Want to learn how to make websites, apps, and more but don’t know where to start? Code Scouts in Portland, Oregon can help. This post originally appeared on good.is, a global community of people who give a damn.

Founder Michelle Rowley and Kevin Turner, who recently joined Code Scouts full-time as their Chief Technology Officer. (Photo by Jason Grilicky.)

At the kickoff event for Code Scouts—a nonprofit providing support and resources to women learning to code—founder Michelle Rowley stands in front of a room of almost all women, welcoming both new and familiar faces in the Portland, Oregon tech community.

She confesses how, at first, she didn’t feel smart or empowered enough to become a software developer. And how it wasn’t until her developer ex-husband said he’d help her learn that she traded her geography and French degrees for hacking.

To get to this point—being one of the 18 percent of developers today that are women—Michelle had a few things in her favor: a father who didn’t think twice about teaching her computer skills when she asked him growing up, a partner who believed in her, and friends in the scene who encouraged her to attend conferences and meetups.

She had hands helping her; now she wants to do the same.

“I want to take the experience and privilege I’ve had and give it to people who haven’t. Just for fun,” she says. “And I think it would change things.”

It’s no secret that knowing how to code comes with all sorts of benefits: good pay, flexible hours, and esteem in the eyes of colleagues and peers. But it’s also an industry known for its competitiveness, locker room atmosphere, and lack of diversity.

That’s where Code Scouts comes in. Michelle, who has been helping lead the Portland Python User Group since 2008, came up with the idea last year as a way to bridge the gap between the people creating the internet (mostly men) and the people using it (mostly women). By creating a safe space for learners to play around with 1’s and 0’s, and, more importantly, be okay with messing up, Michelle hopes to spread the coding love, and wealth, to new faces.

“Code Scouts exists to pull more people out of the woodwork who are thinking about doing it but are scared to even approach the situation,” she says. ” It can be a scary jungle. We’re guides in Code Scouts. We’ll go in that jungle with you.”

Women have come to the monthly event with varying skill levels and backgrounds. Marta McCasland, for one, has been learning coding on and off on her own for the past year. She works as a loan processor at a credit union, and hopes the skills she’s learning at Code Scouts will help her better serve her customers. She also wants to develop a geolocation-based apartment finder app in her spare time.

To do this, her Code Scouts guide will lead her down a path of available resources like Treehouse and Codeacademy. Over the course of the afternoon they’ll work together to find the right starting point, form learning circles with others at her level, and hopefully, make long-lasting connections.

“It feels like I’m surrounded by people who might actually have the same questions I have, whereas in other groups it feels like, ‘Should I ask this? Is everyone going to be like, Why are you asking that?”” Marta says.

While the nonprofit’s formal mission is to get more women in the tech industry, Michelle is also addressing a deeper issue: newbie shaming. Cliques are common, and more often than not, she says, expertise becomes the marker of whether you’re in or out. “Dumb” questions are usually cause for ridicule.

It can be uninviting for outsiders. And not just women.

“Guys are coming out to me and saying they don’t feel welcome in that scene either,” she says.

Michelle allows some men to participate in Code Scouts, and there are some male mentors. The values listed in the code of conduct—respect, kindness, generosity, growth, community—make it clear that no jerks are allowed.

At the start of the event, Michelle makes it a habit to encourage everyone to embrace the mistakes they’re bound to make in the next four hours—as well as in the rest of their coding lives.

“Be willing to do it wrong a thousand times,” she says. “This is the space to be wrong and still feel good about it.”

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Starting with San Francisco, Michelle’s ultimate goal is to have Code Scouts chapters in many, many other places. To learn more or get involved, follow them on Twitter or get in touch with Michelle: adventure@codescouts.org.

Read more from Idealist on good.is.

We often talk about the value of failure but what does it mean to create an organizational culture that embraces it? Rachel Jansen, Writer, and Ashley Good, CEO and Founder of Fail Forward, a project of Engineers Without Borders Canada, talk about how to move past the fear of failing.

Most of us have thought of changes we’d like to see to make the world a better place. But the first hurdle many of us face is the fear of failure.

We’d like to suggest that getting over that fear starts with accepting that, no matter how smart, well-intentioned, and hard working we are, failure is going to happen because almost everything we do has elements of both success and failure.

Our organizations tend to be set up in a manner that discourages open communication about tough issues; open admission of failure comes with risk and poses a threat to our self-esteem and worth in the eyes of others.

How can we change this? How do we accept failure and allow ourselves to step outside of the box and try new things?

Embrace and share your failures

Engineers Without Borders Canada has been publishing an annual Failure Report since 2008. From the very beginning, they’ve strived to encourage a culture of learning through open communication and transparency. Employees and volunteers are expected to share their failures all year round.

With such a viewpoint in mind, there are many ways to encourage communication about failures, support collaborative learning, and break down much of the fear associated with taking action. Here are a few:

• Start with managers. Management should role model the behaviour of speaking openly about their failures. Top-level buy-in is essential as it develops trust, and communicates that we all fail.
• Gain permission from those involved in a failure before implicating them with your story. This prevents hard feelings and encourages communication between all parties involved in a failure where the various perspectives can lead to deeper insights.
• Face failures head on. Try not to euphemize or avoid the big issues by tackling less important ones.
• Recognize and emphasize that just because a person failed does not mean they are a failure. It’s important to separate ego from activity if we are to feel safe sharing our stories.
• Never blame. The failures that teach us the most tend to be the result of multiple factors and are rarely caused by a single person or error.
• Build the conversations about failures and learning into formal structures such as team meetings or project reviews to make sure everyone is encouraged to share. The idea is to turn the idea of failure on its head by implicitly saying “If you do not have a failure to share, you’re either not being honest or you’re not being innovative.”

These initial steps are only the first building blocks in creating an environment where it is okay to discuss failures, and more importantly, to learn from and adapt to them.

What barriers do you, your team, or organization face when talking about failure?  Have you used any of the strategies above to overcome them?

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Learn more about building resilience to failure at Fail Forward or by emailing ashley@failforward.org. 

Confronting mistakes head on is often done in the business sector, but not so much in the nonprofit world. Why? There can be a lot at stake – maybe you have to answer to donors, or you work with vulnerable populations, or you’re worried about offending someone.

But mistakes happen. They happen often. And if we’re honest enough to admit our mistakes to ourselves and to others—and have a sense of humor about it—we can learn a lot.

Photo via Kristen Taylor (Flickr)

This is the philosophy behind FailFaire, an event hosted by MobileActive.org. The gathering focuses on errors related to MobileActive’s mission (using cell phones in development work). Attendees discuss how X project slipped through the cracks or why Y grant never came through. But instead receiving stern looks of disapproval, the atmosphere is open and supportive. Drinks and food are served alongside failures, and presenters are encouraged to be honest, light-hearted and even irreverent.

The idea is quickly catching on. The first FailFaire event was held in New York City this summer. The World Bank co-hosted an event in Washington, D.C. a few months later, and recently the Social Capital Market’s Conference copied the model and held one in San Francisco revolving around social entrepreneurship. The potential for FailFaire to be replicated all over the world, covering not only facets of the nonprofit sector but other fields as well,  is enormous.

If you’re failure-friendly, the site has a tip sheet of how to host your own event and a blog with some great stories and advice.

FailFaire could very well be the beginnings of a cultural shift in the nonprofit sector – and I have a feeling it won’t fail.