A Better Way To Teach The World

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Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast where we go beyond just talking about your why. We help you actually discover and live your why. Now, today we're going to be talking about the why of Better Way. So if you remember Better Way, these are people that always looking for a better way to do things and then share it. They take something that's already there and they innovate it, they make it better, they improve upon it so that it has a bigger impact. My guest today is a good friend of mine, his name is Charles Ashley. Now let me just read you his bio before we get going. Charles is the President and founder of Cultivating Coders. It's a New Mexico based company that provides technical training and curriculum in web and mobile application development to K12 schools in tribal, rural and overlooked urban areas that lack resources in coding and computing and computer science education. Now, prior to his current role, Charles was a marketing and strategy consultant for several clients including Harmonix Technology, vera Wines and DeVry University. He previously served as the film Liaison and Marketing Manager for Bernalillo County's Economic Development Department in New Mexico and was Manager of Marketing for CNM Stimulus Center. Charles currently sits on the Learning alliance and Coronado Ventures Forum board and has served on a variety of other boards around New Mexico. So welcome Charles. Thank you for being here and thanks for spending some time with me.

A pleasure to be here, Gary. As you said, we're good friends, so this is awesome. I've been following your journey for a long time, so I'm thrilled and honored to be a part of the show.

You know, it was two years ago almost to the day that you and I and and Charles, I think were sitting in Scalo, an Italian restaurant, and then you picked up your phone and went through discovering your why better way.

I did. And it was funny because prior to that you had mentioned, hey, you should go really check out your why, see what's driving you, what's motivating you or whatnot. And we were sitting there just hanging out and I said, let's do it. And the most amazing part about it is I knew I always wanted to do things to better or improve or whatnot. But seeing it and understanding how it got to that evaluation was the best part because it really did give me a clear view of what I was trying to create with the company that I run right now.

So Tell us, tell everybody a little bit about cultivating coders.

Well, Cultivating Coders is a computer science program that we created nearly four years ago. The goal was there are coding camps all across the country, all across the world, overly priced, that teaches people basic HTML all the way up to JavaScript, web design, web development, mobile app development. The problem that we were seeing, though, especially myself, I was traveling in the four corner area, which is predominantly tribal, Native American areas. A lot of these kids weren't exposed to early on, computer science. So when you start looking at where technology is going, you're thinking, okay, If I'm in K12 and I don't even have any exposure to computer science, the likelihood of me going into computer science when I go into college is limited to zero, right? Yep. I started asking the question of what would it take for someone to create a program very similar to all the coding camps that were going on right now, but made it in a way that it was accessible to everyone, affordable to everyone, and convenient. Right. Because you learn certain things being in the education space. I was in the education and business space and I've learned that convenience is huge for most people. So we said, let's create a program where it was affordable. So we did free. And people say, well, nothing is free. Right? Nothing's free. But I've learned that there's funding sources in multiple ways that you can go out there and acquire the funding for someone to be able to take a program free of charge. So we did that. None of our participants will pay for it. None have ever paid for it. Then it was provide equipment for free. Every kid gets a laptop because we assume that we're all pretty privileged. Every kid has a laptop at home. But that's not the case. Most people share a PC with their grandmother or their mother or their dad. So every kid gets a laptop. The biggest component was make it to the point where we went out of our comfort zone. So we travel, we parachute into these communities for eight to 12 weeks, meaning we live there to provide this coding camp to these kids. Because we don't want to burden you with having to drive to a major city just to take our program. And it's all project based learning. We introduced kids to video games in the very beginning. So who wouldn't want to build a video game? Video game in the beginning. And then upon completion, these kids are building elaborate mobile applications, web applications. They're deploying their own servers, they have their own portfolio. They're learning how to do project management. They know how to build A resume, they know what a portfolio looks like, what it should say, they know what a 1099 is. So we try to really cram everything in during the summer programs.

That is amazing. So in eight weeks they go from not knowing anything.

