The group’s leaders said their goal is to raise $15,000 using the crowdfunding site Indiegogo.
BY JACOB PALMER | OB DIGITAL NEWS EDITOR
ChickTech, a Portland-based organization aiming to get more women in the tech industry, would like to expand into five new cities.
But first they need to raise some money, which leaders of the group hope they can do via crowdfunding.
From the Portland Business Journal:
The group is looking to raise at least $15,000, said Janice Levenhagen-Seeley. That is the basic amount needed to launch a new chapter. The group wants to launch five new chapters so it is hoping to not only hit that initial amount but also to raise additional $15,000 increments.
“We are going to be creating little seed funds for each of the new chapters,” she said.
Levenhagen-Seeley has established Seattle, New York and Chicago as three of the five cities she would like to expand into. She’s unsure as to the final two cities.
The group will host a party on Feb. 23 in the AppNexus office in downtown Portland to celebrate the launch of the campaign.
Oregon Business profiled Levenhagen-Seely in September 2014:
“Death by a thousand cuts — that’s why women leave technology,” says the 31-year-old former programmer, mother of two and founder of ChickTech, a nonprofit that gets girls to code. “People say, ‘You can’t leave; you have to make strides for all these future generations of women.’ But the fact is that I’m changing these young women’s lives. I’m willing to feel like a hypocrite, because I believe in the mission.”
A few of those thousand cuts: In June Scott Kveton, co-founder of the Portland mobile-marketing wunderkind Urban Airship, resigned as CEO amid sexual assault allegations. A few weeks later, Python Software Foundation director Selena Deckelmann wrote a scathing editorial in the Portland Business Journal about rampant sexual harassment in the tech community. “I can’t recommend that women work for startups in Portland,” she said.
