Where Innovation Is a Family Affair

In 2014, East Palo Alto sat in the shadow of Silicon Valley’s giants – Facebook, Google, Stanford – yet thousands of local families had no computers or internet access. StreetCode Academy was founded to bridge that divide. Co-founder Olatunde Sobomehin vowed to “Motown the industry,” adding the community’s own flavor and culture to tech education. What began as a free coding bootcamp for teens quickly evolved into something much broader. Younger siblings, parents, even elders joined in.

Sobomehin’s nine-year-old son was one of the first to cross that threshold. Two years later, he had built a mobile game that amassed 15,000 downloads and drew the attention of Mark Zuckerberg and a Saudi prince. At the other end of the spectrum, retirees in their seventies and eighties were learning to code alongside him. This intergenerational spirit shaped StreetCode’s philosophy: “Instead of just teaching in a school classroom, we teach whole families in a community-based setting,” Sobomehin explains.

Their model, which focuses on mindset (building awareness of tech), skills (teaching the decoding of the language of tech and business), and access (providing necessary equipment) has successfully proven to bridge the gap between underserved communities and Silicon Valley. 

Today, the organization is on the cutting edge of a new frontier: Artificial Intelligence. One corporate foundation leader asked, “What are we doing to rethink an education that will prepare our young people and adults for the AI future?” StreetCode is answering with free, community-based AI literacy programs. The urgency is real. A 92-year-old recently sought StreetCode’s help in using ChatGPT to interpret his medical records – a reminder that technology is no longer optional, it is essential.

StreetCode’s approach – meeting students where they are, from school classrooms to pop-up tech fairs – has changed lives. Nelson, once a disengaged high schooler, discovered coding at a StreetCode summer bootcamp. He went on to study computer science at Howard University, then became an Infrastructure Engineer at JP Morgan Chase, occasionally returns to StreeetCode Academy to teach the next generation. Max, a first-generation Mexican American, joined in eighth grade, devoured every course, and by junior year was teaching at StreetCode. Today, he is a senior at UC Berkeley, still giving back as an instructor.

For years, StreetCode has operated nomadically – in borrowed classrooms and corporate labs. Now, they are building a permanent home: the Innovation Center. This new facility will quadruple StreetCode’s capacity, anchoring its family-based model in a lasting space where grandparents and grandchildren alike can learn side by side. Imagine evenings where a grandmother codes, teens build apps, and parents explore AI for their small businesses – all under one roof. That’s the vision: inclusive innovation, rooted in community, free, and open to all.