Nonprofit organization
Hack Club is a global nonprofit network of high school computer hackers, makers and coders[3] founded in 2014 by Zach Latta.[4] It now includes more than 500 high school clubs and 40,000 students.[5] It has been featured on the TODAY Show, and profiled in the Wall Street Journal[6] and many other publications.
Programs
Hack Club's primary focus is its clubs program, in which it supports high school coding clubs through learning resources and mentorship. It also runs a series of other programs and events.
Some of their notable programs and events include:
- HCB - A fiscal sponsorship program originally targeted at high school hacker events
- AMAs - Video calls with industry experts such as Elon Musk,[7] Vitalik Buterin,[8] and Sal Khan[9]
- Summer of Making - A collaboration with GitHub, Adafruit & Arduino to create an online summer program for teenagers during the COVID-19 pandemic that included $50k in hardware donations to teen hackers around the world[10]
- The Hacker Zephyr - A cross-country hackathon on a train across America[11]
- Assemble - The first high school hackathon in San Francisco since the COVID-19 pandemic, with the stated goal of "kick[ing] off a hackathon renaissance"[12]
- Epoch - A global high schooler-led hackathon in Delhi NCR organized in public to inspire the community of student hackers and bring hundreds of teenagers together[3]
- Winter Hardware Wonderland - An online winter program where teenagers submit ideas for hardware projects and, if accepted, get grants of up to $250[4]
- Outernet - An experimental four-day hackathon and camping trip in the Northeast Kingdom
- 2024 Leader's Summit - A 72-hour hackathon in San Francisco where teenage club leaders built projects for their club members to use
- Wonderland - A 48-hour hackathon in Boston where teenagers built projects using random items found in their "chest"
- Apocalypse - A 42-hour high-school hackathon at Shopify's Toronto office, with the theme of a "zombie apocalypse"
- The Boreal Express - A cross-country hackathon on a train in partnership with Via Rail originally planned from Vancouver to Montreal, but was turned around due to wildfires in Jasper, Alberta
- Arcade - An online summer program in collaboration with GitHub, allowing teenagers to log work on creative projects to earn “tickets”, which could be exchanged for prize
- Onboard $100 grant for high schoolers to produce PCBs
Funding
Hack Club is funded by grants from philanthropic organizations and donations from individual supporters. In 2019, GitHub Education provided cash grants of up to $500 to every Hack Club "hackathon" event.[13] In May 2020, GitHub committed to a $50K hardware fund, globally alongside Arduino and Adafruit, to deliver hardware tools directly to students’ homes with a program named Hack Club Summer of Making.[14]Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation donated $500,000 to help expand Hack Club in 2020,[15] donated another $1,000,000 in 2021,[16] and an additional $4,000,000 in 2023.[17] In 2022, Tom and Theresa Preston-Werner donated $500,000 to Hack Club.[18]
See also
References
