Katrease Stafford

Detroit Free Press

After spending a few years in Silicon Valley and other tech-focused regions, native Detroiters Brian McKinney and Richard Grundy were left with one question: Why doesn't this type of community exist in Detroit?

The pair realized there was a dearth of technology opportunities in their hometown, particularly for residents who live in the heart of the city within its vast neighborhoods.

So last year, McKinney and Grundy, along with native New Yorker Quiessence Phillips, launched an ambitious organization, JOURNi, aimed at equipping Detroit youth and adults — largely African Americans — in some of the city's more impoverished areas with skills that can potentially be translated into a technology-related career.

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"We want to build something within Detroit that has Detroit roots and Detroit energy," Phillips said. "We’re definitely not trying to copycat anything. If you go to Silicon Valley, you get a different type of energy. Detroiters already have the grit and tenacity, we're just going to expose them and provide them with the skills they need to compete."

The organization is holding its second annual 10-day conference, Detroit Tech EQuity Week, through Sunday, to promote diversity and expose youths and adults to STEM education and careers.

"We’re seeing impact where we didn’t expect it," McKinney said, recalling an incident with a young Detroit woman. "We saw two of our college students, one went to Cass Tech, and she was so impacted by the program, seeing Quiessence and being able to see herself in her somewhat, that she changed her major from psychology to computer science and is already organizing events to help others. We never would have thought in a million years that would be possible. Detroit has this culture of resiliency and we want to embed that and create a tech mecca here."

The event is part of a national festival of tech equity conferences, hosted by QEYNO Labs in partnership with the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. This year's event includes dozens of speakers including Tonya Allen, CEO of the Skillman Foundation.

The trio met by chance when they were all working on national initiatives together at an Oakland, Calif.-based company, trying to bridge the diversity gap in the tech industry.

"I was working with Qeyno Labs and so were Brian and Richard," said Phillips, a cybersecurity professional. "We were doing programs across the U.S. and were exposing students to the world of technology so we started putting our brains together and we thought if we were going to do this together, let's do this full-fledged. Since Richard and Brian are from Detroit and Detroit is in a midst of resurgence, we thought it was an excellent place to start."

Since last year, the group has launched a number of Detroit-based programs, including Code Ramp, a six-week front-end web development course for Detroiters interested in learning to code.

The organization also began the Code After School program, which introduces Detroit middle school and high school students with little to no programming experience to computer science, by incrementally introducing technology concepts.

"As we were looking at how tech was shaking up and how our communities were being left behind, with our experiences as people of color, we felt like if we were going to give back, we needed to do a deeper dive in the community and really build it," Grundy, a digital marketing and mobile development specialist, said.

The trio has worked directly with Hamilton Academy students, located at 14223 Southampton St. on the city's east side, and Mumford High School on the northwestern side of the city, at 17525 Wyoming Ave.

And more programs are on the way, McKinney said.

"JOURNi is all about the culture and bringing in groups of people who may have been marginalized or whatever challenges they may have had and giving them the safe space to use technology," McKinney said. "We want to make sure people understand that Detroit needs to be the mecca of this millennial tech movement."

For more information or to register for the conference, visit: https://www.digitizedetroit.com/

Contact Katrease Stafford: kstafford@freepress.com or 313-223-4759.