Black Girls Code Founder Kimberly Bryant
Black Girls Code Founder Kimberly Bryant

After tallying more than 20,000 votes from its community of Windows Azure developers, Microsoft announced that Black Girls Code is the first-place recipient of its AzureDev community campaign grants.

Microsoft announced the availability of the grants at last year’s Build conference, and asked developers to vote on their favorite nonprofit that provides tech education.

BGC, a Oakland, Calif.-based organization that encourages young girls of color to enter computer science and STEM fields, will receive $50,000 to continue its mission.

“By reaching out to the community through workshops, hackathons and after-school programs, Black Girls Code introduces computer programming and technology to girls from underrepresented communities, BGC founder Kimberly Bryant said in the post announcing the grant. “This grant will allow us to expand these program offerings in our existing chapters, and help us launch in 10 new cities in 2014. It will also provide funding to increase our staff in order to support our programs across the country.”

Seattle-based Code.org was the second-place grant recipient, and will receive $20,000 to help with its mission. In particular, Roxanne Emadi, Code.org’s Grass Roots and Social Strategist highlighted three objectives that the organization will be using the grant for:

  • Urging the now 33 out of 50 states that don’t count computer science towards graduation requirements to change laws
  • Developing 20 hours of free introductory courses for students, and professional development for teachers
  • Recruiting 100 million students to try computer science for an hour in 2014 with the Hour of Code

CoderDojo, Teaching Kids Programming, and CodeDay each received $10,000 as third place finishers.

Here’s a quick video about BGC, and what they plan to do with Microsoft’s grant:

[This story has been updated to clarify Code.org’s goals.]

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