Introducing the Impact Fellowship
By: Chris Kuang
Tags: Nonprofit, Social Impact, Coding It Forward, Technology, Entrepreneurship

Introducing the Impact Fellowship

In collaboration with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), and with the support of Schmidt Futures, Coding it Forward (CIF) is excited to announce the launch of the Impact Fellowship.

The Impact Fellowship matches entrepreneurial recent graduates with technical backgrounds — such as software engineering, product management, and design — with host organizations working on pressing social problems.

This new program builds upon FAS’s founding vision — that scientists, engineers, and other technically trained people have the ethical obligation to ensure that the technological fruits of their intellect and labor are applied to the benefit of humankind — by extending it to today’s digital age. Similarly, the Impact Fellowship is a natural extension of Coding it Forward’s work empowering socially-minded young technologists through internship programs like the Civic Digital Fellowship and funding opportunities such as the First Act Fund.

About the Fellowship

The Impact Fellowship provides recent graduates with opportunities to build technology that serves society and grow professionally as technologists. Too often, due to a dearth of entry-level and junior technology roles at social impact organizations, STEM graduates are forced to make a tradeoff between having an impact and developing as a technologist when starting their careers. With robust program support and professional development opportunities, the Impact Fellowship seeks to break this paradigm and create a scalable model for social impact organizations to attract top tech talent with the support of forward-thinking funders like Schmidt Futures.

Fellows will receive dedicated mentorship over the course of their 12-month term, skills-building workshops and other professional development opportunities, as well as the support of a community at the intersection of technology and social impact.

The six Impact Fellows in the program’s inaugural cohort are working at five organizations, on projects ranging from increasing economic opportunity in the United States and abroad to advancing data-driven justice interventions in the criminal justice system. The 2020 host organizations are Code for America, Recidiviz, UN Global Pulse, Enveritas, and the Laboratory for Social Machines at the MIT Media Lab.

The program covers most of the Fellows’ costs, meaning that nonprofit and social impact organizations receive technical talent at minimal cost to do work that matters.

Meet the 2020 Impact Fellows

Amita Shukla — Product Manager, Code for America

2020 Impact Fellow Amita Shukla

Amita Shukla graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University. She has previously worked at the United Nations, the Department of State, the Department of Defense, and the American Civil Liberties Union on building better governance systems.

Chris Lee—Product Manager, Recidiviz

2020 Impact Fellow Chris Lee

Chris Lee holds an M.S. in Information Management from the University of Washington and a B.S. in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University. He previously worked at Kaiser Permanente Health Innovation and interned at Nike’s headquarters and Infosys in India.

Jonathan Mak—Software Engineer/Product Manager, UN Global Pulse

2020 Impact Fellow Jonathan Mak

Jonathan graduated from Stanford University with an M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering with a focus in Signal Processing and Machine Learning. He previously worked at Apple on Motion Health Research, Amazon on the Photos Team, and DoNotPay as one of the first product managers/engineers developing chatbots.

Mayuka Sarukkai—Data Scientist, Recidiviz

2020 Impact Fellow Mayuka Sarukkai

Mayuka graduated with an M.S. in Computational Social Science and a B.S. in Symbolic Systems with a focus in Artificial Intelligence from Stanford University. Previously, she has worked on developing computer vision and machine learning techniques to measure urban neighborhood change, spearheading a data analytics initiative at the U.S. Census Bureau, and building tech tools to support housing justice advocacy at JustFix.nyc.

Paola Martinez—Product Manager, Enveritas

2020 Impact Fellow Paola Martinez

Paola holds an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering and a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where she was also a Mayfield Fellow. She is interested in exploring the intersection between development and technology — leading her to work alongside shea nut farmers in Ghana to develop a product that increases their yield and therefore improves their family livelihood.

Spencer Yen—Software Engineer/Product Manager, Laboratory for Social Machines, MIT Media Lab

2020 Impact Fellow Spencer Yen

Spencer graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Sociology from Columbia University. During college, Spencer served as a managing partner at Dorm Room Fund, where he led a team that made pre-seed investments in student-founded startups. He previously worked at Karuna Health, where he designed and built a mobile app for care managers, as well as Snackpass and Zynga, and was a Kleiner Perkins Engineering Fellow at DoorDash.