High school sophomore Joy Liu’s frustration was mounting.

A few months earlier, she had approached Hack Club with an exciting idea: to run Central Pennsylvania’s first high school hackathon, bringing together hundreds of local students into a 24-hour coding festival where they’d learn to build apps, websites, and games.

She got busy assembling the parts, including a motivated, talented group of student organizers, community donors, and us: a national organization dedicated to supporting student hackers with programming and expertise. It would be the first and largest high school hackathon in the state outside Philadelphia.

Everything was finally starting to fall into place. They secured their venue, Facebook had just signed on as one of their first sponsors, and they had even launched their website for attendee registration.

But now it was starting to fall apart.

And the reason why was terrible: Joy was too young to have a bank account so she couldn’t accept sponsorship or access funds.

Joy wasn’t alone. She was one of hundreds of students calling Hack Club with their ideas and initiative about to die before getting off the ground due to being unable to open bank accounts or acquire nonprofit status, a process that can take up to 40 hours of a lawyer’s time. Too often, these calls came from students from low-income families who couldn’t reach into parents’ deep pockets or afford to hire attorneys to help them.

As the executive director of Hack Club, a nonprofit network of high school programming clubs, I had already been watching with frustration as students with the best ideas and energy failed for the pettiest reason: our financial system locks out young people. Too often, I saw students’ ideas killed by the very institutions — schools and government — meant to support and encourage them.

The underlying message from grown-ups to students was one they were all too familiar with: you aren’t mature enough to do this. Wait until you’re older. The system isn’t set up to empower you—it’s designed to block you.

Today, Hack Club is changing that. We’re launching Hack Club Bank 1.0 and opening sign-ups to the public for the first time.

Hack Club Bank: A Bank For Student Hackers