Not knowing anything to being able to.

Build a mobile app.

To build a mobile app. And what we've seen is it's not run like a classroom. Think on the job training. Think if you would get 26 kids in a facility. We don't even call it a classroom. It's just, hey, show up to the building or show up to the project or whatever. The name of the building that we're holding these workshops or classes in, we call it that. So if it's at El Camino Real, show up to the El Camino Real room. We really want to break the, this is school, right? We want them to understand that this is really hands on learning. So by the time they're done with the program, they've learned how to say, they've learned who could be the project manager. They learned who's the front end person. With the front end. That's more like the design aesthetics, who's the back end person where that, that's the functionality. And the kids naturally form teams, which is something they've probably never been used to because after the first week is this, I get the same emails from parents. Oh, we're confused. Is it class? There's no books, there's no homework. Well, our kids been on a laptop for two hours Googling everything. And that's where the world kind of is going, is allowing kids to be creative and free flowing and pick their own groups and cliques. But do it in a sense where we're all still collaborating in a community. Right? So during, so at the, upon the completion of eight weeks at our, we call it demo day every time. 14 camps we've had mothers, nanas, papas, whoever, people balling because they've been with these kids their entire life. And to see your kid do something where you've only played on your mobile phone or you've only opened up your laptop to play on Facebook and now you're witnessing your child build something from the ground up, it'll never get old, Gary put it that way, never gets old. See that demo?

So you've done 14 of these already?

Yes, sir.

And so what happens? So you pick a sit a, pick a town or pick a pueblo and you guys just show up, say, okay, this is the day it's going to happen or the eight weeks it's going to happen, I guess.

You know what, that, that used to be the model, okay? Especially I only can speak for United States because this where, you know, I've been my entire life and I understand how programs work here. That's the old model. The old model has always been we're going to go to Community ABC and we're going to tell you guys how to do something. We're going to be your savior. Me coming from my background, very poor kid from south side Chicago, I was also a product of that happening. People come in and say how they could save us, right? And then leave. So come do some good stuff, then you leave. We wanted to build something where once we identify a community, we meet with the three pillars of the community to make it successful. And the three pillars are these. One, you have to have a community champion. You have to have someone that they've been in that community their entire life or they're all about the advancement, the betterment of their community. Because now that person is going to make sure you get it right in front of the people who can make this happen. The second is who's the funding source, right? Who is the stakeholder who can show us to the funding source where we can now partner with the community to come up with the funds for the kids to take our program. Then the third is our school counselor, educator. It could be the principal, someone in that school district who really believes in, hey, we don't want just a one off program. We want to see this thing be planted, water it. We're going to make sure that it's going to continue to be growing once you guys are gone. If we can have those three things, that's when we begin the courting. Right now we have the commitment. Now we discuss how recruitment is going to look. Because by the time the kids even get to us, they're selected from their community like peers or adults or mentors. So Every class is 26 kids per camp. Every time we get a program initiated, we get about an average of 100 kids sign up. So we have to window that down to 26. What helps is we get the 100 kids that people know them, they vouch for this kid, so they go through our own process. And then you're probably going to say, well, how do you select the 26 kids on paper? If you would have interviewed me 17 when I was 17, 18 on paper, I wouldn't have cut it. But I've met people in my life that said paper is not everything, the resume is not everything, and that's what we look for in our process when we're interviewing. We don't care if you're a 3.0 student or you're a 1.5 student. We prefer the student where on paper, you look like you might not be the most talented, but you probably are. You're probably just not engaged. You're probably not interested. Too much is going on in life. So we really try to get to the root of a student, and that's how we pick. And it's been in this workforce. With our youth camps, we have 100% completion rate. With our youth camps, we've done adult camps. Our adult camps, our completion rate is about 87%. And so people have always asked, what's the difference? A child, when nurtured, when you show belief in them, they tend to go above and beyond for you, especially a child that's been kind of overlooked or never won anything or never achieved something. When you can break through that type of young person, they go all out for you. And adults are a little bit harder because if you've been kicked down, beat down your whole life, you know, one bad mark or one negative situation could affect you during our program. So we've been able to adjust our camps accordingly for the youth and for the older adults.

