JYCGIF 2021 Summer Camp for Future Ready Leaders Kicks Off!

JYCGIF’s first Summer Camp for future ready leaders kicked off last week! Our pilot 10,000 Girls4Girls Coding event, the 2021 Camp empowered teen girls from Po Leung Kuk schools through coding training, leadership development and sports to rise to any challenge – and enter the future as digital leaders!

On Opening Day, students received a crash course in leadership, hearing firsthand from women trailblazers in education, philanthropy, finance and sports! Our heartfelt thanks to Helena Pong, Vice Chairman of Po Leung Kuk; Rachel Chan, Co-Founder of Esperanza; Grace Yu of Credit Suisse, and HK tennis pro Ling Zhang, Inspiring HK, for inspiring a can-do spirit in teen girls!

“Leadership is not an innate quality. We all need to step out of our comfort zone to grow!” Helena Pong, Po Leung Kuk Vice Chairman, told students.

The engine driving our Camp was a 10-hour gamified coding class! Led by Esperanza x CoderZ teachers and teaching assistants, the class introduced students to a world of coding – the basic literacy of the digital age. A prerequisite for jobs of the future, coding improves computational, communication, and problem-solving skills while fostering creativity and self-confidence.

“In medicine, law, and the physical sciences, there are far more women in those fields today globally. But computer science is a different story,” said Jeanne Cheng, Teaching Assistant in the Coding Workshop. “Women with jobs in that field represent a tiny minority, with numbers declining. We need to change that, and teaching coding is an important first step.”

During Camp, teen girls also heard the success stories of young entrepreneurs who learned early on never to take no for an answer and to build the self-confidence, determination, and grit—in addition to hard skills – fundamental to business. At the Corporate Workshop facilitated by Alibaba, Debbie Lau and Kyle Kok, Co-Founders of Lecopt Technology Limited, and Vicky Wong and Hoffman Chau, of the Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, emphasized five important business skills: goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills, and business ethics.

“Entrepreneurship is a mindset – anyone can adopt it!” said Debbie Lau, Lecopt Technology Limited, Speaker at the Alibaba Corporate Workshop. “We need to nurture this mindset in teen girls: to teach them not only financial skills but to see themselves as entrepreneurs and leaders at a young age.”

Thanks to Inspiring HK, Campers also engaged in a wide variety of sports and fitness activities, including dodgebee, yoga, k-pop dancing, thai boxing and more! They left feeling pumped – ready to take on any challenge: in the classroom, in the field, and in life!

The pilot program of JYCGIF’s 10,000 Girls4Girls Coding initiative, the Summer Camp was built on the “train the trainer” model, whereby girls receive coding training and then feel empowered to volunteer to train girls in their community to code, too. We look forward to hearing from our Campers as they pass on their coding training to their peers and to other girls in their communities! We can’t wait to unveil our next 10,000 Girls4Girls Coding experience! Stay tuned for more details.