Just two years ago, CEO Stephanie Eldridge and CIO Tariq Hook launched the learning center Code Differently, and their impact since cannot be overstated.

In the technology sector, women represent 25% of the workforce while Black females represent only 3% and Hispanic females only 1%. Code Differently aims to increase diversity within the technology workplace. Enrollees range from adult college computer science or engineering majors to high school students. The makeup of Code Differently’s classes are 98% Black and Latinx, and within that 40% are female. 

“Diversity and inclusion has not only been a part of our mission from the beginning,” Eldridge says, “it’s frankly been a part of our lives.”

Eldridge grew up in Aliquippa, a small town in Western Pennsylvania that she describes as “a tech desert.” Aliquippa is a blue-collar town that was once booming with steel mills. Once the steel mills declined, the economy declined and the educational system was impacted. Her time in Aliquippa became the foundation that motivated her into creating a different possibility.

Eldridge attended Morgan State University, one of the United States’ Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), which at the time graduated the most Black engineers in the nation. She arrived in Delaware based on geographic convenience.

“My boyfriend at the time, now my husband, was living in Philadelphia, and I was working in the Baltimore/D.C. area,” she recalls. “We decided Delaware was the perfect midpoint.”

Eldridge and Hook were both working as technologists in Delaware when they met. She was an executive director at JPMorgan Chase at the Delaware Tech Center, and he was an executive director of education at Tech Impact. Code Differently is now on the Wilmington Riverfront, in the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce building’s Emerging Enterprise Center.

“The great thing about Wilmington is, if you need to catch a train, you are right there downtown,” Eldridge says. “You can be in Philly, Baltimore, D.C. and New York faster than you could drive.”

Code Differently’s 2020 cohort has 43 students, 10 of which are from Delaware State University.

The intention was to have all 43 here in Delaware for the summer “to see all of the great things about Wilmington and Delaware itself,” Eldridge notes. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic made this impossible.

Seven of the 21 Code Differently students from last year ended up relocating to Delaware after recognizing the opportunities and resources here.

“We are great creators of technologists here in Delaware,” Eldridge says, “but we’re also great importers of technologists.”

Eldridge is reminded constantly about the benefits Delaware has provided for their business.

“I don’t know another location where you are one degree of separation away from any need,” she says. “When we look outside of our windows, we see the backdrop of the companies that we serve most. When I look to the left, I see JPMorgan Chase, the top employer of our university program, and the Barclaycard and Capital One buildings, who support our high school work-based learning program along with JPMorgan Chase. It is really helpful that the decision-makers from these companies are actually located in Delaware.”

Code Differently – Fueled by a Powerful Network

The most powerful piece of Code Differently is their network. 

“We are able to rely on diverse people who are already in the technology industry, and that network has increased tenfold over the last year,” Eldridge says. “So we have this family of corporations willing to help guide each student in ways that were not traditionally available.”

The number of small businesses that are downtown also has been a win-win.

“It gives us a vision for where people started and where they can go, the importance of supporting people in your network,” Eldridge says. “We love collaborating with other businesses at The Mill or meeting clients at The Green Box. We take full advantage of the uniqueness that small businesses like us have to offer.”

Having been challenged with fitting people into boxes that aren’t one-size-fits-all, Code Differently decided to build their programs, well, differently. For example, approximately 80% of those in Code Differently’s university programs work 30 hours or more each week while they are in college. This means less time to focus on studies and often lower GPAs. Many also have less access to the technology needed to excel in those classes.

“Imagine you are a computer science major, COVID hits and you are at home, and now you have no access to the computer lab in your university,” Eldridge says. “We try to remove those barriers. We provide a stipend so they don’t have to work, we provide them with equipment and internet access, and we focus on their professional development.” 

The majority of students at Code Differently are first-generation college students. Many of them “come from families that don’t have the life experience or coaching on how to operate in corporate America,” Eldridge notes.

Code Differently looks at themselves holistically within the tech field. “We don’t want to be all things to all people,” Eldridge says. “If there are programs already out there that we could partner with, we do.”

For example, Code Differently partnered with the New Castle County Summer Youth Program. They came up with the idea that, instead of just having the students work in the brick and mortar location, they could create a software development shop that could teach high school students how to create websites and mobile apps as a work-based learning experience. Partnering with the New Castle County government and the Meyer Administration has been a major game-changer for the local youth.