So what kind of, you know, I think about these kids that have had nothing and no access to anything, suddenly getting access to the world. And how does that affect them? I mean, what is a kid like when you first day one, at the end of the. At the end of the eight weeks.

You use my favorite word, access. So when we open up, we say, this is your access to opportunity, right? Because for some guy a long time ago said, opportunity knocks at your door. And I believe that, however, there's some doors that opportunity. It doesn't just walk up and knock one. Sometimes the opportunity has to be created, right? So when we get these kids, a lot of them never used a laptop. A lot of them couldn't even tell you what coding or computer science was. A lot of them come from very low income. Matter of fact, I believe last time we checked our stats, 93% of our participants came from considered, like, poverty income levels. So you're dealing with young person who really has experienced a world that's very siloed and isolated. They don't realize how big the world is. And that's the best part about week one, which we call hello, World. Week one is hello, World, because you learn your first line of code, and your first line of code is hello, World. And then we show you all the possibilities of things that you can do. We can say, well, what do you want to do in life? I don't care if you want to be a mechanic or a welder sun in kid says H Vac. So we, we show him the largest H Vac company in the world, how much money that company brings in all the jobs you can do, all the, the different projects that you work on. And that their mind, you can see it, it opens up for the very first time to say, wait a minute, there's more than what is right here in front of me. So that, that to me is, is the, the best part of week one is the hello World moment. That access show them seeing the access. We can talk about it all day. But until the young person, to that person who's never had that experience, until they, until they see it, that's the moment that they have. The true hello World is like, wow, there's more out there. So that's really what we are. We don't think that all our kids are going to go through our program and be developers, programmers, designers. But what we do know is if you get through our program, your mind has now been completely rebooted. We've rebooted your mind. And now that you know that anything that you want to do, you can do because you can get through our eight week program, you can do anything. This is not a cookie cutter, summer camp, splash part type of thing. This is real deal. Get your hands dirty, you're going to learn something. It's going to be frustrating, but at the end of it, you're going to see the value of it.

It's interesting because to me, as I'm hearing you talk about it, it seems like you're getting these kids and they're leapfrogging a huge amount of population or people to almost get to the front of the line. You're taking them from the back of the line and saying, I'm going to put you right in the front where the rope is at the nightclub. And now you're read.

It'll go in right with the guy with the clipboard.

Exactly.

Are you on the list? And that's the goal. The goal is to allow them, allow them to allow themselves to dream bigger, to see bigger, to think bigger, to allow themselves to take risk. And if you can get through that program after week four, that's when the moment really hits them. Wait a minute, I'm gonna, this is gonna happen. So now they get a little bit more creative. They take More risk. They have more input on what they want to add. For the yes, that student on paper might not be the best math student. She might not be the best physics student. He might not be the best reading. Whatever the case, what you're going to see, though, is a kid that says, I went through a really hard coding camp and I learned it and I've created things and I've built things and I've ran and I was in charge of a project and I executed a contract. How many kids at 16 and 17 can say they executed a contract? So it does, in a sense, put you at the front of the line. But we tell them, don't stop there, because just because you're at the front doesn't mean you're always going to stay at the front. So you always have to continue to get better and grow and build. And we encourage them once we even, once we leave, set up your after school program, do a lunchtime program, have coding meetups. They always have access to our instructors and our mentors. So it's really a family. Everyone who's gone through our program is crazy because this is a shout out to Facebook. Tons of Facebook friends who are like, still high school kids are just now going to college because they've gone through our program. And it's like, those are my kids. I feel as if those are my children. Watching them learn something for the very first time and then take it and literally run with it. So you watch them crawl. Now they're walking. And now, you know, some of those kids now are running. We have kids who've gone on, went up to Dartmouth. We had kids who go into San Juan Community College or San Juan College in computer science programs. We have kids who are sending me, Mr. Ashley, can you write me recommendation letters for Stanford, Right? Stanford. Wow. So that right there in itself is rewarding. Seeing that some of these kids who have never thought about that going after it, that's amazing. So.

