courtesy Code the Dream
GIVERS
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t’s a Thursday night on Fayetteville Street in downtown Raleigh. While many people are drinking and eating their way through downtown, nearly 20 adults and high school students are sitting above the Foundation Bar at the American Underground Campus. These students come from minority, low-income, or immigrant backgrounds. All of them though, share a desire to learn the language of computers in hopes for a career or life change. Their teacher, Ramiro Rodriguez, is leading a conversation that sounds something like: “A equals C and case C is greater than case B.” They’re coding. Code the Dream is their solution, providing an alternative path to success for these students. Unlike careers in education, law, or medicine that require specific degrees, to be a computer programmer, you just need the skills. Originally a pilot project that began in 2015 under local nonprofit Uniting NC, Code the Dream teaches coding to high school students and young adults. Most of the program participants don’t have the means to attend college or are unable to find work. To date, the program has accepted students from more
CODING the
DREAM by ADDIE LADNER
than 20 countries, including Nepal, India, Pakistan, Argentina, and Venezuela, and the in-depth, hands-on curriculum has produced hundreds of capable web and software developers in the Triangle area. Daisy Magnus-Aryitey, 36, was once one of those students. She moved here from Ghana at age four. After seven years as a stay-at-home mom, Magnus-Aryitey had a hard time navigating the workforce. She joined Code the Dream and remembers not only her own world expanding, but her daughter’s world too. “My daughter always wanted to be a stayat-home mom. I started to learn computer
programming and her play shifted from cooking and baking to pretending she had an office with post-it notes and a computer,” she says. Magnus-Aryitey went on to be a full-time software developer at Duke University and is now the director at Code the Dream. She advocates for women, especially mothers and encourages them to consider a career in coding. When she started Code the Dream, it was the first time she remembers feeling comfortable with vulnerability. “As a minority, I had always been scared to be vulnerable. But we were all the same. I just knew it would change my life. There was no looking
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