guess that the highest concentration of IT professionals in the U.S. is in Silicon Valley. But naming the No 2 spot isn't as easy, and the answer might surprise you.

The runner-up isn't a well-known tech center like Boston or Seattle; it's the Washington DC metro area.

"It kind of belies some of the perceptions of where the hiring is, where people work in this field," said John Challenger, president of Chicago-based outsourcing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. "[Many typically] think that most people in IT work in Silicon Valley, and they might add in Washington state, Seattle and maybe Austin," he said.

Data for 2006 from the U.S. Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey (ACS), released just last month, reveal what could be called a metropolitan area's "TQ" (technology quotient) -- how "techie" a region's overall workforce is, based on the number of self-reported computer professionals. And some of the results turn stereotypes upside down. (See the interactive national map, or query the database for a specific metro area.)

Roughly 6% of the D.C. metro area workforce is made up of "computer specialists," compared with 8.3% in Silicon Valley. The third-highest concentration of IT workers is in Raleigh/Cary, N.C., at 5.3% of the workforce, followed closely by Boulder, Colo., and Huntsville, Ala., each at 5.2%. The remainder of the top 10 technology worker areas is rounded out, in order, by Bloomington/Normal, Ill.; Trenton-Ewing, N.J.; Austin-Round Rock, Texas; Manchester-Nashua, N.H.; and Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Wash.

The Census Bureau data also shows that IT worker pay tends to reflect the percentage of techies in the workforce. The annual average salary for computer and information systems managers in Silicon Valley as of May 2006 was $139,460, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the D.C. metro area, that figure was $122,950. Around Raleigh, N.C., it was $102,880.



Click here for the full article

Did you see where your city ranks? You can use these figures to determine a membership goal in your chapter city. For example, there are 22, 000 IT workers in Cincinnati. Doesn't that mean that Cincinnati should have at least 2,200 African American IT workers to approach about membership?