Daugherty Mentors Black Data Processing Associates (BDPA)

Hands-on experience and access to mentors – there’s just no substitute

Daugherty is committed to diversity and inclusion within the IT industry, which makes BDPA a good fit for us. BDPA is a nonprofit organization that brings underrepresented minorities together in the information technology and computer science field for professional development and academic enrichment.

We are involved in BDPA in four ways:

Membership

Daugherty has helped to grow the St. Louis chapter of BDPA tremendously, tripling new membership in the past year. By providing the registration fee for these students, we look to help double that number again.

Scholarship

Daugherty gives two $2,500 scholarships each year in memory of one of our earliest and most beloved employees, Wanda Everett.

Mentorship

Daugherty has instituted a mentoring program for all Wanda Everett Scholarship applicants.

Advancement

Finding new members and mentoring them is good, but it’s only a small part of the picture. Our aim is to expand BDPA’s horizons on a national level.

To do so, we created an incentive program for students participating in the BDPA IT Showcase. This year, Mariah Favell and a group of her fellow students ran with the BDPA IT Showcase Competition, which tests a student’s ability to perform substantive research and organize the findings into a coherent, focused, 10-plus page paper. They will travel to Cincinnati, Ohio, to participate in the 2017 national competition, which consists of a timed computerized written exam, oral questions, and tech development of a web application.

Ashley Shorter represented St. Louis BDPA in the 2017 National Competition for Mobile App. The Mobile Application competition enables youth to explore avenues for entrepreneurship through mobile app development.

Moreover, a group of students presented a sleek website layout they’d designed for a pizza company, and explained how they’d learned throughout the process the fundamentals of coding and collaboration with peers.

We’ve also helped BDPA partner and collaborate with the St. Louis Science Center YES program, Parkway School District and other schools.

Through the gifting of funds, time and mentoring, we hope we can help raise the next generation of brilliant, young minds.