The WIT Project collaborates with the Urban Institute to Reimagine their Virtual Workplace
Welcome. We are glad you’re here, and can’t wait to tell you about the impact our community is having on the greater good. As a refresher, at the <wit> project, we believe in challenging the way tech works.
We want to change the makeup of tech so that its leadership and workforce incorporate the viewpoints of women from economically and ethnically underrepresented backgrounds. We strive to create opportunities and remove barriers to help women underserved in tech to become industry leaders through our 24-week fellowship program.
We firmly believe that by building partnerships with nonprofit organizations, we enable our fellows to mobilize themselves to understand STEM as a mode of inclusivity and social change. Working with the Urban Institute enables our fellows to have hands-on experience with an organization also seeking to challenge the status quo.
The <wit> project team consisted of six women science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students from the City University of New York (CUNY) and New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) who worked in partnership with Urban Institute staff.
For many of the students, this fellowship experience was their first exposure to developing software for end-users and working with nonprofits.
“I heard about the <wit> project during a convening of peers from my CIO4Good network. Year Up’s CIO, Sarah Angel Johnson, spoke about the great work they had done implementing a software solution that helped their organization pair students with experienced mentors.” said Khuloud Odeh, VP Of Technology and Data Science and CIO of the Urban Institute. “After doing my own research, I learned that not only did this program advocate for the empowerment of underserved young women in the technology and data field but that it also valued collaborating with non-profits working to uplifting equity and diversity. I believed the alignment of their mission, Urban’s mission, and my own personal ideals made them the perfect fit for projects we had in mind. And I was absolutely right. I was so impressed with the prototype they put together for Urban’s intranet. They listened to current users' concerns and worked to create innovative solutions addressing them. I can’t wait for us to apply their creative improvements to our intranet soon.”
“I had such an amazing time working on the Urban project. It felt good knowing that the project we worked on would be benefitting the people at Urban Institute. It was a team effort and we had a work environment that allowed for great collaboration and ultimately a great product.”
Kara Davis, Director for the office of the CIO at the Urban Institute shared her experience partnering with our team of fellows on developing an Intranet solution. “I worked closely with the <wit> project program leads to set a few parameters around the engagement upfront - what projects we thought would be most helpful to Urban, and who we thought the fellows might need access to for their research - but they really took it from there. Shylee and Anooj led two teams of fellows; one that focused on the user experience of our current intranet, and another that looked into our internal search and found ways to make it more useful to staff. They helped them understand concepts around user research, prototyping and testing, and dug into different search technologies and tools” said Kara. “We arranged the necessary interviews with our staff, and the fellows took what they learned and came up with some brilliant ideas, including a clickable prototype and some functional code that we’ll be able to work into our search down the road. The fellows were enthusiastic and great to work with and I hope they got as much out of the experience as we did.”
We are grateful for the opportunity to have partnered with such an awesome organization! If you or an organization you know would like to work with us to make tech for all, drop us a note at info@thewitproject.com or learn more about partnership opportunities here.