11 years ago, a group of like minded individuals started a conference called Stir Trek.  We got a few hundred people together to learn about newly released web & mobile technologies.  Today, this conference has blossomed into a huge, local, community run conference with 2,000 developers attending 64 sessions of technology content each spring.  Through our involvement in the community, we've observed a significant lack of gender diversity within software developers.  We find this incredibly alarming and are interested in being part of a solution.  

We have launched the Stir Scholarship Fund.  Our team has the mission to foster gender diversity within the IT community.  We have assembled a group that will be working with local educators to teach them about the opportunities that exist in our field as well as the biases that make it difficult for young women to express an interest in the creative problem solving that we hold dear to our hearts.  Through tihs effort we will be awarding 3 $3,000 scholarships to young women pursuing a degree in software. 

In order for us to make this a self sustaining scholarship fund, we need your help.  We need you to join us in the persuit for reducing the gap represented genders for our community.  Please consider joining several of your colleagues, friends, and technologists in supporting this worthy effort.

High school seniors can apply for the scholarship by submitting an essay on our website that answers the question “How will you change the world with technology?”. We will announce the recipients in the Spring of 2020. Organizations, teachers, and schools who want to learn more about can contact Stir Scholarship President Cassandra Faris at [email protected].

Our goal is raise $50,000 in the next 12 months.  about 80% of that will come from corporate sponsorship.  The remaining 20% will occur as support from individual donors.  We plan to award 3 $3,000 scholarships in the spring of 2020.  We plan to build a self funded endowment to empower more and more young women to major in computer science.