Tech and media are closely entwined, especially for community media -- and tech skills can provide a powerful boost to empower people and their communities. Meanwhile, local capacity building is a core goal for many community foundations and organizations. Consequently, culturally aware tech education programs can complement the goals of community media and organizations by helping to close the local digital divide.

This week the MIT Center for Civic Media published an interview with Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code -- which focuses on introducing girls age 7-17 to robotics, video game design, app development, and computer programming. The group has chapters in many cities, and holds regular events and classes locally.

"We drive the curriculum around a purpose," said Bryant. "We don't just create a web page to create a web page. We focus narrowly on building something that focuses on our community. Some of our team building exercises we do as well. We train our teachers to interface and interact with our girls. We want to make sure how to talk to the kids and engage the kids in class."

This summer a related project, Hack the Hood, by the community media site OaklandLocal, trained 17 local youths in basic tech and business skills to promote local small business.

"A year ago, we realized we'd been doing a good job teaching local businesses and nonprofits how to tell their stories and get their voice heard -- but we could do more to address Oakland's lack of jobs," said OaklandLocal founder and publisher Susan Mernit. "Oakland has a lot of small businesses, but they often aren't easy to find because they aren't showing up well in Google and other popular online directory listings. What if we could transform the whole city by making these businesses visible? And what if, at the same time, we could train local youths to help them get good jobs in tech and business?"