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During Marcie, John, Annalina and Peter Kazickas visit to Lithuania in January and February, the KFF was introduced to DevBridge members at the Residence to learn more about the Chicago-headquartered technology consulting company with offices in Vilnius and Kaunas.
We discussed DevBridge’s new social responsibility initiative and were excited to learn that it overlaps greatly with one of Basketball Power’s goal - to bring technology to Lithuanian kids. We continued the conversation at their Vilnius location where we were given a tour of the office, ate some pizza, and, of course, discussed future avenues for partnership. Thank you, DevBridge!
Here is DevBridge social responsibility vision:
We strongly believe that the biggest impact will result from investing into teachers. Therefore our social capital initiatives has the following priorities:
- · More Computer Science teachers
- · Stronger, better informed CS teachers
- · Introduce CS to younger kids
- · Attract significantly more girls to CS
Our objective for the next ten years is to increase computer science student applications across Lithuanian universities from 1,000 to 10,000. We believe this goal to be strategic as it improves quality of life for families in Lithuania in a scalable fashion.
The initial vehicle we have chosen is to introduce a coding academy to kids as early as possible, with intent to attract, train and compensate motivated teachers, create kids’ interest in IT, and influence their educational choices years later. We have been engaged with Bit & byte and see it as a concrete foundation on which we will continue building and scaling across multiple geographies in Lithuania.
In 2017 we will focus our money and energy investment into this initiative and will update you on our progress half-way through the year. We hope the Kazickas Family foundation can join this initiative later in the year as we can report progress and show results.