The Iris Project

A recent survey published in CIO  of IT professionals showed that Black women and Latinas made up 3% and 1% of the national workforce in IT, respectively. Though these numbers, on their face, are tragic, the survey did not specify educational levels or socio-economic background, which, arguably, would have made the results even more problematic. 

The combined 4% of females of color representing the amount of IT professionals in the US is undoubtedly made up of highly educated and trained women. Historically, whenever a community is underrepresented, the exceptions to the rule are extraordinary by necessity. Though we celebrate the exceptional people represented in the 4%, we have tried to build a system through the Iris Project that does not build on a model that is itself built on the notion of replicating exceptions to the rule. We want to change the rule, and we want to do this by helping to create a workforce of female IT professionals that are older and who have not had access to a lot of quality educational resources. 

To put this another way, and running the risk of pushing back on what the model that this challenge is built on, in order to get at true gender inequity, let us not solely focus on the high-flying K-12 student or the exceptional individual of color who started her own IT business, let us also look at the moms of those individuals who, with the right training and with the right support, can be ordinary as you and me and still be part of a solution that breaks the mold.  

A complete lack of attention to hardworking, high-potential women who lack access to high quality education, is what the Iris Project pushes back on. It is our goal to increase the numbers of trained Black and Latina women in the IT sector, but we are not starting with the MIT or Carnegie Mellon grads; we are starting with under-served and under-educated communities of Black and Latina women who have either just received or are working to get their GEDs. Our theory of change is that a program that provides poor women of color with the education and training they need to enter the IT sector will flood a system that needs change from the bottom-up. By additionally adding entrepreneurship training to the mix, we can create an adult workforce much more quickly than will happen if we only focus on K-12 or on the exceptional individual who somehow found a way to start a company.

Though we think highly of programs like Black Girls Code, the Iris Project is based on the idea that those black girls have moms, and that those moms seem to be forgotten, as if they can only be the support to a new generation that changes the equation and makes Black women a larger voice in STEM. The Iris Project, instead, wants middle-aged, working class, women of color to be lead actors in a new reality in which they are the ones coding or managing data. 

To do this, to truly push back against gender and racial inequity in IT, our program relies on four types of support:

1. Teaching

2. Training

3. Tracking

4. Tutoring

Teaching: In 2021, we created our own IT curriculum for Advanced ESL and GED learners. This curriculum, which we call Education 2 Equity (E2E) was designed by linguists and veteran ESL/GED instructors, with the original lead being an immigrant from Colombia. The E2E team took technical training materials for the CompTIA certification and made them language level-appropriate for learners who are high-potential but who lack a high school diploma and/or did not have access to quality educational resources. 

To do this, we distinguished between academic experience and intellectual ability–a distinction often lost on educators of adults. 

Training: our Pathway 2 Prosperity Program, similar to our E2E Initiative, came out of our experience watching our students of color lose their jobs during the pandemic. We worked with the Small Business Administration to adapt materials for English language learners and GED students. Similar to the approach of the larger Iris Project, we wanted to support learners who lack formal education, but who are high-potential and incredibly bright learners. Our goal was to find a way to convey complex material in language that is appropriate for the learners. Over the last two years, we have found that they are able to succeed as entrepreneurs if they have the right type of support. 

The Iris Project brings this 8-week, 48-hour entrepreneurship training program to our IT students. As a result, we are finding that our graduates are triple threats: they have the maturity and work ethic of slightly older adults  combined with business acumen and technical skill that make them intriguing candidates for businesses looking to hire them full time or contract them for services. 

Prosperity Zone: For Tracking and Tutoring, we are creating an ecosystem of service providers who are brought together and organized by a service navigator and bolstered by volunteer tutors called Community Coaches. 

Every student at every level of education needs support systems. One of the reasons that adult basic education students fail is not because they cannot handle the intellectual load of the materials being taught; rather, they fail because life gets in the way. This happens at all points of the students’ journey with us. As a result, we created a wraparound system that tracks the student, ensuring that they are getting the services they need and eliminating the option of failure.

As a group, C2C has been teaching immigrant adults and more recently, adult native speakers who lack their GEDs, since the 60s. As such, we have developed a relationship built on trust with the communities we serve. When COVID hit, we noted how many of our female learners were especially badly hit with regard to their employment. Many of them worked in the service sector, and though that sector was never high-paying or flexible regarding schedules, it was relatively low-barrier to entry, so many of our learners took jobs in retail or in hospitality. 

