Facebook Donates $250K In Coding Scholarships For Latino, Female, African-American Students

Founder and CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg continues to make great contributions to causes that are near and dear to his heart. The Sillicon Valley titan’s company just donated a grand total of $250,000 for scholarships to Dev Bootcamp, an immersive 19-week coding program, as announced at the annual F8 developers conference, yesterday.

The large sum will help fully cover tuition for 20 students from underrepresented minorities, such as Black/African American, Chicano/Latino, Native American, Pacific Islander and/or a women.

Tarlin Ray, Dev Bootcamp’s vice president of business development and corporate strategy said the generous donation will make a big difference. “Facebook’s generous donation makes a real impact on Dev Bootcamp’s goal to achieve proportional representation of the U.S. population with our student base of women and minorities.”

Laura Mead, who participated in Dev Bootcamp before becoming a Media Solutions Partner Engineer at Facebook expressed her excitement about the donation saying she believes it “will enable others who might not otherwise have the chance learn how to code.”

Like other companies, Facebook is trying to increase diversity of its workforces to better represent their customer base.

Just last year, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan announced a $5 million donation that will support college scholarships for Dreamers and other undocumented immigrants. The donation directly supports TheDream.us, which will issue 400 scholarships for undocumented students in the Bay Area, the communities around Facebook headquarters. The contribution continues Zuckerberg’s philanthropic focus on education. In addition, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan also announced a $120 million donation to Bay Area schools.

“Today Priscilla and I made a $5 million donation to thedream.us, a scholarship fund that helps undocumented young immigrants in the US attend college. Hundreds of thousands of young immigrants are part of our communities and attend school legally in the United States,” Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook at the time.