This Organization is Focused on Creating a National Black Tech Ecosystem

Black Tech Mecca, an organization based out of Chicago, recently received two grants to help expand their vision of creating a national black tech ecosystem.

The first grant awarded was from the Surdna Foundation whose mission is to support social justice reform, healthy environments, inclusive economies, and thriving cultures across the United States. The grant will support the building of an API tool that will make it easier for Black Tech Mecca to assess various cities’ black tech ecosystems, according to a recent press release.

The tool will allow the organization to quickly scale the assessment work that they have been performing in order to understand whether they have been effective in closing the digital divide and eradicating tech disparities for black people in the U.S. In the next five years, they will have accumulated enough data in both urban and rural cities across the U.S. to validate their case.

The next grant awarded was the Inclusion Open Grant launched by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. This grant will help build the National Black Tech Ecosystem Builder Association to support organizations that are committed to strengthening black tech entrepreneurs and tech innovators, STEM/CS educators and professionals, and tech startup policy advocates.

“We are compelled by the efforts of our BTE builders—especially black tech startup support organizations—who work hard to obtain the fundamental resources needed to ensure our community participates in the innovation economy,” stated CEO and co-founder Fabian Elliott in the press release.

Black Tech Mecca’s Research Director, Dr. Fallon Wilson recently did a TEDx talk entitled, Stop Ignoring Black Women and Hear Our Tech Prophecies where she imagines organizations like Black Tech Week, The Plug, Afrotech, Mixtroz, Black Girl Ventures, Backstage Capital, Data 4 Black Lives, Black in AI, The HBCU.vc, and many others working together to build a unified and national black tech ecosystem to successfully and culturally guide black communities into unknown tech markets, STEM arenas, and AI/Big Data futures. This has become the mission for the organization.

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