Women and Color

Women and Color was a non-profit that started as a Twitter account where I posted stats for how many speakers at a tech event in Toronto were women and/or people of colour. After getting feedback that most event organizers didn't know too many women or people of colour within their network (sigh), I received help from Laura DeGroot to quickly put together an online directory. Toronto-based subject matter experts in tech could submit their info through a form and I would manually create their profile.

This approach became quite the effort so I started looking around for help to build a more self-sustaining platform with some moderation control. This is when I was introduced to CivicTechTO. I attended the meetup every Tuesday for a year and worked with Sharon Kennedy and other volunteers to build a platform where anyone in the US and Canada can sign up themselves and be discovered by people looking for diverse subject matter experts in tech.

Shortly after the launch of the new website, I noticed a lot of talented people were still hesitant to sign up for Women and Color. As I chatted with them to uncover their reasons, it turned out that most people didn't feel they had sufficient training as a public speaker or were simply afraid of public speaking. This led to me launching a 2-day speaker bootcamp with Chanèle McFarlane. We created a curriculum to help diverse subject matter experts create a 5-7 minute talk within the two days as they were then expected to do their talk at the end of the talk—our own "demo day," if you will.