Code Tenderloin
Del Seymour’s transformation from drug user to community leader and informal adviser to Dolby, Zendesk, Twitter and other tech companies began at the park in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. Mr. Seymour is a 74 year old Vietnam War veteran who was chronically homeless and incarcerated for 18 years.
In 2015, Mr. Seymour founded (from his car) Code Tenderloin, a nonprofit that offers free-of-charge job-readiness training and coding boot camps for the hard-to-employ, be they formerly incarcerated, recovering addicts, homeless or people simply needing a fresh start.
“Code Tenderloin is a medical term,” Del said. “Our African American population is facing a 68 percent unemployment rate. That’s code. … We’re dying.”
Code Tenderloin provides free job and computer training to help people get off the streets and transition into high paying jobs. Our Job Readiness Program provides employment skills training. Our Code Ramp and Code Ramp + Programs offer basic and advanced coding skills. Over 400 of our participants have landed jobs with a select few gaining employment in the tech industry.
We are proposing an expansion of our Job Readiness Program to address the expanding needs of underserved residents impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.
The proven impact of Code Tenderloin’s programming can be seen in the participants and their lives after they graduate. Code Tenderloin’s recognizes the power of employment to solve larger problems in the African American community. We work to create a healthy environment that fosters a recognition of our collective dignity and humanity within each other. Code Tenderloin’s greatest impact is that it's programming creates new mentors.
Since 2015, Code Tenderloin has helped hundreds of folks move up to the next level of living — gain a community, become housed, stay out of prison, and realize they can get a job or career.
Before COVID-19, the scale of income inequality in San Francisco was crisis level. Now, it has become exponentially worse. Experts have predicted that the economic upheaval resulting from COVID-19 and the related shutdowns may increase U.S. unemployment to up to 25%. The people in our city that will be the hardest hit are people of color. We are also looking at the prospect of mass evictions, which will increase an already skyrocketing rate of homelessness. COVID-19 has not just caused grieving and misery in our communities - it has also reminded many of the suffering that was already there.
On May 8th, 2020, Del Seymour spoke with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about the problems facing San Francisco:
“The COVID-19 crisis is only one epidemic that our neighborhood has experienced,” Del said.
“Our first epidemic is homelessness,our second is drug abuse,and number 3 is mental illness…
This (COVID-19) is just another virus that affected our community!”
Code Tenderloin provides free job and computer training for the homeless, formerly incarcerated, and people living below the poverty level in San Francisco. The goal of Code Tenderloin is simple - help program participants remove barriers, such as: a lack of soft or technical job skills, education, childcare, transportation and other obstacles that have hindered people from attaining long‐term employment. As a free offering, the course removes access barriers as well.
Seymour’s idea of a solution to homelessness is centered on employment.
“A lot of people want to stick it on mental illness, which is a part of it,” Seymour said in an interview. “They stick it on social issues, and that’s a part of it. They stick it on criminal background, and that’s a part of it. But the real deal is employment. ... You cannot go and rent a decent home without employment. You have to pay for that house.”
Many Job Readiness students are homeless when they enter the Code Tenderloin program. Graduates told us that having access to the laptops and training can mean the difference between working, and drifting in and out of homelessness. Our most promising graduates have landed full-time positions or internships with SurveyMonkey, Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Ask.com, Salesforce and Airbnb. Our impact is also our greatest source of pride - our graduates:
Daaimah Tibrey is now an associate engineer with Survey Monkey.
"Definitely pushed along by Code Tenderloin. When I started I was living in a shelter," she remembers.
David Brooks was homeless and lived in his car for 6 years when he began the Job Readiness Program. He has since graduated from Code Ramp and is currently a software engineer at Airbnb.
Preston Phan - now works at Apple Computer
“I was homeless before the program (JRP).
Not having regular access to a laptop or
personal computer made it almost impossible
to create the identity needed for an aggressive
job hunt. If you have an online profile you exist!"
“I was blown away.
Code Tenderloin helped me with school,
transportation, even helped me with my phone bill once.”
-Angela Marc, Code Tenderloin graduate
- Elevating opportunities for all people, especially those who are traditionally left behind
Code Tenderloin helps students reduce or expunge criminal records and connect those with mental health or substance abuse issues with case managers. It also may step in with emergency child care assistance, co-signing a lease, moving expenses, getting a car out of the pound or even a pair of dry socks.
Mr. Seymour, who serves as a chair of the city’s Local Homeless Coordinating Board, believes that there are few hardships that a decent job can’t cure. “Giving someone a job doesn’t just help that one person,” he said. “You’re helping their kids...”
Del Seymour is a Vietnam veteran who was chronically homeless for 18 years. Del came up with this project because of the need to believe in hope. As Bryan Stevenson says: “Hopelessness is the opposite of justice.” Del wants justice for his community. Justice looks jobs for the people on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, medical care and judgement-free support.
