Hack4Impact Penn

09/11/2021

Hack4Impact Applications are due TONIGHT!

Hack4Impact is the student group that builds software for nonprofits! Each semester, we team up with non-profits and other socially-responsible organizations to build products tackling issues in education, food accessibility, poverty, and more.

APPLICATION: https://upenn.hack4impact.org/students/apply (due 9/11 at 11:59pm). No late submissions will be accepted!

09/06/2021

Interested in social good, technology, or building community? Apply for Hack4Impact! We are the UPenn Chapter of the student run non-profit Hack4Impact where we build applications for people in need. Check out our recruiting timeline and we look forward to meeting you soon!

10/28/2020

Join Hack4Impact for our first Bytes of Good Live event on Tech & Electoral Politics! Bytes of Good Live is a monthly speaker series presented by Hack4Impact. Our goal is to help students critically examine the role tech plays in our society and explore potential career paths in the social good space.

We will be joined by three incredible speakers: founder of the Thoughtful Technology Project, Aviv Ovadya, former misinformation Facebook Software Engineer, Timothy Aveni, and VP of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, Darrell West. We will be starting with a moderated panel then will move to open Q&A, so make sure to register then get your questions ready by learning more about our speakers on the event page! bit.ly/bytesofgoodlive1

Join Hack4Impact for the first Bytes of Good Live Event on Tech & Electoral Politics.

09/29/2020

We’re so excited to welcome Hack4Impact’s newbie class of ‘20!! 🥳 Can’t wait to see what this class is able to accomplish!

09/14/2020

REMINDER: Hack4Impact applications are due TONIGHT (9/13) at 11:59pm EST! The application can be found at https://forms.gle/Gt2meZTgfM8C8ZcJ9.
Don't miss out the opportunity to join an amazing community of developers making a real world impact!
If you have any last minute questions please reach out to [email protected], message us on Facebook, or look at our FAQs at https://pennclubs.com/club/h4i.

Check out http://hack4impact.org for more information about who we are, descriptions about roles within Hack4Impact, and why you should join! Please submit this application form by Sunday, September 13 at 11:59pm. Applications are open to Freshmen, Sophomores, and Juniors. Please don't be frightened...

09/06/2020

Come join our Info Session TONIGHT, 9/6 @ 7:30pm EST! Zoom Link: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/7331993890. We will be sharing what makes H4I so special and answering your questions. If you can't make it tonight, we will be posting slides and a recording of the session on our Penn Club Portal, https://pennclubs.com/club/h4i.

Important Dates:
Info session: Sunday, September 6th @7:30pm EST
Q&A Sessions: Tuesday, September 8th @7:30pm EST
APPLICATION: https://forms.gle/Gt2meZTgfM8C8ZcJ9 (due by Sun 9/13 @ 11:59pm)

This fall, we are opening applications to the class of 2022, 2023, and 2024! Check out https://hack4impact.org for more info about who we are and what we do! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach us at [email protected].

Hack4Impact is a student-run nonprofit dedicated to developing software for social good. Each semester, we team up with socially-responsible organizations to build products tackling issues in education, food accessibility, poverty, and more. Hack4Impact was founded at Penn in 2014, and has since grown into a national organization with 10+ university chapters.

09/03/2020

Join Hack4Impact!

Hack4Impact is a student-run nonprofit dedicated to developing software for social good. Each semester, we team up with socially-responsible organizations to build products tackling issues in education, food accessibility, poverty, and more. Hack4Impact was founded at Penn in 2014, and has since grown into a national organization with 10+ university chapters.

This year, per Penn policies, recruitment will primarily be run out of the Penn Clubs portal: https://pennclubs.com/club/h4i. Come join us at SAC fair and our info session to learn more about our organization, the fun we have as a community, and where you fit in!

SAC Fair: Thursday, September 3rd @5-8pm EST Info session: Sunday, September 6th @7:30pm EST Q&A Sessions: Tuesday, September 8th @7:30pm EST
APPLICATION: https://forms.gle/Gt2meZTgfM8C8ZcJ9 (due by Sun 9/13 @ 11:59pm)

This fall, we are opening applications to the class of 2022, 2023, and 2024! Check out https://hack4impact.org for more info about who we are and what we do! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach us at [email protected].

06/14/2020

The second organization fighting for racial justice that we are featuring is the National Black Disability Coalition. Read the feature below and visit the website to learn more!
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The National Black Disability Coalition (NBDC) is an organization for Black disabled people, parents, family members, non-profits, and academic and policy leaders. Founded in 1990, NBDC is focused on studying and improving community leadership, family inclusion, entrepreneurship, civil rights, service delivery systems, and education through the lenses of ableism and racism.

