Today, I’m thrilled to announce a partnership with the Flatiron School located in New York to provide 15 scholarships for high school girls to learn web development and design next Spring 2016. The Meteor Web Development Scholarship program will give girls from economically disadvantaged backgrounds located in the New York area the opportunity to begin shaping their own futures and that of our world, one line of code at a time.

Our partnership with the Flatiron School aligns with our philosophies of education, empowerment, open source and open opportunities curriculum. Their previous initiatives — such as Kode with Karlie and their work with the City of New York — inspired us to take action in diversifying the computer science field and making coding truly accessible for those that have a passion for building amazing software.

At Meteor, we believe that power of software development should be available to the masses and not exclusive to tech giants. Historically open source technology has been limited to people with traditional educations deriving western socioeconomic benefits, which is a trend that we’d like to do our part to change on this end. With a goal of democratizing knowledge for development, especially as it relates to Universal JavaScript, we’re putting our money where our mouth is with these scholarships — and — we’re instigating a call-to-action to encourage more tech companies to follow suit in supporting our next generation of engineers.

To apply, applicants don’t need prior coding experience. The girls will be enrolled in Flatiron’s Intro to Web Development and Design course where they will learn HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, UX and UI. The experience will ultimately prepare these students with real-life engineering skills and provide them with a chance to build world-class apps that will impact the future and their careers too

Applications for the Meteor Web Development Scholarship are open! Learn more and submit your application here.