“There are very few internships and apprenticeship opportunities for high school students in tech,” Eldridge notes. “So right now we have 40 students working with us, virtually, from 12 to 5 p.m. every day. And we are able to work with our partner companies — JPMorgan Chase, Barclaycard, CSC and local small businesses we have in our network to provide mentorship or real projects for our kids so they are getting real work experience. And by bringing in real engineers and developers to talk to the students, real relationships and experiences are occurring organically at the high school level.”

In addition to corporate partnerships, the Department of Labor, New Castle VoTech, Colonial School District, and Rodel Foundation are contributors to this effort. “It’s a great example of a private/public partnership that benefits the future career choices and development of teens,” Eldridge says. 

The Results Speak for Themselves

The results speak for themselves, and Code Differently has begun shifting the statistics that go back to the beginning of technology. “Out of the last group of high school students that have since graduated, every one of them is going on to higher learning and 80% are going into computer science or IT-related fields. And this becomes a pipeline for colleges that we partner with, like Delaware State University, who will begin providing university mentors for our program.” 

What single change would she like to see in the Delaware School system?

“Embed technology in any subject that is taught in a school district,” she says without hesitation. “If you want to be an investment banker, you need to know how to write scripts to analyze data. If you want to open a restaurant, having an understanding of what goes into an ordering app or reservation system, especially in situations like the one we are in, is essential.”

“Technology is embedded into everyday life. It is an accessory to everything we do. If COVID has taught us anything, it is that the way we continue to run society is through technology.”

Eldridge believes that the biggest misconception about technology is that it is too hard – and that anything with great reward takes work. A lot of people feel defeated when they hear the word “coding,” she says, so she’ll use more relatable phrasing, such as inviting potential participants to come help “build a mobile game using technology.”

“In the Black community, the biggest misconception is ‘I can’t do it’ which has its reasons,” Eldridge says. “There are not enough people in the industry that look like Tariq and me to give them the confidence that they could possibly do it.”

Using Delaware and its location, resources, and community as a springboard, Code Differently is changing the face of technology with velocity and passion. Code Differently is now working with New Castle County to expand efforts to reach adults who are facing employment challenges and require job training to enter the technology field. Eldridge expects the venture to succeed.

Why? Because the mantra Eldridge likes to share about Delaware is, “We get things done here.”

Kurt Foreman

PRESIDENT & CEO

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January 22, 2021 – 

Women currently hold 20% of board seats for companies listed on the NASDAQ and the Russell 3000 index and account for half of all new board appointments to companies on the S&P 500. Women can be powerful allies for one another — and for Delaware — as they earn more and more seats at the leadership table on corporate and nonprofit boards.

Delaware Prosperity Partnership Board of Directors member Doneene Keemer Damon, president and director of the prominent Delaware law firm Richards, Layton & Finger, PA, and Board chair for DPP partner ChristianaCare, recently joined Carter Franke, chair of the Board of Directors at Sallie Mae, for the candid conversation “Women as Allies in the Board Room” as part of the “Allyship, Advocacy and Accompliceship” webinar series. The series was hosted by the University of Delaware’s Lerner College of Business & Economics Women’s Leadership Initiative and supported by DPP; Richards, Layton & Finger; ChristianaCare; SallieMae; and other sponsors.

DPP is grateful to Damon and the three additional exceptional women leaders on its Board of Directors – Jeanmarie Desmond, retired chief financial officer of DuPont; Robin Morgan, Ph.D., provost of the University of Delaware; and Richelle Vible, executive director of Catholic Charities – for their service. What follows is a Q & A of Damon’s perspective on board diversity and women as allies in the board room.

Why is board diversity so important and, more specifically, why is it important to have women at the table?

DKD: Having a diverse board and management team means better outcomes for businesses and organizations. Women and other minorities bring perspectives based on their life experiences that are vastly different from those of other members. Boards should represent the communities they serve, and those communities are most certainly diverse. Having individuals who can look at decisions with different lenses helps the board land on a better decision and results in better outcomes.

How does having a diverse board lead to different and better decisions?

DKD: While I can’t speak to the experience of all African Americans or of all women, I can speak to my own experiences. Having someone in the room who can talk about his or her own experience — whether as a woman or as a minority — allows the organization to have a much deeper conversation around disparities and around how the community perceives the organization. It also helps the organization understand how the community receives information and helps effectuate change to better address those issues. It’s difficult to have that perspective in a room of all white males, and that really matters in some very important decisions. Unless we have the right representation in the room to bring credence and context, we won’t get to the right decisions. Also, women often bring an empathetic lens to the conversation, which helps a board get to the right outcome. Having women in the room absolutely makes a difference!