So take us through what it's like at a graduation.

So to graduate.

So don't make me cry.

No, no. So the graduation goes like this. After week, four, five, there's about four or five teams, and all four or five assistants get to pick a project that they want to work on. The instructors, all the instructors know we have about two or three instructors per camp. So think about that. We've taken the old school teaching model where it's one teacher, 50 kids, and said, no, no, three. Two to three instructors for 26 kids. We want you to really know this, okay? Those teams Pick their projects. They tell the instructors. The instructors know. Don't tell me. I don't want to know the projects. Because when you have too many adults in the kitchen, you try to. Right. You know, you try to edit it too much. So demo day comes. So from week five, six, seven, they're working on it. Eight is cleanup. They're cleaning up, making sure it's the. All the bugs are out. You know, they're picking out what they want to wear. We're figuring out the logistics, who's doing the catering. We send out the invites. Week seven, which we've kept it very close knit. So most demo days are just family, friends, community partners, who we trust and who we believe in. Because the thing that I've tried to really hang our hat on is we don't want the kids to ever feel exploited, to ever feel as if they're a charity case. So if you're in our program the entire eight weeks, and then demo day comes, there's a thousand people there.

We're not going to get your true self right. And now. So demo day comes. Every student, regardless of how shy they are, has to present. They have to get up there, speak on a mic. And sometimes it's, you know, it's brutal in a sense, because you see how nervous they are. It's brutal in a sense, because sometimes you see how nervous the people in the crowd get because you see this young person stepping out of their comfort zone for the very first time for some of these kids and presenting. But the greatest part is watching the beginning when it's nervous to. When that moment goes off in their mind where they're thinking, these people don't even know what I'm talking about. Right. I'm leading this. So now they're demoing projects. So we've had kids demo projects from a Danae dating app, which is Navajo. We've done an application where instead of talking about all the bad things that cops do, the kids themselves created a platform where you can do a good Samaritan for cops. Oh, I saw a cop today who helped the old lady across the street. We're going to give you a star. And then it documents all the good deeds police officers were doing. But the ones that always get me and always get the community, there's always three or four people where their family members were business owners and they wanted a web application or mobile app. And watching the kid unveil the mobile application or the web app for the mom or dad who didn't even know that's what they were working on. Those are the moments that change. Not just that young person, not just the adults, but a community. Because a lot of these communities that we're in, they don't really see the value of technology. Technology is the greatest connector that we have right now. It is. It is accelerated business, it is accelerated education, commerce, anything that you can think of, technology has accelerated. In the communities that we have been fortunate enough to work in are the communities that aren't taking advantage of that technology. They're actually being taken advantage from the lack of technology. So seeing that, witnessing parents crying, witnessing young people be empathetic to others, but beyond themselves, right? These are kids who probably didn't even know a girl. Rosa, she wanted to build an app for her mother, who's been in the restaurant business 12 years, had two different developers try to create a website for her. She got burned both times. Rosa, their first project was an awesome project. They were thinking, oh, we want to do like a data tracking for how much traffic takes place in the south valley of New Mexico, right? How much traffic takes place? What can. Where can we put different turns, turn offs to expand the road, that type of platform. So the group was set on it. Wow. Rosa pitches. You know, I don't even think she pitched. She just told them, I'll be cool to work on my mom's website. So Rosa is working on the dang app, the traffic app. But then her friends see that she's working on this app for her mom, the website. So they decide, let's work on that because it's going to have more impact. It's something that your mom is going to use and we want to help you. So these kids, they continue to impress me because a lot of times we talk about how selfish our kids are and, oh, you know, we did this back in our day and they're lazy or whatnot. I see the opposite. I see very compassionate kids who are very socially conscious and who are community driven. And you see it firsthand by the examples that every time that they build something, it's never what you think is going to be. It's never. They're going to build a video game. You never get that. It's always something that will better their community or someone else's life.

