Nerd Stalker

Google Inc. has made a one-time, in-kind donation to the nonprofit Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA). Google will be donating 110 Nexus 5 devices and 350 Nexus 7 devices to support the organization’s goals regarding digital-literacy initiatives. MEDA provides asset building to financially challenged Latinos in San Francisco’s Mission District, with a major component of its service-integration model being computer skills. MEDA is also the lead agency of the Mission Promise Neighborhood (MPN), a citywide community partnership that has been created in support of students and families living, working and going to school in the Mission District. MPN brings together schools, colleges, community organizations, businesses and community leaders to help kids graduate and families achieve financial stability. The donated devices will have programmatic uses in the tech labs at MEDA, where digital-literacy classes are taught based on varying skill levels. Richard Abisla, MEDA...

Guest Post by Christopher Gil Mission Techie Yaritza opened her weary eyes this morning upon awakening in her Mission District home, the 17-year-old Lowell High senior not sure what her day would bring. She and 18 other Mission Techies, from MEDA’s third cohort of its free young adult program , had been graciously invited to tour the campus of tech giant Facebook. The group MEDA has been guiding on the path to an IT career now had that path extended to the tech hub of Silicon Valley. While it is a mere thirty-mile bus ride from the underserved communities of San Francisco’s southeastern quadrant to the leafy, suburban streets of Menlo Park, Yaritza was aware that a new place awaited. It was time to come face-to-face with that world—a world of high tech, as a group used to getting inside a computer was now being taken inside one of the most powerful companies in the world. “It was like spending a short vacation in a mini-Hollywood.”–Mission Techie Jamar Walker As the bus approached 1...

Guest Post by Christopher Gil Google & Client Blog “These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise.” So said the late Apple visionary and driving force, Steve Jobs. Yet a walk down one of the main drags of San Francisco’s Mission District reveals two worlds attempting to coexist. At 24th and Valencia, scores of young tech workers clutch strongly brewed coffees as they wait for the bus to take them to the Silicon Valley offices where the world’s next great thing is being developed. Few conversations are had, with most focused on answering their twentieth text on an already-overworked smartphone, even though it’s just 8am. A short two blocks away on the corner of 22nd Street, a line just as long has formed at the neighborhood Social Security office. A disheveled woman in a wheelchair fronts the queue, already clutching the pen she’ll need to fill out the reams of paperwork that can possibly garner enough federal funds to keep her–one of...