Our West London codebar chapter at Twitter HQ
That’s right, after 14 months of lots of paperwork and legal conversations we are very happy to announce that codebar is now a registered charity 🎉🎉🎉.
A bit of background, when codebar was incorporated in 2013 we were a Limited Company by Guarantee, which means that there were no shares and no capital. However, with this structure came one big restriction. Money! We were simply not getting enough of it, and the company structure did not allow us to fundraise effectively.
codebar events will ALWAYS be free for community members, running free events for minority groups and helping them break into tech will forever be our number one focus. But that doesn’t mean that codebar costs £0 to operate; expenses include our Heroku bill, emails, various other bits of software, stickers ETC.
Since codebar started in 2013, we have had:
- 👭👬👫 16,745 community members attend a codebar event
- 🌍 31 chapters starting around the world
- 🧑🏽💻👩💻 135 organisers join codebar
- 💻 1304 workshops (that’s 2,608 hours of learning)
These numbers are absolutely incredible, and we love that codebar has grown really organically over the years all thanks to our amazing community. We are helping to teach more people to code now than ever before. However, with this volunteer structure, we’ve reached max capacity of how many hours we can volunteer outside of our day jobs. This means that our primary goal for 2020 is to fundraise enough money to employ our first full-time member of staff.
We would also love to raise more money to put back into our community, currently we’re only able to help people at workshops, and we’d love to help people in other ways too. We would also like to help smaller chapters become more established and be able to financially support them better. By becoming a charity we know that companies will be more inclined to support us financially.
We are very excited about what 2020 holds for codebar, and we’re excited that you are all coming on this incredibly exciting journey with us.
Love, the codebar Trustees 💜
Kimberley Cook, Kriszta Matyi, Despo Pentara Gale, Jarkyn Soltobaeva, Charlotte Zhao, Priya Patil, and Kara de la Marck
this post was written prior to COVID-19. The safety of our community is our number 1 priority, therefore, all in-person workshops have been suspended till it’s safe to run them again. This will not stop us from helping people learn to code though, make sure you join our Slack channel to keep an eye out for Virtual Workshop announcements.
codebar — The Charity was originally published in the codelog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.