With an emphasis on people who live in poverty, the goals of NBDC are
1. To promote unity among Black people with disabilities and their families and communities.
2. To advance equity within the disability movement.
3. To foster opportunity for Black people with disabilities.

The organization also offers educational resources on healthcare reform, disability legislation and the history and culture of Black people with disabilities.

Website:
http://www.blackdisability.org/

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/black.disability

06/09/2020

Our donation drive might be over, but there are still so many organizations that need your help. This week, we're researching and highlighting a few orgs fighting for racial justice that deserve your attention. First up, a highlight of Campaign Zero by our member Lisa Moshiro:

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Campaign Zero is a comprehensive policy platform associated with the Black Lives Matter Movement. They use data driven solutions to craft policy ideas with the goal of ending police violence in the US, with a focus on murders by police. Using recommendations from communities across the country, various researchers, and data they analyzed themselves, Campaign Zero had 10 policy solution categories which they want implemented by local, federal, and state officials.

In addition to these policies, Campaign Zero provides a wide array of resources from ways to contact local representatives to numerous reports and data visualizations on relevant topics. The Police Scorecard gives police departments grades based on factors such as number of complaints, number of arrests, and deadly force incidents. There is also the Police Use of Force Project includes a review of the use of force policies of America’s 100 largest city police departments and an analysis of how those policies correlate to the number of police killings

Recently, Campaign Zero released a new set of policies called 8 Can’t Wait, and they believe this approach has the potential to reduce police violence. These policies include: banning dangerous holds such as choke and strangle holds, requiring officers to use de-escalation techniques first instead of force, requiring a warning and the exhaustion of all other options before shooting, mandating intervention if an officer witnesses excess force used by one of their colleagues, a ban on shooting at moving vehicles, limits on force/weaponry depending on the situation, and comprehensive record keeping of police activity.

There are many ways to get involved with Campaign Zero. They take donations which are used to fund their research, advocacy, and the maintenance of their platform. You can also propose policy solutions to expand upon their original ideas. If you want to get more directly involved, you can join a working group and work on either policy, data, elections, or design. Follow them on Instagram .

Campaign Zero:
https://www.joincampaignzero.org/

To donate: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?token=Eos74OaWVpRUalBO6tIVUUgBHZmjVaX5PglVw_7bV9GPhfT-gb00UBqEwN6XGrM5I_-Gqm&country.x=US&locale.x=US

To propose a policy solution:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd7i4WkuSyye1mx6lMCCs6AcSqfecgoEi1nwnxHmEUG8956vw/viewform?c=0&w=1

To join a working group:
https://www.staywoke.org/

Campaign Zero is a comprehensive platform of policy solutions to end police violence in America.

06/08/2020

As mentioned earlier this week, we successfully hit our $10,000 donation target! Thank you all for making so many incredible contributions to so many awesome organizations.

We received donation receipts for over $20,000 worth of donations to racial justice organizations. Hack4Impact members and alumni matched the first $10,000 and have sent donations to all of these organizations:

ActBlue Bail Funds, Black Lives Matter Global Network, Black Visions Collective, Brooklyn Bail Fund, Campaign Zero, Chicago Community Bond Fund, Community Legal Services, Equal Justice Initiative, Faith in Action, Loveland Foundation, NAACP, NAACP Empowerment Programs, NAACP LDF, National Bail Fund Network, National Bail Out, National Lawyers Guild, Northwest Community Bail Fund, Parole Illinois, Philadelphia Bail Fund, Project Home Philadelphia, Reclaim the Block, The African American Policy Forum, The Bail Project, Washington Innocence Project.

Your donations will go towards bailing out protestors, and towards providing legal services for those who can’t afford them. It will go towards projects to challenge and change policing policy in the US, and it will go towards serving real needs of this country’s Black communities. It will go towards these things and other things, and we are so excited to see the kind of tomorrow that your donations today will bring.

We could not donate to every organization we received receipts for (either because the donation came after we hit our $10,000 limit or because they weren’t a 501(c)(3)). The organizations above and others still need more of our support. To that end, in the coming days, we’ll be posting some highlights of causes that we think are worth sending money towards. We won’t be matching any more donations but hope we can still inspire more of our community to give and make a difference.

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And, of course, a most special thanks to our members and alumni who were able to quickly raise the $10,000 needed to match the donations made. This includes, but is not limited to, Alan Fang, Alex Piatski, Aruna Prasad, Ben Holmes, Ben Sandler, Betty Shen, Hunter Lightman, Julia Pan, Rani Iyer, Sally Kong, Suzanne Knop, Victor Chien.

We are all students and recent graduates, yet we were able to put this together. This is a call out to our fellow young people out there, including many of you working in tech now, who are privileged to be able to give money to charity:

If you are able to give and have not, or have only given a small token amount, why have you not done more?