Volunteer for Women Who Code London!
Written by Soumya Somasundaran
Making a tangible difference through volunteering is something that you’ll never regret. Here at WWC London, we have lots of opportunities for you to give back to the community with both your technical and non-technical skills. We need volunteers who can help us organize and execute various projects that will support and empower more women in the technology sector. Read on to find out how you can get involved!
Why should I volunteer?
Women Who Code is a community run by volunteers. There are numerous benefits of becoming a volunteer, like getting to work with and learn from highly skilled women, and opportunities to improve your technical, communication, and leadership skills.
But don’t just take our word for it, check out these testimonials from our Leaders who began as volunteers.
What are the different projects I can contribute to?
WWC London is currently working on lots of projects and initiatives. You can choose one or more projects that you’re interested in and join the corresponding Slack channel and get involved from there!
Here’s a short overview of each project including short lists of common tasks involved, but we always welcome new ideas too.
- Ask me Anything: Career X
The involvement required for this project is around 1–2 hours/week.
Common tasks involved:
- Post information about bootcamps, training, etc. in the Slack channel
- Post helpful guides with tips to get a job as a developer
- Welcome new speakers from other communities to our community
- Connect us with education opportunities
- Post information about upcoming conferences
- Post CFP deadlines
To volunteer on the Ask Me Anything project, join the Slack channel by clicking here.
- Education Evangelist
The involvement required for this project is around 15–20 mins/day.
Common tasks involved:
- Post information about bootcamps, trainings, etc.
- Post popular guides with tips to get jobs in IT
- Help us to connect with school and universities
- Connect us with education opportunities
- Post information about upcoming conferences
- Post CFP deadlines
To volunteer as an Education Evangelist, join the Slack channel by clicking here.
- LinkedIn Evangelist
The involvement required for this project is around 15–20 mins/day.
Common tasks involved:
- Repost our activities from Meetup on LinkedIn
- Repost news from other tech communities and ask them to repost us
- Ask influencer accounts to share our most important posts
- Comment on other posts on behalf of the community and help the community to be active
- Use analytics to strategically inform our social media strategy to help us grow
To volunteer as a LinkedIn Evangelist, join the Slack channel by clicking here.
- Twitter Evangelist
The involvement required for this project is around 15–20 mins/day.
Common tasks involved:
- Repost our activities from Meetup and LinkedIn on Twitter
- Repost news from other tech communities and ask them to repost us
- Ask influencer accounts to retweet our most important tweets
- Comment on other tweets and be active on Twitter
To volunteer as a Twitter Evangelist, join the Slack channel by clicking here.
- Facebook Evangelist
The involvement required for this project is around 15–20 mins/day.
Common tasks involved:
- Repost our activities from Meetup and LinkedIn on Facebook
- Repost news from other tech communities and ask them to repost us
- Ask influencer accounts to share our most important posts
- Comment on other posts and be active on Facebook
To volunteer as a Facebook Evangelist, join the Slack channel by clicking here.
- Java Lead
The involvement required for this project is around 1–2 hours/week.
Common tasks involved:
- Post information about bootcamps, training, etc.
- Post popular guides with tips to get a job as a Java Developer
- Welcome new speakers from the Java London Community to our community
- Connect us with education opportunities
- Post information about upcoming conferences
- Post CFP deadlines
To volunteer as a Java Lead, join the Slack channel by clicking here.
- Career Progression Evangelist
The involvement required for this project is around 1 hour/week.
Common tasks involved:
- Search for and share resources about career progression
- Help organize meetings and events
- Interview people from different career tracks
- Organize and participate in mock interviews
- Organize and participate in mock code challenges
- Facilitate discussions in the Slack channel
To volunteer as a Career Progression Evangelist, join the Slack channel by clicking here.
- WWC London Blog
The involvement required for this project is around 1–2 blog posts/month.
Common tasks involved:
- Post updates on the projects conducted within WWC and WWC London
- Document how our community grows
- Share takeaways from the events we organize
- Share community updates
- Anything you can think of, this blog is yours to shape
To volunteer with the WWC London Blog, join the Slack channel by clicking here.
- Machine Learning Volunteer
The involvement required for this project is around 1–2 hours/month.
Common tasks involved:
- A brainstorming meeting (0.5 hours) to discuss the latest machine learning achievements, events, and ideas
- Create and share posts about our upcoming machine learning events
- Share related articles and events on social media
- Write summaries/reading notes of ML tasks and/or interesting ML articles
- Help run WWLondon’s Machine Learning Slack channel
To volunteer with the WWCLondon Machine learning, join the Slack channel by clicking here.
In addition to all that, we’ve started a couple of new Slack channels. Feel free to join these new streams and share your ideas for them:
A sincere thank you to Emma Miller for proofreading this blog post. We look forward to hearing from you on the WWC London Slack Channel! :)
Testimonials
Nadia Zhuk
“Being a Lead at Women Who Code London has allowed me to expand my professional network in London, which is very important for me as an immigrant. I’ve also had a chance to improve my public speaking and leadership skills as well as my ability to manage projects. I would recommend volunteering at Women Who Code London to anyone who wants to be part of a growing community of like-minded people and to leave a mark on the tech industry. Let’s connect on LinkedIn.”
