Our Team

MICAELA (She/Her/Hers):

Micaela’s core values are to promote equity by showing empathetic compassion and understanding to individuals and spreading awareness of different community struggles. She is motivated by her drive to even out social playing fields for people of diverse backgrounds. Micaela’s leadership skills include that she is personable, outgoing, is a good listener and an effective communicator. She has a background in video production and has a lot of experience with camera work and footage editing. Micaela grew up in a lower class, single parent household and did not have access to technology until her senior year in high school. She often felt growing up that college wasn’t something in her future because of the technological gap, and decided not to be a film major due to the access barriers to technological resources that would prevent her from excelling in that field. Micaela is in YEI because she wants to help young girls like her follow their dreams and teach them useful technological knowledge and ways to get technological resources. She believes that the most difficult part of the project would be trying to give reason to learn technical skills for these young girls that may not necessarily have the resources or be relevant to their lives. Giving meaning for the technological skills such as coding and video editing, and empowering them to believe that them being a part of STEM is useful, manageable and achievable.

LAUREN (They/Them/Theirs):

Lauren is motivated by their knowledge of family cultural erasure, and their experience as a 4th generation POC college student. Their core values are equity, intersectionality, and love. Lauren offers experience in community organizing and deep knowledge of how technology has historically been denied and excluded for POC and used to continue the subjugation of POC, womxn and non binary people. They are passionate for visioning a brave and safe place for womxn to feel empowered in tech spaces and creating the world they want to see. Some of their experiences that will be helpful for the project include being POC/multiracial, womxn/nonbinary, told they were bad at math at young age and discouraged from going into tech spaces, as well as having experienced racism. They imagine they will be challenged in areas of working with others work ethics, moving too fast and being indecisive, as well as misunderstanding the wants/needs of the people we are serving. They need support: checking in about capacity and not burning out with other projects going on.

DAVID (He/They):

David is motivated by a state of peace, which he believes can be achieved by all and provides a strong foundation to build and work from for the future. He is also motivated by creative forces, emotional power, divine spirituality and the experience of life to its’ fullest potential. Some of his core values include universal love, personal autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness with respect to other’s safety, health and autonomy. David is a patient individual and a wonderful communicator, learner and supporting team member. David’s background provides him with a unique inside perspective into some of the struggle and issues potentially faced by our students and an opportunity to connect and relate to them in this regard as a latin(x), first generation college student from an underprivileged background.