Tech Learning Collective

Technology education for radical organizers and revolutionary communities.

AwesomeNYC announces Tech Learning Collective as winner of its December 2019 grant

On the heels of our Hackers Next Door 2019 conference, we were excited to learn that AwesomeNYC has just announced that it will be awarding its December 2019 grant to Tech Learning Collective! AwesomeNYC is the New York City chapter of the Awesome Foundation, “an ever-growing worldwide community devoted to forwarding the interest of awesome in the universe.” In addition to naming Tech Learning Collective as the winner of their final grant offered in calendar year 2019, AwesomeNYC shared information about Tech Learning Collective programs on their Web site and in their newsletter:

Tech Learning Collective is an apprenticeship-based technology school that trains self-motivated individuals in the arts of hypermedia, Information Technology, cybersecurity, and radical political practice. By providing educational opportunities in the form of public workshops, private trainings, and community convergences such as the recent Hackers Next Door 2019 conference, Tech Learning Collective empowers otherwise underserved communities by bringing world-class digital security trainers, legal experts, and experienced activists together with local community groups, neighborhood coalitions, and tenants associations so that they can learn from one another’s experience and perspective.

At the recent Hackers Next Door 2019 conference generously sponsored by Triangle Arts Association and TechAhoy, Inc., a local maker space in Queens, Tech Learning Collective was honored to host, among others, the Atlantic Plaza Towers Tenants Association and a member of their legal team from Legal Services NYC as they shared details of their fight against the implementation of racist facial recognition software in their homes. Conference attendees also heard from organizers of the No New Jails NYC campaign who are defending New Yorkers from the expansion of the carceral industry, and the Executive Directors of both the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and the Tor Project who are working on improving legal and technical tools to protect privacy and civil rights locally and globally.

In collaboration with artists, hacklabs, makerspaces, independent bookstores, and local businesses, Tech Learning Collective further facilitates direct community participation in the construction and operation of autonomous digital infrastructure services focused on providing for the community’s and neighborhood’s own needs.

Tech Learning Collective’s partners and benefiting organizations include projects such as Shift-CTRL Space, whose work maintaining and expanding hyperlocal digital services supporting social justice movements offers Tech Learning Collective students practical experience in numerous specialized Information Technology fields. Through our partnerships with Shift-CTRL Space and similar community organizations, Tech Learning Collective students can build on their classroom or workshop trainings by getting involved in real-life projects that require skills such as network and site reliability engineering, development operations, and computer security.

We at Tech Learning Collective are incredibly grateful to the AwesomeNYC trustees for their support and their contribution. While our team takes some time off over the holidays to recuperate from an intense couple of months of conference organizing, winning this grant renews our commitment to providing the highest quality education in the areas of foundational computer and cybersecurity literacy in order to materially empower our students and workshop participants. We’re looking forward to continuing our work to make sure 2020 looks less like 1984 than the past decade has.

If you’d also like to help support Shift-CTRL Space or any of our benefiting organizations through Tech Learning Collective, subscribe to our event calendar from the Events page or make a direct donation on the Donate page of our Web site.