In 2015, Mr. Seymour founded (from his car) Code Tenderloin, a nonprofit that offers free-of-charge job-readiness training and coding boot camps for the hard-to-employ, be they formerly incarcerated, recovering addicts, homeless or people simply needing a fresh start. Mr. Seymour, who serves as a chair of the city’s Local Homeless Coordinating Board, believes that there are few hardships that a decent job can’t cure.
The “Tenderloin’s most sacred spot” is the Gubbio Project at St. Boniface Church, where 150 or so homeless people are invited to sleep in the pews during the day, the sound of snoring filling the sanctuary. He will walk past a nondescript door behind which lies a storage outlet where “unhoused folks can store their belongings and keep stuff from being wet or stolen.” He was one.
Code Tenderloin is founded by a black man who has not only lived the disparity in his own life, but has climbed his way out of it, and has made it his mission to bring his community out with him. Del Seymour has spent 35 years living and working in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. Eleven years ago, Mr. Seymour, then a crack addict and dealer, shooed away do-gooders from the local church because, as he put it, “I’m selling dope here and you’re disturbing my business.”
Mr. Seymour’s transformation from disheveled drug user to community leader and informal adviser to Dolby, Zendesk, Twitter and other tech companies began at the park. A church deacon noticed his sartorial flair and brought Mr. Seymour a Pierre Cardin suit.
All those years of sleeping in doorways and beneath freeways gave Mr. Seymour a profound understanding of San Francisco’s most vulnerable residents: Tenderloin denizens whose lives stand in stark relief to the young tech employees who get signing bonuses and dine in airy cafeterias with private roof gardens on the neighborhood’s periphery.
“I realized there are other Del Seymours out on the street,” said Mr. Seymour.
Many of Code Tenderloin staff are themselves graduates and recipients of our programs. Our staff have experienced incarceration, unemployment and homelessness. We bring our lived experience to the work we do. This “cultural competency” informs the totality of our work and our passion and this gives us credibility with participants we serve, as well as with the larger tech and business industries.
In addition, some of our most valued volunteers and partners are former graduates of the JRP and the Code Ramp Programs. These include: Shelly Winner, a successful programmer at Microsoft and leading national advocate for encouraging businesses to hire people with criminal records; and Amber Knighten, a former graduate of the JRP, and teacher of the JRP who now works at Salesforce and continues her work here as a skills-based volunteer.
At first, the human resources specialists Mr. Seymour consulted with when he started his organization insisted there was nobody from the neighborhood qualified to walk through the door.
Today, Code Tenderloin has a $710,000 annual budget, including $100,000 from Uber and $50,000 from Zendesk. Dolby gave Code Tenderloin its first corporate grant and has since hosted graduations, monthly board meetings and job-readiness trips to its campus.
Our partnerships with tech companies have also led to long-term relationships. Executives at Dolby and Salesforce currently serve on our Board of Directors.
During the evolving COVID-19 crisis, Code Tenderloin has kept its doors open. We have been out on the streets running our Calming Corners Program, bringing our neighbors basic necessities like hygiene kits, and information about available housing, food resources and medical care. Our long-term presence in the community means that residents of the Tenderloin trust us.
On May 8th, 2020, Del Seymour was interviewed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
Del: We responded to COVID-19 on the spur of the moment… We completely revamped our agenda and protocol - dealing with temperature checks and giving out masks… we’ve handed out 5,000 masks in the last month…
We have over a thousand tents in the Tenderloin right now...
Dorsey: I see it everyday…
D: We are doing pop-ups everyday of the week now…
We are on the corners handing out everything we can…
We can not shelter in place in the TL …
We are educating people on news ways to stay healthy and keep safe…
This is only one epidemic that our neighborhood has experienced...
Our first epidemic is homelessness
Our second is drug abuse…
Number 3 is mental illness…
This (COVID-19) is just another virus that affected our community!
Del Seymour has the amazing ability to create a bridge between the most underserved residents in San Francisco and the most affluent. By his own life experiences, he has credibility with people struggling with homelessness and drug addiction. Through his intelligence and compassion, he has the ability to reach CEO’s of some of the largest tech companies in the Bay Area.
Where protesters saw raw greed, Mr. Seymour saw opportunity. The compelling need to bring jobs to the Tenderloin, a 31-block area of dense poverty and unsheltered drug use, was brought home when he encountered a woman he used to sell drugs with on one of his tours. “‘What are you telling these white folks about us?’” she asked. “‘Tell them we’re no different than them. We have to buy Pampers to put on our babies’ butts just like they do.’”
For the glass tower set, Mr. Seymour is a bridge to empathy. “Del humanizes the experience of those who are different,” said Karl Robillard, the head of philanthropy and community outreach at Twitter. “I’ve seen him give tours to C.E.O.s and Tenderloin residents, and they’re the same. He challenges people to think about their assumptions.”
- Other, including part of a larger organization (please explain below)
Since 2015, Code Tenderloin has operated under the fiscal sponsorship of Independent Arts & Media. We have a Board of Directors made up of a diverse cross-section of our community, including executives from Dolby, Salesforce and Argonaut.