What’s your name and job title?
Laura Azorín - Fundraising Manager
Tell us a few words about your background:
I am Laura Azorín, I have a background in Business Administation and Managament by the University of Zaragoza (Spain). I specialized in Social Economy Entities Management, as I was driven by the desire of focusing in social impact and work for integration, equality, justice and change.
I had the opportunity to work in different social enterprises and associations while studying and after finishing the degree. After that, I found Social Hackers Academy. I have been here for almost two years now. I can say that it has been a great experience. Working in the fundraising department is such an enriching experience. You get to connect with many different people from different backgrounds, it allows you to expand your perspectives and you get to
What organisation do you work for?
Social Hackers Academy
What does your organisation do?
Social Hackers Academy was born in September 2017, in Athens. The main objective is providing vulnerable people with a quality education on advanced digital skills, through web development and coding. We want to achieve a world where everyone has equal access to education, the labor market, and a future-proof Career.
We have a free 7-month Full Stack Web Development course for vulnerable people. Inside the system, we not only focus on the hard skills but also on the soft skills as they are key to getting a complete and competitive professional profile. For that, we follow a holistic approach, with an employability (non-cognitive skills) curriculum of 6 months, parallel to the hard-skills course.
SHA’s mission is to provide a Long Term solution by focusing on their education and assisting them in their future employability, getting a job in the ICT industry, and becoming financially independent. Hence, we develop partnerships with IT companies that agree to take into account our students when recruiting, having internships, etc.
I am the Project Manager of Social Hackers Academy for the Code4SP project. I am the responsible of coordinating internally (within SHA) and externally (within the consortium) to make sure that the tasks are being completed the best way possible. At the moment, we are dealing with two main tasks inside SHA.
We are connecting with companies to involve them in the project, with the goal of having them joining our Database of affiliated Regional, Local and National Enterprises.
On the other hand, we are also organizing how the piloting courses are going to look like, which educators are going to be in charge and establishing an internal timeline for that.
Why is being part of the Code4SP project important to you?
Social Hackers Academy feels very grateful and humble to be part of this project. On the one hand, because it aligns perfectly with SHA, its mission and vision. The project aims to achieve a policy reform by creating a concrete operational method. For Social Hackers Academy, it is amazing to be part of a project that takes our mission and is able to replicate it in so many contexts, being of help to so many people coming from vulnerable groups like migrants, refugees and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Understanding the good practice from CodeDoor and its methodology is an opportunity for SHA, as well as for the rest of the partners, to replicate and scale the model beyond what we ever expected.
How do you like to spend your free time?
There are so many things I like to do in my free time. Some of my favourite things to do are having walks in the nature or hikings, taking care of my plants/garden, spending time with my cats, practising yoga, cooking and of course, spending time with the people I love having nice conversations with a good coffee (or a good wine, let’s be honest).
