Maydm Works to Support Girls and Youth of Color in Experiencing Stem: A Great Equalizer (Part 1 of 2)
Since it was founded in 2015, Maydm — a construct for Made By Them — has been helping girls and students of color explore the world of STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Its founder — Winnie Karanja — and the people who manage Maydm now were tired of being “the only one” in the room in class and the workplace and decided to help the succeeding generations develop, nurture and pursue an interest in STEM related fields and careers.
“Our former executive director was a student at MMSD,” said Carmelo Dávila, Maydm’s outreach manager. “She wanted to join a STEM Club. She realized that there were no girls or people of color in that club. She left the city of Madison and came back with a degree thinking there might be a nonprofit she could volunteer with. It wasn’t there. So Maydm came about to fill in that gap. There were other organizations teaching kids STEM and helping students envision careers in STEM. But there was none specifically targeting girls and students of color. The reason that we focus on this audience is because whenever you visit a tech company in Silicon Valley and other places, you realize that these groups aren’t represented in the workforce. Many companies made achievements in this area. But the industry remained not very diverse. So the idea is we work with young people so that they can be the next generation who will change the face of STEM.”
Maydm’s offices on S. Patterson Street are flexible work spaces that can be flexed to meet the needs of the programs it offers. And in many ways, this reflects to flexibility and design of Maydm’s offerings to meet middle school and high school students where they are in space and personal development to provide a progression of programming that allows students to take their interest in STEM as far as they want to take it in higher education, the labor market and beyond.
The staff of Maydm have skills in many areas that they have developed in their own journeys into STEM, reflecting the diverse possibilities that STEM offers.
Dr, Christina Outlay, Maydm’s executive director, wasn’t even thinking about STEM as she entered DePaul University in Chicago as a psychology major. It was a unrelated job at the university that started her on her journey.
“I am a little bit of a rarity in that I was in college when I decided to pursue IT,” Outlay said. “I found IT in my junior year as a student worker. My employer at the time at DePaul told me to go figure out how to build a website and manage it for the department. Back then, it was some text and a few graphics and some bullet points. It wasn’t like what they are now. But learning about it was enough for me to really fall in the work of information technology and computers and creating. I graduated and I got a job as a computer programmer at State Farm Insurance. It was the late 1990s. Companies were looking to hire and train non-computer science graduates. That’s how I got my first job.”
Outlay eventually went back to school and earned a master’s degree information systems and did project management at DePaul and then went on to earn her Ph.D. from University of Illinois – Chicago before returning to DePaul to teach.
Outlay’s journey led her to teach at UW-Whitewater where she taught IT in 2011.
“While I was there, we had summer programs for girls, girls summer IT camps as well. That’s also what got me involved working more with middle and high school students in introducing them to the field.”
From there, Outlay started her own nonprofit.
“I had a smaller nonprofit of my own called Colorcoded,” Outlay said. “It just focused on information technology, but otherwise, very similar to Maydm, which was to focus on underrepresented youth, especially Black and Brown youth and introduce them to the IT fields and IT careers. So I actually had followed Maydm’s approach and had met with Maydm’s founder early on when she was still leading the organization. They were doing a lot more summer programs at the time and I was staying focused on after school programs, just really trying to make the programs complementary and not competing programs.”
After Karanja left, Olutlay joined Maydm in 2022.
“Initially, I was looking forward to joining, but not leading Maydm,” Outlay said. “I was a tenured faculty at UW-Whitewater. After teaching for a year plus in a COVID environment, I was ready to take a break from the classroom and do something different. It was really a good opportunity to come out of the college classroom and focus more on middle and high school local youth and provide them with those experiences. And Maydm was way more established than Colorcoded.”
Outlay looked at herself as a raity.