So would you say that cultivating coders is a better way to connect kids to the world? Or how would you define. What would you say?

How would you.

In one sentence, how would you talk about cultivating coders?

Cultivating coders is the vehicle for young people to access their Opportunity. That's what our goal is. Whether your opportunity is to better your community, to better yourself, to better someone else's, to better a product, to better a service, for you to even get to that step, you have to know that the opportunity is there for you. We are an access vehicle, whether it's to the world, whether it's to your community, whether it's to internship or an apprenticeship. That's our goal, is to provide that access. That's what the program really was built on. You're in a society where people. You almost have to have a bucket that you fit in. I think we have multiple buckets because every kid is different. Some kids are going to take the access and use it for education. Some will use the access and start a business. Some will use the access to say, oh, I can. Can go work for someone. Some will use the access to come back and teach with us, which a lot of our kids have done that. Right. Some of the kids from our first year have come back around to be junior instructors. And actually going into 2019, we're going to have a couple kids who are going to be considered lead instructors. They've been under our tutelage for four years now. They're ready. So these are kids who 20, 21 now who have thousands of hours of computer science training and instructing. So that's really what we want to do. We just want to be like that access point.

Better way to gain access to the world.

Yep, a better way.

That's awesome. And so why has this become important to you? Why did you get involved? Why do you care? And how is this. Yeah, just why has it become important to you?

When. When I was in my previous life building and creating programs for higher ed institutions and for private companies, I would notice a trend. And you've known me a long time. I have a very eclectic circle of friends from all nationalities and backgrounds and racism and whatnot. But what I noticed in the technology sector is you didn't see a lot of black kids, you didn't see a lot of brown kids, you don't see a lot of native kids, and you didn't see a lot of women. Me thinking, okay, we live in a state that's minority, majority. How is that possible? But then when you start to travel to the different parts of the state, and not even just New Mexico, the problems that we're facing here are same problems that they're facing in California, of all places, in Nevada, in Texas. When you start to travel to these places, you realize that if you are in an affluent community, in an affluent school, the demographic is usually going to be probably more Anglo. So you're going to probably. That child will have probably a lot more access to certain fields. You get into certain areas, lower income, not as many resources, probably more black and brown kids. The cream always rises to the top. So you're always going to have kids from that community that go on to go to Yale or some places. But the bulk of the kids won't even realize that there's opportunities out there that they've never dreamt of. Once I kind of figured that out and I knew it coming from my background being a poor kid, where I lucked out. I have some great mentors in my life where I call them mile markers in my life. I had some really good mile markers in my life where they guided me along a road that I didn't realize was out there. So one was Mrs. Romero when I was going into sixth grade, where she said, your math sucks, essentially, is what she said. And she put me in math tutoring and my math caught up. So I graduated high school. Then I never thought about college, even though I wanted to play college ball. Didn't know how to. Didn't even know what the process was for that Coach Larocque, phenomenal person, said, this is how you do college. This is all the steps to get into college. Now I get into college, oh, well, I don't know what I want to do after college. I don't know if I want to go work for someone or start my. Didn't even think about starting my own business. It was just go work for someone. A guy named Jeremy Capo says, I'm going to set you up with an interview out in Miami. If you get it, good job. If not, at least you know there's other opportunities out there than what you even think about. It was an interview for the Miami Dolphins. I happened to win out. I beat out a thousand people. So from a poor kid from Chicago where he. Where you go through this progression and you see success, it wasn't success on your own. It was success with the assistance of someone who they've had opportunities and they've had access so they can point you and guide you. So that dovetail to where I'm at now, where I'm thinking, you know, that there is this issue of not diversity in tech. And when diversity is not just looks, diversity is the thought process and how you create solutions. In our world, we're always trying to come up with solutions. But if you don't have A diverse group of people and thought leaders or whatnot, making these decisions, you will never come to the best solutions for our community. So with that being said, I just felt someone had to make something so deliberate and so authentic that it wasn't mistaken. And I'm very unapologetic about it where I say I am. We have created this for low income kids. And I know there's some people who aren't low income who fall probably into that book, into that bucket. However, if I broaden that out too much, then it dilutes why we even started this. Right. So the goal was just to provide that access to low income kids, primarily kids of color, to the point where 20, 25, 2026 people are going to say, what happened in New Mexico? Because now you're going to have a true diverse community of kids building things that are going to better this community and it's going to spread everywhere else. We're doing work in California, we've done work in Mississippi, we're doing work in Seattle and we're negotiating for stuff out in Oklahoma now. So now this thing. That was an idea because Gary, I literally just got sad. I was out visiting somewhere and I said, this is sad. For as much money and resources we have, there shouldn't be populations of people who have no access to it. That was the only reason. It was literally from that moment that made me say, I'm not doing this anymore. Didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew that was unacceptable. And you know, four years later, now it's beyond just New Mexico. Wow.