Are women natural allies, and what does it mean to be an ally in the boardroom? Is there a trickle-down impact from the board to women in the organization?

DKD: The expectation that all women think in identical ways is not necessarily true. We do think similarly, but not identically. Being an ally doesn’t mean we always agree on every point, but women tend to be supportive in identifying others who can be effective leaders and creating a path to placement — and then helping those women to develop and grow.

Allyship is about giving women a voice.

Stay Up To Date With Delaware

January 20, 2021 –

If Stephen Sye, CEO of Futures First Gaming, has his way, his company will have planted the seed that germinates the entire Delmarva region esports industry. Esports, or electronic sports, is a style of competitive sports played through the medium of video games – particularly multiplayer games played by professionals as individuals or part of a team. 

“We’re a STEM.org Accredited™ esports and educational organization focused on growing and cultivating the esports community and industry in the region,” said Sye. “With the exception of the University of Delaware, the state itself has only a small underground scene right now as it relates to gaming culture – especially in comparison to other places like Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New York City.” 

The organization, which launched in February 2020, is taking several approaches to its mission simultaneously. Futures First Gaming’s business model rests on four pillars, said Sye. The first is to advocate growth in the state’s existing esports industry, the second is to personally host competitive and recreational events to create opportunities for involvement, the third is to hold educational programs focusing on workforce development and the fourth is to work with schools and universities to launch their own esports teams to engage in tournaments.     

Though their goals are ambitious, Sye believes now, more than ever, is the time for this effort. Gaming has long suffered from a perception problem – but that’s on the cusp of changing in a big way, he says. 

“For a long time, a good portion of the population has felt that playing video games is a waste of time, but this industry is growing by leaps and bounds, and the opportunities for lucrative careers and entrepreneurship are growing every year,” said Sye. “Look at it this way: There was a League of Legends Championship in 2018 that had more than 200 million viewers tune in. That was more viewership than the Super Bowl, NBA finals, and Major League Baseball game seven had that year combined. There are gaming events in this space that are selling out venues like the Staples Center in 12 minutes.”

Perhaps a function of changing tastes, it’s been long predicted that esports will supplant traditional sports in popularity. Sye says that ever since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the time window in which this was expected to happen has shortened.

“Viewership of esports was already expected to eclipse that of traditional sports by 2022 – but now with COVID limiting audiences and introducing a lot of unknowns in terms of schedule, esports has a huge advantage,” he said. “Esports is projected to be a $300 billion global industry by 2025. That’s huge. And it comes with an enormous amount of opportunity and career pathways.” 

Gaming Camp

Hoping to nurture the next generation’s desire to enter the esports industry, Sye said, the company held its inaugural Futures First Camp this past summer. 

“It was a virtual summer camp this year, but it was 100 hours total,” said Sye. “Our Futures First Program focuses on esports, coding, gamin, and entrepreneurship. Over four weeks, our team worked with students from 8th to 12th grade for five hours per day. Two hours were devoted to coding and game design – with the help of our partners Coderrific Academy and Code Differently. Then there was one hour for entrepreneurship where we covered things like starting a business, marketing, promoting, starting a website, esport monetization, and live streaming. Then, the last two hours were basically gameplay. Gamers worked on communication, teamwork, strategy, and gaming skills development.”

There were 10 graduating students in the first class over the summer. Sye said it was a great proof of concept. The class’s final project was evidence of that. 

“Over the last two weeks, the campers were tasked with a hands-on collaborative project to produce and host their own online esports event,” he said. “They hosted a Brawlhalla  tournament and ended up having great participation, and the event was flawless – it was an awesome learning experience.” 

Futures First Gaming will be bringing the program back next summer and will shoot for an even larger class. But Sye hopes to push the program as a regular course in local high and middle schools to expose students to the available career paths. 

“We’ll really be able to educate students on the possibilities if we can meet them where they are,” he said. “We have commitment from two Delaware school districts pending funding and have had conversations about our program with Departments of Education in several states.” 

Equal Opportunity

Although not an exclusive organization, a fundamental goal of Futures First Gaming is to help expose minority students to the prospect of a career in the gaming industry, noted Sye.  

“Looking at the landscape, 83% of Black teens game, but only about 9% of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) professionals are Black,” said Sye. “We really want to change that. We feel that the discrepancy exists because of a lack of awareness and opportunity. Our program works to correct this by reaching out to students through their interest in gaming but teaching them about the business side in the process. That way, they can imagine a future where they make a living doing what they love. In our concept of STEM, ‘E’ stands for entrepreneurship.”     

