April Christina Curley — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Activist — joins Last Mile Education Fund to lead Student Engagement and Community Partnerships
We have exciting news to share at Last Mile Education Fund! We’ve added April Christina Curley to our staff as Engagement and Partnerships Manager. April will lead outreach to staff and students at colleges and manage our partnerships with other organizations that support students who are marginalized in tech and engineering fields.
April has been advocating for underserved groups through professional roles and personal projects her entire career. Most recently, she spent six years forging relationships with HBCUs as Diversity Program Manager at Google. April kicked off Google’s recruitment at HBCUs and placed more than 500 technical hires while there. She nurtured many of those students by helping them hone their application skills and job readiness.
She also worked as a diversity recruiter for Teach for America after serving for two years as a teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools. April has an M.A. in secondary education and teaching from Johns Hopkins University and is a member of Leadership for Educational Equity, a nonpartisan nonprofit that develops Teach for America alumni to become leaders in their communities.
Get all the details in the following Q&A with April Christina Curley
What are you focused on at Last Mile?
April: The most important thing about my role is to find and help underrepresented students in computing and engineering majors who will one day change the face of tech. I’m constantly thinking about how we can find those students who are having a hard time making it to the finish line and support them if their barriers are financial.
We’ll do that largely by leveraging working relationships with our partners. That includes faculty at universities as well as other organizations in the education ecosystem that are already doing brilliant things to help underrepresented students. In many ways, our partners have the most access to students who need our help.
How did your previous experiences prepare you for this role?
April: I started my career teaching high school social studies. I love the art and science of pedagogy. I love how knowledge is transferred. That’s the foundation for my work.
I got involved in tech because it’s a great way to create economic empowerment for low-income communities. I come from one, so I’m always thinking about how to make people free and independent via wealth and opportunities. I want to get more Black and brown people in tech roles because of the financial upside for them and their families.
Plus, so much of our lives are now governed by technology and algorithms, it’s only right and fair that Black and brown people have a chance to participate in that. We are tech users, but we’re also innovators. We can create stronger products that benefit the world.
I picked up a lot of useful skills while working at Google, and I’ve been able to blend those with skills gained while working at Teach for America. I worked on the engineering side at Google, so I became well-versed in their requirements and understood what kind of skill sets they look for in students. Now I can help Last Mile students with job readiness and advise them on how to cultivate skills that will help them get noticed.
What I hope I can bring to the tech industry at-large is what it means to advocate for poor Black and brown students. One of my favorite things at Google was to manage engineers by serving as a rotational instructor for Black/brown students. I spent a lot of time with the men who lead this industry and helped them to figure out how to teach and become effective partners with other teachers and professors. I had their ear for six years and influenced their best practices and experiences. It changed their perspectives on what it means to be more inclusive.
How can Last Mile help tech companies and workers to become more inclusive?
April: I hope we can lead this conversation and influence policy changes that will eventually make our advocacy work unnecessary. What we’re doing in the short term is a band-aid, but what we’re after long-term are drastic shifts for low-income students and their lives.
I want to break the stigma of what it means to talk about poverty. It shouldn’t be taboo. It shouldn’t make people uncomfortable, but unless we explicitly talk about it, that won’t change.
My first question when I started at Google was, “what are we doing for low-income students?” I was told that anything related to socio-economic status was not to be discussed. It took years for Google to talk about Pell grant recipients — and you could say that Google is actually a leader in this conversation. I want this conversation to be at the forefront.
Likewise, companies could easily change their policies to ensure that low-income students can realistically apply for jobs and internships. For example, when I started working for Google, I could barely afford to travel to New York City for the interview. I couldn’t tell the company that I needed help to get there, so I took Megabus because it was the cheapest option.
Sometimes companies reimburse expenses, but that doesn’t work for people who don’t have funds to travel in the first place. For example, it can be impossible to check into a hotel without a personal credit card to cover incidental expenses — unless companies arrange to cover those ahead of time. Many tech companies or departments have an abundance of resources. If they would apply a bit toward interview expenses for jobs and internships, they would get far more diverse candidates.
Any final thoughts?
April: When I was approached about helping the organization reach out to students who need funding and change the tech industry for the better, it seemed too good to be real. Seriously, this is a dream job for me. I always intended to get back into the education space and back into the various Baltimore communities where I had been active.
While the role is similar to what I did at Google, it includes working with more partners traveling similar paths. We’re all focused on how to help striving, low-income students make it to graduation and launch high-paying careers.
It feels serendipitous.
See the full interview with April Christina Curley and Rian Walker, co-founder of Last Mile below.