And I know you did a TED Talk. I remember watching your TED Talk, my.

First real public talk ever.

You did awesome. And I remember watching it. I watched it.

Thank you.

And I know it was about the. It was about commitment versus interest.

Yes. And that, you know, let focus or guide. My focus is are you committed or interested? That's number one. That's that bucket. Are you doing things to have, to help people have access to opportunity? Right. You got that one. And the other one is, does it fall in your passion, vision and mission? Like it has to be in that scope? For me, the interested or committed came from Herm Edwards, football coach. And I was listening to him speak and he has phenomenal talks. If you guys ever get a chance to get on YouTube or any other listening platform, Google Herm Edwards. He's beyond just a coach. You could tell coaching is his passion. He was doing it to inspire people to do greater things beyond just football. And he was talking about, are you interested or committed? And as he really broke it down, I started thinking about how we create programs for people. Are we building things because we're interested? And the interest is. The best analogy is, oh, you have Facebook. There's puppies and kittens on there. They're looking cute and you're clicking like, and, oh, they're homeless or whatever the case, you're just clicking, like, not doing anything about it. That's interesting because it still has your engagement. You're engaging or whatnot. Then there's committed. Then there's people out there where, oh, we can't house these puppies and kittens. We need donations. That's number one. Oh, we need facilities. That's number two. We just need people with resources to help us connect. Maybe some people who can help us out. That's committed to commitment is when you inconvenience yourself when you say, I have to go and do X, Y and Z. That's commitment. Interested is you're not inconvenienced in yourself. You're just clicking, like on Facebook, and it's cool. I'm interested. Oh, that's cute. Well, I want to help. It's when you say, I'm sacrificing time. And as you know, you're a successful businessman, time is something you never get back. So when you sacrifice time, that's the ultimate commitment. Right? So that stuck with me. And as we've built this thing, the reason why we haven't gone just 100% virtual, because then it becomes this just interested. We're just interested in helping. But if we continue to go out and live in places for 8, 10, 12 weeks, we are committed to helping. Because I'll challenge other programs to say, are you interested or committed? Because commitment takes you sleeping in a motel bed for eight weeks. Interested is you living in a community that you have language barriers, cultural barriers, a lot of other barriers. But it's a sacrifice on your part. If you're interested, are you going to be willing to go and figure out who's going to fund a program for kids to take that you have no clue if they're ever going to make it through or not. Right. Those are the things that I think separate our company from a lot of other programs, is that we prove now for going into our fourth year, we are interested in helping out kids. We're not. We're committed. Not interested. We're committed. There's the interested groups, tons of those. Our commitment is to the. Is to these kids in K through 12 and even young adults, our commitment is, can we do whatever it takes to provide you that access to opportunity. If we do that, the rest is up to you. I'm not a believer of hand me outs. This is not a hand me out.

