Our Story

I didn’t plan Coding with Culture. I was called to it.

After 20 years in education — as a teacher, a coach, and an HBCU-focused competitive step coach who built community everywhere I landed — I packed my car and drove to Atlanta on a handshake and a phone call. A principal I met at a conference offered me a seat at a school just beginning its journey in elementary computer science. I didn’t hesitate. I showed up.

But it was the next move that changed everything.

I transferred to a school that served the kids who needed the most. Then the pandemic hit. And sitting in that building, watching what was happening — or more accurately, what wasn’t happening — for Black and Brown kids in CS education, I couldn’t unsee it.

The access gap was real. But the cultural gap was the one that kept me up at night.

Computer science education, even when it was available, was being delivered like it belonged to someone else. No culture. No community. No connection to the lives, the brilliance, or the futures of the kids in those seats. The content existed. The cultural grounding did not. And I knew that absence from the inside.

I grew up in schools where my identity wasn’t a footnote — it was the foundation.

I knew what it felt like to be educated as yourself. To walk into a building where your story was already on the walls, already in the curriculum, already expected to matter. Then I experienced the contrast. Academically rigorous. Culturally silent. Microaggressions I didn’t even have language for yet. I survived it. But I never forgot what it cost.

Then I found my way to Fisk. Then Clark Atlanta.

Walking onto an HBCU campus felt like exhaling for the first time. People who looked like me were the main character. Not a diversity statistic. Not a February spotlight. The main character. That environment showed me what excellence looked like when it was free — free from code-switching, free from shrinking, free from proving you belonged.

But I almost missed it entirely.

I was a senior in high school with no real pathway forward when a Black woman named Mrs. Wright — a college counselor — walked into my life second semester. She saw something. She pushed. One month before graduation, I was accepted to Fisk University. I didn’t realize in that moment that my entire trajectory had just changed.

That’s what a pathway does. That’s what the absence of a pathway costs.

In 2022, a painful professional experience gave me the kind of clarity that only real adversity can.

Up until then, Coding with Culture had been the side hustle. That moment made it the mission.

My aunt Julie was a teacher — one of the greatest influences on why I believe in this work with everything I have. Losing her taught me that some things can’t wait. So I stopped treating CwC like a someday and started building it like it was already necessary.

Because it was.

Coding with Culture exists because I know what it feels like to be educated whole —

and because I’ve watched too many Black and Brown children be educated incomplete.

We teach real, rigorous computer science and design thinking. But we start with identity. We start with culture. We start with the understanding that a Black child who knows who they are is already the most powerful learner in the room.

Our K–HBCU pathway exists so that no child drifts toward their future without preparation. Without awareness. Without a Mrs. Wright in their corner. We want every Black and Brown student to walk onto that HBCU campus already knowing they belong. Already building. Already dangerous in the best possible way.

This isn’t a tech program with a cultural coating.

This is culture — with innovation as the vehicle.

If you’re a parent who’s been waiting to see your child’s story centered in a learning environment — not celebrated once a year, but centered every single day — you found us.

If you’re an educator, a school leader, or an organization ready to do this work for real — we need to talk.

Welcome to Coding with Culture. 🖤

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