COVID made clear that there were some real issues with that sector with regard to stability, and this gave us the opportunity to create a different kind of training that targeted many of these women. We looked for a sector that was more secure, was growing, and was more concerned with skill/competency than credentials. This set of criteria  led us to IT. The jobs we are training our learners for, entry level IT positions like Support Specialist and IT Technician, allow our learners three things they didn’t get before:

1. A pathway towards higher paying work as they gain skills and experience;

2. A family sustaining wage that allows for more flexibility in schedule than hospitality work;

3. Most importantly, a sense that they can achieve things they never thought possible before.

Though tricky to measure quantitatively, the third point is the most important as it is the most impactful. One of the reasons we feel that educational reforms fail, and the opportunity gap starts aligning itself around race and class is that solutions only look at the children and their schools. Our argument is that by helping our students see a greater horizon for themselves, they will affect how their children see themselves, which in turn, will mean that communities of color that are often marginalized, will have stronger voices in calling out for the solutions they need in the way they need them. 

There's value to having advocates come from within the communities served. The insights of such a person are valuable because they're often catalysts for innovation. This is because they see realities not understood outside of the communities being served. 

Our Team Lead is the son of a talented but not formally-educated Latina mother who built a career in high-end photography because someone believed in her. She learned to print because she happened to be the janitor at a lab owned by someone who saw past the fact that she could not speak English well. By getting to know her, the owner of the lab came to see that she had an eye for color. As a result, she became a professional printer and later worked for large film studios in Los Angeles. 

If you look at her life before this and the small town she came from in Latin America, you wouldn’t think this person would end up where she did. She succeeded in another woefully underrepresented field for middle-aged women of color because someone developed her, and as a result, she developed a wider sense of what she could do with her life. The Iris Project is based on replicating this model of developing middle-aged and older women of color.

It should be noted that this deep connection to our learners does not end with our Lead. Our Community Impact Director is a Black woman who is Dyslexic and who worked to overcome this to become a veteran teacher and college professor of communications. She has written three books, runs a Life Coaching business, and hosts her own show on Radio One. 

Similarly, our Data Director, herself an immigrant who identifies as LGBTQ, overcame gender bias in Russia professionally and personally in the IT field, and has worked on the Iris Project's data tracking because she wants others to overcome the same kinds of biases here in the US. 

Lastly, our Lead Curriculum Designer, who identifies as Queer, and who is a trained linguist with advanced degrees in instructional design, comes to the work knowing what it is like to be discounted and ignored because of a bias of low expectation.

We often think of bias as a product of racial/class/gender/sexual orientation discrimination, and though that is true, as a team, we know from our biographies that our learners have often internalized that bias, and programs that seek to mitigate gender inequities need to face that head-on.

We listen to our learners and seek their guidance, but we first have to get them to see a reality for themselves that they often struggle to imagine when they start with us.  To bring it back to our Team Lead’s story, if you'd asked his mom if she wanted to work in photography, she would have laughed and she would have said that was a dream for her son, not for her. That mindset is what the Iris Project is truly trying to push back on.

At present, we have over 400 students served across the various programs that make up the Iris Project. 

Upon reflecting on what we are doing as a group, the Iris Project, though proven to work with a small sampling, is like any other strong regional program, i.e., its utility is limited by its reach. So if we want the program to truly make an impact, we need to scale the approach beyond the two counties that we currently serve. This is where Solve and Tiger Global Impact Ventures could partner with us: with technical and financial support, the Iris Project will be more refined and expanded. 

Refinement:

As innovative as we try to be in our program design, there is no hiding from the fact that we are a program run by educators. This means that our approach to data management and tracking is not as elegant as it could be. Even though we have an amazing Director of Data, she is limited by the tools we can afford, and by processes that work for a small program with 4,000 learners, but that need to be improved if we are to scale to the needs of a national program. 

Beyond our data tools and processes, the biggest problem that we face is that we do not know what we do not know, and as a result, we need the technical support that this prize will give us to not only track data better, but also to be strategic in how we utilize the data.

Expansion:

Connected to the idea of refinement, we believe the interconnected approach that holistically deals with our learners is something that needs to be replicated nationally. As mentioned above, we know that by targeting and training the middle-aged women of color that make up our participants, we are not only challenging the issue of gender inequity in a new way, we are also bringing front and center the relationship that class has to race–something that is not always addressed. 

At the heart of Iris Project is this: the cycle of generational poverty is broken when equal attention is given to both the older and younger generations simultaneously. Therefore, our approach will challenge race, class, and because of our approach, we are also challenging some implicit ageism, which is often present when discussions of technology workers arise. 