Yeah, you get.

You talk to some of our kids, they'll say, oh, Mr. Charles. They call me some. Oh, if you see Mr. Charles in here three times.

That means we're in trouble because that's what I give him. This is not a hand me out. The world is not built on hand meows. So you're going to earn this. You're going to be committed to this. Wow.

You know what? One of the things that I talk about a lot is when what you do, where passion comes from, you know you want to. I feel the passion in you. As we're, as we're sitting here talking, you're leaning forward over my desk talking to me. I'm feeling that passion. And one of the things that I talk about at the Y Institute is when what you do is in line with why you do what you do, you will have passion for what you do. So if your why is to find a better way and share it and you've found a better way to help these kids to have access to the world, you're going to have passion for that for the rest of your life. Because what you're doing is showing them a better way. And nothing could get any better for you than that.

You're right. Because there's things I'm very. I tell my friends all the time. I was making way more money when I was consulting.

Yeah.

For people in universities or whatnot. But it wasn't rewarding. We weren't creating things that were going to give someone this opportunity to change, not just their lives, but generational. Right. If you can cause some type of ripple into that generational poverty, you give that young person to change their family story. Yeah, right. That family story can change forever with just this one opportunity, could change that family story. So that passion for me is. It's driven by. I witnessed it firsthand for myself. I've witnessed it from other friends I have in life. I witnessed it from gentlemen like yourself. Like you were putting in a situation to say, okay, I could just be a dentist. But you didn't do that. Right? Right. You didn't say, I just want to do this. You took what your opportunity and you've done Y Institute, you know, written books, traveled the world, mentored people who have gone on to great do great things. You're constantly learning and Whatnot, you are an example of what you're supposed to do with opportunity. So that passion for me is allowing these kids who probably wouldn't ever have that opportunity to just say, okay, we're gonna give you access to it, but it's really up to you, and sit down with different, like, workforce groups or groups that are trying to do job placements or whatnot and try to get that message to them to say, it's not. You're thinking small. When you just think job, you're thinking small. Right. If you aim so high that they're thinking, you know, universally like, oh, the universe is at my fingertips. They're going to land into a job, right? Yes.

A fourth of the way there, they're still in something really amazing.

They're still going to be something amazing. But if your win is just a job, this is not the program for you. Because we don't even talk like that to our kids. We promote. We want you to use this to accumulate wealth. We want you to make money. We want you to start multiple businesses. We want you to be able to help your mom out here. We want you to travel the world. We want you to be a key community stakeholder. So we are trying to catapult these kids beyond what they're even ever thinking about. So when you come to our camp and you're just promoting the job, you're belittling our kids. We're thinking more than that. Right. So if we can get them thinking, I just want to take off as far as possible, and then wherever I land, it's going to be okay because I've prepared myself. That's what we want these kids to know. They've prepared themselves for everything else because we've shot you out into the, into the universe. So everything else is going to. Is going to work out for you. But if you just think small, you know you're going to hit small.

Yeah. Last thing I want to talk about, you have created a team or collaborated with another company, Rs21. Tell everybody a little bit about what that's about.

So our evolution with cultivating coders was and has always been, number one, get your foot in the door to show that your program is working. Number two, allow young people to create and expose them to all the opportunities we've been talking about. Now the next evolution is bring people to the, to our program that will invest in them, invest in the kid. And when we say invest, invest Rs21 in cultivating coders, we agreed to do a true pathway program, meaning the kids Go through our program for the eight weeks once upon completion. The cream of the crop, the best of the best. The kids who've shown that commitment. Because I just told you now, we don't do handouts. So those kids who've gone through our program that say, you know what, I want to do more with my life, Rs21 has committed or will do a paid apprenticeship. And it doesn't sound like much, but our kids come from little to no money, so they can afford free apprenticeships or free internships. So 15 bucks an hour, all the way up to 25 bucks an hour. Rs21 has made that commitment. Five students per camp for Rs21. We have another group, 11.

