Partner With Us

tech2elevate started as a group of Target engineers spending Friday afternoons at one high school in South Minneapolis. The model is simple enough to repeat anywhere: a handful of tech professionals, one school, eight Fridays, and a shopping-cart project every student can show off at the end. Everything we use is on this site, free, for anyone who wants to run it.

We’re looking for two kinds of partners.

For tech companies

If you lead a technology team, you already have what the program needs most: people who write code for a living and remember what it was like to learn.

What your team commits to

• A small group of volunteer mentors, so that each student gets one-on-one attention. Mentors need no teaching experience; the weekly lesson plans and cheat sheets tell them exactly what to cover.
• One hour a week for eight weeks, plus a few minutes to read the week’s lesson beforehand.
• A host for the finale, if you can. Target’s cohorts end with a visit to the Northern Campus: a tour, lunch, and students demoing their projects to the people who mentored them.

What tech2elevate provides

• The complete eight-week curriculum: lesson plans with minute-by-minute agendas, instructor notes, cheat sheets, and checkpoints.
• The Web Fundamentals Guide so mentors can brush up on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript before they teach it.
• A starter project  and a laptop setup checklist that gets students coding on day one.
• The lessons we’ve learned running the program at Target, from account restrictions on school devices to what to do when a student finishes early.

For schools and teachers

If you teach at a high school, or run an after-school program, we’d like to bring mentors to your students.

What the program looks like in your school

• Eight sessions of one hour each, during a class period or after school, on a consistent day of the week.
• Students in pairs or one-on-one with a mentor, building a real website from a blank folder. No prior coding experience is needed.
• A final session where students present what they built.

What we ask of a school partner

• A room with Wi-Fi and a teacher or staff champion who is in the room each week.
• A laptop per student. Target has provided refurbished laptops to its cohorts, and we can help partner companies plan for this.
• Flexibility on student accounts. Some school Google accounts block the developer tools we use, so students may need to sign up with a personal email.

Start the conversation

Tell us a little about your company or school and we’ll follow up to talk through the details.