Ying Liu
“I joined Women Who Code in 2019. I was a PhD student back then who was trying to look for a job. Women Who Code offered a lot of resources such as invitations to company talks and career advice events. After I started working in 2021, my focus went to improving myself in machine learning instead of job hunting. I noticed that the Women Who Code London branch did not have much talks about machine learning. So I volunteered to organize and gave talks about machine learning. Not only it helps me to learn more about every ML algorithm, it trains me with my presentation skills so I can deliver difficult algorithms to the public in an accessible way. After about 4 regular machine learning talks, I was promoted to the Machine Learning Lead. The recruiter started to notice it in my CV and mentioned it every time I had a chat with them. It seems to be very impressive to have volunteered alongside my current job, especially when this work is related to my job. I benefited from volunteering both career wise and skill wise. I hope this volunteering experience will benefit you as well.”
Irina Kamalova
“Volunteering is about running a small project, and you can take ownership of the whole project! No boss checks your job! Do you have in your mind what has to be done? Would you remember the main things? Do you need to plan meetings, dissect all work into small steps, and tackle deadlines? Do you need to create your first Trello board or Notion page, or do you feel very comfortable putting everything into google docs and spreadsheets? You have a chance to practice during your volunteering project! In a “safe” way, you won’t be fired or lose money if something goes wrong or life circumstances won’t allow you to finish the project.”
Eleonora Belova
“Volunteering for Women Who Code London for nearly one year made it possible to collaborate with talented people, and create a really helpful product for the community. The thing which always motivates me is that in Women Who Code London we unite people from diverse backgrounds towards a common goal. Every person in this mechanism does great things, in general, there is huge progress. Isn’t this magic? For me, volunteering is a great investment, a tool to develop skills, and an opportunity to gain experience while helping others!”
Abhipsa Mishra
“I have been associated with Women Who Code, London since 2016. I first joined the group to network and attend in-person WWC events hosted at some very cool locations in central London. I had just moved to London and was quite awed by the amazing fellow coders and engineers I met. A bunch of very talented women, all wanting to make an impact in software engineering and help each other grow via this network. Everyone I talked to or reached out to was extremely approachable. Over the years, I did attend as many meet-ups as I could more so because I find them quite refreshing and enriching.
The pandemic has been tough on everyone, and there was no scope for physical events anymore. During the lockdown, we majorly kept in touch via virtual events and slack channels. I came across one of the ideas being proposed for an Algorithms and Data Structures Meetup track. Honestly, I was enthralled by this idea. Being in the software engineering industry for more than a decade and having worked across so many domains, I saw this as an opportunity to share my knowledge and experience with a wider community. I had always been on the other side, listening to people speak. I was excited and motivated to sign up to be a speaker for this track, and I will admit it was equally enriching for me to share my experience with fellow women coders. Before, I had only ever mentored or spoken at smaller company events! WWCode London has provided me with a platform to do something so close to my heart — mentoring and helping women grow in technology, and all this at a global level!
Although in the past few decades this industry has been a male-dominated field, the number of women in technology has been steadily growing in the past 20 years. It is important that women, who have been in this field for a while, constantly motivate and inspire other women to join this workforce and explore the wonders that technology can do! This spirit and my personal experience in this industry keeps me motivated to be a part of something as wonderful, exciting and noble as Women Who Code.”
Jamica Ortiz
“WWCode is the community where I made my first connections as a newcomer in London. The support of these women is what made me keep going amidst the challenges of working as a minority in technology. These women have been my mentors, friends and colleagues through thick and thin. These connections are already counting the years and we have gone through various jobs, roles and life changes together. It has given me a lot to hope for women and other minorities in working in tech jobs and a new appreciation for the programming discipline.”
Mary Gudman
“Being in tech for some time now, I was looking for a community to inspire and support me. I’m so glad I discovered Women Who Code a little over a year ago. It’s indeed essential career-wise to find a group of like-minded individuals, but it’s amazing on the personal level, too. At Women Who Code I finally got to volunteer my time towards empowering other female engineers and women pursuing a career in tech. It’s been a dream of mine always: to be able to give back and to contribute to building a diverse and inclusive tech field. Now I’m running one of the programs, organizing events, and mentor, which all works to that goal. And one of the most amazing things is that I get a lot of inspiration from the people at Women Who Code, from their dedication, experiences and ideas.
Participating and building a project like that — is an amazing opportunity to grow and develop while helping others to do the same. Highly recommended!”
Anna Nogal
“I came to a meeting about mentoring people, and even though I didn’t apply to be a mentor or to be a mentee that first time I did give it a try in my company: And I have it really clear now that this is what I want to do with my career. I wrote about it, click here to read.”
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