To support this goal, Futures First Gaming has started to reach out to HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) to assist them in launching their own competitive esports teams. Sye is a strong believer that the opportunities in esports will continue to proliferate and offer opportunities to people of all kinds of backgrounds and interests. 

“There really is a spiderweb of careers cropping up to support gaming,” he said. “For example, last year’s Fortnite world cup winner, a 16-year-old named Kyle Giersdorf, won $3 million. He’s a millionaire now. He’s going to need an esports-specific attorney. There are gaming companies that want to create game characters with his likeness and image, so he needs to negotiate that. He’ll need an accountant. He’ll even need a personal trainer to work on stamina and hand-eye coordination. The web of opportunity keeps spreading.”

“That’s why when students come to us, we can work on where their interests lie and steer them toward a great career opportunity.” 

Stay Up To Date With Delaware

January 15, 2020 – 

As the COVID-19 pandemic has worn on, so many people are actively monitoring online data dashboards and listening to the news to get a sense of what they should do next – whether that’s regarding holiday plans, school decisions or just understanding whether their ZIP code has been particularly hard hit.

Predictive Analytics Group (PAG) has taken that one step deeper and created a nationwide COVID-interactive dashboard with overlays that are more “predictive” than the standard view. The dashboard enables various industries to make operating decisions in areas such as staffing, plant openings and closings, marketing adjustments, technology investments, PPE purchases and return-to-school decisions. 

For example, the database could look at local infection and hospitalization trends within a multi-state hospital system’s operating area and help it develop a hybrid approach to where and how it markets different services ranging from COVID, mental health, surgeries and use of telehealth. It can offer comparisons with other hospitals and within its network.

Predictive Analytics designs strategies for clients by analyzing segments to identify trends from data received from different environments. It was the first non-University of Delaware occupant in the Tower at UD’s STAR Campus and the four-year-old company has been recognized as one of UD’s most promising new ventures two years in a row.

“Data is fun for us,” says Chief Data and Analytics Officer Dee Ridgeway, one of three University of Delaware graduates on the senior leadership team. “We’re happiest when we’re building out dashboards that let us tell a story and speak intelligently on a topic, to go beyond what you hear anecdotally on the news and let the data drive the direction you go.”

Development of the database and dashboard began in late April using data from Johns Hopkins University and the New York Times. It was ready for testing in September, thanks to the programming efforts of two UD student interns double-majoring in entrepreneurship and statistics who were hired for the project. 

Where possible, PAG hires students from UD (and other local colleges), which isn’t surprising considering that Dee Ridgeway, CEO Stephen Hoops and Managing Director-US Operations Dave LaRoche graduated together in 1998 and worked together at MBNA America and other companies before deciding to go into business together. Beyond its on-campus location, PAG has built a strong relationship with UD, including Ridgeway’s service as a board member on the Horn Program at UD, which is ranked among the best in the nation for entrepreneurial studies and a big supporter on COVID-19 initiatives.

“Our strength has always been making underdeveloped ideas work, and we often talked about how great it would be if we could do that with great ideas,” Ridgeway said. “The challenge here is there are just so many moving pieces for COVID that you have to account for.”

The team has built in a range of scenarios that could help a client make faster business decisions or identify risks. The dashboard utilizes a proprietary database that is designed to allow custom industry views/overlays such as hospital systems, hotels, tourism, sports, retirement locations and education (colleges, public schools).

“You can choose what you want to look at,” Ridgeway says. “We can overlay events [such as the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally or a political rally] – we call them stressors – and tell you what the potential impact could be. We think it could help bring data to decisions about bringing people back to stadiums or how you [protect the public at] a larger event.”

The next phase of the project will focus on creation of a vaccine dashboard that could help states and municipalities decide where to prioritize distribution. A vaccine dashboard will help provide analytics on the vaccine effectiveness and penetration in the country, which can be especially helpful given multiple vaccines are in production. In addition, the team is considering next steps around obtaining funding and monetizing the database so that further enhancements like the vaccine dashboard can be produced and shared.

According to Hoops, who was one of the Delaware Business Times’ 2020 People to Watch, PAG is well-established within the financial services, gaming and marketing worlds today – and they have a collective 120-plus years of experience in financial services and marketing. 

“Gaming took time building contacts, our reputation and some pro-bono work to establish ourselves,” Hoops told the publication. “Healthcare and sports are moving well today, but had similar hurdles early on. As we grow cross-vertically, we are starting to see less ‘time to market’ from initial contact within an industry to a first paid engagement.”

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