Empowering Tech Accessibility Through Community Collaboration

It takes a village to bring technology to the community. At re:Bloom, our mission is to make tech accessible, affordable, and sustainable for women and minority-owned small businesses.

To make website development accessible without compromising quality, our programs pull together the collective expertise of our diverse community partners, volunteers, and experts. This allows us to bridge gaps in the tech space and ensures that everyone, especially those traditionally underserved, can thrive in the digital landscape.

Each person within the community brings unique perspectives, skills, and resources. This is exactly why user testing is one of the key features of our 10-week website boot camp. We work with real people who provide feedback for tangible improvements at the mid-point of the program. Partnering with experienced UX designers for this has been a longstanding goal for re:Bloom, and thanks to our village, we were able to implement this meaningful change. 

For our Spring 2024 Cohort, we collaborated with Steel City UX Ladies to invite 9 industry professionals to give feedback to each of our website project teams. 

The panelists included:

• Matt Reed, Director of Product Design @ Confluence Technologies
• Kate Cummings, Senior Product Designer
• Kevin Voller, Senior Product Designer @ Google
• Alexa Mavrogianis, UX Content Strategist @ Cloudflare
• Varun Mangal Gadh, Technologist @ Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
• Teslla Todhunter, Design Operations Lead/UX Designer
• Anjali Akula, Product Manager @ Novata
• Eileen Lee, Product Designer @ GoDaddy

Each of our panelists also encouraged our volunteers to connect with them for their current and future professional journeys. Many of our volunteers use their experience with re:Bloom to explore their career interests, and connecting with seasoned professionals creates mentorship and networking opportunities.

It takes a lot of people to make these projects happen.  The collaborations that support our programs exemplify our village's commitment to driving meaningful change in entrepreneurship and tech. We're not just building websites; we're growing a stronger, more inclusive digital future.

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If your organization is interested in collaborating with us on future events, please reach out to Abbey, abbey@re-bloom.org.

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