Happy 2026! January is a time to look forward, and we’ve got lots of exciting news to share about our upcoming events.
But right now, let’s talk about looking up. January is National Mentoring Month, and we’re celebrating role models and mentors: the ones who help us figure out where we want to go, and the ones who help us get there.
Mentoring really makes a difference in kids’ lives. According to the National Mentoring Partnership, only 22% of youth with a mentor say that they’ve experienced a strong sense of belonging growing up – but with a mentor, 92% of those youth are more likely to volunteer regularly in their communities and 75% are more likely to have held a leadership position in a club or sports team. Most of the young people surveyed – 85% – report that this key relationship has helped them with issues related to school and their education. 74% of survey respondents who had a meaningful mentor say that person contributed significantly to their success later in life. And three out of five mentees under 40 years old are still drawing advice from their childhood mentors.
Who do you look up to? Who looks up to you? If you have a strong role model or significant mentor in your life, we’d love to hear about it. Tag @techbridgegirls on your social media platform of choice with hashtag #IAMTBG.
And if you’re ready to make a big difference in a kid’s life, now’s a great time to start. Our next STEM Learning Community cohort starts in early February, and recAnd fruitment is open now. And our Role Models Matter program is open all year.
And we just wanted to say thank you to all those who donated during our End of Year campaign! Our celebration of 25 years continues and your support means the world to us.
Happy New Year from The Techbridge Team!
Bridge Building: How can I bring Techbridge Girls to my school or community center?
Registration for our spring STEM Learning Community and for on-site program facilitation opens in January! If you are a program manager, administrator, or site director for out-of-school-time STEM learning, we welcome you to join us in exploring how our own experiences can help us to create equitable learning spaces for all children.
Reach out now to program-managers@techbridgegirls.org to find out more.
Pathways: Role Models and More
Meet Dr. Joy Buolamwini, artist, advocate, and AI expert. Dr. Buolamwini is the best-selling author of Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines. She holds a PhD from MIT, two masters degrees from Oxford University and MIT, and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Fortune Magazine named her to their 2019 list of world’s greatest leaders, describing her as “the conscience of the A.I. Revolution.”
Dr. Buolamwini is also a talented communicator who helps the rest of us understand what goes into building AI, and how we can build an AI that’s more inclusive. Check out this TED talk from 2017 – still relevant! – in which she shares how she discovered and addressed bias built into the algorithms of facial recognition software. You can find more at her LinkedIn and on her Substack.
Intersections: Techbridge in Conversation
AI is everywhere. What are we going to do with it? At Techbridge Girls, we’ve been thinking hard about how to explore artificial intelligence while centering human intelligence. Starting this spring, we invite you to join us in trying something new: a curriculum and event sequence that uses AI and the underlying data science as learning tools for out-of-school-time education. In this LinkedIn post, Techbridge Girls CEO Savita Raj talks about what we’re doing with AI, and why.
Don’t sleep on our blog posts! Two guest blogs are coming in January.
What does authentic, community-centered engagement look like in practice? As Keystone Fellows with Beyond 100K, Techbridge Girls Senior Program Manager Tracy Staley and Board Member Dr. Taunya Nesin explored this question and many more to deliver this toolkit, which offers:
- Partner-led strategies for equitable engagement and culturally responsive collaboration
- Reflections and lessons from Beyond100K network partners co-creating solutions in their communities
- Actionable practices that integrate decolonizing methodologies, prioritize relationship-building, and redistribute power
- Guiding questions to help adapt and apply these strategies within your own work
Look for Techbridge Girls at the Science for All Summit on Feb 19th and 20th in Chapel Hill, North Carolina!
The View: What we’re reading, using, and finding inspirational here at Techbridge Girls
- Celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with a day of service for your community
- Need a role model for your classroom or child?
- Check out Million Women Mentors to find a STEM mentor.
- Explore 500 Women Scientists at Gage, the world’s largest directory of women and gender diverse folks in science, technology, engineering, math and medicine.
- Get real-life answers to students’ science questions (or your own!) at Skype a Scientist.