Aloha kākou!
Welcome to Purple Mai‘a’s blog. This is our first post–very exciting! On this blog we’ll be posting our thoughts on a range of topics related to technology, education, underserved youth and their communities, innovation in the islands, and Hawai‘i’s future.
I wanted to start with some very basic thoughts about underprivileged youth and what it takes for them to be judged fairly by society. The following ideas come out of discussions I’ve had with Purple Mai‘a’s two founders, Olin Lagon and Donavan Kealoha, as we worked to define our mission and articulate how we see tech and maker education serving multiple purposes in Hawai‘i.
Before we get into all that, let’s back up a second and think about what our kids are up against:
We all hope that society will judge our kids based on “the content of their character” rather than by external factors that are largely out of our control–things like race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status. But every parent knows that to a certain extent, these things can make a difference in our kids’ lives, for better or worse.
We also know that underprivileged kids often face the worst forms of discrimination our society has to offer as they grow up and face people and institutions that judge an individual’s worth based on predetermined assumptions and stereotypes. The hard work of changing these societal prejudices falls on individuals who are willing to speak up, and it can sometimes seem like an endless project.
At Purple Mai‘a we’ve got an idea of how to help. It’s a hack–an improvised and haphazard solution that nonetheless brings about results: Teach underprivileged kids valuable tech skills, and society won’t care what they look like, where they come from, or who they know or don’t know.
Olin has first-hand experience of this from back when he was helping to found one of the world’s first crowdfunding platforms. Once when being interviewed he was asked where his head of development went to college. Olin was embarrassed to say he had no idea, but after thinking about it he realized that his head of development hadn’t actually gone to college.
In fact he’d dropped out of high school! Olin’s company hadn’t even considered college as part of the hiring process, but instead gave software development tests to all applicants. This guy just killed it… and eventually he went on to run the company’s engineering team. The company was soon acquired by a giant global software company.
It’s not exactly a solution that gets at the underlying causes of prejudice–those we still have to work on. But teaching kids tech skills does even the playing field for kids who have the odds stacked against them. And when more people see that youth that come from at-risk demographics have the intelligence and sophistication to wield the power of 21st century technology, maybe some of those stereotypes will start to change.