“I love working in IT,” Outlay said. “I’ve often been a minority in the room as a woman, as a Black woman. I come from an urban background. I actually didn’t have my own first computer until I was about to graduate and start working as a programmer. It’s something that is personally significant for me and I look at how the field continues to expand and so many of our youth and people in general who don’t see themselves or have access to see themselves in this growing field.”
Benjamin “Ben” Pate, Maydm’s program manager, also took a different path after he started his college career at UW-Milwaukee.
“I started in college as a prescience major, but that wasn’t necessarily doable for me with the math side of it,” Pate said. “I love math. I did math as a major for a little bit too. It’s not necessarily how I like to learn. I did learn with answers and finalities. But I was more into seeing how the process works. Having something that you can solve is great. But also having the process of solving is what I was really into with math. And so finite of like, ’You can’t mess with anything’ was a big struggle especially in college in how it works nowadays.”
Pate graduated with a degree in community engagement educational development. That degree coupled with his experience in STEM proved to be a great combination for Pate.
“While having that background in technology — knowing it pretty well from that side of being a math major and prescience major for a while — I went more into the side of working with students,” Pate said. “Working with youth and still having that knowledge and background, knowing how to fix a computer and knowing how to do other things, I saw as an opportunity here. “Setting up stuff, not necessarily doing the teaching of it all, but still being around it and being able to help where I can with what knowledge I still have of from it. I help create the process to learn the STEM side of things is really where my drive was.”
Johanna Taylor, Maydm’s lead instructor, was a natural for STEM.
“I have always been interested in STEM, even as a kid,” Taylor recalled. “I was really big in going out in nature and doing ‘experiments.’ I found myself as I was going through school really getting interested in biology. And so that is what I went to school for, molecular biology. I was really interested in DNA and genetics and pharmaceuticals and things like that. But when I got through school, I found that I wasn’t super interested in getting a lab job. I was a lot more interested in communicating all of the things that I learned about STEM and biology.”
Taylor earned her degree at UW-Madison. And while she was there, a portal opened to her dream career.
“I took a class where we actually got to go to a local elementary school and lead a science club once per week for a semester,” Taylor said. “And that was just so much fun. I ended up doing that. I worked a little bit with a program on campus with AmeriCorps, helping students get connected with the STEM outreach programs at different labs and places on campus. And then I worked running programs like Maydm, but for younger students, a lot of summer camps and after school programs in STEM and robotics and computer science.”
While Carmelo Dávila, the outreach manager, doesn’t have formal traiing in STEM, he brings other skills that help complete the team.
“I’m originally from Puerto Rico,” Dávila said. “But I have been living in Wisconsin for 13 years. I don’t have a background in STEM either. My degrees are in history and archaeology. But I got a graduate degree from Michigan Tech in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. They are big on engineering. I do have a background in history technology as a degree. But I worked many years for UW-Extension as a youth development educator. I have that background in envision what you need to provide young people so that they can develop fully and develop their skills. Obviously Maydm sounded like a great fit for that particular background. I love to work with young people. And I love to provide opportunities to help them flourish. Maydm has given me that opportunity.”
Rounding out the team is Lennise O’Dwyer, program coordinator Madym for Maydm’s internship program. While she dreamed of being a doctor, she didn’t have anyone who could guide her through the rough spots.
“I think I just kind of fell off by the wayside,” O’Dwyer said. “I identify with students who are interested in STEM, but they don’t have the mentorship or the guidance.”
While working in healthcare administration, Lennise volunteered in Chicago and St. Louis in community and church programs. And she then moved to Madison when her husband enrolled in the UW-Madison’s curriculum and instruction Ph.D. program.
“I was in corporate,” O’Dwyer said. “My work did not feel like I was giving back. It just felt very monotonous. I would clock in and clock out. And I’ve always had a passion for wanting to be in the community. And I was working from home. I didn’t want to be at home all the time. I wanted to be in the community. Making that pivot from corporate to nonprofit just made sense, especially for an organization like Madym. Coming from some sort of STEM background, I said, ‘This makes sense.’”