A Technology Roadmap for Social Good, Built by Volunteers at SCORES Labs
Develop for Good engineers, developers, and designers
When SCORES Labs launched in late 2020, it was designed as a technology-first initiative to leverage software and pro bono engineering talent to dramatically expand SCORES’ impact and capacity to provide services to children in underserved communities. With greater numbers of children, coaches, schools, funders, and lead agency partners engaged with the organization, data management demands quickly escalated.
Between the low point of 2020 and mid-2024, SCORES quintupled the number of low-income students it provides its ingenious mix of soccer, poetry, and service-learning programming, reaching 3065 1st-8th graders in 2023 spread across 113 program locations in San Francisco, San Rafael, Oakland, San Jose, Hayward, West Contra Costa, and Watsonville-Pajaro Valley. For 2024, SCORES is on target to reach 5000 students. That impact expands geometrically with the inclusion of families, SCORES coaches, SCORES school communities, and service-learning partnerships.
And remarkably SCORES Labs has assembled a powerhouse and nearly all-volunteer tech team on a shoestring budget to leverage technology to scale SCORES’ services without compromising quality or impact.
Today, SCORES Labs is a solutions hub for data gathering, data management, and data-driven decision-making. SCORES Labs is driving the effort to measure SCORES’ impact on the students it serves in social-emotional development, academic confidence, improvements in attendance, health metrics, poetry contributions, self-assessment, and observational data from coaches. Much of that measuring comes through a constellation of apps created by SCORES Labs, the primary being SCORES’ “Coach App.”
SCORES’ partnership with MuleSoft (acquired by Salesforce in 2018) and Salesforce became key to the organization’s strategic move, resulting in nearly 4000 hours of pro bono engineering and professional support over the last three and a half years. Salesforce volunteer engineers and developers proved to be enormously helpful in driving SCORES’ technological capacities, often contributing volunteer hours well beyond expectations.
“Working with powerhouse volunteers from Salesforce, MuleSoft, and Develop for Good has dramatically expanded our ability to explore feature design in our apps and discover what will work best for our coaches and staff. It’s also allowed us to expand our access and relationship with the global developer community.”
Even more hours have come through a dynamic new partnership between SCORES and the nonprofit organization Develop for Good, which pairs teams of volunteer college students and recent graduates with nonprofits to leverage their technical skills for social good.
While SCORES has benefited enormously from the pro bono assistance, so too have the volunteer engineers and developers. The mutually beneficial relationship was intentional from the start. At the virtual center of SCORES Labs is the open-source development platform GitHub, where engineers can contribute code improvements, bug fixes, or build new features for existing projects, demonstrating expertise in specific technologies to a global audience.
SCORES CTO Pete Swearengen explains. “Engineers need opportunities to apply their skills and talents in ways that build their portfolios and resumes beyond their current positions. They gain experience and exposure.” SCORES Labs offers hands-on projects involving a growing list of technologies including Mulesoft Anypoint and Dataweave, Salesforce and the Nonprofit Success Pack, Tableau, Github, Google Drive, Slack, Heroku, AWS Lambda, Node.js, iOS and AndroidOS, javascript, SQL, Typeform, Unity, and MongoDB. Developers are also using Chat ChatGPT, CoPilot, Salesforce Data Cloud, and other AI services to boost the functionality of new SCORES Labs product features and capabilities, pushing beyond the AI applications students typically learn in the classroom setting.
And crucially, as the tech industry rapidly reshapes modern life and work, SCORES Labs offers engineers opportunities to learn and innovate with technology in a non-exploitative or market-driven context, explicitly addressing concerns over data privacy, algorithmic bias and social and economic inequalities fueled by the digital divide. “We’re starting to think about data science as an essential component to data justice, access, and alignment in the age of AI,” says Swearengen.
Colin Schmidt, Executive Director of SCORES says all of these efforts have exponentially driven the reach and capacity of the organization. “By nurturing partnerships with MuleSoft and Develop for Good, Pete has created an amazing and passionate team of talented and dedicated tech professionals at SCORES Labs. This is an astonishing accomplishment for a small non-profit organization. They’re helping us drive impact.”
Develop for Good
In late 2023, SCORES began a partnership with the nonprofit Develop for Good, launched in 2020 by two computer science students at Stanford to match students looking for real-world project experience with nonprofits seeking digital support, DFG initially supported teams of students developing technical products for companies and later brought on mentors from Silicon Valley tech companies. DFG has since expanded to work with numerous colleges and universities, engaging students from many backgrounds. DFG volunteers include engineers, designers, and product managers.
The organization offers services including website and app design, web and mobile app development, and data analytics and works on a wide range of projects. Recent cases have included designing and developing a website to increase access to addiction recovery therapy, designing features for a climate app, and designing a web app to monitor horse stress levels.
Aleksandr Molchagin is a recent graduate of Kalamazoo College with a double major in computer science and business. Molchagin started with DFG as a volunteer computer engineer before moving into his current (still volunteer) role as Product Lead. While in college, he leveraged the technical skills he picked up at DFG to lead a computer science student organization. Now he’s reviewing proposals from nonprofits and overseeing fellow volunteers like Nikkolas Glover and Pranavi Pratapa, who started working with SCORES last November. Each nonprofit is matched with eight student volunteers for a 16-week cycle. Some volunteers, like Glover and Pratapa, extend their stays.
