RailsBridge Cape Town is the Cape Town chapter of RailsBridge. We’ve been running free workshops helping people learn Rails, Ruby, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript since July 2013. The workshops are targeted at groups of people that are underrepresented in tech; we want to help increase diversity in tech, to help all people feel welcome and comfortable in our industry.
The main thing we need sponsorship for is breakfast and lunch for our attendees. This usually costs around R2,000 for 30 people. Supporting RailsBridge shows that you value diversity and inclusion in tech. Read on for more about what we need and what’s in it for you. :)
If you’d like to sponsor a RailsBridge, contact us on meetup!
What do we need?
The workshops are free for attendees. For every event, we need to provide:
- breakfast and lunch for our attendees;
- a venue with plenty of seats and desks, and good WiFi;
- volunteers to mentor.
We fund stationery supplies and loot (like stickers) ourselves, but we’d love help with that too. Getting sponsorship is our biggest challenge for each workshop and we appreciate all the help we get!
RailsBridge Cape Town is quite informal, so we’re not a registered NPO and we don’t have a PayPal account like our US-based mothership does. We ask for sponsors to pay directly for things for us where they can. In other cases, we pay and ask for reimbursement from sponsors.
What’s in it for you?
Supporting RailsBridge has the long-term benefit of contributing to increased diversity in tech (which leads to more productive and creative teams, for one). But supporting RailsBridge also has more immediate benefits. In particular, increasing your organisation’s visibility within the local tech community. By sponsoring RailsBridge, you are publicly demonstrating to professional and future developers that your organisation values diversity, openness, and excellence. Yay!
Attendees aren’t the only ones learning. Seasoned developers join the RailsBridge community and learn to be more empathetic, deepen their knowledge of their craft, and importantly, challenge their subconscious preconceptions of what a programmer looks like.
Our workshops
We’ve had a total of 24 workshops (at various offices, at the Bandwidth Barn in Woodstock, at the University of Cape Town, at Herschel school) and have had over 350 attendees. Our meetup group, which we’ve been using to track attendance since April 2014, has over 660 members. For each workshop, we aim for between 20 and 30 people. We try and keep the number around there so that we can have a good balance of mentors to attendees.
Our content
All of the course material is open source and online at docs.railsbridgecapetown.org so that students can continue with the workshop material (and other resources) after they leave. People that do the Intro to Rails course also get guided through installing Ruby and Rails (and Git and the Heroku toolbelt and Atom) onto their machine so that they have those after the workshop too.
If you’d like to sponsor a RailsBridge, contact us on meetup!