Today, 31 Dec 2024, is the last day of The Collab Lab!. We’ve filed articles of dissolution with the State of Oregon, so as of tomorrow we will no longer be a 501(c)(3) corporation. #PourOneOut. Over our 5+ years in operation, we accomplished some pretty cool things… 🧵.

Tech can be a dumpster fire at times, but our hope is that The Collab Lab has made a small difference in making it a little better. Thank you to everyone who participated both as developers and mentors as well as everyone who supported us along the way! 🫶

An early mentor @AdrienneFriend told her team in their last meeting, “You’ve just been given a gift. You were part of a functional, supportive team. Across your tech career, this will help you recognize toxic teams & give you skills to advocate for healthy ways to work together.”

Though our run is over, we expect Collab Lab to have a long lasting ripple effect across tech via the hundreds of people who have come together to learn from each other and reinforce values of inclusion & respect as part of the community. 🌊.

We’re incredibly proud of the work we did as an organization & community these last 5 years. So many Collabies credited them landing that coveted first job in tech to what they learned in our program and from our mentors. Some even called the experience, “life changing.” 🥲.

From day 1, we’ve worked in the open. Though the program is shutting down, we encourage others to take our materials and use them for their own learning. Our repos are on @GitHub under an MIT license. Go forth and collab!.

Recordings of the vast majority of our Tech Talks are available on our website. We had some pretty esteemed speakers over the years. 💅.

In addition to our core program, we ran a pretty successful @Meetup, hosting over 50 events on a wide range of tech/tech-adjacent topics. Huge thanks to everyone who helped run the Meetup! It was a great way to bring the TCL vibe to more folks!.

We polled the community & decided to split our remaining funds among these 5 groups:. - @AdaAcademy.- @BlackGirlsCode.- @CodeTheDream.- @FreeCodeCamp.- @jass4justice. Each of these organizations will receive a check from us for more than US$2,300! 🤑.

Over the years, dozens of people generously donated real cash to help us pay for things like pro @Zoom accounts and an upgraded @Airtable team. Most of these were small donations on the order of $4 or $8/month. 🙏. We ran a lean operation, so we have 💰 left over….

The Collab Lab community—including both developers and mentors—is incredibly diverse. Our primary goal was always to help early-career developers get jobs, but one of our secondary goals was to push tech to be more inclusive & less gatekeep-y.

312 developers from more than 25+ countries on 5 continents participated in the program. Every one of them learned skills beyond coding including how to pair program, conduct a code review, and demo to stakeholders.

RT @AdiatiAyu: I had the last 1:1 meeting as a COC responder @_collab_lab . I feel sad that it comes to an end. 💔. But I'm very grateful to….

RT @alexinbits: 🌟 Latinoámerica! No pierdas la oportunidad de desarrollar tus habilidades con mentores y peers. Postúlate a The Collab Lab….

RT @AdiatiAyu: The application for the LAST COHORT of @_collab_lab is now open!. Don't miss this chance! 🙌.

RT @alexinbits: 🚀 Calling all early developers! Ready to kickstart your coding journey? Join @_collab_lab for hands-on experience, remote c….

RT @alexinbits: 🌟 Postúlate a @_collab_lab y obtén experiencia práctica junto a otros early developers en Latinoamérica 💛. ¡Aplica pronto!….

PS: We are running one last cohort! Applications are open right now. We have mentors lined up for an epic cohort of 4 North America teams, 2 Europe/Africa teams, and 1 Latin America team. Join us!.

We’re incredibly proud of the work our developers and mentors put in over these last 5 years. The legacy of Collab Lab will live on in the impact we had on the people who trusted us to help them gain their footholds in tech. 10/10.

The most positive way to look at the end of our program is that the capacity we’ve all been putting into our community can now be redirected towards the dozens of companies who employ people who’ve been part of our program. 9/10.