Rs21 is what?

Rs21 is a big data science data visualization company based in New Mexico. However, their work is global. Their CEO, Charles Rath, is great friend of mine, great friend of yours as well, but brilliant mind. He. He truly gets it. He's not just a business guy. He knows that for you to build a Fortune 500 company or Fortune 100 company, you have to invest in your kids, right? We've gotten away from investing in education for some reason. We just think that kids go through middle school, high school, go to college, and all of a sudden, voila, workforce. Now the data, which he's a data company, supports that. That's not what's happening. We're cranking out kids who are not ready for the workforce. So him and I were going to back and forth on what would this look like? And he was very upfront at, hey, I want the 16, 17 year olds, I want the 18 year olds, because those are the kids that in five to 10 years they'll be leading companies, they'll be creating companies. So they're our first official partner. And he's going to be a company that you hear about three, four years straight. I think he's at the very beginning of data visualization. And most people out there, you have to Google data visualization, but it's where you take data and instead of doing boring Excel spreadsheets, he actually puts it into a visual model. So think Minority Report if you're a movie junkie, where you could click a screen and oh, this is what a hurricane would do five years from now. And this is what the death tolls are going to be. So you visually see it instead of just reading it. Which is, as we all know, we're visual creatures. A lot more compelling when you see it. So him making that commitment to hire our kids is awesome. Ever since we made that announcement. We've had multiple companies come forward and say, hey, we want to do the same thing. And that's been our push the last year. I go into a. And I say, invest early. You keep complaining about, we don't have this, we don't have that, we don't have this. Then let's create a solution, a better way, right? What's the better way? Then instead of us spinning our wheels, okay, we're presenting you a better way. Let's invest in it and let's see if it works out. If it doesn't, it's the same result. But why not try something to see if we get a different result instead of just continuing what we've been doing out here in New Mexico? And I think this pathway program is going to be a great blueprint for other communities because you'll see firsthand what a young person can do if given an opportunity and not even given given means. It indicates that I just gave it to you. If earned, they earned this opportunity. You'll be amazed what happens, what these young people will do.

You know, we spent so much time just hanging out and doing things together, but I've never heard this much about what you're doing. And it's fascinating to me. It's right up my alley because I'm. My why is a better way as well. So I just keep hearing it and thinking, man, you have found a better way. You're doing a better way, you're bringing a better way, you're showing people a better way. It's just awesome. So if there's people that are listening to this and they want to get a hold of you, they want to participate in this. What kinds of people, companies, organizations are you looking for that could connect with you?

So we really have community equity, right? You build enough community equity where you're trusted within your community. So now we feel that we've built enough community equity within New Mexico where we're comfortable. If you are a school district, we would love to talk to you. If you are foundations or any philanthropic groups where you're looking to economic development or education programs in your communities, we're looking for those type of partnerships. We're always looking to partner with different software firms. Right now, Facebook's one of our partners. Microsoft is one of our partners. So we've built up pretty decent portfolio for a young company. And the best way to get in contact with us is you can email. It's infooultivatecoders.com again, that's infoultivatecoders.com you can email us. The team is good about getting us all the emails and our whole thing is community. We built this program off of community collaboration. The students understand community. Our instructors understand community. We build projects that benefit the community. This is a community lift in a community project. So if anyone out there is just interested in learning more, please reach out. We're always open to new partnerships and friendships. Awesome.

Charles thank you so much for being here.

Gary thank you.

Great interview. Appreciate you being here.

Thank you sir. Thanks.