Though his connection to the Latina population is biographical, our ED's connection to the target populations is also professional. Unlike many professional educators working in adult basic education, he did not back into this kind of work. Partly because of his mother's story and how training and support catapulted her into a new career, he also witnessed first hand his sister's withdrawal from school due to a lack of good teaching and mentorship. As a result, she dropped out of high school, and has to this day struggled with her own sense of her talents and gifts. 

The combination of those two extremes: on one side how support and training could help a person succeed and on the other extreme, how the lack of support and good teaching could damage the self-esteem of a young Latina's mind made our ED want to go into education. Specifically, he wanted to go into a sector of education that is often neglected: adult basic education. 

For 25 years, starting first as an Americorps volunteer teaching ESL to janitors in Harlem, to leading GED classes for Haitian women in Boston during graduate school, through to his current position leading C2C, he has attempted to meet needs with well-designed programs that are data-informed and that, even more importantly, are rooted in the belief that education is connected to equity. That said, the connection is not rooted in a definition of education that is concerned solely with knowledge. As a reflection of what motivated the design of the Iris Project, education for him and for C2C as an organization really only has value if it helps learners see their true potential. If that happens, mastery of skill will follow. Simply put: education is most impactful when it helps change mindsets--of the learners, and by connection, of the communities from which those learners come. 

Our ED's belief in that definition of education comes from his connection to being poor and Latino, and to his quarter century of trying to find ways to serve Black and Brown students, so they can see their true value and be empowered to demand what they need as they see it.

As alluded to above, a major differentiator for the Iris Project is its target demographic, which is adult, (often middle-aged), poor, and who identify as female. The reason for this different target is not accidental. It reflects the experiences of our team as teachers working to make education a force for social equity, which in this case, has led us to the conclusion that any attempt to move towards a more inclusive, more equitable society means that we cannot solely look at race and gender, but rather, we need to look at how those aspects of a person also combine with class and age. 

Even looking at categories that this challenge offers groups like us, one sees a lack of consideration for working class women of color who are middle aged. The categories for solutions in this challenge are either about young women (K-12) or about more financially established women (entrepreneurs). The Iris Project makes the case that older, working class women can and will be part of a solution to be more inclusive in STEM, specifically the IT field. In fact, we feel that this demographic needs to be part of the solution because their age and their socio economic position allow them to be role models for younger women and their backgrounds as poor will help break generations of poverty.  

In addition to who we are targeting, it is also worth noting that our methodology and approach to education and training is unique as well. Our use of mentors/tutors gets at the psycho-social challenges that our students face and that most education/workforce development agencies overlook. Groups that are effective in the classroom for under-served adults will design their programs in a way that takes race and bias into account, but they often neglect the psychology of internalized bias that is happening within their students. A program that does systematically and aggressively tackle this internalized bias that is like an imposter syndrome on steroids, will not have a lot of success with the demographic that we serve in the Iris Project. 

We see this all the time. And the saddest part is that because of this internalized bias of low expectations, because our students do not see their true potential, they do not demand programs to train them for careers in IT (or any other STEM career for that matter). 

1. With where we are in the process, we have to answer this with two different sets of goals: one with added funding and one with our current funding. Though in both cases, the goals are around Refinement and Expansion. The main difference is how refined and how far we can expand.

   With current funding, we project the following:

   1. We would graduate 200 women of color from our IT Pathway that culminates in the CompTIA certificate

   2. Place 50% of our graduates into a IT position within 6 months of graduation

   3. Connect the remaining 50% to our Workforce Development Board for further training and/or for additional job readiness skills

   With funding, we would:

   1. Double the number of graduates to 400 per year

   2. Place 50% of graduates into a position within 6 months

   3. Develop pipelines to some of the larger corporations in our region who hire IT professionals 

   4. Develop a list of women of color in the region who work in STEM to help us keep refining what we teach

   5. Create a class for adult education agency administrators to learn the Iris Project method, so they can replicate the program in their own regions and use the proceeds of that training to keep the program going

1. In looking at our impact, we categorize them between what we call internal and external metrics for success. In so doing, we are distinguishing between the steps that we (and our learners) need to take before learners move into CompTIA certification classes and then the progress markers that we look for post-graduation. 

   Internal Indicators:

   1. How many of our target demographic are we recruiting into the IT Pathway (which makes up of 4 classes that learners have to take or pass out of in order to be ready for the IT Certification classes.

