How To Hack For Impact
By: Skyler Wharton
Tags: Tech, Impact, Hack4impact, Social Good

How To Hack For Impact

How we started, what we’ve accomplished, and where we’re headed

Spring 2017 Hack4Impact Retreat

In August 2014, I stepped onto the University of Pennsylvania’s campus as excited and optimistic as any of the freshmen, but also aware of the divide between members of the incoming class and me. This was my second time attending new student orientation, my second time navigating a new campus, my second time trying to fit into a community of thousands: I transferred to Penn at the beginning of my sophomore year.

I attended a Hack4Impact information session on a whim. A flyer was shoved into my hand during a club fair; as a new organization, Hack4Impact had no assigned table at the fair and members were instead standing in the fair’s doorway, persistently handing out flyers anyway. Their flyer read, “Interested in technology and social impact? Join Hack4Impact!” I was intrigued.

Hack4Impact’s information session was impressive: the Hack4Impact team — then a small group of four undergraduates led by co-founders Dhruv Maheshwari and Ali Altaf — had partnered with Kiva to develop a prototype of Kiva Zip over the summer. Kiva Zip’s goal was to leverage volunteers to more quickly review loan applications from nontraditional organizations — like churches and schools — worldwide.

Hack4Impact’s model was concise and compelling:

Each semester, several teams of members collaborate with nonprofits to engineer a technical solution — a web or mobile application — that addresses a core need of their nonprofit client.

I believed — and still do believe — in the power of technology-enabled social impact, and I jumped at the opportunity to test my hypothesis at Penn. I also quietly sought to meet like-minded peers in Hack4Impact, as my fellow sophomores were already clumped into friend groups, and I was struggling to form friendships based on shared classes alone. I applied to join Hack4Impact that evening.

I joined the organization a week later with a class of twenty other new members, none of whom had met each other until then. At Hack4Impact’s first technical bootcamp — during which Dhruv and Ali taught a Flask crash course over five hours — we all tentatively interacted with each other, excited to be present but unsure of what to expect. We later broke the ice with an outdoor picnic. (We have since vastly iterated upon and improved our technical bootcamp and general onboarding process for new members.)

The first ever Hack4Impact retreat (Sept 2014)

Throughout the semester, I was the Product Manager (PM) for a team of four developers; we created Philly Food Finder, a map-based web application that enables food-insecure Philadelphians to find local food resources. For this project, we partnered jointly with the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger and the Philadelphia Food Policy Advisory Council. We were dually motivated by goals to learn web development and to enable future users of our application, who either are or work directly with some of Philadelphia’s neediest citizens. Each week, we collectively struggled and pushed each other to learn web development best practices, as none of us had significant prior web development experience. Each week, I communicated our progress via email or phone to our clients. Collaborating directly with leaders of a nonprofit organization was educational and rewarding in a way that no class could have been. Working elbow-to-elbow with some of the most brilliant, thoughtful, and caring teammates and later friends was a joy and a deep privilege.

We launched Philly Food Finder in January 2015, and it is still in use, more than two years later. To date, the site has had more than 12,000 users. We were honored when, in April 2016, Philly Food Finder was a finalist for the Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney’s Award for a Distinguished Group Service Project. At the end of my sophomore year, I reflected on how my commitment to Hack4Impact’s mission and members had deepened, and I decided that I wanted to invest more in the organization.

Philly Food Finder team members with Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney (April 2016)

The following year — my junior year — I co-directed Hack4Impact with Cathy Chen. Our Executive Board collectively drove Hack4Impact forward by leaps and bounds. We debuted new member recruitment and onboarding processes, with particular care toward mitigating unconscious biases and supporting women and underrepresented minorities. We expanded our projects model to include generalized projects — projects with no specific nonprofit client but instead designed with a common need of many nonprofits in mind. We expanded our teams’ leadership structure to include a Technical Lead (TL) in addition to a PM. We grew technically, both by increasing the rigor of our new member technical bootcamp and by taking on increasingly technically complex projects. We broadened the scope of our client sourcing initiatives. We finalized a set of values for our organization. We hosted speakers including Brett Perlmutter, the founder and leader of Google Access & Energy’s high speed internet access initiatives in Cuba, and Joe Walsh, a leader of the Eric & Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good program in Chicago.

Moreover, we grew tighter as a community. Spontaneous events — small-group meals, eager city explorations, summer break meet-ups, vibrant Slack discussions, meaningful late-night conversations — soon outpaced scheduled events in number. Community members began to share their passions and experiences beyond their work within Hack4Impact. Guided by his expertise as a 5-time Oregon state chess champion, Alex Piatski shared his knowledge and thoughts on how machine learning has affected the game of chess. Riley Wong shared their passion for queer and trans* POC community-building; they taught us about systemic oppression and discrimination, with focuses on tech inclusivity and how to be an effective ally. Alex Harelick shared his experiences growing up as the son of a professional magician/entertainer and attending circus camps as a kid. Others shared their passions for women’s health education, using computers to model climate change, and their personal relationship with Judaism and Israel. As we got to know each other better and better, our friendships grew.

Three years after coming to Philadelphia, I am now a Penn graduate, and I am incredibly proud of Hack4Impact.

We have grown from a collection of like-minded individuals into a strong community of driven and conscientious developers and designers. We have worked with nearly two dozen nonprofits and other socially conscious organizations to develop projects, and we have released high-use open-source software, including flask-base and Maps4All.

Our culture is characterized by deep community engagement, a shared commitment to developing high-quality software, an understanding of technology’s limitations within social impact, and a healthy criticism of our methods. And we’re not done yet! We continue to push Hack4Impact forward: we are actively developing new opportunities that will meaningfully involve more people — both technologists and nonprofit leaders — in our social impact projects; we are rigorously evaluating our projects’ short- and long-term impact; and we are contributing to the broader conversation about how technology intersects with social impact. Hack4Impact has become more than simply an organization that I am in — it is my family and my home at (and beyond) Penn.