Our 2024 Report - Wevise

Our 2024 Report

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2024 was an interesting year for Wevise. Although Wevise is now 2 years old, as a volunteer-run organization we are still in the startup phase–an exciting time for testing new models and finding our niche. A national scope was too broad for an all-volunteer team, making it difficult to find funding and to focus our efforts. 

In October, after reviewing our successes and challenges, we decided to pivot our efforts to an in-person, city-focused initiative (the TechPath Alliance) that will use the platform as part of a multifaceted approach to career development for underserved people. While the platform will continue to run as a place for people to find mentors with similar lived experiences, this new initiative allows us to be more focused and impactful with a replicable and scalable model.

With the TechPath Alliance, we’ve found our groove for 2025. We can’t wait to launch in Chicago with the support of our new partners!

Programs

Mentoring Platform

We made progress on our beta version and improvements to our MVP experience. While MVP focused on solving challenge #1 of mentoring (finding the right mentor/mentee), beta focuses on challenge #2: the tactical struggle of meeting. We’re about ready to launch chat and video, and then we’ll get to work on the ability to easily schedule each mentoring session directly from the platform. Once that’s done, our beta version will be complete!

With the launch of the planning for the TechPath Alliance initiative in October, we’ve been working on our SaaS platform to be able to run and manage the mentoring program for those 150 mentees and their mentors. Once this functionality has been completed, we’ll be able to offer the platform to other nonprofits and SMEs. This will help us to become more sustainable financially.

In 2025, we’ll continue to work towards Prod V1, which will tackle challenge #3 (what do we do now that we’re meeting??) with flexible templates and modules, along with goal setting to track progress and get feedback. 

The Program team has begun working on static versions of those mentoring modules, along with mentor and mentee training, which will soon be provided as resources on the platform.

TechPath Alliance

As mentioned above, we struggled to make the impact we wanted through the platform itself. We evaluated options based on the need we saw in the community, including the needs of nonprofits working in the space, and decided to pilot a new initiative called the TechPath Alliance. The Alliance is a replicable city-focused model that invites nonprofits and for-profits to come together to help underserved people start their tech career through mentorship and career development. We’ll be launching the model in early 2025 in Chicago.

The Alliance has been resonating with the Chicago community, and we have three of the target five nonprofit Alliance members signed up. We’ll be continuing to build nonprofit partnerships, along with looking for corporate members as well. The corporate members will be responsible for funding, additional workshops and networking opportunities, and mentors for the program participants. 

In 2025, we plan to launch, learn from the experience, and begin planning in other cities.

Other Programs

As we’ve been bringing on new Program team members, the team has been brainstorming workshops and webinars around topics such as mentoring mentees struggling with unconscious bias and imposter syndrome. We plan to begin running these towards the end of Q1. In addition, we’ll be launching a Wevise community forum for mentors to support each other in their mentoring relationships and for mentees to ask general questions about careers.

Impact

Our impact in 2024 was less than we had hoped for, due to challenges before our pivot. Our focus this year was on creating a more stable organization and creating a stronger platform. Once beta is complete, we’ll focus on increasing our mentee and mentor base and creating impact through our TechPath Alliance initiative.

We plan to relaunch our goals from 2024 in terms of people served (2500 mentees and 1000 mentors) and additional programs launched. In 2024, 80 mentees and 52 mentors registered and completed onboarding. Of the current mentees with active mentorship requests (60), 73.3% of them identify with one of the “underserved” categories. 

Organization

In 2024, we built and grew our board to 7 board members. We’re continuing to evaluate our board structure and will add a board of advisors in 2025. Our organization continues to be volunteer-run, with 36 volunteers supporting 5-10 hours per week on average. We built up our structure, adding processes, tools, and documentation, and made the switch to Jira from ClickUp to have a more thorough way to track tasks and progress for each department. We continue to look for ways to better support our volunteer team members.

We received our 501c3 status at the end of February 2024, which was an exciting milestone!

In 2025, we’ll look for funding to add staff to provide the continuity and support necessary for a positive experience for our partners and volunteer team members.

We look forward to serving our community even more in 2025.

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