Hack Club is a global nonprofit network of high school computer

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term ''hacker'' has become associated in popu ...

s, makers and coders. Founded in 2014 by Zach Latta, it now includes 400 high school clubs and 20,000 students. It has been featured on the

TODAY Show ''Today'' (also called ''The Today Show'' or informally, ''NBC News Today'') is an American news and talk morning television show that airs weekdays from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. on NBC. The program debuted on January 14, 1952. It was ...

, and profiled in the ''

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'' and many other publications.

Programs

Hack Club's primary focus is its clubs program, in which it supports high school coding clubs through learning resources and mentorship. It also runs / has run a series of other programs and events. A few notable programs and events are:
Hack Club Bank
- a fiscal sponsorship program originally targeted at high school hacker events * AMAs - video calls with industry experts such as

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a business magnate and investor. He is the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX; angel investor, CEO and product architect of Tesla, Inc.; owner and CEO of Twitter, Inc.; founder of The Bori ...

and

Vitalik Buterin Vitaly "Vitalik" Buterin (born 1994) is a Russian-Canadian computer programmer and founder of Ethereum. Buterin became involved with cryptocurrency early in its inception, co-founding ''Bitcoin Magazine'' in 2011. In 2014, Buterin deployed Eth ...

* Summer of Making - a collaboration with

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

Adafruit Adafruit Industries is an open-source hardware company based in New York City. It was founded by Limor Fried in 2005. The company designs, manufactures and sells a number of electronics products, electronics components, tools and accessories. It ...

Arduino Arduino () is an open-source hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices. Its hardware products are licensed unde ...

to create an online summer program for teenagers during the COVID-19 pandemic that included $50k in hardware donations to teen hackers around the world * The Hacker Zephyr - a cross-country hackathon on a train across America. * Assemble - the first high school hackathon in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

since the pandemic, with the stated goal of "kick ngoff a

hackathon A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, datathon or codefest; a portmanteau of hacking and marathon) is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. Th ...

renaissance". * Epoch - A global high schooler-led hackathon in

Delhi NCR The National Capital Region (NCR) is a planning region centred upon the National Capital Territory (NCT) of Delhi in India. It encompasses Delhi and several districts surrounding it from the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. The N ...

organised in public to inspire the community of student hackers and bring hundreds of teenagers together. * Winter Wonderland Hardware - An online winter program where teenagers submit their idea of a project and if accepted they get upto $250 grant for their hardware that is required in the project.

Funding

Hack Club is funded by grants from philanthropic organizations and donations from individual supporters. In 2019, GitHub Education provided cash grants of up to $500 to every Hack Club "hackathon" event. In May 2020, GitHub committed to a $50K hardware fund, globally alongside

and

, to deliver hardware tools directly to students’ homes with a program named Hack Club Summer of Making. In 2020,

and the Musk Foundation donated $500,000 to help expand Hack Club, and donated another $1,000,000 in 2021. In 2022,

Tom Tom or TOM may refer to: * Tom (given name), a diminutive of Thomas or Tomás or an independent Aramaic given name (and a list of people with the name) Characters * Tom Anderson, a character in ''Beavis and Butt-Head'' * Tom Beck, a character ...

and Theresa Preston-Werner donated $500,000 to Hack Club.

References

{{reflist Hacker_culture Clubs and societies Computer programming 2014 establishments in Vermont