Mona, from Iran, found herself in a small town in the north of the UK where she spent five years with her husband and their son as asylum seekers. As asylum seekers are not allowed to work, the combination of a long period of time spent outside of the labour market and differences in practices in her field of work … Read More
Volunteer Stories: Lucy
Meet Lucy. A recent graduate from Manchester Met University, she lives in Manchester working as a graduate software engineer at the BBC in MediaCity, Salford. Lucy has worked on areas as diverse as the Voice+AI team to front end development on the Sport website. She first came across CodeYourFuture while in the middle of her industrial placement year. She wanted … Read More
Student Stories: Mohammed
This is Mohammed Mohammed came to the UK as a refugee from Sudan in 2015. Like others in a similar position, he tried to integrate himself quickly in his new community in the hope of making up for the challenges and disruptions he had faced in the past. ‘First, I was doing ESOL in college, then working at a car … Read More
Student Stories: Abdoulrazack
Meet Abdoulrazack Somalia is a country destroyed by civil war and then by the occupation of Al-shabaab. I had been working as an Interpreter in Somalia and my life was threatened by this malleolus group. I fled the country to save my life and my journey ended in the UK. After applying for asylum and humanitarian protection, things were going … Read More
Student Stories: Madiha
Meet Madiha Madiha originally comes from Pakistan. She came to live in the UK about 15 years ago. After years of juggling various jobs to make ends meet, and not feeling content with the shift her career and life had taken, she decided to turn her life around. This is how she found CodeYourFuture. Not only was CodeYourFuture life-changing for … Read More
Fighting inequality, one line of code at a time
CodeYourFuture is not just any other coding school; we are a community with a mission to fight inequality. We support motivated individuals from the most disadvantaged groups – those who have limited access to training and opportunities and who are underrepresented in the tech sector. It has never been more apparent how important it is to build pathways to opportunity … Read More
CodeYourFuture — a coding school to train and empower refugees, asylum seekers and disadvantaged groups in the UK
What is Code Your Future? Code Your Future started in 2016 as a coding school for refugees. We’re a non-profit organisation with the aim of supporting refugees and asylum seekers in the UK who have a dream to become a software developer in the tech industry. In 2015, as the worldwide refugee crisis hit new heights, and the media coverage … Read More
Humans of Code Your Future: Yohannes
Yohannes is a CodeYourFuture graduate, looking for his first tech job. Check out his GitHub here. I was born and brought up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I’d studied some computer science, but I would say it wasn’t until I moved to Glasgow in 2016 joined the first Scottish class of Code Your Future that I became a programmer. Glasgow is … Read More
Why do we volunteer?
Along with our students, volunteers are the lifeblood of our organisation. Liliana, who started with us as a volunteer, asks… Why do we volunteer? There’s always a temptation to give a one-size-fits-all answer to that kind of question. You can Google it to see tons of articles and find people offering advice related to the volunteering enterprise. I’ve asked … Read More
A future of coding opportunities for our graduates at CYF
Just over a year ago CodeYourFuture existed in the minds of a couple of people that wanted to create the first programme in the UK dedicated to helping refugees and asylum seekers. We had no mentors, no students and we didn’t know any refugee organisations that could help us in finding them. We only had a draft version of a … Read More