“Our professors always emphasize that we build technologies not just because we want to scale society, but also to improve our lives,” explains Molchagin. “There are many problems in the tech field we need to address, and we are in the position to help. I want to utilize technologists for social good,” he says.
Nikkolas Glover, a Georgia Tech senior, doesn’t feel he would be fulfilled pursuing a traditional tech internship at a large company. He’s deliberately targeting his search toward small companies and nonprofits where he can make more of a direct impact. He’s already worked for a small cybersecurity firm. Glover first learned of DFG from his mentor and fellow teaching assistant at Georgia Tech, Joey Orfino, who also volunteered for the organization.
“Joining Develop for Good and SCORES was a great opportunity to use tech in positive, non-exploitative ways and to connect to other engineers with a similar mindset. I feel most aligned with people interested in the real impact of these technologies.
Glover found those people in both DFG and SCORES. “I study artificial intelligence. I’m intensely interested in ethical issues tied to this powerful technology including algorithmic bias and discrimination. I’m interested in the ways technology is often used for the explicit purpose of continuing to disenfranchise marginalized groups. As a Black engineer, I believe it’s my purpose and responsibility to be thinking about these issues.
“I’m also a non-traditional student. I started my undergrad career at another institution, became disabled in my early 20s, and then took a break from school. I returned to school only after a long career in the food industry – those are my people. Most of my adult life was spent in working-class environments. I became interested in tech by dealing with POS (point of sale) systems and being the guy people would come to when things weren’t working.”
Prathima Pratapa is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan. She discovered DFG after stepping away from a prestigious junior software position with Amazon that she’d held since her sophomore year. Leaving that position was one of the hardest things she’s done, but one that felt true to her real interests and desire to see the direct impact of her work. “It takes courage to make the decision that works best for you. But especially at this age, it’s something everyone should cultivate. I’m glad I’ve had the opportunity to do that and to explore new things,” she explains.
And in her current work, she’s found that. “I’m not sure there’s a better way to express how much I love what SCORES is doing. It’s amazing how they identified this specific need among at-risk school communities and created such an ingenious solution. I study math and computer science but also did a creative writing minor. I love writing poetry in my free time because it taps into an imaginative part of your brain, and that’s important for students.”
For SCORES CTO Swearengen, Glover and Pratapa’s contributions have contributed new energy at SCORES Labs. “This is the summer of AI for us,” he says. “The sudden expansion into AI by all the platform and tool providers at SCORES Labs presents an exciting challenge to volunteers in thinking about opportunities and risks. Pranavi’s sense for product clarity, ensuring features address clear values, and Nikk’s professional focus on data governance and security have worked well in this preparatory phase.”
What’s to come:
As SCORES Labs continues to grow, Swearengen sees an enormous opportunity to serve SCORES students and families directly, envisioning a future where SCORES students, coaches, families, and communities co-own the physical, mental, and socio-emotional health-related data they accumulate as SCORES program participants, able to use the data for themselves and with full privacy.
Fundamental questions are driving SCORES Labs, Swearengen explains. “How can we take the best of present and emerging technologies and create value for our primary customers – our students, families, and coaches? How can we obtain or build tools that address the reporting requirements of school districts and funders? How can we ensure that we’re benefiting SCORES coaches and students and not just benefiting a system? That’s how we find true alignment with people and tech, especially AI.”
Supporting Swearengen is new SCORES board member Andrea Bonilla, a senior data scientist at Airbnb. The chance to be directly involved in SCORES’ tech effort cemented her decision to join the board. “I want to help wherever I can, but here I can use my expertise in data science, which is exciting. Nonprofits can’t generally afford to hire engineers the way big companies can, so you’re making a real impact working with them. And there’s so much you can do with open-source.”
From a data science perspective, she’s most interested in data literacy, “which means how can people read data?” she says. “There are a few key stakeholders for SCORES: The parents, the schools, the students, and the organization. For students, the top priorities in SCORES are their poetry, soccer, and schoolwork. But their data is also important. It’s important to understand how much data is being generated on you and how valuable it is. We know it can be valuable to others, even to other stakeholders, but how about to the students themselves?”
Bonilla suggests students could use years of data collected in their writing to understand changes or growth in their poetry, their development, and even their identities. “They could look back to what they wrote about in first grade and see what mattered to them then. And then they could jump to fifth or eighth grade and see how they’re now writing about something entirely different. Seeing those changes can show them something meaningful about who they’ve become.”
SCORES Executive Director Colin Schmidt is exhilarated by the sheer pluck of the multi-talented tech dream team Swearengen has pulled together. “The tools and applications created by Pete and his team propel SCORES into the future. Because of their efforts, we’re tapping into the best talent and technology available, and together we’re using it to lift up and support the most disadvantaged people and communities in the Bay Area and beyond.”
Getting Involved as a Volunteer Engineer or Developer
SCORES is now onboarding a new summer cohort of DFG volunteers and will be ready to bring on more mentor and volunteer developers by June or late May. “We encourage people to think about leveraging their passion and their technical ambition so we can select the right opportunities and project focus for each person,” says Swearengen.
To get involved, you can reach out to:
GitHub
Develop for Good
SCORES CTO Pete Swearengen
The Data Journey: participation passes through many stages from observation and collection to correction and aggregation in order to provide an ongoing near-real-time analysis of program impact and value to students. The SCORES Labs tech team reflects on this whole picture to understand where technical benefits and risk live and how to scale.
