“She Who Codes: - A Shelter, a Scholarship, and a Vision

Survival wrote the first line. Purpose codes the next

My family, Sarah, Jenny, Bryan (LB), and I.

🔗 From Crisis to Code: A Call Across Generations

My technology journey didn’t begin with curiosity. It started with a crisis.

I was a young mother in the mid-1980s, raising three children, caught in a story that masqueraded as a fairytale — until it didn’t. When that illusion shattered, I gathered my courage, my babies, and whatever hope remained, and walked into a shelter for women escaping abuse. Then into the YWCA. Then into a scholarship I never expected.

They handed me a lifeline. I grabbed it.

I didn’t yet know what a database was. I knew survival depended on learning not just for me, but for three small lives tethered to mine. So I leapt into computer technology — a field still mysterious, primarily male, and rarely designed for a woman like me.

But there I was. Learning. Coding. Finding purpose inside machines built to move the world.

🌱 Out of failure bloomed clarity.

I hadn’t earned a title at Caterpillar, but I had earned something greater — a sense of purpose. I began to discover my voice, my power, and the spark that had been buried under years of silence and survival. I wasn’t interested in simply ‘making it’ in tech anymore. I wanted to wield it — to build spaces, create access, and write code that could open doors for women still in shelters, still carrying the bruises of their past in their spirits.

I saw what technology could be: not just profitable, but liberating.

So I started showing up in community centers, helping women write resumes, tutoring their kids on floppy disks and Apple II screens, using every bit of my training to rewrite the narrative I’d once believed was closed to us.

🖋️ From shelters to syntax, a signal rose.

I had crossed thresholds most never see. I became a writer. A journalist. Someone who hunted truth for alternative news publications because conventional stories didn’t carry our weight. Tech, once a foreign language, became fluent in my hands. I used it to scale my work, my advocacy, and the reach of my voice.

I built digital spaces that honored pain, empowered resilience, and elevated women who had walked the same shattered sidewalks I had.

And now, decades later, I’m here — on Substack — where the cursor blinks like an old friend and every post is another way I say: I’m still here. And I’m not done.

🕊️ The Story’s Not Over — And It's Ours to Write

Now, I look back and forward all at once — and I want to speak to the two generations with the most power to shape our next chapter.

👵🏽 Boomers — we’ve built, endured, resisted, and reimagined. But our legacy is not in what we’ve weathered. It’s in what we choose to pass on. Let’s hand Gen Z tools, not warnings. Wisdom, not worry. And the conviction that real change begins where human truth meets technological possibility.

🧠 Gen Z — you were born digital, but screens do not define you. You are poets of protest, architects of equity, and keepers of curiosity. You remix history like a mixtape. You build movements in minutes. You dare to believe that truth should trend.

Together, we can turn AI into more than an algorithm. We can make it a mirror — one that reflects the soul of a more compassionate world.

This isn’t just my story. It’s a blueprint. For anyone who ever thought technology was out of reach, or power was out of their hands — think again.

Because the story isn’t over, and you’re already part of the next chapter.