A little bit of context

There is a shortage of women in computer science and often our students feel isolated. We also had one of our outstanding Industry Advisory Board (IAB) members suggest we start trying to take our senior female students to the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC), which we managed to accomplish last year through the GHC Scholarship program. The students we took last year were inspired, and it reinforced that they can be successful as women in computer science meeting so many other women in computer science at GHC, where of the about 15,000 attendees last year over 14,000 were women.

But there’s a problem

This year we did not get all the students who are now interested to apply for the scholarship in time and the students who did were not granted a scholarship. Many of the students who would like to go this year were so inspired by the students who went last year and hearing about it are even talking about paying their own way if we can't find funding for them, as they see a massive benefit personally, emotionally, and professionally in attending.

Here’s what we can do about it

What we are doing is trying to start a social campaign and crowdfunding through Chuffed to try and raise the money to send all the students who have indicated they would like to attend GHC. It's not a massive amount of money and I know if we can get the word out to alumni, friends, family, people who support women in computing, etc that we can raise the money in time so that I can tell the students that they can all go to GHC and we have funding to pay for them to go.





And there’s some amazing perks for supporting us





I have gotten the students who are interested in going to buy into helping with the perks for this campaign. The perks are personal engagement directly from the students that you are through donating to this campaign will be sending to GHC 17.





$100 or more will get you a letter from each student thanking you for your contribution and them writing up their experience at Grace Hopper for you and the impact it had on them personally.





$250 or more will get you the letters and photos/selfies/etc that the students take while at GHC of their experience.







$500 or more one or more of the students will commit to doing a short google hangout call with you either while at GHC or after attending.







$7200 or more in addition to all the other perks, if you can make it to CSU Chico's campus before the end of the Fall 2017 school year after the students have attended GHC 17... I will personally take you and all the students who attended that can make it out for pizza. They can then personally tell you about their experience over a casual meal.







About Us & Stretch Goals

So this campaign was started the faculty advisor for the CSU Chico ACM Student Chapter. As the Association of Computing Machinary (ACM) is the professional organization for CS majors, we feel as a club/chapter that it is important to support the success of our majors in activities and experiences that will make them more successful.





Our student chapter is a non-profit and all donors will recieve an email with our EIN number and the amount you donated that went to our chapter for your tax records. These emails will be sent out after the campaign ends to make things easier on our end.





In the event that folks are super excited about this campaign and donate more than we need to send the students to GHC in 2017. All proceeds will be going to the local CSU Chico ACM Student Chapter, which also raises money to send students to a regional programming competition every fall, host a local programming contest for the university and surrounding community colleges every spring, and we want to make sending students to GHC an annual event. There are also other events such as hackathons, sending students to other conferences, etc that could happen with more donations to our student chapter.





We may also wish to support sending a faculty member every year as well; however, the primary goal of this campaign is to get the students to GHC 17... but I had the oppurtunity to go last year with the students and it was quite inspirational for me as well and only pushes me harder to make sure to support our female and under represented minority students in our major all the more.