   2. How many of these same students who need to get their GEDs are making progress towards that goal?

   3. Out of those students who enter the IT Pathway, how many are we retaining to get into the CompTIA certification class?  

   4. In our student surveys, which we give to our students, and during our student check-ins, which are done at the midpoint of all classes with their teachers, we look for longitudinal data around the following: student satisfaction around the support they are being given (academically, personally, and emotionally)  and progress towards life goals that the student has shared with staff upon entering the program. 

   Those 4 internal goals help us understand if we have the proper amount of scaffolding to support learners (many of whom are low-confidence) as they get ready to enter the Iris Project phase, which means, entering CompTIA certification classes.

   External Indicators:

   1. Retention rate for students who start the Iris Project phase

   2. Graduation rate of students

   3. Placement of students into jobs within 6 months

   4. For those not placed into jobs, how many go onto further training?

   5. How many graduates are willing to come back to the program and be mentors for other learners.

Our theory of change is that with the proper training and support, we can get a target demographic that often forgotten (middle-aged, working class women of color) into family sustaining work in IT-related jobs, and that if we do this, we will not only push back against gender and racial inequity, we will also help future generations as many of these women are mothers/grandmothers/caregivers in communities that are often overlooked by hiring managers. 

N/a

11 full time

30 PT instructors

3 PT admin

We started this project in 2020 during the start of COVID

There is a long-shared principle in Anthropology that we are all like fish floating in a bowl and that only with the greatest of effort and focus can any of us attempt to pull ourselves over the lip of the bowl to get a sense of that reality. The lesson here is that no one can objectively see our place and how it relates to others. As a result, we have blind spots, and those blindspots do not let us see how we are standing in the way of oppressing another. 

The team that works on the Iris Project does so reminded of the fact that we are all culpable, and the best we can do is to hear each other and to keep looking for ways to bring in new voices to hear new approaches/thoughts/worldviews.  

When we started this project, we thought of the work through the lens of race, class, age and gender. These were represented on the design staff in that we had representation at all levels (administration, curriculum designers, and instructors) who reflected the demographics we were seeking to serve. What we lacked at that point was the student leadership. As stated above, we collect surveys and do one-to- one check-ins every six weeks with students, but what we lacked was the voice of students who came out the other side of the project. 

Though the staff reflected the learners, we were not the learners themselves. We were not middle-aged, working class women living in 2023 trying to make ends meet. The goal for us has been to create a way to get graduates a leadership voice, which means not only giving us feedback on our services, but also helping us to think of better ways to do the work going forward. We not only find that this will help us with recruitment, but as we will see below on the question regarding the Business model, we also feel that their presence will make us an even more powerful tool for social change. 

The What:

As this project came out of COVID and the decimation of industries that had historically hired our target demographic, we knew we had to do something to get our learners re-skilled and up-skilled for jobs that would provide for them and their families. We landed on IT because we saw that IT-related positions paid well (even entry level positions paid relatively more than our learners made), that the need for those skills was growing as even small companies had IT needs, and most importantly, the field was more interested in mastery of skill than it was in traditional academic credentials. This last point is vital. As we work with middle-aged women who do not have time or resources to go off to college for 2-4 years to get degrees that might not even serve them well, we needed to find a sector to focus on that was open to candidates who could prove competencies in the skills that the company needed. What we are trying to do is create a turbo track to solidly paying employment for working class, middle-aged women who have to make money in the short-term. 

The How:

We have already listed elsewhere in this application our holistic approach that takes into consideration not only our learners academic, and life needs, but also their emotional support needs. But we have not listed the mechanics and logistics of the programs. As we run all our classes as hybrids (online and in-person) we not only are providing needed skills, we are doing so in a way that is flexible, so that learners can attend. In FY24, we will also be adding asynchronous approaches to many of our classes to ensure that our learners have anytime, anywhere access to learning. 

As the Iris Project is a stacking of programs we already run, funding is steady and set–at least for our current capacity. The main sources of funding are government contracts and grants supplemented by private foundation support. In the long-term, our goal will be to hire our top graduates for contract IT work with small nonprofits and companies in the region that have IT needs but cannot afford full-time IT staff. This will not only help us provide real-world experience to our students, it will also help us retain students longer as it offers what programs like ours should always try to offer but cannot: a wage to students as they are studying. This is especially true when working with learners who are older and who have families to support.

We currently have funding from Maryland State Department of Labor, local county government contracts and funds. Most recently, we won a renewable contract from our workforce development board for $100,000. 

We have also won smaller awards from Graham and Truist foundations to support this work.